At the Oxford Union a few months ago, Toby – who as well as being Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Sceptic is General Secretary of the Free Speech Union – delivered an impressive speech in favour of the motion “This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far”. It was uploaded to YouTube about a week ago.
Watch me making the case against the terror tactics of the woke Left at a recent Oxford Union debate. pic.twitter.com/F4or7YXqpK
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) January 15, 2023
Several times in his speech Toby expressed the view that it is not the ends of woke culture that are objectionable, but rather the means used to try to attain those ends.
Toby is not alone in his view. Far from it. In the last three or four years I have lost count of the number of times my heart has sunk when, usually early on in an otherwise excellent article or podcast, someone criticising wokeness says the woke “have good intentions”, their behaviour is “well-intentioned”, or “they mean well”. In other words, their heart is in the right place, and their goal is a noble one. It is only their chosen route to that goal which is a problem.
I think people who believe this about the woke have misjudged the situation in several ways. And in the battle against the often pernicious effects of wokeness, this matters. Such praise is unjust and hands the woke a free gift they simply do not deserve.
One of the main problems with thinking the woke have honourable intentions and laudable goals is not that they really have malicious intentions and wish to cause misery – though there is a pretty good case to be made for that view, which I’ll return to below. Nor is it that the woke’s relentlessly sanctimonious attitude and their uncompromising and often brutal behaviour greatly outweigh any supposedly good intentions, to the extent that they aren’t worth mentioning. The problem is more fundamental than that.
It is clear from what the woke say and do that they are in the grip of a powerful ideology. They are therefore not truly free agents calmly and voluntarily making a series of rational decisions which they believe are in the interests of all, or even in the interests of some. Quite the opposite. They are effectively slaves to the ideology, and are ultimately acting in their own interests, to meet the demands made of them by the grand meta-narrative that has possessed them.
Read More: We Need to Stop Saying the Woke Have Good Intentions