1. The Rise of Woke Religion

2020 will go down as a notable year. It will also be among our most difficult to explain to posterity. ‘Pandemic, panic and protest’ does well to summarize this current US election year. Politics has taken on a religious fervour all throughout the Western world. It reminds me of ‘the Troubles’ in Ireland with its ability to divide families against themselves.

I can create some outline as to how we got here, where we need to go, and how to get there. Depending upon the reader, this will require some willing suspension of disbelief. And as we can only expand our internal world of ideas one at a time, this task will likely prove impossible for those with a more leftist bent.

I offer no pretence of an unbiased viewpoint. As Charles Darwin noted, “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” Thus, I hope to be biased toward the service of greater Truth. At the very least, I hope to acquire it for myself.

Let us begin by looking superficially at the growing chasm dividing families in the West. The word ‘Woke’ is used by some as an insult, whilst their intended targets take it as a compliment. Those insulted use their own word ‘Deplorable’ as an insult, and their intended targets also take it as a compliment. How strange indeed.

Good and Evil are fundamental categories, used in judgement of those less fundamental. Good being that which we would see prevail, and Evil that which we would see destroyed. Clearly that which the Woke would see destroyed, the Deplorable would see prevail, and vice versa. Thus, common broad categories produce contrasting affects in these two groups of people.

What are these broad categories? I’d suggest the Self (or Consciousness), the Arena (or Nature) and the Other (or Culture) as useful to the discussion. Every man will categorise each of these as Good, Evil or neither. He who sees all three as good recognises that they ought to overlap, thus forming a unity.

The Woke are inclined to see Nature as Good. Her abundance obstructed by an Evil Culture which actively destroys her. To add to this conundrum, they see their Self as impotent, and their own subjective state as undesirable and blame it upon the Other, that which produces the Evil Culture. Even the great Ernest Hemingway complained that, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

Whilst Deplorables are also inclined to see Nature as Good, they see Culture as an additional Good, as deriving abundance from Nature. Consciousness too is an additional Good, as both a subjective state and in contributing to and creating Culture.

We did not get to where we are in a single bound, but by long trial and error and from the same starting point as the Woke. As Northrop Frye wrote, “We are all born into a sea of liquid chaos as a man falls into the sea; and we must either sink or swim to land because we are not fish.”

We certainly are not fish, and whilst we’ve made many generalisations, they illustrate that free will has been exercised and has delivered us to opposed ways of being. We are each the sum and sequence of our reactions to experience. He who now claims it impossible to turn back, once could take either path but took neither seriously.

We all claim rationality as our authority. However, the man who protects the consistency of a few ideas against a sea of anomaly cannot manifest the authority of one who maintains the consistency of thousands, and who regularly admits anomalies by the psychological exaptation of those thousands. Yet the former attacks the later as inconsistent, as he confuses intelligence for wisdom much as Hemingway did.

Exaptation — the process by which features acquire functions for which they were not originally selected.

The Woke are atheists who use the term ‘white privilege’ seemingly unaware of the irony. The concept is awfully similar to ‘original sin’, just without any possibility of salvation. They use ‘cancel culture’ to punish what they perceive as heresy. And yet they attack not particularly religious folk for ‘being religious’ and for being conformed to old ideas. If old ideas are wrong, why are they constantly rediscovered such that they can persist across time?

How did we end up here? A place where our common ground has disappeared, and where religious instinct has been lowered into the political domain. As increasing parts of our Western populations can no longer discern the utility of old foundational assumptions about life and the cosmos, they’ve assumed them wrong, then started out with their own. A great many have ended up with worse assumptions than they started with, whilst more still have found their way back to those which shall continue to persist.

If atheism cannot avoid but descend into a vicious form of pagan religion, then we must understand woke guilt and the projection of this guilt upon those traditionally regarded as Good. Words from Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister are appropriate here. “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” The current challenge to the West is as real as that of World War II.

This challenge will take place in the political realm and will have very real economic consequences, the extent of which could bring about an end to prosperity in the West. We must understand this challenge and how to defeat it. We must not only defeat it in the immediate political arena, but we must fix all those institutions where it has already taken root and done damage. We must bring Liberals into a broad coalition, and figure out how to build and maintain institutions with them. An important part of this will involve reviving religious institutions, and in so doing, relegate the Woke to some dim corner of History.