Woke Language Is a Weapon of War
Editor's Note
The destructive Left’s revolutionary mission consists of three main elements: to destroy the American way of life, to implement a new one in its place, and to secure the power necessary to accomplish both. Because the present conflict is limited to a cold civil war, the immediate contest over power is less about arms or material resources than it is about cultural control: the power to shape how we think and how we act. Daniel J. Mahoney inspects the terminology at the heart of the destructive Left’s ideology — “diversity”, “equity”, “inclusion”, and much more — and finds that the enemy has already achieved great success on this front, with a clear eye toward effecting the first and second goals.
Individuals need not believe all these [totalitarian] mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.
―Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978)
Those who love our country’s principles of justice — equality of rights, equality under the law, merit and responsibility — must not be taken in when old and precious words are given radically new and pernicious meanings. Such manipulation of language is a hallmark of ideological despotism that aims at the destruction of the capacity of citizens to speak and reason together about the “advantageous and the just,” as Aristotle put it so well more than two millennia ago at the beginning of his Politics.
The clear meaning of words must be respected if civic life is to endure in any meaningful way. Language, which is never merely “private language,” is rooted in common experience and, when undistorted by ideologues and tyrants, gives us access to a shared public space where the virtues and vices of human beings come to sight. Such is the venerable Western conception of the human being as a rational, ethical, and political animal, a conception challenged by every form of totalitarianism.
In the 20th century, the integrity of language came under systematic assault from totalitarian ideologues committed to the transformation of human nature and society. Cherished old words and concepts with tried-and-true meanings (“oldspeak,” as the totalitarians called them in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) gave way to “newspeak,” an ideological distortion of language that was woefully “wooden” (i.e., jargon-laden) and that deliberately undermined the human capacity to understand the most elementary realities before us. The age-old distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, were replaced by an ideology of “progress” where being “on the right side of History” is all that really matters. Being “reactionary” became the worst thing imaginable, requiring “reeducation” if not elimination.
Whatever served the cause of revolutionary transformation — however violent or mendacious — was said to be right and just, and thus obligatory. “Liberty,” “equality,” “peace,” “democracy,” and “justice” took on new, ideological meanings. All too often, this development went unappreciated by progressives and fellow travelers in the Western world. They, too, had come to accept the pernicious ideological distinction between “progress” and “reaction.” This distinction served to justify the unjustifiable, such as mass repression against those who were deemed “class enemies.”
The great sociologist of totalitarianism Paul Hollander liked to note that Western intellectuals and activists were never more impressed by Communist regimes than when they were most terroristic and surreal, such as during Stalin’s Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Chairman Mao. Even the poet W.H. Auden, who came to loathe totalitarianism, wrote excitedly in 1937 about “necessary murder.” Auden came to deeply regret that lapse in moral and civic judgment. Some indefatigable defenders of totalitarianism, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, never had such regrets.
One must be careful to avoid any simple or overwrought identification between the murderous ravages of classic totalitarianism and the totalitarian impulse as it manifests among the woke in America today. Civic and intellectual freedoms still exist in the Western world. Nonetheless, the thinking of the woke is undoubtedly totalitarian, and their linguistic deformations bear remarkable structural similarities to the earlier totalitarian abuse of language.
Let me provide some examples. As evoked by woke ideologues, “social justice” has nothing to do with equal rights or equal opportunity, or the recognition of a common human dignity. “Social justice warriors” are not interested in the careful weighing and balancing of the rival claims of the rich and the poor (and everyone in between). Instead, they wish to tear down and level, to “equalize” outcomes. The woke Left believes that, but for racism and “heteronormativity,” all groups would have equal outcomes. Since natural and cultural differences still produce their effects, force must be applied. Tyranny is the inevitable result.
As Thomas Sowell has been arguing persuasively for decades, in books such as Discrimination and Disparities (2018), racism in fact explains very little of group outcome differences within or among various ethnic groups. The appeal to racial explanations for almost everything is a terrible simplification that appeals to ideologues, who do not have the time or inclination for measured empirical analysis, in a rush to transform the world.
Likewise, there is the increasingly obligatory alphabetical agitprop that must be resisted and challenged. These include DEI — the insidious acronym that justifies the new tyranny of bureaucratically imposed slogans, doctrines, and programs required by Critical Race Theory — and our new LGBTQIA++ regime, with its unremitting obsession with “queerness,” “transgenderism,” and sexual “fluidity” (categories that did not exist even a few decades ago and that remain vacuous and ill-defined). In classic Orwellian fashion, “diversity” demands total ideological uniformity. Anyone who has taught on a college campus of late knows that a significant number of one’s colleagues are impervious to the demands of “viewpoint diversity,” i.e., the welcoming of intellectual differences, not to mention reasonable disputation. Thankfully, many of our less credentialed fellow citizens are not.
As Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania have compellingly argued, the well-intentioned appeal to “diversity” as a crucial civic and educational good by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the scope of which was originally intended to be limited to blacks in education, very quickly became the basis of an increasingly radicalized multiculturalist regime. The call for racially neutral anti-discrimination laws was abandoned by civil rights activists and is now deemed “racist” by elite opinion. Race became the all-encompassing obsession of a regime animated by white guilt and self-loathing. That regime is also marked by an utter lack of confidence in the capacity of “people of color” to make their way in life without being granted permanent “victim” status.
In addition, black and female independent thinkers who challenge the new orthodoxy that denies any normative sexual differences rooted in biological nature and attributes all other group differences to omnipresent racism are relegated to the category of “traitors” to their race and gender. This is linguistic totalitarianism, a corruption of language with the most pernicious moral and political consequences.
The woke regime, no less than the classic totalitarian one, is an example of what Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet and Nobel Prize laureate, called in his 1953 classic The Captive Mind a “logocracy,” where barely comprehensible tyrannical clichés replace reasoned debate and discussion about how human beings ought to live and how civic life ought to be ordered. These omnipresent ideological clichés must be resisted by those who do not want to become complicit in the Lie mentioned by Havel in the epigram to this essay.
Similarly, the once noble word “equity” has been distorted beyond all recognition. No longer connoting fairness or balance, or an effort to adjust a discrepancy or deal with an exception not covered by the letter of the law (as in Aristotle’s Ethics or the Anglo-American common law tradition), it now demands a perfect equality of outcomes for every race or ethnic group. As the journalist Barton Swaim has put it, much like Sowell before him, progressives who invoke this ideological reinvention of equity “believe … against all evidence, that any variance in success among individuals of different races must be the result of conscious or unconscious racism.”
So understood, “equity” wars with human nature and would require draconian tyranny to be applied in practice. It has also led to patently unfair results; witness the quotas that minimize admissions for Jews and Asians in elite institutions. Left-liberals now openly applaud insidious forms of discrimination in the name of “anti-racism.” There is nothing that is remotely liberal or democratic about this.
Tocqueville and Lincoln show us another way. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville eloquently distinguished between a “manly and legitimate passion for equality that incites men to want all to be strong and esteemed” and a “depraved taste for equality in the human heart that brings the weak to want to draw the strong to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.” Equality can thus be noble or ignoble, elevating or debased. And Lincoln, the philosophic statesman who best articulated the moral grounds of a political order dedicated to the freedom and equality of human beings “under God,” never confused equality with the tyrannical desire to level human beings into one homogenous mass. No less than slavery, doctrinaire egalitarianism was for Lincoln the enemy of equality rightly understood.
From diversity and equality, let us move on to inclusion. “Inclusion” is equally dishonest as well as insidiously Orwellian: Those who believe in the color-blind constitution, who do not loathe their country, and who question the replacement of the sexual binary by limitless, ill-conceived “genders,” are not welcome in the woke university, law firm, corporation, or media outlet. The woke ‘community’ in truth is as exclusionary as it gets. It is marked by obligatory moral preening where its adherents demand pronouns of their own or rebuke themselves (and the rest of us as well) as “settlers” in a permanently occupied country (see Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, for an expert dissection of this latest destructive ideological obsession).
Thankfully, there are signs that at least some businesses and universities are having second thoughts about the DEI regime and want to return to older understandings of merit, equality, opportunity, and responsibility. These signs are growing increasingly frequent and widespread. Let us hope that this salutary trend continues.
The struggle against wokeness is thus a battle to restore the clear meaning of words and the principles of an authentic democracy. In a public statement delineating the purposes of Nineteen Eighty-Four dated July 1949, just six months before his untimely death from acute tuberculosis, George Orwell noted that the kind of totalitarianism he had sketched in that political novel was not inevitable but “could arrive” because “totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere.” Alas, that remains very much the case today. It is one reason why Orwell’s bracing call for moral clarity and linguistic hygiene remains as relevant as ever.