It should be enough, then, to point out merely that the Woke ideology is both gaining significant amounts of power on nearly all levels — social, cultural, institutional, and legal — and is wholly inimical to the legal foundations of a free, liberal society filled with citizens who are equal under and before the law. In fact, just pointing this out should constitute an emergency for all classically and traditionally liberal-minded people, left, right, and center. The fact of the problem, however, raises an even darker specter that needs to be reckoned with as well: what would the Woke replace reasonableness and the reasonable-person standard with, if they gained enough means to do so? The answer, as it always is with the Woke, is power that suits them and disenfranchises those who disagree with them.
Here are two important ideas that currently exist in fundamental opposition to one another: “Reasonableness” and “Wokeness.”
In advanced legal systems, we depend upon the concept of “reasonableness” and specifically a standard known as the “reasonable-person standard.” This simply asks: what would be reasonable in, or what would a reasonable person make of, a given situation?
On the other hand, the “applied postmodern” ideologies that we refer to as “Wokeness” or “Critical Social Justice Theory” posit a concept of radical subjectivism and socialization into power-laden biases. In this worldview, there is no such thing as a “reasonable person,” and nothing can be considered “reasonable,” because the very application of “reason” is a mere application of whatever is accepted by the dominant power structure at hand. No one is reasonable because everyone is biased; there are only people who speak into dominant discourses or who resist them.
These ideas are wholly incompatible with one another. It is not possible to rely upon a standard of reasonableness or to defer to a hypothetical reasonable person if no such thing is believed to exist. Even worse, the reasonableness principle is wholly undermined by the further notion that any semblance of or consensus about what is reasonable is an application of the very sort of oppressive politics that our laws and courts in free countries are supposed to guard their citizens against. As these “critical constructivist” ideas, as they’re formally known, rise in prominence in our culture, they therefore present a significant threat to the very rule of law that makes liberal societies like ours possible — to say nothing of securing equal rights for all citizens.
It should be enough, then, to point out merely that the Woke ideology is both gaining significant amounts of power on nearly all levels — social, cultural, institutional, and legal — and is wholly inimical to the legal foundations of a free, liberal society filled with citizens who are equal under and before the law. In fact, just pointing this out should constitute an emergency for all classically and traditionally liberal-minded people, left, right, and center. The fact of the problem, however, raises an even darker specter that needs to be reckoned with as well: what would the Woke replace reasonableness and the reasonable-person standard with, if they gained enough means to do so?
The answer, as it always is with the Woke, is power that suits them and disenfranchises those who disagree with them.
