Posted on 09/16/2022 5:13:09 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Conservatives reply to woke objections with a modest offering of facts that undo the woke narrative—and get nowhere. Here’s a better way.
If you’re invited to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving Dinner, and his daughter shows up and starts talking about America’s genocide of Native Americans, what do you say? Or if you’re in a discussion of classical education with other parents from your neighborhood and someone comments that classical education has a curriculum that lacks diversity and flirts with white privilege, how do you respond?
These are standard woke gestures, commonplace and unsurprising. The language is always the same, the charges familiar. People voice them with a set script in their heads, one they have heard a thousand times in classrooms, on talk shows, and in social media. That hasn’t made them less difficult to answer, though. Our woke interlocutor has a point to make, an objection to raise, and more than that. She has indignation in her delivery, too, maybe a little outrage. Occasionally, she verges on a tantrum. The historical contention is one thing, the moral fervor another. It intensifies the exchange. What was a conversation has become a trial. She has put your conscience in the dock. Are you a bad person who perpetuates injustice? Or are you a good person out to end it?
It sounds like a trivial occasion, but it’s really not. It happens too often not to be important. Woke attitudes have spread too widely for conservatives to avoid it. Not long ago, talk of “privilege,” “patriarchy,” and “transphobia” would have puzzled most Americans. Now, it echoes everywhere, in public and private and professional life. The choice a conservative faces on those occasions doesn’t depend on the truth of things. It’s a social matter, a crossroads. “Do I speak my mind and annoy the present company? Or just nod and move on?”
The affect of wokesters pushes you toward the second option. They speak forcefully, haughtily. They may not know much about the founding, but they know the founders owned slaves, and that’s enough. They can’t name the U.S. presidents in order, but they know that none of them was a woman. They haven’t read news reports on the current chaos at the border, but all Americans are immigrants, they insist. These convictions put them on moral high ground. They also please the holder of them. Indignation can feel awfully good, especially when wokesters can fire it as an adversary and watch him squirm.
People conscious of others’ feelings or raised with bourgeois manners find the affect hard to overcome. They don’t want to offend. I’ve seen conservatives reply to woke objections with a modest offering of facts that undo the woke narrative—and get nowhere. They don’t match the indignation of the wokester with a defensiveness of similar intensity, and so their facts lack authority.
To say that in 1800 slavery existed all over the world, so we should stop treating the American practice as an unusual abomination, does nothing to lessen the blameworthiness of the American South. Noting that the absence of female leaders in ancient times may have something to do with the duties of a king back then to command an army in the field at any time has no persuasive power. Appeals to nature are hollow.
It’s a losing game. Save your breath—don’t try to argue, don’t defend. The wokester is strong on belief and weak on knowledge, no matter how much she thinks she knows the real history of things. To be woke is precisely this claim of superior knowledge, a keener awareness than that of those still un-woke, asleep in their illusions of, say, American greatness. Knowing they possess the truth, wokesters have the blessing of moral courage, the dedication to speak truth to power. It gives them a noble role to play in the correction of the historical record.
And there lies the weak spot of the woke brigade: the pretension to moral superiority through better knowledge. They believe they have better hearts because they have better minds, and that’s an assumption that easily collapses. It points the way to a different response than argument.
Instead of challenging the wokester’s knowledge, let’s go with the wokester’s knowledge and draw it out. Let her school us, let her show us her certainty and let’s accept her duty to instruct the ignorant. She wants to be a pedagogue; we shall accept the position of pupil.
The model is Socrates, who comes to many dialogues as one who knows nothing and desires enlightenment. He asks simple questions and listens closely to the answers. The other participants believe they grasp the truth firmly, but as his queries continue, their confidence begins to wane. They speak at first as ordinary folk who nonetheless possess common sense, or as experts in a subject, such as Ion the rhapsode on the topic of Homer. They are complacent until the dialectic leads them to acknowledge their error.
Take the same approach with the wokester. If she brings up the Native American issue, ask her in all innocence why those cavalry officers were often flanked by native scouts helping them track down other tribes.
If she berates the founders as hypocrites, ask why Thomas Jefferson penned a document that became a rallying cry for civil rights forever after. Why would he do that?
If she brings up the absence of female rulers in the old days, ask what would happen to a kingdom if it were threatened by a neighbor and the ruler were eight months pregnant?
If she objects to Western Civilization as white supremacy, ask her to describe the whiteness of Beethoven’s Ninth, or ask her if she wants her children to read Hamlet, tour the National Gallery, and study the architecture of the Acropolis and the Pantheon.
If America is shot through with systemic racism, you can say, why do so many people of color keep scrambling to come? Really, why?
Ask those questions in a spirit of education. The wokester has taken the podium. She can’t not answer. Her shtick is to catechize and berate, so give her the chance to amplify her contentions. The spread of woke knowledge should satisfy her, as should your willingness to be awokened. What could be better than a willing student, an open mind?
What you will uncover, of course, displeases her more than your expected resistance. The knowledge she presumes will soon appear to come in small packages, biased and uncontextualized. She hasn’t listened to Beethoven’s Ninth or read Hamlet, can’t distinguish a Renaissance work of art from one created in the Romantic Period, and goes blank at the mention of the Acropolis and the Pantheon. In truth, wokeness doesn’t appeal to her intelligence and never did. It flattered her ego. Now, faced with questions directly related to what she has just stated, the certitude crumbles and the ego collapses. You have asked her for knowledge, and she hasn’t replied. She can’t.
You’ve won. It’s time to hum a few bars of Beethoven, mouth some words of Polonius, praise the dimensions of Greek columns, and detail what the Comanches did to their neighbors, and see if she’s ready to listen.
The Socratic method only works with smart people which woketards are most certainly not.
No it's not. We just call it trafficking now.
Uppercut, followed by a right hook.
About the Indians? When we visited the Little Bighorn battlefield, we took the park bus tour. I don’t recall how it came up in the conversation, but the woman giving the tour had casually mentioned that she was Crow. (The Little Bighorn battlefield is on Crow land.) Always ready to be a polite bull in the china shop, I asked at one of the stops if she got any static from Sioux and Cheyenne visitors, since the Crow were ancient blood enemies of the Sioux and Cheyenne; by the time of the battle, the Crow were peaceful, attempting to assimilate and allied to the U.S. government. Custer’s scouts were Crow.
So: when I asked if she got static from members of the other tribes, our guide smiled and said, “Oh, all the time. But we don’t shed blood over it any more except on the basketball court.”
LOL, so funny. Cigar and bourbon therapy is a staple at my homestead.
I’m going to try the dialectic. Pretty good technique. At least I don’t have to wrestle the pig.
> if they can explain to me why black men sold black people
> to white men, I would like to hear what reasons they
> suggest
That’s easy. It was Black Muslims who ran the African slave trade. In fact, they still do.
See, Mohammad taught that it was okay to enslave infidels.
Answer: Don't. Not even if they talk to you. Act like they are not there and leave as quickly as possible.
Don’t talk to a wokester
Wokesters must be ostracized, shunned
Good idea. Akin to reporters who actually ask follow up questions. The wokester described here, and I know some, has a sound bite mentality. They can rattle off a meme or a phrase as if they memorized it for the occasion, but there is nothing much more behind it. They adopt ideas like the flat props on a stage— false front ideas.
The trick is how to keep them engaged after they have shot their one round and the chamber is empty. Typically they will hurry off or change the subject.
That may be true, but there was slavery even back in Biblical times.
Joseph was sold as a slave by his own brothers.
Hebrews were slaves in Egypt.
Centuries before Mohammed was even born.
It’s as old as prostitution.
“The Socratic method can be used with effect. “
The woketards just get frustrated and call you a racist, then they walk away basking in their smugness.
I prefer sign language in which the middle finger plays a prominent part. Actually, my first choice is not to talk to the moron at all.
Kick them out of thanksgiving dinner since they obviously have nothing to be thankful for.
And wokesters approve of trafficking. They want open borders on
No, but it’s great fun to watch them spin up as they talk themselves into a Gordian knot. In my experience, Socratic Method is the way to go when trapped in a conversation with Woketards.
Or, another option might be to tell them to STFU, then tell them not to talk to me until they get SOME education and then walk away. I really do not care what they think. They refuse to consider getting an education that requires thinking. If I want to hear ridiculous dumb s^^t I will watch CNN or something from Disney.
Total waste of time.
If the wokester had real knowledge, they would not be spouting this nonsense.
I have tried to have to have a rational, quiet, conversation with a few of these freaks and it is not possible.
My response now is, "Some people call this leather bag a fanny pack, I call it a holster, blow me."
End of conversation.
“ Save your breath—don’t try to argue, don’t defend.”
Works for me. You can’t fix “stuck on stupid “.
I engage with a such a person only if they accept the following two conditions:
1) They agree that the objective of our conversation is not to change the other person's mind (as that is most unlikely to happen and leads to frustration when it doesn't happen); rather, our objective is to identify where and how we differ, and to develop an understanding of why we differ.
2) They accept that our discussion must be conducted in an objective, even civil manner, and that although it may very well become emotional at times, we must avoid personal attacks if our discussion is to be productive (this one is extremely difficult for the emotion-driven Leftist to carry out, much less agree to!)
I've done this with considerable success and have learned much about the Leftist/"woke" thought process which makes me more effective in future discussions. It's actually enjoyable when you are able to pull it off.
Lol watched a man on the street video at a pro illegal immigration rally and his shtick was to thank them for their support and how many “immigrant” he could sign them up to live in their houses and support them shockingly and by shockingly I mean not shocking everyone of them had a reason why they couldn’t like nyc Chicago dc and maaaathas vinyard
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