European culture wars, a meta-perspective.

Yesterday I was chatting with Manon Garcia (yes name-dropping the famous French feminist), and we agreed that one of the oddest features of living in Europe is the warm-embrace of the ‘woke vs anti-woke’ framework in European mainstream media and by cultural elites in their wake. The anti-woke forces are especially well organized and vocal, and tend to receive support from fairly significant figures in cultural and pedagogical mainstreams (including well known feminists).

While it is tempting to think of the ‘woke vs anti-woke’ as a great distraction from the Environmental crisis (which does mobilize a subset of the young), I decided (after musing on my chat with Garcia) that the virulent anti-woke side of the European cultural, media, and intellectual sector is due to the following four features.

First, Europeans basically role-play their sense of ‘cool’ or ‘vibes’ in light of their perceived aspirational counterparts Stateside. By ‘role-play’ I mean the kind of thing Erving Goffman made familiar in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and what Judith Butler made hip in Gender Trouble. As a university instructor this role-play is familiar from the fact that European students are both more familiar with iconic moments in modern American history (say the civil rights movement) than any of their national or European counterparts as well as more likely to use American cultural analysis to interpret contemporary social life, including their own. There is nothing objectionable to such role play; it’s the effect of living in protectorates of American empire with influential (as it was once known) soft-power or mass-culture. Europeans are generally more aware of American icon-production than each other’s social and political debates (which generally echo US news cycles).

A corollary of this is that local (European) media and ambitious politicians are permanently trying out American templates and scripts in contemporary political debates. This does not always have local uptake (with or without significant transformation). If one pays attention to US media culture war cycles or news patterns, then one discovers European tinted waves at some later point.

I take the first to be an uncontroversial baseline for what follows. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that all culture emanates from an American center to European periphery. Undoubtedly in gaming and music there are other more lateral networks that may well bubble below the US role-playing center I am hinting at. Thus, I am distinguishing here between cultural consumption (which may well be globalizing) and the cultural/social role play (and interested in the later).

Okay, with that in place, second, many former members of ‘The Left’ now have a class and social interest in existing cultural and pedagogical hierarchies. The European education system is so stratified (and tracked) that these high grounds may be thought safe from any ‘woke-inflected’ forces. Even so, the 'woke' frame is threatening to those hierarchies not primarily because the ‘woke’ are feared or will grab their jobs or pensions, but rather because the ‘woke’ clearly make the Left seem less avant-garde and less trend-setting. And so, they perceive ‘woke’ as an assault on what for lack of a better word) I’ll call their cultural capital. (For those who read philosophy and social theory: notice the enormous nostalgia to the 60s/70s that infects ‘Left’ theorizing.)

Now, you may think it’s odd, then, that if that’s the worry why would the anti-woke response embrace what look like reactionary partnerships with political conservatives (as they often do)? But in the anti-woke campaigns, the ‘woke’ are always treated as enemies of freedom and fun.  (Scholars sometimes treat the political undercurrent of this under ‘homo-nationalism’ if you want to explore that literature.) And ‘freedom’ now means speech and sex.

Here’s where the first point (about role-playing) re-enters. Most European countries have no elevated history of free speech. In most places the current laws on free speech are much narrower than the US experience (see what I did there?) of the last half century. Many European countries have rather strict blasphemy laws, and enforce lèse majesté, as well as all kinds of anti-discrimination measures. As the environmental movement is re-discovering, anti-civil disobedience laws can be draconian. But in the shared cultural imagination, ‘free speech’ first amendment style has become constitutive of (European/local) freedom. This is why ‘free speech’ is elevated as a central commitment by the anti-woke side because ‘the woke’ is seen as either demanding a kind of policing of responsible speech or curtailing speech altogether (canceling, silencing etc.).

The third feature involves the sexual revolution in Europe. In many European countries the impact of the second feminist wave/revolution was very imperfect. From an economic and legal perspective it must be judged a partial failure. Even the European Union’s own data show that on a host of measures gender parity is decades off, trailing [sic!] the US on most measures.

However, the second wave did create or at least coincide with breakthroughs on sexual ethics and liberalized abortion laws (and a collapse of religious participation in organized churches). But in social institutions that are broadly unequal, this means that ‘pleasure’ has been liberalized in the context of female subordination. So, to put this in terms of Garcia’s We Are Not Born Submissive, contemporary social life or institutions valorize feminine subordination and pleasure simultaneously. Unfortunately, the cultural mainstream has made its peace with this state of affairs (and associated gender roles).

The institutional analysis of social subordination or structural injustices of the would be ‘woke’ (associated, in part, with #M2) threaten this status quo greatly. And, while in principle, a structural injustice analysis could be liberating to many who think of themselves as ‘already liberated,’ in practice it risks upsetting a comfortable status quo in which many are complicit in their own subordination. The potential attack on pleasure, especially, is taken to be reactionary (and with a dose of Islamophobia) treated as paving the way for women’s subordination associated with the Califate.

Fourth, this gets me to the last and most paradoxical part. Despite the US-inflected role-play that is constitutive of European social life, Left-wing Europeans are by and large convinced of their own civilizational superiority. In part this is articulated in terms of not being wild west Americans (with more restrictive gun laws and better public transport, public goods), in part this is felt in terms of the purported savagery/barbarism of the Muslim Middle East and the failed states of Africa. While there is, undoubtedly, old-fashioned racism lurking here (great replacement theories are becoming incredibly popular and widespread among anti-establishment types), the sense of entitlement I am pointing to is not (despite its imperial roots) especially racist in content, but it is primarily cultural and civilizational in character (although the effects re-affirm ethnic boundaries).  

The ‘woke’ threaten this sense of civilizational superiority because it threatens to unmask the self-serving narratives as neo-imperial (and racialized) in character. Because contemporary European cultural elites understand themselves as anti-fascist the legacy of European imperialism is treated as distant past, a long closed door. The mere threat, the fantasy image, of the subaltern speaking back has led to an astonishing out-poor of virulence against anything that can be identified with ‘woke’ (such as gender studies, or imperial/slave history). Somewhat ironically, by overplaying their hands unnecessarily the anti-woke brigades may have created a specter that will haunt Europe.