Perspective | The Moral Myopia of Woke Culture

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

These hallowed words of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, first learned in my Grade 9 history class, were my initial introduction to American politics. For a teenager born and raised in Cambodia, a country with people full of nationalistic fervor and a government that can do no wrong in the eyes of its citizens, I couldn’t help but admire the innate humility in the American spirit, to admit that their country will always be a work in progress, which is why they must continually strive “to form a more perfect Union.”

Having come to the United States at the age of 19, I started to think of it as my adopted country. But it wasn’t long before I recognized that the America I had yearned for so long was a shell of its former self. Everywhere I turned, I was told how intolerant this nation was. Every time I went online, I was bombarded with videos of intellectuals calling the Constitution “trash.” Every day my American friends talked about moving to a different country since they could not stand it here. By all accounts, I do believe that Americans regularly fight for valid and noble causes. But when I hear people here insisting that America is a great evil all the while being born in a country seeping with privilege that millions around the world would risk their lives to be a part of, I notice that the aspiration “to form a more perfect Union” has been twisted into a phenomenon subsequently known as wokeness.

To be woke, as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is to be “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues.” It originated from Black communities and only gained popularity in 2014 following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in which the term was used in a chilling context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. Then years later, “woke” has “evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory,” according to Vox.  

Without a doubt, woke ideology has bent the moral arc toward justice as many Americans began to acknowledge and tried to redeem the failings of past generations. But while they are embarking on this moral crusade, their awareness of societal issues heightens. In turn, it impels wokeness toward fundamentalism and generates generational guilt that firmly takes a grip on the national consciousness, usually presenting itself as destructive self-hatred.

The first 15 words of the Preamble are predicated on the idea of constructive self-criticism, which allows Americans to critically assess various inequalities that were shaped by historical injustices. It is the bedrock of what makes this society exceptional. Yet, its replacement, wokeness, symbolizes the descent of self-criticism into the abyss of self-loathing and detrimental guilt. It is mirrored in the changes in attitude from a healthy national confidence to a terminal uncertainty, and it brings about moral myopia exemplified by some woke elites’ reactions to the predicament of oppressed people in other places around the globe.

I could point to dozens of examples. But just consider this one: during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, J.A. Adande, the Director of Sports Journalism at Northwestern University, was asked how he could reconcile enjoying the games while China is committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

Here is what Adande said: “I think it’s standard in sport right now. You have to have a cognitive dissonance. You need to compartmentalize. […] And who are we to criticize China’s human rights records when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against unarmed citizens, and we’ve got assaults on the voting rights of our people of color in various states in this country.”

.@jadande talks about reconciling watching the Beijing Winter Olympics amid China's human rights crisis pic.twitter.com/mqkOygjBXV

— Around the Horn (@AroundtheHorn) February 4, 2022

Over the course of 2022, one of the topics I debated most with my American and European friends was regarding FIFA’s decision to award World Cup hosting rights to Qatar, a country where homosexuality is prohibited by law. A country where migrant workers involved in World Cup infrastructure projects faced delayed or unpaid wages, forced labor, long hours in hot weather, employer intimidation, and the inability to leave their jobs because of the country’s sponsorship system.

Presented with these facts, many of my friends’ attitudes toward the situation could be described as nonchalant at best, and their responses were, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!” and “We aren’t really in a position to say anything when our Founding Fathers were colonizers and slave owners.”

This kind of sentiment was further echoed in FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s nearly hour-long tirade against critics of the controversial tournament. There, he claimed: “What we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons.” It was then that I realized wokeness is not just a phenomenon unique to the United States; it has consumed the entirety of Western civilization.

Why are people in the West so fixated on the misdeeds of our forefathers while largely ignoring the abuses and exploitations we are witnessing around the globe? It is because our hyperawareness of historical injustices compels us to seek out signs of oppression (despite its decline) at every corner of our society. And sometimes the zeal to right the wrongs of our past makes us nitpick at every minor instance that can be deemed problematic, resulting in the nearsightedness of the world at large. For one thing, the logic of wokeness usually goes like this: Given our own ills, what moral high ground does the West have to lecture Qatar or China? And if we have no right to lecture these autocratic countries, why shouldn’t we vacation in Qatar or other Middle Eastern countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and revel in the luxury that migrant workers—whose living conditions amount to indentured slavery—create? Why shouldn’t we enjoy purchasing the cheap goods produced by Uyghur forced labor in China?

Unfortunately, this logic normalizes tyranny. It says that anyone who doesn’t abide by every single aspect of woke dogma in the West is a slaver or a fascist. But those actual slavers and fascists in the Middle East and China? Well, who are we to judge? We detest our own society so much that we aren’t willing to accept that other places may be worse.

The error in this rationalization lies in attempting to absolve a moral offense by appealing to the faulty character of the West. It is nothing new; it goes all the way back to the late 1970s when any criticism of the Soviet Union was warded off by reference to some of the West’s shortcomings. The only thing that is different now is that in a culture where wokeness permeates our largest institutions, we seem to have internalized these bad-faith critiques weaponized by whataboutism, thereby blinding us to foreign affairs.

People like me who have experienced life outside of the Western world challenge the simplistic woke narrative of an ill-gotten Western civilization because we tend to recognize how progressive it is here compared to our homelands, forcing woke elites to confront the reality of other countries. Yet, more often than not, they perceive our recognition to be bolstering oppressive discourses of cultural imperialism/racism and colonial power because they frequently regard the West as an exclusive civilization that has perpetuated a series of injustices.

Take Australian writer Van Badham, for instance. In 2018, she wrote that “the words ‘Western civilization’ denote a racist colonial project to crush, change, enslave, eradicate or genocidally erase other cultures.” She went even further to say that “to ‘civilize’ is a verb that divorces people from the values of their own community and indoctrinates them into another’s. Historical rhetoric polarizes the ‘civilized’ westerner as superior to the dehumanized ‘savages,’ ‘primitives,’ and ‘barbarians’ of the term’s late 18th-19th century common use.”

This line of thinking has become so ingrained in our collective psyche now. Concepts are broadened and lexicons are arched on top of each other. The definition of the word “Western” has become vague and ripe for overuse by woke idealogues to mean other things like “racism,” “oppression,” and “colonialism.” They characterize this position as defining Western civilization by every bad cultural and political feature that happened to emerge from the western part of the Eurasian continent.

By simply displaying support for values that are direct outputs of the West—which include civil rights, equality before the law, procedural justice, and liberal democracy—woke idealogues find people like me guilty of upholding a “vile” institution. They misconstrue our support for Western civilization as a promotion of White civilization’s supremacy, White nationalism, cultural racism, and colonialism. And therefore, we must be opposed at all costs. This argument epitomizes how one’s fundamental reasoning and moral compass may be befuddled when immersed too deeply in wokeness.

Following suit, the Chinese Communist Party and theocratic leaders of the Middle East can effortlessly undermine their dissidents’ fight for liberty and civil rights by deploying “Western” as a smear and accusing them of being in a secret league with the West. Hence, when people here only see the West—thereby Western values—through the lens of wokeness, they demonstrate the distorted moral vision of overlooking global tyrannies. Ultimately, they belittle the universal aspirations of the dissidents who hunger for the ideal of freedom—or in other words, their own “Western values.”

Contrary to what Badham believes, “to civilize” does not mean divorcing people from the values of their own community and indoctrinating them into another’s. In fact, it means bringing them and their societies to a more advanced and progressive stage of social and cultural development. And Western values do just that. They are values that transcend race and culture, that move people toward progress, liberty, tolerance, and human dignity.

Or as Ibn Warraq, an Islamic scholar and a leading figure in Qur’anic criticism, put it:

The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and expression, human rights, liberal democracy—together constitute quite an achievement, surely, for any civilization. This set of principles remains the best and perhaps the only means for all people, no matter what race or creed, to live in freedom and reach their full potential. […] When Western values have been adopted by other societies, such as Japan or South Korea, their citizens have reaped benefits.

If the West is the home front of the free world, the most urgent question we ought to ask ourselves is: how can we prevail in an ideological struggle with our rivals when our dominant culture is so self-loathing?

We can’t. I once saw a quote by Russian-born American researcher Ariel Durant that said, “A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.” When a society stops believing in itself and its values, it risks self-immolation and ruin. All around the globe, countless people seek the freedoms that the West takes for granted. In the meantime, our refusal to see the enormous progress we’ve made throughout the span of our history is undoing the foundations that have made Western civilization the birthplace and bastion of liberal democracy, while shielding the world’s most audacious abusers of human rights from criticism. In doing so, tyrannical forces that run counter to the current liberal world order are empowered, from China’s increasing outward aggression and internal repression to Russia’s own brand of illiberal populism, and the stirrings of Islamist groups keen to restore their caliphates.

The path toward “a more perfect Union” is not paved with guilt or shame. It is paved on our fortitude to stare at our moral and practical shortcomings in the eyes and repair them. It is paved by our resolution to retain the capacity to combine self-criticism with self-affirmation, demonstrating pride in what we have done and will continue to do.