I Encountered the Epitome of “Wokeness”

The following is my December 19, 2024 article on "wokeness" that Medium recently took down. I refer to this article in another article about wokeness on Medium.

I Encountered the Epitome of “Wokeness”

Two lessons to draw from a run-in with a shallow social justice warrior

I ran into a walking, typing stereotype of left-wing political correctness, pejoratively known now as “wokeness,” and I feel it’s incumbent on me to share two valuable lessons I learned from the encounter.

Here’s how it happened.

My run-in with a rabid wokester

I’d posted an article on how Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew anticipates alt-right sexism, and how feminists and progressives should respond to his sexist argument in the climactic speech.

A day later, I found that someone had left twelve rude, misinformed comments on the article. This commenter is named Jaimie Hileman, and her Medium profile describes her in these terms:

Trans/LGBTQ cultural competency and DEI educational consultant, member WPATH, AASECT, university instructor, intersectional advocate, zero tolerance for abuse.

Here are some of the condescending comments she left me:

Quoting me as saying, “In essence, consistent humanism is just a prelude to transhumanism since the equality that liberals have in mind is the equality between self-sufficient gods,” she replied,

Dear author, how did you get to be so expert on “liberals” and their “theology”? Also, I caught the anti-Trans dog whistle “transhumanism “. SUB-TILL.

Quoting me as saying, “Those early [Stone Age] societies would have been egalitarian and communistic by necessity since all the members had to pull their weight to survive under the dire circumstances of life in the wild,” she replied,

So many unsupported assumptions.

Explain “would have been” and how it is so predicated. Define “survive”, define “circumstances of life”, define “wild” in the context of pre-urbanization.

Quoting me as saying, “The question is whether women and minorities are likely to suffer buyer’s remorse due to the downside of such a free society,” she replied,

Literally WHO THE HELL IS ASKING THIS “QUESTION”?!?

Besides intellectually bankrupt and stultified asshat hacks and hollow online construct personalities like Peterson, Weyrich, Knowles, Walsh, Shapiro? Seriously, this is college freshman level BS supposition based on cartoonish tropisms. If any of my students turned in a laundry list of unchecked assumptions I’d out of kindness refuse to grade their paper, hand it back, and give them a week extension plus directions to the departmental writing assistance resources. But then I’m a liberal and take seriously my obligations to universally foster insight and learning, instead of just flunking them. Then I’d review my syllabus for the 180th time to see if I could make the rubric for the assignment any god-damned clearer without essentially writing the paper for them and robbing them of a creative and intellectual opportunity.

No disrespect intended to the author, and I’m fully aware that they’ve identified these tropes in a critical fashion, I just wish additional analysis was provided. I’d genuinely like to hear the author examine these assumptions, their integral history, the history of their use, how those who use them have benefitted, who benefits from them today, how they’ve been perpetuated intergenerationally and infragenerationally, and do they serve additional purposes such as social cohesion and as always, cui bono from such coheres.

And quoting me as saying, “… it’s a wonder he [Shakespeare] hasn’t been cancelled,” she replied,

Can’t say I’m impressed by pseudo intellectual usage of right-wing childlike cancel culture tropes. Nobody is a bigger snowflake than the kulturkampfer banning the saying of “gay” or “Trans”, straight White males banning Trans people from bathrooms in order to supposedly protect them from rapist straight White males, or banning DEI because righties/whities cannot emotionally tolerate hearing about the horrors their grandaddies perpetrated against non-whites, non-Christians, LGBTQ people, women. Why perpetuate such tropes?

Now, rather than responding to her in kind, such as by pointing out that I back up many of those assertions in lots of other articles, and that transhumanism is a separate issue that I also write about elsewhere, so it’s hardly an “anti-Trans dog whistle,” I decided to take the high road.

I replied to one of her comments with an invitation to have a substantive dialogue or debate about these disagreements over email, so that I could post the exchange as an article. I told her that if she’s interested in having one, she can email me at the address in my Medium profile. Below is a screenshot of the comment I posted.

My invitation to Jaimie Hileman

Around fifteen minutes after I posted that invitation, I found that all her comments on my article had disappeared because she responded by “blocking” me on Medium. On top of that, she “hid” my invitation so no one else could see how I replied to her. Due to the block, I can’t delete her comments, but they remain there for others to see, with no response from me, and all because I foolishly tried to take the high road with an insufferable wokester.

Of course, she never emailed me to start a dialogue.

Gaming Medium

As I said, two lessons can be learned from that debacle. First, Medium’s rules can be abused in a way that runs contrary to Tony Stubblebine’s vision of Medium as being potentially a “better internet.”

According to Stubblebine, Medium’s CEO, “The villain is ads. They make businesses care more about your attention than they do about serving you. It’s as simple as incentives: When a business is paid for by ads, you stop being their customer.” So, the internet is being ruined by ads. Yet because Medium is “member-supported, we get to build our space on the internet very differently.”

For instance, he says, “we are building a place that recommends great writing, not the loudest writers,” and “we’re building a better internet” by protecting you from “spam, fraud, trolls, and AI-generated content.”

That may be, but the “blocking” feature can be abused. After all, the real problem with the internet is hardly just ads; rather, it’s how social media tribalize us all, so we lose sight of a free society’s humanist principles. In taking the high road with my offer to dialogue with this hostile commenter, I was adhering to the humanist ideal of critical thinking. But nice guys finish last.

As a practiced culture warrior, Jaimie Hileman took advantage of Medium’s rules to leave a misimpression in that comment section. Her abusive comments remain, and my invitation is hidden.

Moreover, because she’s a woke social justice warrior (in the newly established pejorative sense), she doesn’t understand the humanist basis of social progress, a point that would have emerged had she accepted the offer to debate the issues of feminism and liberalism. And because she’s been tribalized by social media, she lacks the courage of her convictions or the deep understanding needed to put her bluster to the test, so she declined the chance to prove the merit of her allegations.

This brings me to the second lesson.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION, on Pexels

Snobbery hobbles Democrats

The second lesson is that as the epitome of the lame side of wokeness, Hileman shows what’s wrong with Democrats and why they lost twice to Donald Trump. Of course, the centrist, neoliberal Democratic Party doesn’t advocate left-wing policies, but the complacency of Democrats and of their professional class of supporters is akin to wokeness in being so much effrontery.

On the surface, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris sound eminently competent and humanistic. But their neoliberal institutionalism amounted to an apology for America’s underlying plutocracy. Resentment against that economic reality paved the way for Trumpian populism.

Similarly, Hileman’s tone in her comments was condescending. She presupposed that she knew everything, so that I should have thanked her for deigning to correct my misapprehensions. The truth, though, was quite otherwise. If anything, that kind of tribal pugnacity overcompensates for a fear of intellectual inadequacy, a fear that outed itself in Hileman’s refusal to prove where the truth lies by accepting the offer to debate the issues.

Amusingly, she said in one of her comments, “I’m a liberal and take seriously my obligations to universally foster insight and learning,” yet she indicated the opposite by ducking the opportunity to debate.

Kamala Harris had her best moment of the 2024 campaign when she got the better of Trump in their staged debate. But Harris also demonstrated her shallowness by avoiding interviews with critics, such as Joe Rogan. Hileman seems as shallow as Harris.

The underlying problem here is that liberalism has entered a decadent, “postmodern” stage of cynicism and relativist complacency. Supposedly, objectivity is impossible, and all knowledge claims are just underhanded attempts to dominate someone else, so all that matters in discourse is showboating, indulging in the use of your tribe’s symbols with no obligation to humble yourself by engaging with other worldviews.

I happen to have studied philosophy, so I know what’s wrong with postmodernism and what passes for wokeness or the late-modern liberal “awakening.” When privileged Whites advocate for social justice for minorities, while ignoring the downside of consumerism, they show that their understanding of justice is superficial. They only pose as progressives because they must avoid recognizing the performative contradiction of advocating for “justice” while presuming that all ideologies and social interactions are tainted by power dynamics.

Contrary to the worst of the postmodern blather, objectivity is real even if it’s not inhuman neutrality, and those who understand our species’ limited form of objectivity respect genuine dialogues on quasi-Platonic grounds.

Yet ever since Hillary Clinton called them a “basket of deplorables” and Joe Biden called them “garbage,” Democrats have disdained Trumpers rather than engaging them in dialogue. That’s understandable, to some extent, since Trumpers thrive on trolling liberals rather than testing the rationality of right-wing conspiracy theories and prejudices in fair debates. Obviously, both sides have been tribalized, but Democrats are supposed to have the moral high ground due to their advanced education. What Trumpism shows is that street smarts can beat book smarts, especially when the whole Anglo-American culture has entered a decadent phase.

Many fragile, spoiled consumers who compensate for their developed society’s ravaging of the biosphere by posing as social justice warriors hide in safe spaces, using anonymity on social media to score empty, symbolic victories. The real fight for social justice is taking place in the undeveloped, war-torn, premodern world, such as in much of Africa and the Middle East. It’s precisely the developed world’s extraordinary progress that spoils modern urban consumers because of the social justice there that’s already been achieved, and this spoilage makes for the fragility that’s apparent in Jaimie Hileman’s antics on Medium.

We’re liable to lose our perspective when our environment has been toxified by too much of a good thing. The bounties of high technology and economic opportunities can infantilize us, as our machines and computers do much of our work for us, making us obsolete. Will the whole educated class one day, then, be as feeble and impudent as Hileman, with AI condescending to humanity and trivializing our intertribal culture wars?

Again, the way to prevent that grim future from transpiring is to develop our big-picture perspectives, by engaging with alternative worldviews and the harsh realities in life that instill humility.