The English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, with his sober humor British, illustrated what he believed to be the difference between right and left in the following way: “People on the left find it very difficult to get along with people on the right because they think they are evil. Whereas I I have no difficulty getting along with people on the left because I simply think they are wrong.” Indeed, the first usually considers political opposition as a confrontation between True and False, while the second sees it rather as a fight between Good and Evil. However, it seems that this distinction has disappeared and that the right, too, has taken the path of moral admonition. As proof, the emergence of a right as “woke” as its left counterpart.
It has been several years since the woke phenomenon, this progressive identity movement, attached to the promotion of groups defined by their degree of domination suffered, has been intruding into France. Coming from the English-speaking sphere, it was transmitted to Europe through intellectual and media channels. On a smaller scale here than in the United States or the United Kingdom, confined to what the British journalist Frank Johnson called the “chattering classes” in the 1980s, it nonetheless has consequences. cultural disproportionate to its real weight. It starts from a good intention: to be woke is to claim to be “awake” in the face of injustices; it is, in particular, wanting to highlight the difficulties that certain people may encounter depending on their gender or their origin. But its concrete translation often turns out to be hell. “Awakening” is entirely relative since it amounts to ignoring or even attacking the categories considered dominant, to the point of perpetrating injustices against those who are part of them. In this regard, we have been able to speak of “cancel culture” or “culture of erasure”, that is to say the blacklisting of certain comments (for example the deprogramming of conferences of accused authors of “transphobia”) or even ostracism altogether (recall the sad episode at Sciences Po Grenoble, when two teachers were accused of Islamophobia for having… contested the term Islamophobia, one of them having been then dropped by his superiors and put in the closet).
Woke “thought”, before being a piecemeal ideology, turns out to be above all a moral posture, and corresponds perfectly to Scruton’s judgment on progressivism. But its most striking dimension turns out to be its relationship to reality. The woke base their vision of the world on the feeling of victimhood, sincere or exploited. But not only does feeling, which is not feeling but its most reflex version, prevent discussion since it ties it to a starting point which is also its arrival point, but it turns into authoritarian relativism since he reserves the status of victim for some and refuses it to others. The result is akin to a postmodern festival where, as the saying goes, “there are no facts, only interpretations.”
Immigration and insecurity
Now, in a curious reversal, this is now the impression one can get when listening to certain politicians and commentators located to the right of the right. Knowledge of the facts, their putting into perspective, their interpretation, no longer have any importance in the face of certainties that have become unshakeable. This is particularly true of the two hot topics of immigration and insecurity. Instead of considering them coldly and without taboo, but with the reserve that befits the analysis, this right today sticks to the facts that suit it and is offended that we underline the complexity of any fact social.
I recently experienced this while participating in a debate on a news channel that I prefer not to name. It was about the reduction in insecurity in Nantes. No one around me seemed to take these figures seriously: since they showed a decline, they were necessarily false, even if none of us provided proof that they were. And one of us to place this decrease in the perspective of several decades of increase in violence. I then let him know that the cognitivist Steven Pinker, from Harvard University, had shown, in a fascinating book, The angel part in us, that violence had decreased over the centuries, according to a process of civilization with multiple factors. My goal was to emphasize that relativization had its limits: that of my co-debater also had them, and it might be possible to welcome the reduction in insecurity in Nantes, even temporary, as good news.
The result was quite different: the discussion transformed into a general condemnation, made up of exclamations and mockery, of my odious relativization of violence! And nothing helped: it was impossible for my co-debaters, who were not listening to anything, and one of whom simply prevented me from speaking by covering my voice (a common procedure among men), to hear that the two facts (the decrease in violence as a long-term civilizational trend, its possible increase in recent years, in certain places and certain circumstances, which obviously had to be studied), were not incompatible. To them, it’s not that I was wrong, it’s that I was evil.
The common places of wokitude
In this case, we find among this right the commonplaces of wokeness: the exaggerated reaction to a word considered provocative (which left-wing woke people call “trigger”), the postmodern preference for opinion over judgment and even the tendency towards “cancel culture”, when a divergent opinion proves untenable. In a word, this right also claims to be “awake”. She has, in a word, become woke.
Like its big sister on the left, the woke right first appeared in America, embodied in a not very clear-cut businessman who was also, and this is no coincidence, a figure of reality TV, a postmodern concept. it is. In France, it fit into a pre-existing mold, that of the reactionary right, and found its standard-bearer in a polemicist who is a master in the art of historical rewriting, Eric Zemmour. And if this right has become adept at post-truth, it is, like the left, for moral reasons. She considers defending the truly oppressed in our society, whom she considers to be, among others, the “white males”, the police or even the “natives”. Its objective is not to point out the real cases where these groups are unfairly treated, it is to claim that they are systematically treated and that, for this reason, they are always on the good side.
We can understand the genesis of this movement: it is a reaction to the moral left which, for too long, refused to examine angry questions and referred their authors to many “phobias”. But right-wing Wokism, by dint of being only reactive, ended up imitating the very people it hated. It has become the negative in the photographic sense. However, let us remember, like Marcus Aurelius, that “the best way to take revenge on an enemy is to not be like him”.