The Bible isn’t a book. It’s a collection of several books. Wokeism isn’t one view. It’s a collection of several views. What unites them is what unites the collection of people who hold them. Something like a religion. First you subscribe to the faith, and only then to what the faith espouses. It saves having to think through each article of the faith severally. Instead beliefs come conveniently pre-packaged. It’s more efficient that way.

As it happens among this particular collection is the view that no culture is superior to another. They’re just different. I want to claim this is nonsense. And I want to explain why.

By a people’s culture I don’t just mean how they dress, or dance, or what they eat. I mean how they do all the things they do. Depending on how you count the things we do, most of those things we do the same. For example, we all crouch to take a dump, because if we didn’t we’d have more of a mess to clean up. Call these things, if you will – these things we all do the same – human culture. As distinct from, say, cow culture.

But we don’t all crouch the same. Some people crouch and sit, whereas others just, well, crouch. And if that were all to be said on the subject, that would be the end of this entry. But I want to say something stronger. I want to say that some peoples crouch and sit, whereas other peoples just crouch.

By a people I mean a collection of people. But not just any collection. I mean a collection of people sharing a common culture. By this do I mean they all dress or dance the same, or eat the same things? Obviously not. But they share enough with each other, of what they don’t share with those who are not these others, that we can say, as we do, that this is one culture and that is another.

In this sense what counts as a people is indexed to what counts as its culture. So Chinese culture is distinct from, say, American culture, in just the way that tech culture, which boasts both Chinese and Americans, is distinct from literati culture, which likewise boasts both.

Of the two sortals, which is a subculture of which? The question makes no sense without already having answered it. I’m male because, much to my wife’s disapproval, I pee standing up. I’m Jewish because – and I have the focus group data to prove it – I’m funny. So if you’re booking someone for your comedy club, a member of which people, men or Jews, would you be looking for? So culture is defined by the regularity we want to exploit. Or at least comment on.

But now I want to say something much stronger than just that. Contrary to wokeism, I want to say that crouching and sitting is better than – and in that sense superior to – just crouching. The proof for this is not that people offered a choice will invariably opt for the Western toilet, because a) they do so only variably, and b) popularity matters only in marketing. Rather the proof lies in the common sense notion of progress. The replacement of incantation with surgery represented progress. By what measure? In this case longevity. In the case of taking a dump, convenience.

But hang on. Aren’t longevity and convenience values? And aren’t values in the mind of the valuer? Absolutely. So to call the Western toilet progress is to presuppose, and so to privilege, the coloniser’s values. That my indigenous students have their heads permanently buried in their smart phones, just like my white students, is the product of the coloniser imposing his values on the colonised. First we killed off the buffalo, rending them wards of the state, and then we threatened to cut off all nutritional support if they didn’t send their kids to our residential schools. So more derivative values, like being able to do long division, are parasitic on more primitive values, like having something to eat.

But hang on. Isn’t that true of all values, save for whatever values might be innate? So, it would seem, values-acquisition is a chain. And what we mean by progress is the superior satisfaction of the value-driven druther in question. Are there people who’d prefer to crouch rather than crouch and sit? There are. Are there people who’d prefer to let their children die rather than violate Leviticus 17:11 or Acts 15:29? There are. So what counts as one culture being superior to another is indeed in the mind of the counter.

We can co-adjudicate cultural differences if and only if we share certain core values. So at the core of the conflict, for example between academic freedom and cancel culture, is a conflicting set of what seem to be non-negotiable values. I’d druther heterodoxy, they’d druther orthodoxy. Can I claim that my druthers are superior to theirs? Only if I can claim that the druther at the head of my druther-chain is superior to the druther at the head of theirs. Put another way, to what are heterodoxy and orthodoxy respectively instrumental? I want to say progress versus peace. Progress in that common sensical sense. Peace in that dystopian one.

Even supposing the wokester would grant me this admittedly prejudicial reduction, can I claim that ‘progressive’ dynamism is superior to dystopian peace? If not, then neither can she claim utopian peace is superior to perpetual conflict. And that’s just the problem. Her cultural relativism is not exactly incompatible with her advocacy. But it certainly takes the wind out of her sails.

To be fair, this is an old saw. News flash: certain religions – and wokeism is one of them – are logically incoherent. But religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and wokeism among them – aren’t arguments. They’re ways of being in the world. Some religions – Christianity, Islam and wokeism among them, though not Judaism – include a mandate to proselytise. If need be by the sword. And in fact in his infamous “Clash of Civilisations”, Samuel P. Huntington predicted that clash would be an Islamic revival versus a complacent West. Little did he know about the army mustering over the horizon. But I digress.

Some years ago I was at a dim sum restaurant in China, I had to go, and I had to crouch rather than crouch and sit. I guess getting along in the world is about learning to adjust.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: "Clash of Civilizations", Acts 15:29, colonialism, culture, druthers, Leviticus 17:11, peoples, religion, Samuel P. Huntington, values, wokeism