THE ESSENTIAL WOKE PHILOSOPHY: I Feel, Therefore I Am. The novelist and religious historian Mark Goldblatt has written a short and savagely funny philosophical analysis of wokery. He imagines, for instance, today’s academics canceling Galileo because “astronomical observations privilege a specific Enlightenment view of the earth as an inanimate object hurtling through space rather than as a living, nurturing mother figure” and therefore “reinscribe the cultural hegemony of Europeans over communities of color.” A summary:
Advocates for Critical Race Theory, the Me Too movement, and transgender-recognition, often grouped under the umbrella term “Woke,” share more than a perpetual sense of grievance, an attraction to street theater, and an intense dislike of straight white guys who drink cheap beer and wear their baseball caps backward. They share a devotion to subjectivism. Their gathering principle is the idea that subjective belief, if it is heartfelt, trumps whatever objective, verifiable evidence may be brought against it. For these social justice warriors, if you sincerely and passionately believe an injustice is being done, then the effort to determine whether that belief corresponds with reality is a further injustice.
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