The Best Thing About Wokeness

What’s the best thing about wokeness? Simple: Holding people in the past to universal moral standards. History is packed with mass murder, slavery, and other atrocities, often committed by famous beloved figures like Columbus and the American Founding Fathers. When confronted with these harsh realities, most thinkers try to weasel out with a variation on, “It was a very different time.” The woke, on the other hand, want to not only teach kids about mass murder and slavery, but tear down the statues of mass murderers and slavers.

Which is the rational position.

Murdering and enslaving fellow human beings really are evil, and you don’t have to be a moral visionary to realize it. Even kindergarteners can grasp the moral challenge, “Would it be alright if someone did that to you?” Sure, you can add, “People who pioneer a massive expansion of murder and slavery are morally even worse than people who merely accept a pre-existing way of life based on murder and slavery.” But the latter is still terrible. And yes, Columbus, like Hitler, really was a pioneer of murder and slavery.

Sadly, wokeness aggressively refuses to universalize its own universalism. If we should hold people in the past to universal moral standards, we should also hold people in the present to universal moral standards, not credulously accept lame, lawyerly excuses like, “In their culture, this is normal” or “Given their life story, we mustn’t blame them.”

Most obviously, if one group has much higher murder rates than another, it is ridiculous to forgive their murderers on account of poverty or poor education or “racism.” If you’ve got actual evidence that the murder rate gap is driven by piles of false convictions, by all means share your evidence. But if “He would have been a gentle soul in a world free of racism” is all you’ve got, spare us.

The same goes for economic and educational success. If you’ve got actual evidence that racial or gender earnings gaps are driven by sheer bigotry, by all means share the evidence. If you’ve got actual evidence that grade or test score gaps are driven by sheer bigotry, by all means share your evidence. But if “She would have founded a unicorn company in a world free of racism and sexism” or “Racism reduced his SAT score by 300 points” is all you’ve got, spare us.

Yes, you can always try to shift moral responsibility to strangers. Instead of blaming murderers, you can blame “society” for failing to teach them not to murder. Instead of blaming the homeless, you can blame “society” for failing to teach them not to live prudently. But these are absurdly high standards. And if you take these high standards seriously, why not use them to excuse Columbus or Hitler? Hitler did have a pretty bad childhood, after all. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned to genocide if the Jews had funded after-school programs for at-risk anti-Semitic youth.

The stronger critique of my position is that I’m giving the woke too much credit. They don’t actually hold people in the past to universal moral standards. Instead, they hold historical Western societies to strict standards while holding the rest of the world blameless for its horrors. Fair enough, but morally condemning a large fraction of the murderers and slavers of the past is still a lot closer to moral truth than giving all of history’s murderers and slavers a pass. To quote the timeless Western words of Lord Acton:

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual.