What is threatening Western civilization? Written by Michael Huemer

Q: What is threatening Western civilization? Is it nuclear war? Misaligned AI? Global warming? A: Meh. I mean, sure, nuclear war could be bad. But the real problem is contemporary woke, progressive ideology. Q: Wow. What is this ideology? A: Basically, Wokism views America and the West as deeply unjust, oppressive, racist, sexist, etc. It blames “cis-het” (cisgender, heterosexual) white men for this evil. It is also the source of cancel culture, a phenomenon in which hysterical, ignorant mobs try to ruin the lives of people who harbor forbidden thoughts. Progressivism is a broader set of views, which includes wokeness but also includes some other left-wing ideas, such as climate alarmism and opposition to capitalism. Q: Sounds silly. But how is it a threat to Western civilization? A: A few things. (i) It sows discord by teaching people that their true “identity” is some particular group within society (based on race, gender, etc.), and that some other group within society is their group’s enemy. (ii) It undermines loyalty and trust in Western civilization by teaching that the foundation of Western civilization is oppression and evil. (iii) It attacks the norms of free expression that are essential to the pursuit of truth as well as the peaceful resolution of disputes. (iv) It attacks the norms of meritocracy and individualism that are essential to the prosperity of our society. Q: Wow, that sounds bad. But isn’t Wokism just a fringe view of a few inconsequential crazies in the universities? Surely it doesn’t have any real influence on our society. A: That’s what moderate, old-school Democrats would like to think. They don’t want to have to criticize anyone on “their side”, so they try to make excuses and minimize the problem. In Progressive Myths (a book by Dr. Huemer ), you’ll see many quotations indicating how prominent, influential sources spread false, woke propaganda. You’ll see mainstream news sources making factually false reports to support the woke narrative about a given story. You’ll see public officials, up to and including the President, helping to spread these false narratives. You’ll see academic researchers mischaracterizing academic research or suppressing information to support progressive narratives. Woke progressivism has taken over huge swaths of the nation’s educational system, its media, and its entertainment industries. This ideology has been dictating what normal people learn about our society, and woke people have zero concern for objectivity; they have no problem whatsoever with blatant propaganda, suppression of dissent, and deception. In 2021, the year after the George Floyd protests, the S&P 100 companies hired >300,000 new employees. (These are 100 huge companies that appear in the S&P 100 stock market index. They include the likes of Apple, Amazon, Bank of America, Chevron, etc.) Of these new employees, just 6% were white; the other 94% were “POC”s (“people of color”, as the woke refer to non-white people). Bear in mind that about 60% of the country are white. This is obvious and extreme racial discrimination, and it’s obviously driven by the Woke scapegoating of white people. Of course, this is blatantly illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the woke progressives don’t care. They reject the Civil Rights Act; they think racial discrimination is great, as long as it targets the right group. And they have no fear of anyone actually enforcing the law against them, because the people whose job is to enforce that law are themselves woke ideologues, who will only enforce the law against “the other side”, not against their own side. Btw, Republicans hold roughly half of elected offices in the U.S., but the bureaucracy is mainly leftists, and leftists, as a rule, will not do anything against other leftists. Even moderates who privately know that the wokists are insane will generally not speak up, and they certainly won’t (if they are in a position to do so) do something so rash as trying to take legal action against woke causes. The Woke now control most of the government and most of our large companies, in addition to almost all of our information-producing institutions. Q: I dunno, what’s so great about Western civilization? Why not burn it down? A: Our current society is vastly better than the situation of almost all people throughout human history, on almost all dimensions of human well-being. I won’t go into detail here, but this is discussed more in the book. For now, let’s just say that most people in history lived lives of constant hardship, danger, physical suffering, oppression, and fear of violence. Contemporary America is a Shangri-La of which people in most of the world and almost all of history could not even dream. The progressives living in this paradise are so thoroughly sheltered that they cannot even comprehend what actual hardship is. If they had to experience a day of life in the Middle Ages, or North Korea today, they’d probably die. And this is relevant, because if we disrupt our current society in a large way, the most likely result is “regression to the mean”; that is, a move back toward the normal state of humanity, which is state of abject misery. The minimum “social science” education of every Westerner should include this knowledge, so that everyone appreciates what we currently have and is not eager to throw it away. But discussion of the greatness of our civilization is anathema to the wokeה progressives.Q: Right, of course. But how does your book combat woke progressivism? A: I expose some of the myths that progressives have been using to spread their ideology. Q: Like what? A: Like the myth that unarmed black people are frequently murdered by white people out of pure racism. That women get paid 30% less than men for the same work due to sexism. That global warming is shortly going to destroy human civilization. That most rich people get rich by inheritance, and that it’s almost impossible to get ahead in America once you’re born poor. Q: I guess that seems kind of useful. But that doesn’t prove in general that America and the West aren’t oppressive. Won’t woke people just say that there are some other ways in which we’re horrible, or some other evidence of our racism and sexism? A: Yes, they definitely will. Wokists are almost impervious to evidence. If you rebut one of their examples, they’ll just shift to some other alleged example, without at all diminishing their confidence in their general claims about how horrible our society is. Q: So you have to refute all of their examples of how our society is evil? A: No, that would be impossible. The underlying ideological claim is too broad, and there is an unlimited range of things that someone might say in support of such a broad claim. Q: So then how can you deprogram the Wokists? A: I think there’s probably no way to do it. Q: Well, then what good can your stupid book possibly do? A: I hope that there are some open-minded people who will read it, and it will stop them from becoming woke ideologues. Q: But since you can’t refute every alleged piece of evidence for Wokism, how can it do that? A: Once you see 20 examples of progressive deceptions, you should notice the pattern and know not to trust information that people give you to support progressive ideas. Basically, after reading the book, the next time someone tells you some new piece of evidence that supports progressive ideology, your reaction, if you’re rational, should be “I bet that’s BS.” After reading about what actually happened to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the next time you hear about an innocent, unarmed black man being murdered by a white racist, your initial thought should be, “Yeah, I bet that’s not what happened.” Of course, initial media reports might turn out to be accurate, so don’t completely rule that out. But more likely they aren’t. Q: I guess that makes sense. Then why won’t that work on people who are already Woke? A: Basically because most of them have already adopted certain belief-system defenses that prevent them from revising their belief system. For example, they actually believe that it is morally wrong to question the woke worldview. And you can’t argue them out of that belief either, because they think it would be immoral for them to seriously entertain your arguments.