Am I woke, or just morally broke?

Ok, the title doesn't really reflect this article as you think it does…

On Facebook recently a member posted a comment about being sick of hearing the word “woke”. It generated more responses than one would have predicted, and the most fervent responses seemed also to be the most misguided. Two things became clear: 1: There seem to be multiple ideas about the meaning of the word, and how it's used. 2: It must hurt an awful lot and take some effort to change your mind about that meaning, because clearly some were not willing to go to the trouble.

All words have a generally agreed upon meaning. To you or me our use might be different to the generally agreed meaning, and that's all fine, but if we want to engage in good faith, we need to figure out whether we are using the word the same. The word “woke”, for example, has a literal meaning of course. It no doubt has an origin too. However, those things are not always relevant to a conversation. “Woke” is almost exclusively used these days as a pejorative, as a conversation shut-down, and as a way to dismiss your own bigotry.

“You're just woke…” or “the woke left…” is code for “I don't want to hear about the thing you're addressing, and my argument is bad so…nothing to see here”. Of course, this is intellectual dishonesty, but I would argue that most people that do it don't even know they're doing it. They get that little shot of dopamine when their brain tells them “gotcha!” and that feels nicer than the cognitive dissonance they experience when considering the prospect of their wrongness.

Disputing the meaning of a word can have the same effect. It was suggested in the Facebook post (I'm paraphrasing) that “woke” is used to hide bigotry, someone disagreed with this, then promptly attempted to use the word to hide their bigotry. Remember too, a lot of this trouble stems from the person responding having a differing meaning in their head about a word, they may not even disagree about the important things, yet get bogged down because they haven't stopped to clarify the meaning of the word they're pontificating about.

I would argue that phrases like “virtue signalling” and the (now old) term “politically correct” are much the same. The truth is we all virtue signal all the time. We're social creatures, there's no escaping the desire and need to appeal to others (unless you're a psychopath). If you want to influence others or have an effect in society, you need an audience. I think everything we do is virtue signalling. Using the term “virtue signalling” is itself virtue signalling. It's a redundant term. In a sense the use of these words and phrases are ad hominem because they're an attempt to shut down an argument with an attack on your character. The only trouble is that none of those things they're calling out are bad character. Being called virtue signalling, woke, politically correct…or feminist, leftist, atheist, or skeptic for that matter. If you're being called these things, it probably means you're having an effect.

If they think they're disparaging you with these words they're ignorant. Somehow, we need to get the message out there, “bro, that's not the insult you think it is!” Seriously though, education is the answer of course, but we also need to discern when someone just isn't listening, and isn't going to listen. Or when someone is engaging in bad faith, and just walk away.