Helen Pluckrose on “Wokeness”....etc...

 “Wokeness comes from a mixture of postmodern scholarship and leftist activism......at the centre is a postmodern conception of knowledge, power and language. In short, there is the belief that knowledge is a construct dependent on dominant ways of talking. The powerful get to say what knowledge is and dictate how things are spoken about legitimately. Everybody on all levels of society speaks into this and perpetuates the power imbalance. These invisible systems of power are known as things like patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism and cis-normativity etc...these are all understood to be omnipresent below the surface, and to reveal themselves in the way people speak about things. Therefore, there is a need to interrogate speech and pick it apart and find the problematic biases behind it. That is the basic philosophy underlying it all....

These ideas arose in the late 1960s, when people from different disciplines suddenly starting saying they were sceptical of meta-narratives (eg: Christianity, and Marxism and even science), that knowledge was a social construct, and that language could not convey meaning reliably. There was a critical attitude towards everything we thought we knew. This was a really aimless development, because if you do not believe language can meaningfully convey anything, you cannot really use language to change anything. As a result, this movement burnt itself out by the middle of the 1980s.....

But around 1989 there was another flood of new writing, in which certain scholars/activists started saying postmodernism had some useful tools, but was not very good for activism. There had to be some kind of objective truth, if we were going to say certain people in a certain place are disadvantaged. They all wanted to use the idea of social constructivism, but also identify power structures that they felt were objectively real. Then came intersectionality, queer theory and critical-race theory etc. They all drew on this idea that society is socially constructed through language to oppress certain people....

This then developed and became more and more confident and clear until around 2010, when we suddenly saw a real kind of merging of all these ideas into the intersectional framework, also known as critical social justice. We have gone from a scepticism towards meta-narratives to a social justice meta-narrative. And this has been escalating m particularly in the last 5 years, and especially this year.

(Reread this great article in full which can be found by googling: Spiked online Wokeness Pluckrose)

David Williamson wrote this about 20 years ago, I think :

“....the central proposition (with Theory) seems to be that there is no “reality” in the world other than one constructed by words. Categories are constructed according to the power interests of groups advantaged by such constructions (those groups = straight, white, western males) and the main intellectual labor confronting the humanities is to deconstruct those false categories and show them not to be based on objective reality or knowledge but on ideology generated by a group wishing to maintain their power advantage. The corollary of this belief is that these ideologies and discourses are taken to be “the truth” not just by those generating them but, also, most times by those being exploited. Thus the only way justice will be served is by analysing the modes and techniques of verbal deceit used in the construction of these ideologies to expose their fallacies and implausibilities.....”