Ideas - Left Is Not Woke: Susan Neiman

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

In recent years, the word "woke" has evolved from a catchphrase into a political ideology — and a catch-all pejorative routinely wielded on the right against its left-leaning adherents. But in her book, Left Is Not Woke, moral philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the "woke" ideology represents a fundamental break from traditional leftist ideals. *This episode originally aired on April 12, 2023.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Nala Ayyad, and welcome to this episode of Ideas, which begins with one word, woke. begins with one word, woke. The term itself has been associated with political activism, with progressive activism, and being engaged and responding to inequalities, injustices, discrimination, layers of discrimination, intersectional discrimination, everywhere.

Woke started off as a way to indicate awareness of social injustice. But as it gained currency on the left, it also became weaponized by the right. I think it goes back to this woke mind virus that's infected the left and all these other institutions. This woke self-loathing has swept our country. The poisonous lie of equity, wokeness, and identity politics. You've likely heard of most of this so far. But what you may not have heard is a critique of wokeness from the left. What's confusing about the woke movement is that it expresses traditional left-wing emotions.

Empathy for the marginalized, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions that ultimately undermine them. This is moral philosopher Susan Neiman. She's director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, and a self-described lifelong leftist. I was raised in Georgia during the civil rights movement and turned left from there. I'm happy to be called leftist and socialist. Susan Neiman argues that what's often called wokeism

has now become antithetical to the left. What concerns me most are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint. A commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Susan Neiman's most recent book is entitled Left is Not Woke. She joined me at the Toronto Reference Library for an onstage discussion. Thank you all for being here, and thank you very much for coming.

It's a pleasure. There have been criticisms of the word woke for a while now, and almost always they come from the political right. But what I want to know to begin with is, at what point did you realize, I absolutely must write a book called Left is Not Woke? So I'm not sure there was a particular day. For about two years, I was having pretty disconsolate conversations with friends in very different countries, saying things like, did you see this? Did you see that? I guess I'm not left anymore. know, my response was more and more intensely, no, you are left. You've been left all your life. I mean, somewhere on the liberal left spectrum, depending on the person, they're not left. And my attempt to figure out exactly where the confusion was led me to exactly 11 months ago,

I had been invited to give a big lecture at the University of Cambridge. And I figured, okay, they can throw tomatoes at me. It doesn't matter. I'm going to see if I can work out what I think about this. And there were no tomatoes? There were no tomatoes. On the contrary, all of these people in their late 20s said, gosh, I never heard a critique from the left before there's something in that. I mean, that really surprised me. I expected a lot of pushback. And I made it clear, as I make clear in the book, I don't call myself a liberal.

Now, that's partly because I live in Europe, where liberal just means libertarian. But I'm very happy to call myself a socialist. There's a proud socialist tradition that's not necessarily communist or Marxist, but that's where I situate myself. I was raised in Georgia during the civil rights movement and turned left from there. At a time when even liberal is often a slur in American culture, it's easy to forget that socialist was once a perfectly respectable political position in the land of the free. None other than Albert Einstein wrote a proud defense of socialism at the

height of the Cold War. Like Einstein and so many others, I'm happy to be called leftist and socialist. What distinguishes the left from the liberal is the view that, along with political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel, and vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights, which undergird the real exercise of political rights. Liberal writers call them benefits, entitlements, or safety nets. All these terms make things like fair labor practices, education, health care, and housing appear as matters of charity rather than justice. I'm happy to do a big tent with people who are less far to the left. If you'd like me to define it. Well, sure. Why don't we start there? How would you define the left? So it seems to me

that there are three principles that are common to everybody who situates themselves on the liberal left. The first is we're committed to universalism rather than tribalism. The second is we're committed to a hard distinction between justice and power, even where it's not always easy to draw. And thirdly, we're committed to the possibility of progress, which isn't inevitable, but is possible. Those are principles that I would share with anybody who calls herself a liberal. To be on the left, you need to add a commitment to the idea of social rights. So for both liberals and leftists, we have political rights to freedom of speech, travel, worship, etc. liberals and leftists, we have political rights to freedom of speech, travel, worship, etc. For people on the left, education, healthcare, a whole series of labor practices are also rights and not benefits. Okay, so that's the left. What about the word woke? It has been a contested term,

it's been valorized, demonized, every otherized. How do you define woke? So what's so confusing about woke is that it appeals to emotions which are common to every progressive person. That is, sympathy for marginalized peoples, indignation at the oppression of people, determination to right historical wrongs, all of those are emotions that I share. Where it gets muddy is that the woke depend on a series of theories which actually undercut or deny all the three principles that I talked about. There's a focus on tribalism rather than universalism. There's a focus on power rather than on justice with a skepticism that maybe justice is just hype and used to cover power differentials. And while, of course, various woke activists work towards progress, they hold a series of beliefs that actually undermine the possibility of progress. And I think the person who's most responsible for that is Michel Foucault.

What people take from Foucault is the idea that every apparent step towards progress is actually a subtler form of oppression. And it goes along with refusing to acknowledge that there have been instances of progress in the past. This is the kind of thing we hear all the time. Well, it looked like they were working towards universal rights, but in fact, certain people were left out. Yes, that's true. But nevertheless, you didn't have to stop, say, by abolishing slavery all over again. That was a step towards progress. And now we need to go to work to abolish other kinds of discrimination. abolish other kinds of discrimination.

Can woke be defined? It begins with concern for marginalized persons and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it has led to focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized and multiplies them into a forest of trauma. Woke emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice and seeks to rectify and repair the damage. In the focus on inequalities of power,

the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process, it often concludes that all history is criminal. What's confusing about the woke movement is that it expresses traditional left-wing emotions. Empathy for the marginalized, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions

that ultimately undermine them. Some listening to your critique of woke might accuse you of being anti-woke, of being, you know, hostile to progressive values, you know, or to, like, listening to voices that have been marginalized throughout history. What's your response to that? Well, some of those people are even friends of mine. I had at least two friends who said, my God, Susan, I agree with your argument, but don't use the word woke. Come up with something else. Otherwise, you sound like Ron DeSantis or Rishi Sunak or whatever.

But you did use the word. I did. I thought about it for a long time. I agonized about it. But it still seems to me that woke picks something out that we all recognize and that needs to be examined even if it looks like it's putting you in bad company. I think even if you don't know that this is somebody who has been very much on the side of righting historical wrongs and standing with people who've been marginalized, I think I make it clear that I'm not Rhonda Santos. What would you say, I guess, to someone who belongs to a group that has been historically

marginalized, who would say that your argument that universalism, which sounds ideal, is a luxury they can't afford? First of all, tribalism is a luxury they can't afford because all marginalized peoples or people who've been oppressed in the past need deep solidarity with other peoples. And I say somewhere in the book, I'm not an ally. I don't want to be an ally. Allies are based on interests. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies for a short period of time when they had a common interest in defeating Nazi Germany. And as soon as that was over, they became enemies. If you don't base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it's not real solidarity. So that someone who claims their marginalization is worse than

everybody else's is reckoning themselves out of the game. And I should say, one of the things that this book was influenced by is the fact that for two years in Berlin, I've been very active in the media and in the political world, arguing for a universalist conception of Judaism. I am Jewish, and in Germany, which has focused on its crimes against the Jewish people, what that has seemed to mean is we learned that we were perpetrators, we learned that the Jews were our victims, and we learned that we did the worst thing to them that could ever be done to anyone. And if people say, as other left-wing Jewish friends of mine and I have said, wait a second, we don't want to be seen as the victims who are worse

than any other victim. And as a matter of fact, we want to focus on crimes that the state of Israel is committing against the people who it's occupied for 56 years. We're called anti-Semitic. And so it's quite funny, of course, to be Jewish and be called anti-Semitic in the German press. But that experience very much strengthened my own sense that insisting on one's own marginalization or one's own victimhood as a people is not only in principle false, but it's politically and pragmatically really a dead end. but it's politically and pragmatically really a dead end.

Identity politics embodies a major shift that began in the mid-20th century. The subject of history was no longer the hero, but the victims. Two world wars had undermined the urge to valorize traditional forms of heroism. The impulse to shift our focus to the victims of history began as an act of justice. History had been the story of the victors, while the victims' voices went unheard. To turn the tables and insist that the victims' stories enter the narrative was just part of righting old wrongs.

Yet something went wrong when we rewrote the place of the victim. The injunction to remember was once a call to remember heroic deeds and ideals. Now never forget is a demand to recall suffering. Yet undergoing suffering isn't a virtue at all, and it rarely creates any. I'd prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you've done to the world, not what the world did to you. This wouldn't reduce the victims to the ash heap of history. It would allow us to honor caring for victims as a virtue

without suggesting that being a victim is one as well. Where do you see the excesses of what you would call wokeism most pronounced? We're not. Every place I go, I hear another story. Look, critical books are not being published. Critical plays are not being presented, or if they're presented, they're being rewritten in certain ways. presented there being rewritten in certain ways. The idea of cultural appropriation,

that cultural products belong to a member of a particular tribe, strikes me as against the concept of culture itself. Another kind of problem can be seen, and I'm not current on what exact what issues are going on in Canada, so I don't know how this is being dealt with here. In the U.S., we've had for the last three or four years a discussion about monuments. I'm extremely glad that people have taken down monuments to Confederate generals. I'm happy for them to go into museums. There's an interesting museum in Berlin where they sort of put all the bad statues and they've taken them off pedestals so that people can climb on them and do things with them.

I think that would be a great thing to do. That discussion has definitely also happened in Canada. Right. But what we've also had in the United States is people asking to take down statues of Abraham Lincoln. I get quite angry about that. Now, was Abraham Lincoln, did he say things that we today would consider racist? Sure. What I don't understand is why we can't see that as an instance of progress. Why we can't be glad that we have made progress in the 160 some years since Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. But if we made progress, we made it on the back of people like Abraham Lincoln, who gave his

life for civil rights for African Americans. The history wars are not about heritage, but about values. They are not arguments about who we were, but who we want to be. Current debates over monuments focus attention on the question of whose statues should fall, but we need to think about the question of who should replace them. I mean, there are historical wrongs that people believe need to be righted and that perhaps taking statues down is part of the process. I think some statues should be taken down.

What disturbs me is the way that it's often done without serious thought or nuance. My hope, when the wave of statue overturning began, was that this would be an occasion for a serious community discussion where people would, first of all, talk about what should be taken down, and even more importantly, talk about who should replace the people who have been taken down,

because that's an important question. You talk about that in your book. I was going to ask you, if you had a magic wand, who would you put up a statue for? Paul Robeson is one of my heroes. Somebody whose statue I'd be happy to see all over the place. I mean, a whole bunch of people, depending on where the place is, I think it's nice if there could be community-based statues. I quote Bryan Stevenson, who's also one of my heroes, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, an anti-death penalty program, and perhaps most importantly, founder of the National Lynching Memorial. And I interviewed him for my last book. And one of the things he

said to me really stuck. He said, there were white people in the South who worked against slavery, and you don't know their names. And there were white people who protested lynching, and you don't know their names. And if we remembered their names, we could build an alternative history of the South, a history, a narrative devoted to people who were brave and courageous and went against convention and stood up for the right thing. So there are plenty of unnamed people. I mean, Paul Reptitson just occurred to me off the top of my thing. So there are plenty of unnamed people. I mean, Paul Reptitson just occurred to me off the top of my head, but there are plenty of others.

I would say those people, whether they're famous or not, in every community, and my guess is that almost every community had them, who embodied the ideals that we would like our communities to uphold. Back to the term woke. We're going to keep coming back to the word. Was preceded years earlier by politically correct. And before that, you know, almost forgotten now is ideologically sound. These terms start kind of on the left as legitimate notions

and they kind of migrate and they make their way somehow to the right, and then they get weaponized and used against the left. What is it that accounts for that movement, do you think? It's a really good question, because I used to be furious about the term politically correct, which, by the way, I mean, there may have been real Stalinists who used it, but I don't really know any Stalinists. It was used on the non-Stalinist left. Ironically, if they felt that somebody was being too Stalinist, too rigid, too ideologically pure, you would say, oh, she's so politically correct. That was a left criticism of overly rigid leftists.

And then suddenly it became used by the right. Why? It's a good question that I don't have an answer to because four years ago or so, I was sitting with a group of pretty left-leaning people. We were talking about the fact that we liked the word woke, that we were looking for a word that expressed a kind of excitement about a political activist project. And it seemed like woke would fulfill it. I assume that it gets taken up by the right simply as a way to smear any left-wing project. That's certainly how it's being used today. You make it clear in the book that the words you use are,

I will not cede the left, I think is what you say. Do you ever imagine these kinds of terms ever being reclaimable? I mean, I don't see it happening to politically correct because the irony got lost very quickly. And I'm not sure that I can see it happening with woke either. I'd prefer to go back to the good old term left. It's something that I think we should be not afraid to claim. What concerns me most are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint.

A commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. This has led a number of friends in several countries to conclude, morosely, that they no longer belong to the left. Despite lifetimes of commitment to social justice, they're estranged by developments on what's called the woke left, or the far left, or the radical left. I'm unwilling to cede the word left or accept the binary suggestion that those who aren't woke must be reactionary.

One of our colleagues at IDEAS, Nahid Mustafa, came up with this observation a few years ago. It's this. There's a mirroring of sorts going on here that the left polices language the way the right polices values. Why is the left apparently or seemingly fixated on language? Look, I'm going to say something that may upset people in the audience. I think it's easier to

change language than it is to change realities. I really do care about exact language. I think it's important. It's a reflection of thought. But here's an example that I use in the book. I'm aware of the dangers of ideologizing one form of progressive language. So here's the thing. If I called you an authoress, okay,

or a journalistess, right? I've been called worse than that. Yeah, but I think you'd be offended, and if somebody called me a philosopheress, I would have a problem with that. Okay. German feminists see it exactly opposite. And if I don't call myself a philosopher or a writer or all of those kinds of things, I'm offending against gender correct language. against gender-correct language. Living in more than one country, as you'll probably agree,

is a good way of getting a distance from certain kinds of rigid ideologies and realizing, yes, language is important, but it's not baked into the language that what one group of people have decided now is progressive speak is the only way to go. When James Baldwin wrote, I am not your Negro, that was all right. I have a friend whose students went to the dean to complain that he used the word

when talking about Baldwin. So it's very, very easy to get enraged and upset about those kinds of linguistic problems. It's much harder to make real systemic change. You address some of this in your book, and of course there are words that are incredibly difficult for people to hear, and there are reasons why we don't say them. But you talk about the way that utterances that are judged to be offensive, of all stripe, sometimes become irredeemable, and even career-enders. What do you think accounts for this kind of hard-line attitude towards a verbal transgression, no matter where it sits kind of on the spectrum? I mean, once again, it's a soft target. It's very, very easy to shoot somebody down for speaking against a prescribed language rule, okay?

Something that's been determined to be a language rule. And of course we'd like to have those kinds of rules that would make our lives easier. They don't work. But reacting in that way, I suppose, makes people feel like they're on the side of the angels and they don't have to do much more. You're listening to Ideas.

We're heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it.

Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. We were looking for a word that expressed a kind of excitement about a political activist project. And it seemed like woke would fulfill it. It seemed like woke would fulfill it. The term woke has become so ubiquitous and contested that getting a fix on its real meaning can be elusive. It began on the left to mean being aware of racial and social injustice, but was later seized by the right as a pejorative to indicate moralizing zealotry.

A way to smear any left-wing project. That's certainly how it's being used today. But left-wing philosopher Susan Nieman believes the term does demand scrutiny. It still seems to me that woke picks something out that we all recognize and that needs to be examined even if it looks like it's putting you in bad company. For Susan Neiman, that examination begins counter-intuitively for some on the left with the Enlightenment. The best tenets of woke, like the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective,

come straight from the Enlightenment. But for many left-wing thinkers, the Enlightenment is synonymous with the blood-stained era of colonialism. Susan Neiman counters that central figures of the Enlightenment opposed colonialism, even if their impact was limited. The Enlightenment critique of colonialism did not stop colonialism. What it did do was to give colonialists a bad conscience. Susan Neiman is the author of Left Is Not Woke. I spoke with her on stage at the Toronto Public Library as part of the Provocations Ideas Festival. In many ways, the book that you've written is a very spirited defense of the Enlightenment. It is.

I wanted to talk a little bit about that. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. As you acknowledge, though, in your critique and in your defense that the Enlightenment was the age of empire, the age of colonialism, the age of expansionism, and it's been criticized as kind of being a justification or camouflage for both. Do you see any validity in those claims? I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how those claims arose, because when I first heard them, I thought they were ridiculous. First of all, the real age of empire starts after the Enlightenment, starts in the 19th century. But let's even leave that aside. There was some colonialism during the Enlightenment. I found it hard to take seriously, because I know these works. No one wrote stronger attacks on colonialism than Enlightenment thinkers. Dieter Rowe says at one point, as if he were speaking to indigenous South Africans,

you know, let fly your poisoned arrows. Don't believe the Dutch. Let not one stay alive to tell the tale. the Dutch, let not one stay alive to tell the tale. I knew that Kant was congratulating the Chinese and the Japanese for not allowing European so-called traitors to enter their territory. And I was trying to figure out how anybody could get things so backward. The other thing that's claimed before that is that the Enlightenment is Eurocentric. And Eurocentrism is an idea that was invented by the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment that urged Europeans to look at themselves from the perspective of non-Europeans and to learn from them. So they used non-Europeans to criticize European values,

European customs, European politics, European sexual mores. The Enlightenment critique of colonialism did not stop colonialism. It went on after the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were dead. What it did do was to give colonialists a bad conscience. And if you look a little bit at the history of colonialism before the 18th century,

it was self-evident that big countries preyed on smaller countries. That's just what everybody did all over the world, whether it was the Aztecs or the Malians or the Chinese or the Mughals. No one questioned the idea that big countries should swallow up or make territorial inroads into or take tribute from other countries. It was just the way the world was. It was the Enlightenment that says, this is wrong, this shouldn't happen. They gave the 19th century a bad conscience.

Because of course the 19th century could see perfectly well colonialism was violating human rights that European countries wanted for themselves. So they use Enlightenment ideas to cover up colonialism. So they say things like, well, we're not just coming to your land and taking your treasure because we're bigger than you and have better guns, we're going to help you become more modern. It's a scam. It's a terrible scam, but you cannot blame it on the Enlightenment itself. Now, why does this matter, except as a question of historical justice? I think historical justice is a good thing, and we should give credit where good ideas deserve credit. It's important because if you throw out the Enlightenment as only an agent of empire, you throw out a lot of good things that go along with Enlightenment. You know, in particular, the idea that reason is not just an

agent of power, but something that's worth hanging on to and perfecting. And then all the other principles that I talked about, the ideas of universalism. I think it's really important to distinguish between the fact that the Enlightenment had, by and large, extremely good ideas, extremely anti-racist ideas, that, like many left-wing intellectuals time and again, didn't succeed in establishing themselves. By the way, they were pretty sexist. I can't defend them on everything. But given that the Enlightenment has been conflated and mixed up with the idea of colonialism and empire, and I would argue, and I think a lot of people would, at least not misguidedly, because of the timing everything happened and because of the history that we know,

if you are a PR agent, how would you untangle that history? I mean, where would you begin in trying to recast? What did I do wrong just now? Because that's what I was trying to do. I was to say they started out as absolute you know anti-colonialists anti Eurocentric anti mostly anti-racist once again just like with Abraham Lincoln you can find racist remarks but if you look at their actual work and you know don't cherry pick a couple of quotes you'll see this is a deeply progressive anti-racist movement. Then you say, well, did they succeed only partly? There was a lot of treasure to be had, and people ignored the criticism.

But they also felt guilty enough to take over and twist some of the theory. It's clear the Enlightenment did not realize all the ideals it championed, but that's what ideals are about. Some of the criticisms voiced today could have strengthened the Enlightenment by showing that, through the restless self-critique it invented, it had the power to right most of its own wrongs. Instead, those who might have realized the Enlightenment have been engaged in attacking it. Enlightenment thinkers insisted that everyone, whether Christian or Confucian, Parisian or Persian,

is endowed with innate dignity that demands respect. Going back to the idea of reclamation, if you're trying to reclaim what is good, as you say, of the Enlightenment, where do you begin? Where's the starting point? So the starting point is taking a look at what the world was like before the Enlightenment, and to appreciate what it is that they gave us. Start backwards, if you like. 17th, early 18th century. If the world was going to get better, we'd have to wait for the Messiah to come, or we'd have to wait to die, and then if we were lucky, we would go to heaven. The idea that people working together could actually make changes in improving human dignity and human freedom was a brand new idea.

So, by the way, was the pursuit of happiness. I mean, happiness was something that either we lost in the Garden of Eden or some other golden age, or something we would get when we would die. The idea that people on Earth had a right to happiness is brand new, okay? Start there. Start with the idea that each of us is endowed with human reason that allows us to question what's natural.

And then think about what was natural at the beginning of the 18th century. Feudal hierarchies, slavery, the oppression of women, most forms of illness, all of those things were taken, in fact, in parts of the world well into the 19th century as that's just nature. So the idea that we can use human reason to ask whether some tradition that we've been told by some authority or some religious thinker is God's will or part of the way the world is, that's an Enlightenment idea. Many of the theoretical assumptions that support the most admirable impulses of the woke

come from the intellectual movement they despise. The best tenets of woke, like the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective comes straight from the enlightenment but contemporary rejections of the enlightenment usually go hand in hand without much knowledge of it you cannot hope to make progress by sawing at the branch you don't know you were sitting on let Let's go back to Foucault. You spend a great deal of time talking about him and rejecting his way of thinking or his thought. You sort of regret his impact. I'm just wondering what it is that you find most objectionable

about what Foucault had to say. So, again, Foucault is a, you could call him the grandfather of woke, if you like, and he's the most quoted thinker in post-colonial theory. And again, what's confusing about Foucault is he has this very transgressive aura and being openly gay at a time when people weren't even beginning to imagine marriage equality was part of that, but it wasn't all of it. He came on like someone who is inured to convention, is ready to turn everything over. But he is somebody who flouts or simply rejects all three of the principles that I think are central. First of all,

he's not exactly tribal, but he says at a certain point, the human was an invention of the 18th century. And that's true, except it was a good thing. That is, it was a good thing when people began to start thinking of themselves as part of a large, you know, a much larger group than their family or their tribe, and thinking of things that they had in common, and acknowledging the dignity in other beings who looked very different from them or perhaps behaved very differently from them. So he's not wrong to say that it's a constructed concept, but I think we should look at it as an achievement. Human rights are claims meant to curb naked assertions of power.

They insist that power is not merely the privilege of the strongest person in the neighborhood. It demands justification. Remember the history in which claims to human rights arose. It was unthinkable that peasants and princes could stand anywhere on anything resembling equal footing. If the peasant took the prince's deer, he could be hanged. If the prince took the peasant's daughter, that was just the way the world was. Universalist claims of justice, meant to restrain simple assertions of power,

were often abused, from the American and French revolutions that first proclaimed them to the present day. Think of the war in Iraq. You may think that power grabs are the best we can do, or you may go to work to narrow the gap between ideals of justice and realities of power. There's a terrific television debate from about 1970 between Foucault and Chomsky on Dutch television. You can get it on YouTube.

It's still floating around there. And that's a point where he says, you know, justice is basically a sham. All there are are power relations. Yes, I want there to be a world revolution, but only because I want my people to be in power. And incredibly pessimistic. Totally pessimistic. I mean, just any claim to be working towards justice is simply trying to

pull the wool over people's eyes whom you want to oppress. And then finally, his view about progress is something that I think has been incredibly influential. Probably his most widely read book is called Discipline and Punish. And it begins with the graphic description of the horrible drawing and quartering of someone who tried to assassinate King Louis XV. Everyone remembers that passage. Most people don't remember anything else from the book. And it's used as part of an argument to say, well, this sounds horrible, and of course we're all going to react very fascinated

but also nauseated by it. But he then goes on to give his readers the impression that actually reforms, prison reforms, were actually much more insidious, much more sinister, and much more dominating than old-fashioned drawing and quartering. And there Foucault gets very slippery. If you try to say, wait a sec, are you really saying that being in prison is worse than being drawn and quartered? His response would always be, what a vulgar question. No, I'm not going to, you know, say something is better or worse. But in fact, the impression that he leaves people with is better not try to do any prison reform because you'll only wind up making things worse. Mutandis, mutandis for the same, you know, for a host of other reforms.

But let's say that Foucault and others, like-minded, are as pessimistic as you say they are. But let's just look around, like just at the way things are, the way things were then, and the way nobody's getting drawn and quartered now. But there are a lot of things to be pessimistic about. Obscene wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. That concentration means unprecedented power. Corporations have more power than ever. Political systems are essentially falling apart just about everywhere you look. So isn't pessimism kind of a reasonable reaction to what we see around us? So I should make very clear that I'm not an optimist.

Good thing we're clear on that. Yeah. You know, I think optimism in the face of all of the things you just mentioned, plus the climate catastrophe, which you didn't mention. I mean, the list is long, isn't it? Rising fascism all over the world. You know, I think optimism would be obscene.

But here's the thing. Optimism and pessimism are claims about how the world is going to be. And I don't make those claims. I don't have access to how the world is going to be. What I do instead is follow Immanuel Kant, but also it turns out Noam Chomsky makes the same argument. He didn't know it was from Kant, but it doesn't matter. It's a true argument. If we are pessimistic or despair, the world really will go to hell. There's no question about it. If people who are concerned about all the things you mentioned and all the other things we could mention believe that it is possible to stop the

disaster, we have a chance of doing it. If we don't believe that we can, then we're really facing an apocalypse on a number of levels. So hope is not optimism, but it's necessary. Whether you see the proverbial glass as half full or half empty is more than a matter of temperament. If you cannot see it as half full, you'll eventually stop trying to fill it. Maybe there was a crack at the bottom, making all your efforts

in vain. I've suggested that hope is not an epistemological but a moral standpoint. The argument is simple. If we do not have hope, we cannot act with conviction and vigor. And if we cannot act, all the doomsayers' predictions will come true. all the doomsayers' predictions will come true. You tackle how this whole conversation connects to nationalism, and I want to talk about that. You see a connection, or a rather kind of lack of connection, between wokeism and nationhood.

I wonder if, in this context, I wonder why is nationhood even on your radar? Why are you thinking about that in terms of wokeism? I mean, I talk about tribalism, and nationalism is, I suppose, the political form of tribalism. And nationalism is simply the idea that the only real connections that we have with people, the only really deep connections that we have with people. And therefore, the only political obligations we have towards people are those who belong to our tribe. And this is something that I have one Israeli friend who's pointed this out. I'm the second person who's pointed it out in print, and I hope it will get around to certain people who are woke, the reductio ad absurdism of the

tribalism of the woke, including basing tribalism on victimhood, is Benjamin Netanyahu. That is exactly what he has done and how he has stayed in power, insisting that, first of all, because we were victims, we can do whatever we want. And anybody who denies that is simply contributing to our victimhood by being anti-Semitic. And secondly, by insisting that there are no real deep connections between people who don't have the same ethnic backgrounds. Obviously, my guess is that anybody who could be called woke is not going to explicitly support the government of Israel in any way, shape, or form. And I hope that the analogy opens some people's eyes, because that's where it leads.

It's the same principle. In your mind, what would a progressive flag-waving nationalism look like? Flags. Do we have to wave flags? I mean, I was just thinking of a friend who has around her house about 40 different flags from different countries. Why not? That one could do, perhaps. I would be nervous about anybody waving a single flag. Why? Because it's focusing on one part of your identity. I mean, one of the problems that I have with identity politics is it's the suggestion that

we all have one or at best two identities. And that's so false. We all know that. And interestingly enough, it's focusing on those parts of our identities that we have no control over. And so I think one can be proud of one's culture, at home in certain ways in one's culture, but I guess I also think it's crucial, not only for understanding other people, but to understand your own culture, to immerse yourself in somebody else's? And I would say probably in two other cultures, actually, because if you only do it with one, you sort of seesaw back and forth. It's important to get a sense both of difference from the other, but also, of course, commonality. What do I share with somebody who comes from a very different world than I do?

But also, what are my cultural assumptions that I'm not aware of? Because if you only live in one culture, you think the whole world is like that. And that's a silly and dangerous position. I guess, yeah, I can't see any flags. I don't know. But people want to be proud, I suppose, let's say, the counter-argument would be, people want to be proud. And that kind of realm has been ceded to the right. Once again, this goes back to the monuments question. I think in every culture, there are traditions to be proud of, people who held certain ideals,

and I think it's absolutely right to remember those people. So I do think it's important to have people to look towards, to be inspired by, and to be proud of. I just don't know why that has to take the shape of a flag. You know what? Music. I mean, maybe music can be turned into sort of right-wing nationalism too, I suppose. Everything can be abused.

I wonder if we could sort of meet on saying, you know, it's wonderful for people to have songs of a particular culture that thrill them and move them, and to cherish those songs without waving them? I don't know. One other quick question before we go is a question actually you pose in the book yourself. You say, at a moment when anti-democratic nationalist movements

are rising on every continent, don't we have more immediate problems than getting the theory right? So let me ask you that same question. Don't we have more immediate problems than getting the theory right. So let me ask you that same question. Don't we have more immediate problems? No. I worried about that initially. And then I began to see two things. One is the sectarianism of the left. And I use the phrase, the narcissism of small differences. It's extremely disturbing that these right-wing nationalists manage to agree on principles of tribalism and work together, whereas people on the left tend to separate into smaller and smaller groups. And what I also realized, and I did ask myself that question

as I was writing this, I see, first of all, people in the middle. People who are put off by wokeism and are moving to the right. That's happening all over the place. And then you have a kind of the silent progressive majority who are really disturbed and don't feel they have a political home, don't feel moved towards any kind of effective action because they don't agree with certain woke tendencies. They don't want to criticize them because they're worried about being put in a camp with Rishi Sunak or whoever, but they're sort of staying on the sidelines

until things calm down. So yes, I do think getting the theory right turns out to be important. Thank you very much for taking our questions, for being here tonight. Thank you for great questions. I really appreciate it. My conversation with philosopher Susan Nieman about her book Left Is Not Woke was recorded on stage at the Toronto Reference Library as part of their series On Civil Society and the 2023 Provocation Ideas Festival. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Annie Bender. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Austin Pomeroy, with additional help from Will Yar. The web producer of Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.