To oppose wokism is to oppose the fear of mistakes and ‘bad ideas’.

The ‘woke’ movement of the last decade is by no means synonymous with civil rights. Its flaw lies not in excess, but in its very foundation – namely, the attempt to conflate spheres that are undoubtedly connected, yet distinct: that of coexistence in increasingly heterogeneous societies, which certainly requires certain civic rules; and that of cultural debate, to which spaces must instead be dedicated where the only rule is open, critical dialogue ‘without restraint’. This confusion between the two spheres, as a consequence, exacerbates tribalism. It empowers the type of figure who acts as a hierarch or ‘people’s commissar’, who fails to distinguish between criticism – even violent but defenceless, in the manner of Kraus – and the inquisitorial blackmail of the Vishinsky type, who, however subtly, threatens the supporters of certain ideas and excludes them from the common sphere. ‘Total freedom within one’s own sphere is essential to intelligence,’ wrote Simone Weil, adding that ‘wherever there is a stifling of intelligence, there is oppression of the individual by society, which tends to become totalitarian’. It is a statement worth repeating to those who today, often in a mocking tone, attempt to reduce opposition to wokism to a defence of the behaviour of Trump or, closer to home, Vittorio Feltri, but above all to suggest that such behaviour seeks to pass off mere racist or fascist discrimination as ‘free ideas’.

The proponents of such a clumsy reductio bring to mind those parents who, when their child is busy discovering the world, ask irritably why on earth they need to go ‘down that dodgy alley’; with the added complication that here there are neither parents nor children, but individuals who ought to be able to engage with one another independently. Only an individual who has stifled within themselves—I won’t say the capacity to reflect, but certainly the capacity to reflect on how one naturally reasons—could believe that ‘true ideas’ can be separated in this way from ‘useless discriminatory arguments’. Any thought that does not accept pre-emptive neutralisation proceeds, in fact, by trial and error, and is not afraid to venture into even the muddiest of territories; indeed, the only guarantee that it will not draw barbaric conclusions from there lies precisely in its willingness to explore them. In this way, connections, proportions, and more or less unexpected relationships between ideological strands are established, and we learn to understand that sometimes the most diabolical evil arises from the seemingly minor flaw in a theory that seemed beneficial to us – or vice versa.

To think is to make connections, and thus to put things into perspective; this does not in any way mean justifying everything in practice, because a sacred boundary separates it from reflection. Like other now-widespread subcultures, wokism erases precisely what it claims to defend: diversity. Generally speaking, its champions are people terrified by the very idea of stepping into other historical and cultural shoes, of taking a radically different worldview seriously. They contemplate ‘differences’ only within a paradigm that has already categorised them: and in doing so, they gloss over the violence inherent in every classification, rendering those who carry an unlabelled history with them even more of an outcast. This drift is particularly evident in fields of study which, like the humanities, can never amount to a professional qualification, and yet which the new clerics stubbornly pretend to regard as ‘sciences’. Amidst so much ostentatious inclusivity, cultural workers are increasingly terrified of being pilloried for some lack of erudition or linguistic inaccuracy. By now, the younger generation no longer even remembers that high culture was often cobbled together with makeshift means by people who possessed a bizarrely eclectic store of knowledge.

A critical spirit cannot gain accreditation, as they told Benjamin – whilst granting it to those who have learnt the watchwords of the Zeitgeist is all too easy. Perhaps a master of relativism such as Montaigne can come to our aid here. In the second book of the Essays, the author once again reminds the reader how slow, uncertain and intellectually and stylistically inadequate he is, both in analysing ideas and in playing chess. To his shame, he even overlooks what is always right before his eyes: he manages land but cannot count; he knows nothing of plants, animals or agricultural tools; and ‘not even a month ago it was discovered that I was unaware that yeast was used to make bread, or what was involved in fermenting wine’. Yet the reader is well aware of his singularly keen capacity for judgement, which also stems from this courage to observe himself and acknowledge an unvarnished truth. In the foolish conception of knowledge that has long prevailed, such an attitude is scandalous. We have forgotten that one learns something only by becoming oneself, and one becomes oneself only by carving out spaces in which one can make mistakes, venture down seedy alleys, and admit one’s failings with ease. Fear of this very human quest turns us into liars, bureaucrats and fanatics.