IN HIS magnificently unreadable The French Revolution: A History, Thomas Carlyle tells us that when we cast around looking for signs of possible revolution, we are too late: it has happened already. The revolution comes as a thief in the night and, being asleep, we don’t notice. But when we wake up next morning our valuables have all gone.
This is precisely where we are now. There has taken place is what Friedrich Nietzsche described as ‘a revaluation of all values’. Only posthumously, as it were, do we notice the fact. Our history, which made us what we are, we now condemn and seek to obliterate. Forms of sexual coupling which were a cause for shame are now celebrated as a matter of Pride. Even the fundamental biological differences which identify the sexes have been set aside. The treasures of our classical art, music and literature are supplanted by fakery and trash. The institutions that were set up to protect and promote our civilisation – government and administration, universities and schools – have not merely been subverted by the iconoclasts but have joyfully joined the revolutionaries.
We are left rubbing our eyes and asking: ‘How could this have happened?’
We did not stay awake, so now are all woke.
Where did this wokery come from? It is not an accidental mutation in the development of our society and culture: it is a change in what T S Eliot called sensibility, in the unconscious presuppositions which, while they themselves go unexamined, form the mores of culture and society. We have experienced a dissociation of sensibility. Wokery – what we used to call political correctness – originated in the work and ambitions of the early 20th century radical political group the Institute for Marxism, which became known as the Frankfurt School.
In his 2001 book The Death of the West, Patrick J Buchanan says: ‘Political correctness is cultural Marxism. In a third of a century, what was denounced as the counter-culture has become the dominant culture, and what was the dominant culture has become a dissident culture, an ideological state, a soft tyranny where the new orthodoxy is enforced not by police agents, but by inquisitors of the popular culture.’
I would amend this only to include police agents. What else, when the police are called to schools to arrest children for calling one another ‘racist’ names? Or when a teacher at Eton loses his job for attempting to discuss the impact of feminism on public morality? Or when to shout ‘Black lives matter!’ is virtuous orthodoxy while to declare ‘White lives matter!’ is racist? Or when J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books are effectually blacklisted because she dared to criticise the sex-change industry? Or when the BBC, the national broadcasting medium, bans all criticism of the contemporary myth of climate change? Having discarded our historic Christian faith, we make laws to defend its persecutors: for, while there is Islamophobia, there is no Christianophobia.
Still, we claim to enjoy free speech. Of course we have free speech: it’s just that we’re not allowed to say anything proscribed by our new political masters and cultural commissars.
The prophets of wokery included György Lukács (1885-1971) who saw the necessity for the destruction of traditional civilisation and advocated ‘demonic ideas’ in the spread of ‘cultural terrorism’. The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) noticed that the Russian people had not been converted to Communism; rather, they hated it. Gramsci called for ‘a long march through the institutions’ – the arts, the cinema, education, theological seminaries, the mass media.
All this has now come to pass.
Gramsci became fashionable among the radical chic revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, among them Charles Reich who revealed Gramsci’s influence on him in his 1970 bestseller The Greening of America.
He wrote: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed and it cannot be successfully resisted with violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity and already our laws, institutions and social structures are changing in consequence.’
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) invented Critical Theory, which is now the basis of education – or rather re-education – in all our universities. It insists that Western societies are racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, fascist and Nazi. The fundamental ambition of Critical Theory is the mass inculcation of ‘cultural pessimism’ and ‘alienation’ by which a people, though prosperous and free, comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil and unworthy of affection and love.
Marcuse knew that past revolutions had prospered by the use of rallying oratory and persuasive books, but he believed drugs and sex were better weapons. In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation he called for the universal embrace of the Pleasure Principle – derived of course from Freud – and the creation of a world of ‘polymorphous perversity’.
His slogan ‘Make love, not war’ caught on worldwide and his aim has now been achieved. We failed to notice that, even as he was saying this, he was waging war on our way of life.
Marcuse’s colleague Wilhelm Reich declared: ‘There is no political revolution without first a sexual revolution.’ The sexual revolution is simply the abolition of traditional morality and the family. But surely there is an opposition to all this iconoclasm?
Indeed, there are many of us in the opposition. How many? Five hundred, say? A thousand? Many thousands? We scribble, scribble, scribble every minute of every day, just as Edward Gibbon scribbled. And it makes no difference. There is dark humour in the fact that articles by conservatives constantly appear in the newspapers saying that such and such a woke policy and practice must cease. But it will not cease. A 6ft muscled and bearded biological man can still identify himself as a woman, and a being with a womb can call itself a man.
There is no ‘must’ about it. Just as Karl Marx demanded that the workers control the means of production, so now the wokers control the means of thought production.
So we wake up to find all our valuables have been stolen. No use calling the police, for it was the police – the thought police – wot nicked ’em.
