Woke Is Dead
How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness
Piers Morgan
Having read it
★★★☆☆
In the interests of balance and continuing the conversation and debate, sort of like the author himself says . . .
A complete lack of trust in any information or each other is desperately unhealthy. Democracy is the competition of ideas and solutions based on a shared set of facts, but increasingly we can’t agree on what the facts are. If a new pandemic began tearing across the world tomorrow morning, I have serious doubts about many people’s readiness to believe it was real, which is a dangerous situation to be in.
. . . I decided to read this book and it is actually a clear and reasonably balanced attempt at adding to the world’s need of a more common-sense approach to discussing, better understanding (even if you don’t agree) in our political and cultural conversations and debates so as to learn and action how to do good stuff for us all and slowly and steadily, with purpose and humility, keep moving forward and lessen the need of reducing everything to a binary result and so conversely, better appreciating nuance and well, common sense.
Although, passages like this one . . .
I’ve always considered myself to be a liberal because liberalism meant free speech, free markets, small government, a colour-blind society and a general but pragmatic aversion to war. Yes to all of that. But the woke-branded liberalism is the polar opposite.
. . . may be why people won’t read a book by Mr. Morgan (or want to give time to him or his views) or be willing to listen to ‘the opposition’ . . . but hey, if you don’t listen (or read) to others, how are you (in fact, how are we all) going to learn and grow?!
A good passage
World Athletics chief Lord Sebastian Coe was next to announce a total ban on post-puberty trans athletes in female international events. Lord Coe said the decision had been taken to ‘protect the future of the female category’ and that it was their duty to ‘maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations’. Hallelujah.
He also said the authority would be ‘guided by the science’ on male physical advantage and by using those words he acknowledged the simple truth underpinning this whole debate: biological sex is an irrefutable scientific fact. It’s ironic that ‘trust the science’ became a woke mantra during the Covid pandemic, but the same people are selectively deaf to ‘the science’ when it comes to women being walloped by men in sports.
Covid taught many people a lesson about healthy inquisitive scepticism, me included, not least because science is ever-evolving and necessarily mistrusting of itself. But it underlines the back-breaking logical gymnastics of woke ideology. Science is gospel on masks, vaccines and climate change but irrelevant or wrong on sex and gender because it does not fit the woke script.
That’s not how it works! Why did it take a man to say it?
There is no need whatsoever for this kind of common sense to be ‘right-wing’ or even conservative. The great American anti-slavery author Harriet Beecher Stowe said: ‘Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.’ That is really all this boils down to.
A second good passage
In what we now know to be her very final
days, the Queen dragged herself from her deathbed to formally appoint the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss. The Queen looked frail and delicate in those photographs; one outstretched hand was bruised and the other held a walking
stick. But she had the same toothy, beaming smile as always and found the energy to make classically British wisecracks about the torrid late summer weather.At a time when many healthy young people were openly fuming about returning to the office after Covid, this was quite a riposte. She died just two days later. And that meeting became Liz Truss’ only unblemished act in a historically disastrous 49 days as Prime Minister; memorably losing a longevity contest to a fresh lettuce.
A third good passage
Barack Obama hit the nail on the head all the way back in 2019. ‘I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people,’ he said. ‘If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because “Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!”’ He also summed up the whole folly of cancel culture with a very simple sentence that’s worth remembering: ‘People who do really good stuff have flaws.’
In our brave new world of common sense, we have to do a lot better and it starts with a reality check. Millions upon millions of posts are now by bots, sent out to harvest our wrath for clicks, which makes the whole thing feel like a total farce. Al has been quietly absorbing our insanity and learning to replicate it with disturbing accuracy. If we’re not careful we’ll find ourselves trapped as props in a world of warring Al chatbots, screaming at each other over AI-generated videos of Al characters. Not exactly a good use of our time and energy.
It’s already capable of generating ever more lifelike content, which can very easily be used to create false realities. This is why I worry so much about any movement that is so convinced of its moral superiority that all means are justified in recruiting supporters and silencing critics. It already feels like people are watching two different movies with the same characters and the same sets but wildly different storylines; directed by who they follow and who they watch. The next moralistic movement will have some scary new weapons in its armoury and needs to be met by a wall of very human gut instincts.
The best defence is to trust your boring inner moderate who can see a bit of good in most things and doesn’t want to ostracise and destroy the other side. The great thing about common sense is that most of us are born with it.