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.
I don’t know about this. How many recover after their mind has rotted.
Don’t bother. If they’re threatening you, deescalate it if possible. If that doesn’t work, defend yourself by any means necessary. Otherwise, stay away from them. It’s a waste of time, and they might snitch to the FIB.
About the Indians? I say they had been fighting with one another over resources for centuries before the European tribes arrived here. We took it fair and square.
Slavery is horrible. It’s over. Now shut up about it because it was corrected
Pointless.
This is brilliant and classical. The dialectic. Fantastic.
Using Socratic dialog doesn’t work well with narcissists.
What? Take hemlock? Cause that’s what they want from us.
No wait till they throw the first punch then destroy them.
Has she resigned from a job or a college fellowship or scholarship so that a person of color could have it?
If she has children, has she avoided giving them educational advances that will place them above inner city children?
Does she at least let people of color cut in front of her at the cashier's line in the grocery store?
Does she make an effort to not buy things made in countries that use slave labor (like China?)
Does she keep quiet in meetings so that persons of color can be heard?
Does she relinquish positions of leadership so that persons of color can have them?
That sort of thing. It's amusing sometimes to see them realize that they haven't given up a single thing.
Slavery is only over in the United States. There are a lot of countries that still practice it.
On top of that, if they can explain to me why black men sold black people to white men, I would like to hear what reasons they suggest. If you already know that a person shouldn’t be owned, then why do that?
Paragraph 2. Educate the young missy that thd Injuns murdered lots of wypipo too, like in my own family.
Paragraph 3. Release the Kracken.
Cede no moral ground whatsoever. If your host takes offense, the host wasn’t doing his job, and riding herd on his feral spawn.
I don’t bother anymore like I used to-—If they want to talk about Jesus I will. Other than that it just ain’t worth my time.
This works well with honest people.
Use it on a dishonest
( markist/prog/predator )
person and they will evade and make it their mission to ambush you with gossip , slander, entrapment, violence, and maybe even swatting.
I agree. They’ve received full indoctrination by government schools with the full support of their parents and financed by you and me.
A dinner conversation will not change someone’s mind so heavily indoctrinated.
Honestly, I have inherited a few of “those” due to marriage and in my experience, DO NOT ENGAGE. Their level of Stupidity, Ignorance, Blindness, etc. is to such a level that a common sense fact that “water is wet” is beyond their comprehension.
My BIL and I tolerate the Loonies, eat well then go out back for a nice Cigar and Good Bourbon. My poor wife “has” to make nice with her Sisters and Aunts. We bug out at earliest convenience. About 4hr is max time limit. Beyond that I can start to feel my IQ drop.
Thanks for the invite, sorry I cant stay. ....then throat punch the bitch on the way out or dump the gravy boat in her lap, which ever is to your liking.
Never wrestle with a pig.
As far as slavery is concerned, it lasted 81 years in this country, so that begs a lot of questions also. How many slaves exist today? Where do they come from? Whose policies allow it?
As far as Native American genocide goes, if this country hadn’t been colonized by England, who was waiting in the wings? China, Muslims?
Answer their hate with questions, they lose every time.
Sorry, but this is stupid and no one will ever react well to it.
The way to deal with a wokester is to make it plain and clear when the VERY FIRST woke pronouncement comes out of their mouth, that you find them to be insane enough to make invoking judicial intervention to be a plausible option, and that you intend to treat them like a mental patient as long as they act that way. Make your dripping contempt and animosity towards their Nazi-like behavior (call it out as such explicitly) clear at every single step of the conversation.
This is the only feedback that wokesters need - to be treated as the despised and hateful one, and to have any assertion that they are in a position to judge others slapped down before they are allowed to base any further claims on that assumption.
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