Awokened Prigs
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Awokened Prigs
The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an instance of a much older one.
There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it's social justice.
So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.
Paul Graham, tech pioneer and investor, explored the roots of “woke” in an essay that starts as above. Graham is known as a capable essayist, and this example to lives up to his reputation. It provides a good theory as to the origins of the term—as well as to its fate: as a term of contempt wielded by the practitioners’ most vocal critics. That is, it is more likely to be leveled as an accusation than invoked as a rallying cry for its practitioners.
The essay neatly gathers several socio-cultural filaments from the second half of the 20th century and spins them into a common thread. I’m not sure that it’s completely right, but it strikes me as plausible. My ambivalence is partly because I was never a direct participant, and partly because I don’t have a better theory to hand.
As he says, spasms of “aggressively performative moralism”—the overreach he identifies behind “wokeism”—are socially destructive because of their abrasive nature. The question is whether their aims are sensible to enough people, or whether their methods are so disruptive as to be counter-productive and lead to a backlash, undermining those stated aims.
My understanding of Woke as a social phenomenon is that it emphasizes how terrible others are, as opposed to in your blameless self.
While it may be true that other people are bad or circumstances are unjust ... then what? The woke answer seems to be "then nothing." I stew in my righteousness waiting for society to be good enough for me.
Please note, all, that this refers to the ideology as it presents in pop culture and journalism, not to every individual who would say he or she is "woke."
Good morning. It's pleasantly cool here in The Villages. My brother left this morning. Drama Queen and I have a few legal things to square away as well as continuing to clear the apartment.
Denise wants some of the furniture but can't get here until Saturday, so we may arrange for her to do the final close-out with the facility.