Letter #51: Tradwoke

Individualism is only half the story.

Dadzekiel,

I don’t want to embarrass you, but I thought yesterday’s letter was brilliant. Slow down or the chariots of fire will come for you before we’re through here! I’ve been turning it all over in my mind—your brilliant thoughts, plus Carl Trueman’s—and something dawned on me. I wonder whether we’ve been thinking about “wokeness” all wrong. 

We typically view it as the pinnacle of what Trueman calls “expressive individualism.” There’s certainly lots of that abroad in the land: “authenticity” has become the one ring of power, the unanswerable argument. “If I sincerely want ten lovers a night, or five thousand calories a day, or someone else’s money, justice demands I should have it.”

But reading your letter, I thought about what a terrible burden total authenticity is—having to create yourself out of nothing, with no social roles or archetypes for reference. And then I realized wokeness can equally be understood as a desperate flight away from individualism, into primitive stereotypes. “As a person of color,” or “as a woman,” or “as a trans indigenous penguin,” I want this. Hate that. Vote this way. Woke politics offers to give you your heart’s desire, but also promises to save you the trouble of figuring out what that is. It’s both a forward rush into anarchy and a frantic retreat into rigid social roles.

This weekend I saw a production of Hamlet, and one line stood out to me above all the rest: “conscience does make cowards of us all.” “Conscience” was the watchword of the era that gave rise to the Protestant reformation. An “inward knowledge” was supposed to guide the believer to stand fast in his faith even if the church itself condemned him for it. Martin Luther invoked conscience against the Catholic church—but so did the Catholic Thomas More invoke it against Henry VIII’s budding Church of England. The inescapable challenge of the age was how the unique soul could stake out its territory within the grand narrative of history.

Individuality is liberating—but Shakespeare saw that it is also paralyzing. So did Coleridge, who realized that the soul sometimes lacks sufficient resources to light up the world. Just like Hamlet, whose private dejection makes the whole sky look like “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors,” Coleridge in his darker moods felt that he “may not hope from outward forms to win / the passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”

Wokeness and post-humanism are both attempts to replace the individual soul with systems—group identity, machine logic. They won’t wash. But neither will a simple return to “trad life,” and for the same reasons: wholesome though they are, the social roles of the Middle Ages aren’t enough to make us whole. They can help guide us, sure. But our road lies forward, not back into lockstep with the machines, or the wokesters, or even the trads. “In our life alone does Nature live,” writes Coleridge: our task is to recover that life. And there’s only one source from which it can spring.

Love,
Spencer