A Very Woke Pandemic
When I was a young boy, I spent several summers at my grandparents’ cottage in East Europe. The place was rustic, the pleasures were simple, and I would join the local boys in what was known as a “game of knives” to pass the time. We would draw a circle in a patch of soft earth, slice it into triangles, and allot a triangle to each of the players. Taking turns as everyone stood outside the circle, each participant would throw his knife into an opponent’s territory. If the knife landed flat, the player lost his turn. If the blade came in at an angle, the player would proceed to draw a new triangle, increasing his domain. The winner was the player who annexed his competitors’ territory and dominated the entire circle.
To take part in the game, you had to BYOPK — bring your own pocket knife. You could borrow someone else’s if you didn’t have one, but that was something girls did. Real men were expected to be armed, if only for the purpose of playing a game of knives. As I wanted to be seen as a real man, I made sure I showed up with my own pocket knife. It was very easy to obtain one — my grandfather had happily provided me with what I needed upon request, no questions asked.
I’ve had many occasions since March of 2020 to remember this lost world of my childhood, most recently when I took a walk down the memory lane with someone who had participated in those games alongside me. I asked him whether this kind of adolescent entertainment would receive the imprimatur of one’s grandparents in 2021, and we both laughed. In a world where one is regularly confronted with the sight of small children wearing masks as they gambol outside, a game based on knife throwing is unthinkable. Then my interlocutor turned serious. It’s because of the woke, he observed. Had the world not turned woke, we would have never gotten into this Covid debacle to begin with.
That got me thinking. Generalizations tend to be adhesive, but truth doesn’t always stick to those. The “new normal” has been embraced all over the political spectrum, and countries such as Russia and China — which have taken oppressive measures against the virus — are not exactly known as paragons of wokeness. Yet I knew that my interlocutor had hit upon something. There is certainly a correlation between one’s progressiveness and one’s devotion to Covid health protocols. Look at some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the “new normal” on Twitter, and you are more likely than not to see their preferred pronouns prominently displayed as part of their profiles. On social networks and in the media, demonstrators against Covid restrictions are automatically lumped together with Trump supporters, white supremacists, and far-right extremists, whose menacing shadows forever haunt the nightmares of wokeists. When former US VP Mike Pence famously visited a hospital without a mask, he was admonished for his “toxic masculinity” — a term right from the woke arsenal. If one can’t insert an equal sign between wokeism and the Covid crisis, one can confidently draw a straight line.
How to account for this? There is the totalitarian temptation implicit in both phenomena — the view that only a single point of view has a monopoly on truth. The woke promote tolerance but are notoriously unwilling to extend it to anyone who doesn’t agree with them; “the science” defers to facts but tries to suppress anything that challenges the putative consensus, even if the challenge is based on incontrovertible facts. For the woke as well as for “the science,” any kind of dissent is verboten. Another explanation is the symbiotic relationship between wokeism and World Inc. Remarked upon by a number of observers, this “unholy alliance” keeps woke initiatives generously financed while woke crusaders train their guns on other targets, ensuring that the yawning economic inequality and other elephants in the room continue to go unnoticed. Also, the exigencies of the “new normal” provide the opportunity to broadcast one’s virtue globally and, in a faithless age, to belong to a system of belief.
All of this is as convincing as it is unsatisfying. There is a deeper reason why the woke are steeped in the “new normal.” For all their hymns to humanity, the woke are utterly foreign to the idea of human life as an existential experience. The essential leitmotif of our times is the growing distance between modern man and what we might call the texture of life. To use a somewhat crude example, in a world where condoms and other methods of contraception are either uncommon or do not obtain at all, sex is a fundamentally existential experience. Lovemaking comes with an omnipresent risk of pregnancy, venereal disease, and — if the society also happens to be traditionally oriented — moral opprobrium. In modern society, the ubiquity and popularity of contraceptives have made sex safer and its outcomes less uncertain, while the erosion of traditional signposts has made it a lot less morally charged. At the same time, the sexual act has become less existential and more sterile; from an existential experience it has been reduced to its strictly biological function.
The above does not mean that the way to the texture of life is through unsafe sexual practices or promiscuity. On the contrary, the texture of life can be and is perhaps best experienced through tradition. In many ways, the truly religious are a lot closer to the texture of life than nonbelievers. By setting hard limits and reining in hubris, religion heightens the meaning of life. The human experience is a composite of its biological/physical dimension and its spiritual/social one; by embracing the fullness of life, it invariably encompasses the experience of death. The ancients were aware of that and made room for Thanatos. The faithful are also aware of that — in Christian tradition, death plays an important role as it gets us from here to eternity — and this might explain the strong presence of the religious among those who oppose the “new normal” (I am talking about the religious and not religious institutions).
For wokeism, on the other hand, the texture of life is a problem. In the name of social justice, woke ideology — to the extent that a phenomenon that has yet to produce a constellation of serious intellectuals can be called an ideology — advocates the destruction of strictures, conventions, and moral standards. Viewed by the woke as social constructs inherited from the white heterosexual male, that perennial bogeyman, they can be discarded at will, like dusty useless heirlooms. The fact that our traditions are grounded in the experience of life is irrelevant — if human anatomy contradicts aspects of woke ideology, so much the worse for human anatomy. In the hands of the right ideology, man (though of course the woke would never use that term) is forever protean and always malleable.
Like so many utopian ideologies, wokeism quickly runs aground when challenged by reality. When you believe you can invent an infinite number of genders and change sex ad libitum, the emergence of a virus that is highly contagious — and, for some, deadly — is discomfiting. You are forced to consider the fact that you’re not God, that you cannot tame nature, and that you must inevitably bow to its laws. Though not consequential for most people, the virus is an unwelcome reminder that one must forever contend with mortality. This is a hard pill to swallow, and the woke retreat into their safe zones, from where they can yell at those who do not care to wear masks, get a shot every six months, and spend the next decade waving at each other on Zoom. When they do brave the dangerous world outside, they fanatically adhere to the edicts issued by health authorities and experts, however farcical and contradictory. The more farcical and contradictory, the better — well used to trafficking in contradictions and farce themselves, the woke eagerly lap up practices that promise to keep them safe from the encroachments and inroads of real life.
In its abnegation of the human experience, wokeism is related to transhumanism. At first glance, the connection might be hard to establish. Wokeism is about how one wants to see reality, while transhumanism must work off the existing reality if it is to change it. The woke want to cancel the human condition, transhumanists to overcome it. Yet, in a way, the two complement each other. Both neglect the spiritual dimension of the human experience and emphasize only its biological side. Both despise constraints and limitations, and both are deeply hubristic. Both are also resentful of history — and for good reason. History is the study of the past, and the past is defined by death. For the woke, the past is toxic and unsafe (the destruction of monuments and statues by woke mobs is as much a rejection of Western legacy as it is a rejection of history as a phenomenon); for transhumanists, with their wet dreams of immortality, the finiteness inherent in the past is downright intolerable.
A bad respiratory virus evokes the presence of something greater than man. Neither wokeists nor transhumanists know what to do with something greater than man; it just doesn’t fit into their conceptual frameworks. So they demand Procrustean solutions. The virus must be eradicated at all costs — even at the cost of losing one’s human face, dignity, and soul. These champions of modernity and progress have welcomed dehumanizing measures against the virus because their vision of life is dehumanizing. While the response to the virus was influenced by biopolitics (the control of the biological life of the citizenry by the government) upstream, it was inspired by wokeist safety culture and transhumanist visions downstream. Lockdowns and QR codes were brought to us by technology. Both wokeism and transhumanism require technology — wokeism to reduce human nature to a social construct (as with, say, a sex change), transhumanism to enhance human nature. Therein lies their difference. One aims to repudiate the human experience, the other seeks to optimize it.
Ultimately, though, both wokeism and transhumanism deprive life of its existential essence and its meaning. The dismantling of timeless frameworks in the interests of a half-baked doctrine turns people into rudderless consumers of antidepressants, while heady dreams of a fusion between man and machine — dreams that are themselves intrinsically anti-human — turn them into techno addicts dependent, physically and mentally, on the very machines that are supposed to serve their users. In both cases, we end up with spiritual amputees.
When I leave my home to go for a walk, I pass by a place that was once a burger joint. Now it is a private COVID-19 testing center. I walk further along, past a number of shuttered bars and restaurants, wading through pockets of masked people drifting like flotsam, until I come across a venue that, in its present reincarnation, is a cannabis retailer. I walk by another cannabis retailer, then a third. “Your journey awaits,” a sign on its door promises. This is the life offered to us by the “new normal.” Stay home, stay safe. Your journey awaits, along with your equally stoned friends in the Metaverse. Experience life — by getting away from it. It is not so much a life as a simulacrum, like so much else about our modern world, an imitation that is foisted on us because the real world is supposedly fraught with dangers and can only be ventured into with a mask, digital vaccine passport, and perhaps a stopover at your local Covid testing center. There is a pandemic, after all. But it’s a very woke pandemic.
As I have written elsewhere, the Covid battle line is not between the masked and the unmasked, or between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The great divide is between those who are aware of a higher transcendent authority (God or nature, depending on your beliefs) and those who recognize no such authority. It is between those who are rooted in the texture of life and those who want to be cocooned in a safe space, between those who draw meaning from the real world and those who look for it in glib illusions peddled by Silicon Valley, between those who want to live and those who are content merely to exist. At its simplest, the divide is between a teenager with a pocket knife and one with a mask on his face.
That pocket knife from my childhood is a metaphor, of course. I am not calling for teenagers to be equipped with sharp weapons, even if it’s just to play a game. There is such a thing as being too close to the texture of life and, taken to the extreme, it will lead us back to the cave. We do not need to walk around hirsute and malodorous to palpate the meaning of existence. Life is about balance. But it is also about a lot more than just being safe and risk-free. The human experience consists of existential moments, and those require an element of risk if life is not to lapse into sterility. This is something that was understood by our ancestors, who never treated life as a laboratory, and it was certainly understood by my grandfather when he gave me that pocket knife. He wasn’t being reckless; he simply had a good idea of what the business of living was all about. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that no one ever got hurt during our games of knives. Not once.
