Wokedom: Your Gluten Free Christianity

Hold on to your resentment. There is a new gospel in town. The post-modern sapling has come into its full glory through the scripture of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The ministry of Unconscious Bias and Cultural Sensitivity is coming your way. This is the born-again Christian gospel of Wokedom. Only it’s a meat-free, gluten-free version.

Wokedom is stripped down to a singular ingredient: compassion. It’s a sea of compassion but it did not arise out of concern for, or from, third-world slums, refugee camps, or the poor and disaffected anywhere in the world. It bubbled up from the world’s most fashionable alfresco sidewalks, fueled with champagne, chardonnay and campari spritzes.

https://hbr.org/2021/09/unconscious-bias-training-that-works

Compassion pissing contest for the elite and aspirational

Before becoming a religion, the DEI trinity began as a philanthropic pissing contest at charity galas. A battle of the most virtuous between the rich and famous, the elite and aspirational. It may have remained only that, but for a small group of disaffected French philosophers who reframed the whole thing into the post-modernist critique. The nonsense they conjured mesmerized and transformed the satiated ingrates occupying western academia. But that’s another story. This story is about the legions of nascent woke graduates would go onto infiltrate media, government, and corporations.

The gospel of wokedom requires no churches, or temples, no deity or metaphysics, not family or community. Arthur Jensen’s speech in the 1976 movie “Network,” fore shadowed its essence, “You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no people. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There is no third world. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, Electro-dollars, Multi-dollars, Reichsmarks, Rubles, Pounds, and Shekels…”

This holistic system of systems, like the old-testament deity, demands nothing less than total obedience. It comes replete with a creed of ritual disciplines and solemn oaths.

The DEI god is coming for you all at once: at your work, at your school, on every screen, before every public gathering. There are ordained HR officers, prefects, who speak in tongues infested with saccharine compassion tasked to baptize you. But instead of Satan and all his works, you will renounce group identity and seek out every root of unconscious bias, racism, misogyny and, of course, Trump. Those who resist suffer excommunication: social-media shadow-bans, shaming, shunning, demonetization, and debanking.  

God only knows whether any of us remain sane after enduring this insufferable idiocy

Fifty years ago, the western world acquiesced to a secular self-conception. All religions were deemed superstition, talk of god became embarrassing, and over time we came to scorn church attendance. We ditched the creation story and creative design. Then substituted it with the barren Big-Bang theory coupled with evolution and the pitiless survival of the fittest trope. The magic of quantum physics lured us to suspect the reliability of cause and effect and reason itself.

When the postmodernists arrived to lampoon the western canon, we cravenly ditched the wisdom that had guided us out of the Middle Ages, tore up Plato and Socrates, Euripides, and Shakespeare, sent Zola, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn and ascribed it all akin to witchcraft or white supremacy.

Either way, out of this self-imposed willful ignorance comes this emasculated vegan Christianity. Born out of amnesia, not conscious plagiarism. The ethics underpinning DEI thought is, of course, entirely new, and never imagined. There is nothing of the sort covered in the western canon. No one ever spoke of civil rights, social justice, and equality before DEI. No one had ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Slavery was never abolished, and Foucault only knows how women could vote or work before the advent of DEI.

No one had ever heard of the golden rule

Just behold the racist and misogynist hate taught by western culture before the advent of DEI:

· “One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.”–Republic, Plato.

· “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”–Gospel of Luke

· ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’–Gospel of Mark

· “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Gospel of John.

· “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Gospel of Matthew.

· “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”–Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

You cannot hoist the DEI with its own petard: cultural appropriation

To appropriate culture means to adopt or use elements of a culture that is not one’s own, often without understanding or respecting the cultural significance or context of those elements. Cultural appropriation typically occurs when individuals or groups borrow aspects of a marginalized culture for their own benefit without giving proper credit or consideration to the origins or significance of those cultural elements.

There is nothing like that going on here!

It must be impossibly gnawing for a marginalized practicing Christian to endure these upstarts. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The empty angst, the sound and bluster, inflated by this Campari spritzer compassion.

Forgive those who trespassed against us

Whilst I will not, the traditional Christian will probably turn the other cheek and forgive those who trespass against them. They will not bathe in resentment, cast stones, or shun their accusers. They will embrace the difficulties and burdens of life and carry their cross. More is the pity. They will probably swallow their pride and endure the unconscious bias and the cultural sensitivity workshops, the outrageous insinuations, the tedious monitoring, and pointlessness of it all. Many will pray for their tormentors.

The DEI adherent will know nothing of that.

DEI principles are not about compassion, they are about division

We are rendered imbeciles. For all the preaching, the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion they have never applied to the power structures that rule us. They do not inform US foreign policy. The UN, the IMF, the world bank may endorse the DEI principles publicly, but they guide neither the constitution nor any of the policies of these power centers. Because the DEI principles were never designed to advance the cause of compassion, they are designed to ensnare our best instincts and deploy them for the purposed of distraction, diversion, and division amongst the public. Keep the deplorable masses fighting amongst themselves and not against their betters.  

From T S Eliot’s Little Gidding

The satiated beast kicks the empty pail.

The dead, those who opposed them, and those whom they opposed, fold into silence. We cannot revive those old factions. They belong to another time and place. What we inherit from the fortunate we have taken from the defeated.

What comes ahead for us all:

is the impotence of rage, of laughter at what ceases to amuse. The rending pain of re-enactment of all you have done and been the shame of motives late revealed and the awareness of things ill done and done to other’s harm which you once took for the exercise of virtue.