MB: Foucault’s defenders would argue that, unlike real reactionaries, he was fighting against oppression by exposing its mechanisms. Neiman suggests that what fills the vacuum where the universal idea of justice should be is power. Here, she argues, much of the left has converged on a position staked out by the far right, claiming that appeals to universal values and common humanity are no more than smokescreens intended to conceal the reality that all of life is a struggle for domination. Again, this is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw from the history of colonialism or even the more recent history of the US and British invasion of Iraq, in which, as she puts it, the “glaring abuse of words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ magnified doubt that such words can ever be uttered in good faith.” There cannot be any knowledge that “does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations,” Foucault wrote. So utterly fused are knowledge and power that he conjoins them in his neologism “power-knowledge.” Because there is no point outside of power relations from which they can be objectively criticized, “one abandons the opposition between what is ‘interested’ and what is ‘disinterested.’” From a very different starting point, Foucault ends up in the same place as Schmitt—only war is really truthful: “Isn’t power simply a form of warlike domination? Shouldn’t one therefore conceive all problems of power in terms of relations of war?” None of this is to say that Neiman’s critique is directed entirely at straw men, or that it does not speak to genuine pathologies within the left. Her suggestion that many putative progressives indulge in ethnic “tribalism” (defined as an outlook that sees “the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else”) and racial essentialism are sadly well-founded.

c.) Wokeism doesn’t really believe in progress. Again, I agree with Neiman. The Enlightenment, as we know from Steve Pinker’s two big books ( Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), always rested on beliefs that progress was possible, even if not always achieved. One example I can adduce is civil rights. The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence. SN: I see how you could use it that way. But first of all let me ask the question. When you say “Take the mind of a hunter-gatherer two million years ago,” how have you taken that mind? How has anybody? I have to admit that this was the part of my book that I was the least certain of, so I asked my friend Philip Kitcher, who has written at least two books on evolutionary psychology, to read it and please tell me where I got things wrong. He made a couple of minor suggestions, but he thought that I got the heart of the thing right. Evolutionary psychology is the biggest example of a pseudoscience that ever became so respectable. But they have zero sources to go on. Yes, evolution works slowly, but we don’t have access to the mind of a hunter gatherer. We can look at their bones and various archaeological relics, but talk about their minds is sheer speculation. And even if we knew what our ancestors were thinking two million years ago, we have absolutely no reason to believe that we have the same drives and motivations as they do, because in the intervening two million years cultures have also evolved. Because the concept is so ridiculous, most serious thinkers haven’t wasted much energy on it (leaving aside the reactionary centrists who have turned complaining about “the woke revolution” into a veritable cottage industry). Until now, that is. Enter Susan Neiman, an American philosopher who directs the Einstein Forum in Berlin and has authored numerous acclaimed volumes. Making sense of this seeming paradox, scholars like Uday Singh Mehta have helped us to see that the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason was a particularly European one that viewed the rest of the world as “a vacant field, already weeded, where history has been brought to a nullity,” a dark morass receptive to being enlightened. In so doing, Enlightenment thought often relied on modern science to argue that white Europeans were constitutionally superior to people in other parts of the world. They were thus the privileged vessels of reason, a precious commodity that needed to be brought to the rest of the world, by force if necessary. That version of Enlightenment reason was not a value-neutral heuristic, but rather an imposition of European power on a global scale. After all, Mozart’s famous opera The Magic Flute, which historian Paul Robinson has described as “fully explicit in its Enlightenment values,” stakes a claim that only white men can access reason. Theresa May, Britain’s fourth-most-recent prime minister, has a book to sell. In a recent interview, the former Conservative leader declared herself “woke and proud.” In The Abuse of Power, she cites an Oxford English Dictionary definition of woke as being “well-informed, up to date and chiefly alert to racial discrimination and injustice.” She told her interviewer: “And on that basis, who would not want to be woke?”Neiman’s primers on the anti-colonialism of Immanuel Kant and neoliberalism of Foucault are accessible and engaging enough. But it seems doubtful that imploring young progressives to read more Kant and Voltaire is an effective means of countering woke ideology. It seems plausible that one can draw a line of devolution from Foucault and Schmitt’s theories of power down to the bizarre dogmas found in a Telluride anti-racist workshop or Okun pamphlet. But it does not follow that rebutting the former will lessen the latter’s cultural influence. SN: I’ve only had one review from a conservative who wrote something along the lines of: “You have to wade through a lot of leftist bullshit to get there, but she makes some good points.” It’s pretty clear that I’m not being instrumentalized by the Right. Let no one confuse what this book has to say with the tired right-wing denunciation of ‘identity politics.’ The right-wing critique charges promoters of difference and multiculturalism with undermining the shared legacy of the national culture. It is a battle pitting one avowed particularism against another alleged particularism. Left Is Not Woke accuses some trendy voices of the left of a fatal self-betrayal: renouncing the very grounds on which the left has traditionally stood, the concepts and principles in the name of which it has fought its battles and advanced its ends, above all, universalism.” SN: The problem is that you can make the same relativist claim about “indigenous” customs and traditions that are even worse, like Female Genital Mutilation. Someone like Narendra Modi is a perfect example of the misuse of such post-colonial rhetoric and claims about indigeneity. Yes, human rights were originally formalized as a concept in Europe, though versions of them exist in other cultures. But for all of the very real harms of British colonialism in South Asia, do we really want to say it was wrong for them to protest and to forbid suttee (the burning of widows)?

oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind. China and Japan, who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry. Alex Chambers:You got interested in thinking about these big questions through the existentialists, but then went to school and started studying with, sort of, some of the great philosophers of their time. Maybe no longer our time. And so, to a certain degree it was those early experiences that then connected with your interest in understanding these thinkers of the Enlightenment. Being woke means being aware of some social injustices more than others. Raising concerns about men using women’s bathrooms, for example, can get you suspended from your job; men’s desire to urinate in the location of their choice takes precedence over women’s right to feel safe in public. Being woke also means responding to perceived injustices in a certain way. Britain’s National Health Service spends millions of pounds on equity, diversity, and inclusivity projects, for example, while some of its low-paid nurses are forced to use food banks. Economic hardships get overlooked, while the U.K.’s General Medical Council obsessively removes references to “mother” and “women” from the language of its maternity-leave and menopause policies. Finally, wokeness connotes an authoritarian impulse: proponents compel some speech, such as people’s chosen pronouns, while censoring other speech. Most people know instinctively that wokeness entails overturning a once-progressive, colorblind, gender-neutral approach to equality with an identity politics that re-emphasizes biological differences. I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself. But the Telluride workshops were being organized by two college-age students, filled with the spirit of the times. From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about: My sense is that calling attention to the peculiar dynamics of contemporary progressive institutions — and noting that these yield incentives that are often diametrically opposed to the imperatives of effective political action in an ethnically and ideologically heterogenous democracy — may be a more effective means of combating wokeness, in Neiman’s pejorative sense, then excavating the anti-colonial side of Kant.

References

We both agree that “protofascists” around the world represent a true threat. Whether it is best to oppose them by demanding conformity, debating first principles, or simply doing the hard work of coalition building, I leave to you to decide. Neiman’s short, punchy, and brilliantly articulated argument is essentially a call for those who regard themselves as being on the left to remember the distinction between skepticism and cynicism.” SN: I think we have a lot of innate dispositions, but the bottom line of leading evolutionary psychologists is that we have this one disposition to want to increase our own gene pool and that is the basis of our every action. From that perspective, evolutionary psychologists have what they call the “problem of altruism.” Quite interesting that they see this as a problem! In fact, altruism is quite common in the living world, as you can read in Frans de Waal’s books. And to explain altruism they say things like: you will sacrifice your own interests if and only if you’re increasing the gene pool of any near relatives, so either two children, or four nieces or nephews, etc. This is where it looks like satire.

The book thus sets out to defend the Enlightenment against “standard contemporary readings,” which are more accurately just called critical readings. For much of the last century, the Enlightenment—a loose movement of European intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries who emphasized individual reason over tradition and religion—occupied a privileged place in the origin stories of liberalism. It was the moment when human rights and democracy became thinkable to Europeans as organizing political principles. Susan Neiman:It's really very hard to describe the German scene to Americans because it seems so weird. But, because the Germans finally Alex Chambers:That's what's coming up. We talked about how her childhood and adolescence in the American south shaped her politics and philosophy, how she got into philosophy as a way to think about big questions that matter to people, not just obscure abstract concepts. And why she's such a passionate defender of the enlightenment. Here we go. A rather fascinating finding is that ‘One in five One Nation voters (22%) would describe themselves as woke.’ One Nation is a right wing party known for advocating low immigration and opposing Aboriginal self determination. Neiman sets her sights on Foucault as an exemplar of this turn away from Enlightenment reason, arguing that he pioneered a worldview held today by “the woke left.” The French philosopher, who still looms large over academic discourse, did indeed question the principles of the Enlightenment. In dozens of books, lectures, and essays, he contended that while Enlightenment ideas may have made the world more humane, they also substituted naked and obvious domination for far more insidious forms of power that work through norms and institutions to shape our very existence.

Further Reading

SN: Correct, but he’s also giving you the sense that whatever you do to fight those mechanisms of oppression they are bigger than you and you are even part of it. It’s an extraordinary call to defeatism or resignation. It was even unclear whether he was on the side of prison reform. When people talked about concrete improvements that would make the lives of prisoners better, Foucault would just say: “Ah that’s trivial.” A lot of so-called progressive academics have come think that all you need to do is to deconstruct mechanisms of power. But deconstruction by itself is not a political act. Kant’s search for universal values led him not toward notions of European superiority but away from them. Neiman’s sensitivity to these fallacies derives partly from her own identity as a Jewish critic of Israel. Apologists for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians incessantly seek to invalidate reasoned arguments with invocations of historical trauma and ill-substantiated allegations of hateful bias. And in many cases, their basic position is affirmed by all major Jewish American organizations and the most identitarian Jewish activists. But it does not follow from this that there is one essentially Jewish perspective on the occupation of the West Bank, let alone that rejecting the dominant perspective among Jewish organizations and activists is inherently antisemitic. What these groups do share is the certainty that if we have any hope of confronting the future—of even surviving into the future—we need new ways of thinking. We need doubt about the structures and ideas that brought us to this point. If we are living in a world that the Enlightenment made, a world that in the centuries since Kant’s first editions has suffered imperialism, genocide, climate change, and more—much of it imposed by “enlightened” Europeans—it is worth asking if the Enlightenment is all its advocates purport it to be.