People immersed in cultic binary thinking often simply conflate anything and everything that's at odds with their cult doctrine. Thus, you often see Christian conservatives speaking as if secular humanism and the New Age are the same, when in reality these have contempt for each other.
But Islam and wokeness don't have the same root system? Wokeness is definitely a Western phenomenon made up of a distinctly Christian sense of original sin, Marxist focus on power structures, postmodern epistemology & language obsession and a distorted liberal sense of progress.
The radical nature of them? Yes, I think so too. Then people make the mistake of seeing a Muslim who is radically woke and call him a radical Muslim which is not actually wrong and therefore an Islamist which is.
A woke Islamist is not self contradictory. If woke means viewing the world and all relationships through an oppressor/oppressed - anti-western lens it makes sense IF you define western governments and cultures as oppressors.
I agree with you. Woke ideology and Islamism are two entirely different things, so one cannot believe in both. This is also why I am skeptical of the concept of the “Woke Right.” It seems as nonsensical as the term “Woke Islamist.”
But they aren’t **entirely** different, just different enough in the way Helen said, and thats an important distinction. Both do have totalistic impulses that clash with varying degrees of intensity with liberalism. Both tend to the dogmatic and the collectivist. That’s what the right wing picks up on when they misdiagnose “woke Islamism” as one thing (however much motivated reasoning is driving this misdiagnosis, and it’s far above zero.)
Exactly this. I’m so glad to read this piece from you, Helen. There is so much misunderstanding here- thanks for your clarity and insight: “The woke are inclined to downplay the problem of Islamism and accuse people concerned about it of Islamophobia. Islamists, of course, do not return the favour by accusing people concerned about radical queer activism of homophobia or transphobia.”
I’m usually a big fan of yours, but the tiny flaw in this essay is the fact that we are facing a tsunami of people who are both Woke & pro-Islamist simultaneously. That’s _their_ failure, not ours.
I’m perfectly clear about the logical impossibility of those two ideologies coexisting consistently. But look at Iran 1979: the Islamist takeover was ushered in by ‘woke’ communist radicals.
Except that's just the usual fallout from every revolution against every tyrannical regime ever. People who put aside their differences in order to fight against the common enemy then rediscover their differences when the common enemy is defeated. Iran is not the only place this happened. Nor is it the only place where incompatible idealogies forged a temporary alliance.
You can argue that something similar is happening re Palestine, that, faced with a live-streamed genocide left-wing people have engaged in a similar alliance of convenience against a common enemy. But you'd be wrong. The anti-genocide movement takes great care not to endorse either Islamist or anti-Semitic ideologies, to the great disappointment of the pro-genocide extremists.
"desperately antisemitic ICC". You realise that when you start with something so ludicrous and ridiculous, nothing else you say will be taken seriously, right?
Good thoughts. Speaking from the US it does appear that he tried to focus on bread and butter class oriented issues more than on cultural ones. I'm for this. That said, he seems to not really have reached voters outside of Manhattan, and there could be reasons for this that really don't have to do with him. Also, he did come from a woke place at one time, and this needs to be watched, but many people seem to be growing past this. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I do think he is going to have a hard time becoming mayor.
Excellent, a balanced reasonable person looking at policy decisions and weighing up pros and cons based on what he has actually said and done in a balanced and nuanced way. Kindly clone yourself, sir.
Agreed. It's also telling that Islamists and wokeists mean almost opposite things when they talk about 'Islamophobia'. (An attack on the most important thing in the world vs an attack on something that should be irrelevant.)
I also wrestled with an image for this piece, but I didn't get the terrifying handy warning. Is that AI?
Yes, but I was asking it to help me think of an image and throwing ideas at it and asking specifically for pros and cons rather than just describing what I wanted. I have aphantasia and cannot picture things in my head or even think in terms of symbolic images very well. I didn't just ask it to generate the image and receive a warning without asking for an opinion. I said "What about this" and then it said that.
I'm reminded of a rather funny clip of Alex Jones raving about the "communist socialist system of Islam." Such constructions seem to be employed more as tribal totems than as anything resembling a coherent concept; the audience is not meant to imagine any concrete noun at all, but only to feel the pangs of instinctive unease: "Oh no! Three things I dislike!"
Most political content works this way, in my view, even if it's generally less on-the-nose. One responds to an imagined enemy rather than real ideas. It's why I rarely bother with it.
You are correct in concluding that what logically connects these contradictory beliefs is anti-Westernism. That is the final singularity I eventually arrived at when examining pretty much every single variety of progressive belief. It is a destructive movement not a reformist one - and they explicitly say so when you read the "queer" polemics. Liberalism is meant to improve lives individually and collectively.
Are you familiar with the term "Omnicause"? - I've encountered it used by Mary Harrington, Helen Dale and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A word that is getting increasing airplay, a description of the way the Palestine issue has become totemic for the prog/left.
You are correct but I think as is common even the woke who seem to be favoring Islamist Hamas nowadays are ignoring all reality while progressive Muslims are realizing their performative areas of religion can stretch really well into trappings of wokeness. What better way to avoid sexualizing than a hijab? How much does no alcohol play very well into wellness cults nowadays? Meditation or praying five times a day?
Hi I’m new to your Substack. Do you have an essay where you explain what evidence based epistemology is? From what I understand, what you describe as wokeism and what I understand as “identity politics” are based in the evidence of lived experience, so defined by a common communal experience—the way a population demographic navigates the stereotypes that color their existence in a society.. joining this convo without previous context, I’m interpreting the moral hierarchy you describe as wokeism’s unviable “one-size-fits-all” kind of remedy to a problem in society (e.g. homeless people can’t get jobs because they dress poorly because they don’t have jobs to buy clothes); intended to be internalized by an individual in order to avoid the perpetuation of an oppressive or micro aggressive act.
In my view the intention is good but the solution is, in a way, dehumanizing due to the way it fails to allow the afflicted group to state what they actually want. It also has a way of dictating how other human beings, who also want to help, should respond.
Hi! Welcome. Evidence-based epistemology is simply determining what is true based on evidence but what you're describing is 'standpoint epistemology' and that works politically, unfortunately. You absolutely could get evidence of the experiences and perceptions of a certain demographic by surveying a large representative sample of them and this is valuable data on experiences and perceptions. You have to be aware of two things:
1) They may not match reality. e.g., A big survey in the UK found that Britons believed 21% of the population to be Muslim when the actual percentage was 5%. This is evidence of a mismatch between perception and reality and it is useful to know it because then we can investigate why it exists and the answer is probably to be found in anxiety about cultural incompatibilities. Then this can be addressed at its source whereas accepting the lived experience of people who had this perception as true would just cause a mess.
2) The 'woke' don't do representative surveys. They explicitly regard the members of every group who agree with them as the 'authentic' voice of that group and everybody else as still trapped within their socialisation into oppressive power structures and blind to social reality (not woke). This means that we really only hear from political subsets who are likely to be middle-class and university educated. e.g., The woke will tell us that BLM represents black views. Surveys tell us the majority of black people feel BLM has not been at all helpful to reducing racism. The woke will tell us that black people want to defund the police. Surveys tell us that positive or negative opinions of the police among black people vary mostly by whether they have been to university or not with those who have feeling more negatively while those who have not are more likely to feel positively.
So, yes. Your view that this is an unviable 'one-size-fits-all' kind of remedy that does not really hear what certain groups are saying is spot on, in my view!
"When conservatives are guilty of this kind of conflation"
Helen - There you go again. You provide the specific example for left liberalism, but you do not to back this, again, moral equivalency claim with conservatism. I don't see it at all with conservatism. There are debates within the conservative domain as to what are traditional values worthy of protection, but there is consistency in the overall framework of conservative ideology.
The left-liberal woke framework is rife with hypocrisy and contradictions like this example of antisemitic support of Islam even in its radical form and practice while Islam in its radical form and practice kills gays and trans and women that step out of line set by men. Another is the woke left support for trans biological males competing in female athletics and allowed in female locker rooms and bathrooms and thus harming women's rights and safety. Climate crisis beliefs and related policies result in higher costs of food that result in more hunger while the left virtue signals care to end hunger. Woke defund the cops demands that harm low-income minority people that the woke left claims to advocate for.
The list goes on.
Provide me one example of conservative hypocrisy and contradiction. And no, eliminating critical theory and woke content, curriculum and instruction from the schools and libraries is not any free speech contradiction. Conservative principles include preventing children from accessing things that are bad for them.
Some of this is noticing the pattern of “taqiyya” from Islamist extremism and speculating that the “woke-ness” is being used as a cover to gain power/prestige and allow the Islamism in through a back door. While some of this may be subconscious, I don’t doubt that there are those who see this alliance as a means to an end.
Yes, but once you're into mindreading, you opt out of addressing reality and just argue about people you've made up in your head. Taqiyya is a thing where Muslims may conceal their religious views in order to preserve their own lives and safety. Judaism has a similar rule because they too believe it is more of a sin to risk one's own life than temporarily lie to preserve it. Christianity differs in that it has a history of valorising martyrs. This rule does not lead people to embrace queer theory and defunding the police. I think a more modest and plausible claim is that he might be biased towards Islam and underplay the threat from Islamism and that Islamists can use this to their advantage.
Yes, it is a shortcut (and so not as accurate) to just call him a “woke Islamist”, but I do think that it indicates the threat. And yes, taqiyya is interpreted very differently by different sects and individuals. It can be all about safety/defense but is also used offensively by some extremists.
Taqiyya is Shia and was developed to allow them to live in Sunni dominated environments.
I have to stand against any stance that argues against what we can speculate other people to really think that is opposed to what they actually say and do. It's not only impossible to try to analyse or make any arguments on that basis and so is a conversation terminator, it is also done to me all the time and it's a bad habit of thinking because it enables people to ascribe the beliefs they want to argue against to others. I had to create a Twitter account called "Straw Pluckrose" because of how many versions of me there are. I'm claimed to really want a white supremacist state, a patriarchy, a communist state and even wokeness. It's very frustrating when I've spent so much time setting out what I really do want only for people to say "Nah, you really want to say the "n-word"/hate women/are a communist".
I appreciate that. I value your perspective and insights. We will all just have to wait and see what people do, hopefully without losing the ability to counter things if the path turns sharply against our values.
This is actually way more complicated. I agree in principle against straw manning and mind reading. But a great part in politics is played precisely by not being overtly open about one's motives and goals, and so its actually understood by almost all that you actually *should* try and mind read your opponent. Its a tension I dont know how to address but it should be taken into account one has probably as often is to balance opposing pulls
People immersed in cultic binary thinking often simply conflate anything and everything that's at odds with their cult doctrine. Thus, you often see Christian conservatives speaking as if secular humanism and the New Age are the same, when in reality these have contempt for each other.
But Islam and wokeness don't have the same root system? Wokeness is definitely a Western phenomenon made up of a distinctly Christian sense of original sin, Marxist focus on power structures, postmodern epistemology & language obsession and a distorted liberal sense of progress.
The radical nature of them? Yes, I think so too. Then people make the mistake of seeing a Muslim who is radically woke and call him a radical Muslim which is not actually wrong and therefore an Islamist which is.
A woke Islamist is not self contradictory. If woke means viewing the world and all relationships through an oppressor/oppressed - anti-western lens it makes sense IF you define western governments and cultures as oppressors.
I agree with you. Woke ideology and Islamism are two entirely different things, so one cannot believe in both. This is also why I am skeptical of the concept of the “Woke Right.” It seems as nonsensical as the term “Woke Islamist.”
But they aren’t **entirely** different, just different enough in the way Helen said, and thats an important distinction. Both do have totalistic impulses that clash with varying degrees of intensity with liberalism. Both tend to the dogmatic and the collectivist. That’s what the right wing picks up on when they misdiagnose “woke Islamism” as one thing (however much motivated reasoning is driving this misdiagnosis, and it’s far above zero.)
As usual, you've brought nagging concerns to the foreground. Now I have more questions to find answers for.
Exactly this. I’m so glad to read this piece from you, Helen. There is so much misunderstanding here- thanks for your clarity and insight: “The woke are inclined to downplay the problem of Islamism and accuse people concerned about it of Islamophobia. Islamists, of course, do not return the favour by accusing people concerned about radical queer activism of homophobia or transphobia.”
I’m usually a big fan of yours, but the tiny flaw in this essay is the fact that we are facing a tsunami of people who are both Woke & pro-Islamist simultaneously. That’s _their_ failure, not ours.
I’m perfectly clear about the logical impossibility of those two ideologies coexisting consistently. But look at Iran 1979: the Islamist takeover was ushered in by ‘woke’ communist radicals.
Except that's just the usual fallout from every revolution against every tyrannical regime ever. People who put aside their differences in order to fight against the common enemy then rediscover their differences when the common enemy is defeated. Iran is not the only place this happened. Nor is it the only place where incompatible idealogies forged a temporary alliance.
You can argue that something similar is happening re Palestine, that, faced with a live-streamed genocide left-wing people have engaged in a similar alliance of convenience against a common enemy. But you'd be wrong. The anti-genocide movement takes great care not to endorse either Islamist or anti-Semitic ideologies, to the great disappointment of the pro-genocide extremists.
Cool. There’s only one tiny flaw in your otherwise perfect argument:
there is no genocide - to the great disappointment of the anti-Zionists (ie pro the genocide of Israel) on both the left & Islamist sides.
Except there is.
Says random person on internet when even the desperately antisemitic ICC can’t make the accusation stick.
"desperately antisemitic ICC". You realise that when you start with something so ludicrous and ridiculous, nothing else you say will be taken seriously, right?
Good thoughts. Speaking from the US it does appear that he tried to focus on bread and butter class oriented issues more than on cultural ones. I'm for this. That said, he seems to not really have reached voters outside of Manhattan, and there could be reasons for this that really don't have to do with him. Also, he did come from a woke place at one time, and this needs to be watched, but many people seem to be growing past this. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I do think he is going to have a hard time becoming mayor.
Excellent, a balanced reasonable person looking at policy decisions and weighing up pros and cons based on what he has actually said and done in a balanced and nuanced way. Kindly clone yourself, sir.
Well, I have my flaws too, but thanks for the compliment.
Agreed. It's also telling that Islamists and wokeists mean almost opposite things when they talk about 'Islamophobia'. (An attack on the most important thing in the world vs an attack on something that should be irrelevant.)
I also wrestled with an image for this piece, but I didn't get the terrifying handy warning. Is that AI?
https://dolancummings.substack.com/p/islamophobia-homophobia-and-the-moral
Yes, but I was asking it to help me think of an image and throwing ideas at it and asking specifically for pros and cons rather than just describing what I wanted. I have aphantasia and cannot picture things in my head or even think in terms of symbolic images very well. I didn't just ask it to generate the image and receive a warning without asking for an opinion. I said "What about this" and then it said that.
I'm reminded of a rather funny clip of Alex Jones raving about the "communist socialist system of Islam." Such constructions seem to be employed more as tribal totems than as anything resembling a coherent concept; the audience is not meant to imagine any concrete noun at all, but only to feel the pangs of instinctive unease: "Oh no! Three things I dislike!"
Most political content works this way, in my view, even if it's generally less on-the-nose. One responds to an imagined enemy rather than real ideas. It's why I rarely bother with it.
You are correct in concluding that what logically connects these contradictory beliefs is anti-Westernism. That is the final singularity I eventually arrived at when examining pretty much every single variety of progressive belief. It is a destructive movement not a reformist one - and they explicitly say so when you read the "queer" polemics. Liberalism is meant to improve lives individually and collectively.
Are you familiar with the term "Omnicause"? - I've encountered it used by Mary Harrington, Helen Dale and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A word that is getting increasing airplay, a description of the way the Palestine issue has become totemic for the prog/left.
You are correct but I think as is common even the woke who seem to be favoring Islamist Hamas nowadays are ignoring all reality while progressive Muslims are realizing their performative areas of religion can stretch really well into trappings of wokeness. What better way to avoid sexualizing than a hijab? How much does no alcohol play very well into wellness cults nowadays? Meditation or praying five times a day?
Hi I’m new to your Substack. Do you have an essay where you explain what evidence based epistemology is? From what I understand, what you describe as wokeism and what I understand as “identity politics” are based in the evidence of lived experience, so defined by a common communal experience—the way a population demographic navigates the stereotypes that color their existence in a society.. joining this convo without previous context, I’m interpreting the moral hierarchy you describe as wokeism’s unviable “one-size-fits-all” kind of remedy to a problem in society (e.g. homeless people can’t get jobs because they dress poorly because they don’t have jobs to buy clothes); intended to be internalized by an individual in order to avoid the perpetuation of an oppressive or micro aggressive act.
In my view the intention is good but the solution is, in a way, dehumanizing due to the way it fails to allow the afflicted group to state what they actually want. It also has a way of dictating how other human beings, who also want to help, should respond.
Hi! Welcome. Evidence-based epistemology is simply determining what is true based on evidence but what you're describing is 'standpoint epistemology' and that works politically, unfortunately. You absolutely could get evidence of the experiences and perceptions of a certain demographic by surveying a large representative sample of them and this is valuable data on experiences and perceptions. You have to be aware of two things:
1) They may not match reality. e.g., A big survey in the UK found that Britons believed 21% of the population to be Muslim when the actual percentage was 5%. This is evidence of a mismatch between perception and reality and it is useful to know it because then we can investigate why it exists and the answer is probably to be found in anxiety about cultural incompatibilities. Then this can be addressed at its source whereas accepting the lived experience of people who had this perception as true would just cause a mess.
2) The 'woke' don't do representative surveys. They explicitly regard the members of every group who agree with them as the 'authentic' voice of that group and everybody else as still trapped within their socialisation into oppressive power structures and blind to social reality (not woke). This means that we really only hear from political subsets who are likely to be middle-class and university educated. e.g., The woke will tell us that BLM represents black views. Surveys tell us the majority of black people feel BLM has not been at all helpful to reducing racism. The woke will tell us that black people want to defund the police. Surveys tell us that positive or negative opinions of the police among black people vary mostly by whether they have been to university or not with those who have feeling more negatively while those who have not are more likely to feel positively.
So, yes. Your view that this is an unviable 'one-size-fits-all' kind of remedy that does not really hear what certain groups are saying is spot on, in my view!
Concept creep is an important consideration.
"When conservatives are guilty of this kind of conflation"
Helen - There you go again. You provide the specific example for left liberalism, but you do not to back this, again, moral equivalency claim with conservatism. I don't see it at all with conservatism. There are debates within the conservative domain as to what are traditional values worthy of protection, but there is consistency in the overall framework of conservative ideology.
The left-liberal woke framework is rife with hypocrisy and contradictions like this example of antisemitic support of Islam even in its radical form and practice while Islam in its radical form and practice kills gays and trans and women that step out of line set by men. Another is the woke left support for trans biological males competing in female athletics and allowed in female locker rooms and bathrooms and thus harming women's rights and safety. Climate crisis beliefs and related policies result in higher costs of food that result in more hunger while the left virtue signals care to end hunger. Woke defund the cops demands that harm low-income minority people that the woke left claims to advocate for.
The list goes on.
Provide me one example of conservative hypocrisy and contradiction. And no, eliminating critical theory and woke content, curriculum and instruction from the schools and libraries is not any free speech contradiction. Conservative principles include preventing children from accessing things that are bad for them.
Some of this is noticing the pattern of “taqiyya” from Islamist extremism and speculating that the “woke-ness” is being used as a cover to gain power/prestige and allow the Islamism in through a back door. While some of this may be subconscious, I don’t doubt that there are those who see this alliance as a means to an end.
Yes, but once you're into mindreading, you opt out of addressing reality and just argue about people you've made up in your head. Taqiyya is a thing where Muslims may conceal their religious views in order to preserve their own lives and safety. Judaism has a similar rule because they too believe it is more of a sin to risk one's own life than temporarily lie to preserve it. Christianity differs in that it has a history of valorising martyrs. This rule does not lead people to embrace queer theory and defunding the police. I think a more modest and plausible claim is that he might be biased towards Islam and underplay the threat from Islamism and that Islamists can use this to their advantage.
Yes, it is a shortcut (and so not as accurate) to just call him a “woke Islamist”, but I do think that it indicates the threat. And yes, taqiyya is interpreted very differently by different sects and individuals. It can be all about safety/defense but is also used offensively by some extremists.
Taqiyya is Shia and was developed to allow them to live in Sunni dominated environments.
I have to stand against any stance that argues against what we can speculate other people to really think that is opposed to what they actually say and do. It's not only impossible to try to analyse or make any arguments on that basis and so is a conversation terminator, it is also done to me all the time and it's a bad habit of thinking because it enables people to ascribe the beliefs they want to argue against to others. I had to create a Twitter account called "Straw Pluckrose" because of how many versions of me there are. I'm claimed to really want a white supremacist state, a patriarchy, a communist state and even wokeness. It's very frustrating when I've spent so much time setting out what I really do want only for people to say "Nah, you really want to say the "n-word"/hate women/are a communist".
I appreciate that. I value your perspective and insights. We will all just have to wait and see what people do, hopefully without losing the ability to counter things if the path turns sharply against our values.
This is actually way more complicated. I agree in principle against straw manning and mind reading. But a great part in politics is played precisely by not being overtly open about one's motives and goals, and so its actually understood by almost all that you actually *should* try and mind read your opponent. Its a tension I dont know how to address but it should be taken into account one has probably as often is to balance opposing pulls
Yes, I can see that radical progressive Muslim mix.