What takes 50 months, and is black, white, and red all over? A revolution.
Fifty months is approximately the time elapsed between the events at Evergreen College in November 2016, and the coalescence of a new national mythology for the United States in January 2021. These are rapid movements.
In this second installment of “The Woke Danger”(1) series I want to equip you with the minimum information you need to put yourself through a crash course on applied postmodernism. We are in a new place; we can know where we are and how we landed here.
Events at Evergreen College in Olympia, WA, provide a concise preview in small scale, to what appears to be in process on the national. On that larger scale, it seems that a new national self-understanding is being crafted to replace the one we grew up with. This will have vast repercussions. But let’s start with Evergreen. . .
Evergreen College Goes Woke
Authors James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose have called the ideas we are presently seeing play out before our eyes “applied postmodernism.” Bret Weinstein lived through the Evergreen experience and that experience was in a test-tube that which appears now to be in process on a national scale.
Weinstein was professor of biology at Evergreen College in Washington state. Evergreen, founded in the 1960s, was the most liberal of left liberal private schools. But that wasn’t enough. Wokeness was not long in replicating itself in that “progressive,” northwest environment. Evergreen had a tradition called the “day of absence.” When it came time for the 2017 “day of absence,” white people were asked not to present themselves on campus that day. On the Evergreen internal email list, Weinstein objected, writing,
“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles. . . . and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”(2)
Weinstein refused to absent himself on the basis of his color. The situation degenerated into campus riots, demands he be fired for “racism,” faculty members imprisoned in the library, and the administration trying to rid the faculty of Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying as instructors. The Evergreen story is a test-tube case for what is spee dily developing in other institutions. (I strongly recommend that you watch the three video resources linked in the notes with this presentation. Mike Nayna’s concise documentary about the Evergreen episode linked in the notes is the fastest way to begin to get up to speed.(3) Weinstein gives the following warning from experience. Evergreen’s woke infection is
“A breakdown in the basic logic of civilization, and it’s spreading, and college campuses may be the first dramatic battle, but of course this is going to find its way into the courts. It’s already found it’s way into the tech sector. It’s going to find its way into the highest levels of governance if we’re not careful, and [it] actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function.”(4)
He seems to be right. As a sample of what others are saying, Sasha Johnson is calling for the creation of a “race offenders” registry. Her December 31, 2020 Twitter post (which she since deleted) calls for reverse slavery of white people. The “race offenders registry,” among other things, would include “microaggressions” and prevent “race offenders” from living in certain areas.(5)
I want to share this slide again as a reminder of where all this lands. These are Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey’s summary of the two principles and four themes of applied postmodernism as they stand today in our world. These will be extremely useful to us in the last half of this series.
But now I want to move to the last half of this introduction, drawn from James Lindsey’s January 13, 2021 podcast titled “The Birth of a New American Mythology,”(6)
Lindsey comments on what has happened the past few days (this presentation is being created on January 15, 2021):
There are two American stories. . . . We have to be able to tell the true American story, which in some sense starts really with the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence from July of 1776. And that sort of sets a national mythology, and it set in motion a chain of events that led eventually to the abolition of slavery, eventually to the civil rights act and the end of segregation and the end of Jim Crow, and almost the end of racism. . . .
I was comparing this with the critical race theory narrative that posits instead that America was created as a slavocracy in 1619, and that slavery and its maintenance was the main reason for the Revolutionary War in the 1770s. This presents two very different visions.
The critical race theory story of America is one of racism, and then more racism, and then more racism. In fact, the story in critical race theory begins with the first assumption that it has, which is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society, not an aberration from them. And then, the second assumption of critical race theory is interest convergence, that white people specifically only help minority races, but especially black people, when it’s in their own self-interest to do so. Therefore, racism doesn’t actually go away, it just reinvents itself in a more hidden and insidious form. There is built into this set of assumptions this idea that the people who benefit from racism, have absolutely no motivation whatsoever to try to get rid of it.(7)
So, there are two stories. There is the true one, that as flawed and imperfect as America’s beginnings and continuation have been, it moved closer to those founding ideals, very dramatically reducing racism. But in wokeness there is an epic convergence of bad ideas under the theme of the secular religion of DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity). But no equal opportunity is being replaced by partiality, bias, and preference. The power of the state-and-corporations-union is beginning to tilt the playing field and reset power relations. The last needed piece is turning up with the present promotion of a different view of American history. Lindsey again:
What we have been witnessing . . . is the creation of a new national mythology, what the postmodernists would call a American metanarrative. . . a national mythology that is attempting to replace the former national mythology which it has systematically torn down. . . Postmodernism, as Jean-Francois Lyotard put it it in The Postmodern Condition in 1979, is an incredulity toward metanarratives. . . This postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives has torn down the old story by which Americans knew who they were. . . What’s actually going on now is they are replacing it with a second mythology, their own mythology.
We are witnessing the attempted creation and mainstreaming of a new American national mythology, that says that America was founded in slavery in 1619. It was not founded in freedom or with the seeds of freedom, under the words of Thomas Jefferson that all men are created equal. . . . But we are witnessing the creation of a new mythology that says that America was founded in slavery, in racism, in hate, in 1619, 401 years ago, and that this has just continued throughout history, it has not diminished, it has only changed shapes and hidden itself and become more and more insidious. . . What happened on January sixth of this year, while congress met to authenticate the electoral college vote and the election . . . They are trying to foist a new national mythology upon us. It has a pivotal moment which will actually be mainlined and installed in its national mythology will be that there was a attempted, maybe nazi, maybe white supremacist, something of this kind, insurrection and coup; that it was attempted to stop the democratic election in the United States, which has a kernel of truth to it but is mostly hyperbolic nonsense, and that the forces of good, the true America was able to defeat those nazis and white supremacists through what we are going to now observe as a very large amount of histrionic media behavior and extraordinarily tyrannical legislation and corporate policy. . . people are referring to it as the great purge already.
The new narrative will pivot upon this act on the sixth of January this year and will assert that a new era in America has arisen in which 401 years of oppression are being put behind us as we turn to a new way of thinking, a new way of life when finally those oppressive supremacists of whatever type were all defeated. . . We’re watching the creation and installation of a new national mythology. You have to understand how significant that is. An already large number of people already believe this mythology very deeply. . . Its going to be a pivotal moment that is going to try to mainline and make this the totally hegemonic new view of what America is, was, and will be.(8)
In short, what happened at Evergreen College in 2016-2017 is happening right now on the national scale in the United States. The woke danger is now impacting American life at the highest levels. This will have dramatic implications in a thousand ways, not the least of which is the relation of church and state under the new paradigm. Robin DiAngelo in her book White Fragility identifies the church as an agent propagating white supremacy.
Racism is a structure, not an event. . . . While racism in other cultures exists based on different ideas of which racial group is superior to another, the United States is a global power, and through movies and mass media, corporate culture, advertising, US-owned manufacturing, military presence, historical colonial relations, missionary work, and other means, white supremacy is circulated globally.”(9)
Just imagine how that will play in the new national self-understanding. Hundreds of years of mostly positive church-state relations can rapidly change into a negative relation.
But maybe you think that people will not so readily change out one story for another. You might say that the new story is poorly founded and has not proven its case. But in postmodern thought you have no master story, just stories competing with each other for dominance. You also have no ultimate truth anymore, just power relations. The question is no longer which story is true, but which story is effective in telling the story that we want to be regarded as true. Stories are not about truth; they are merely tools to attain ends. In applied postmodernism, stories are only about power.
Here is a lesson. Christians like myself tend to assume honest intentions in others. But when it comes to what people say, we should also remember, “The simple believes every word, but the prudent considers well his steps” (Proverbs 14:15). Today is a day for prudence.
In my next installment, “The Woke Danger 3: Collectivist Roots,” I plan to unpack important historical pieces that will make more clear what is happening.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes
1. The first installment is The Woke danger 1: Applied Postmodernism, https://youtu.be/XnUsk_MR4Eg.
2. Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019), p. 128.
3. PART ONE: Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying & the Evergreen Equity Council, https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk, PART TWO: Teaching to Transgress, https://youtu.be/A0W9QbkX8Cs, PART THREE, The Hunted Individual, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vyBLCqyUes, accessed 2020-12-06 Timestamp 22:25-22:52).
4. Mike Nayna, Part Three: The Hunted Individual, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vyBLCqyUes, accessed 2020-12-06 Timestamp 22:25-22:52.
5. Richard Delgado and Jean Stafancic in their volume, Critical race theory, 3rd ed., p. 179 define a microagression as Stunning small encounter with racism, usually unnoticed by members of the majority race.”
6. The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 14, January 13, 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7QZCncZkrs. I highly recommend this hour and 12 minute podcast.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, 29.