Premium Thoughts : On Left Not Woke

Background: 

The following is based on the bones of an email I wrote in reply to a center-right pen pal. They emailed me to share a 2023 interview in Quillette with Susan Neiman about her book Left not Woke. 

As I mentioned in the response, I actually own a copy of this book but I had not yet read this interview. I haven’t finished Left Not Woke and the following is a response more to the Quillette piece than it is to the book in its entirety. I hope to actually finish the book one day and give a full review, but as of now, I’m standing on my opinion as stated below because the point of view that Neiman expresses in Quillette is very indicative of the general rhetorical engine behind “The Left left me behind'' discourse. A discourse that I find more and more tedious every time it takes over my Twitter feed. 

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Dearest Regards My Annoying Friend,

It's funny because my father-in-law gave me Left Not Woke as a Christmas present last year. I read the introduction chapter and kind of lost interest. Maybe I'll pick it up again, but I didn't find her argument very compelling. Mostly because while I mostly agreed with a lot of what she was saying, it really wasn't addressing the core of why a lot of people find postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critiques of enlightenment so compelling. 

In this interview and in the chapter of her book I read, I found myself nodding along with much of her critique toward "woke" intellectualism, (I don't know how much you read my substack but I critique wokeness a lot), but at the same time there are little bits and pieces that turn me off. Like this portion of the interview for instance:

MB: But let’s assume you’re right that evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience. Still, the biggest opponents of evolutionary psychology are the woke crowd. They absolutely hate it.

SN: But what’s the woke attack on evolutionary psychology then? Because I haven’t read one.

MB: Well, that it’s sexist and essentializes the differences between men and women.

SN: Well, it does! In any case, even the woke often presume it. You can’t grow up in this culture without absorbing it. I once got talking about evolutionary psychology with my son, who’s a documentary filmmaker and very woke but a sophisticated thinker. And he told me: “Well, that’s just science!”

It's so odd to me that she wrote a whole book about the woke left and its extreme counterproductive ideology and yet she doesn't seem to realize that woke leftism hates evolutionary psychology. (About a month ago, popular BreadTuber Munecat did a whole 3.5 hour video debunking evolutionary psychology which has already gained a million views) Of course, the interviewer and she both brush past it with an anecdote about her son, so we don’t really get to interrogate this oversight.

I guess the biggest problem I have with Neiman's analysis here is that she uses the most extreme excesses of what she considers woke political formation ("pre-colonial cultures are just as good if not better than Western enlightenment-backed colonialist cultures") and doesn't bother to address the more sensible and nuanced takes that exist within that same discourse.

Similar to Neiman re: woke criticisms of evolutionary psychology, I haven't actually heard the woke defense of female genital mutilation or burning wives. It seems to exist mainly as a slippery slope conjecture on the part of woke critics. A large part of the argument here relies mostly on the supposition that if you believe that colonialism was an unmitigated disaster and that pre-colonial societies in the global south were inherently better, then you can't argue against the barbaric practices of those pre-colonial societies. We don’t really need to scrutinize any other thought coming from post-colonialist philosophy if that is the case. 

And if that were the only or main argument of postcolonialism, I'd probably agree. But it's not an argument that I've ever really come across when delving into postcolonialist thought. It's more like the idea that we should be conscious of the ways that colonialism has shaped what we view as objective ways of looking at the world. Sometimes in ways that have been detrimental to those cultures and identities that didn't get to shape the world.

This is not the same as arguing that all Western colonial influence is bad and should be abandoned. Nor it is to say that no one from the West can critique any pre-colonial culture. And if we looked at other specific things than the one that Susan picked to make her argument, like say...sustainable ecology or the erasure of non-European scientific discovery....then she would have a harder time portraying the entire thing as farce.