A Brief History of the Ideas behind Wokeism

By Adam S. Francisco - Posted at The Lutheran Witness:

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These words, penned by the Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), capture the spirit of modern revolutionary thought. It argues that institutions and standards, even notions of goodness and truth, enslave people by binding them to a political system, social order and moral and theological tradition. True freedom can never be realized within these structures. Neither can real equality — where all are equal in every respect. Achieving these lofty (though undefined) goals of freedom and equality requires liberation from the institutions and standards of the past. Individuals and society must move past them and create new ones — ones that avoid the oppressive and exclusionary nature of those being replaced. How? In the past, force and even violence was the strategy. Think of the French and Russian Revolutions. There is, however, another way. Over the last century, revolutionary thinkers have also advocated for a quieter, more intentional approach, one that seeks to change institutions from within in what was described in the 1960s as “the long march through the institutions.”

Cultural Change

This social strategy can be traced back to neo-Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), whose work was translated into English by Notre Dame professor John Buttigieg (father of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg). Gramsci taught that the best way to liberate society from oppression was not through political revolution. Rather, it was by slowly but surely influencing and eventually changing extant institutions within it, especially ones that shape culture, such as colleges and universities. This would lead to a cultural revolution and, politics being downstream from culture, political change would follow suit.

We seem to be living either in the middle or, as some argue, the end of a cultural revolution. So much has changed in just a few years. Ideas regarding race, gender and sexuality that made no sense a decade or two ago (and for thousands of years prior) are now part of public discourse — claims like “there are more than two genders” and “elementary school music classes promote white supremacy” or “math is racist” and so on. Universities are abandoning traditional curricula and the ideal of the relentless pursuit of truth for the advancement of social and political causes informed by critical theory and the relativism of social constructivism. Businesses are becoming overtly political and identifying with radical causes such as transgenderism and feminism. Even the military has been affected. One retired Army Lieutenant General named Thomas Spoehr described the military’s greatest challenge as “the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or ‘woke’) policies being imposed … by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness.”

Continue here.