What I find most irritating about new ‘woke’ culture
One of the most irritating aspects of the new “woke” culture is its apparent mandate to enlighten the rest of the world about things that used to be common knowledge.
Most irritating is the fact that not only have those on the receiving end of this dubious wisdom been on the planet much longer than the “woke,” they’ve actually read books. Lots of them.
One nugget these earnest, but ignorant, educators seem to think is absent from the West’s intellectual arsenal is recognition of the fact that non-Caucasian peoples all over the world invented things. It seems that the “woke” really do believe that the rich intellectual heritage of the Western tradition not only completely ignores the rest of the world’s contributions to civilization, but does so deliberately because those cultures were composed of people with different pigmentation.
From my own experience I find that whenever I profess my considerable esteem for the greatness of Western Civilization, those within earshot (or Twitter-shot) pounce on my alleged Euro-centrism and counter my admiration with revelations clearly intended to startle me out of my xenophobic ignorance.
One such bubble-buster came at me with the emphatic assertion that “numbers and algebra came from Arabia, ya’ know!” — as if that fact had not only escaped me all these years, it levels the greatness of the West once and for all.
This inanity is what we get for relegating history to the back-burner, apparently deeming it irrelevant to our children’s education and the future health of our society. Now, we’re reaping the benefits of the ignorance we’ve sown by our being obliged to counter triumphant displays of what passes for erudition these days with the contin
ued repetition of “we already know that.”
Just a few decades ago history was still viewed as a sufficiently viable subject for general consumption and consequently we saw a plethora of highly acclaimed documentaries presented on television as mainstream fare
Within the same few years we were introduced to “World at War,” Kenneth
Clark’s “Civilisation,” James Burke’s “Connections,” Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and my favorite, Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man.”
The latter is an excellent example of the sort of work that scholars produced decades before “woke” culture came to us, unlearned but full of advice. Bronowski trained his eye on the entire world, organizing his episodes thematically, using particular cultures
as examples of a crucial moment in the intellectual development of mankind.
For this purpose Bronowski explored a diverse array of cultures, from that of the ancient Incans of Machu Picchu to that of the northern Lapps to the nomadic Bakhtiari. Most importantly, nowhere in this work is there any sign of the sophomoric . historical triumphalism we hear these days from revisionist historians pointing out the terribly obvious —“see, other cultures made stuff!”
Why? Because Bronowski, and other historians like him, took it for granted that people all over the world were tremendously inventive.
Men and women have been inquisitive about other cultures and their achievements for thousands of years and many have gone to great lengths to pay them homage. You only have to recall Herodotus’ utter fascination with everything he saw to remember that historians have always delved deeply out of curiosity, fascination, and passion for their subject, which is, in a nutshell, other cultures.
This set of driving motivations is the only explanation for why some individuals produced the prodigious amount of work they did. Consider the massive tome by Will and Ariel Durant, “The Story of Civilization,” running a staggering 11 volumes — just part of their impressive oeuvre.
Or Sir Richard Burton’s decadeslong exploration of a wide swath of the Middle East. As a result of his years of immersion in foreign lands, he acquired 29 languages and introduced Europe to the “Kama Sutra” and the “Thousand and One Nights” — his own translations, of course.
To produce work on the scale of these two examples requires a passion for other cultures that I doubt your average “wokester” can even comprehend. More importantly, the knowledge these researchers painstakingly acquired and then offered to the rest of the world used to be the fare students were obliged to learn in school, which meant that not only were the achievements of the world at large understood to exist, this knowledge was considered to be the basic equipment for an educated person.
Compared with this lavish banquet, what the woke have to offer is meager indeed.