As members of "The Observatory of Decolonialism", we have the "privilege" of receiving, addressed by our associates, the weekly collection and anthology of the tribulations of French wokism, of observing its growing and already considerable impact in our universities and public institutions, and its incredible inventiveness - all disciplines combined - to saturate the spaces of public research and teaching. Considering the denial and refutations of the control bodies, but also of the prescribers of research, whether it be in disorder the CPU, the CNU, the CNRS, the large local authorities or the European Union, or other public bodies, the thing is almost comical if it were not overwhelming.
In the mid-2010s, this new ideology was almost non-existent in the French public and media landscape. The then Minister of National Education, Najat Vallaud Belkacem, had pretended in 2013 to deny the existence of gender theory, which is a segment of it, even though she was a discreet but active advocate of it. A five-year term later, French education and research, in all their components, have become the breeding ground for a spontaneous and omnipresent flowering of the ideology Woke : themes and programs of conferences by the dozen, study days, subjects of masters and theses (in considerable proportions now), school programs and manuals, associative activism, job descriptions and public competitions, both in research and in higher education, teaching at INSPE, international and national research programs (due to calls for tenders to apply), irruption in the hard sciences and in the arts, rewriting and censorship of works of the mind etc.
Wokeism – and its many variations in racial studies, gender studies and their relationships, decolonial studies, sexuality studies, supposedly dominated religions, etc. – is no longer just another way of apprehending the world and falsely rewriting history, but it studies itself as a scientific object. The circle is almost already closed between a way of thinking about the world – once the sciences inherited from Western civilization have been delegitimized, in the name of a revolutionary moralism that has its roots in American Protestant sectarianism – and all of its theorists, designers, actors and retired disciples: the new esoteric science thus constituted is on the way to becoming autonomous.
The thing is, in fact, classic. This is how many established sciences were formed. Political science is a shoot of history (as a discipline). Economics was formed as a branch of law studies. And sociology was born from a branch of philosophy. No one finds fault with this, even if everyone observes the damage caused by the dispersion and specialization of knowledge, of which our political class offers a permanent illustration. But in this case, because it is not a science, but an ideological reading grid of the world with an eradicating pretension, all the established sciences are affected, and are in turn subverted by the new thinking.
The only recent and accessible precedent is the invasion of Marxism in universities and in the various sciences in the aftermath of the Second World War. On the initiative of Moscow and its many local political and ideological relays, a socialist art, a socialist medicine and science, a Marxist grid of thought applied to the human sciences and to history (that of the modes of production), a socialist economy (the same one that condemned to death the economy of the Algerian Republic), a discrediting of the arts deemed "bourgeois" (poetry, philology, classical philosophy, theology, history of religions, etc.) were formed in a few years. etcStructuralism applied to literature and the human sciences was a sophisticated moment of this invasion.
The common point between ideologies is that they do not spring from the scientific disciplines themselves (as sociology, through Weber and Durkheim, was born from philosophy), but that they are new glasses that thousands of actors simultaneously put on to look at the world differently. So that thought Woke arises today spontaneously in medieval literature, in classical letters (whose American representatives call for the scuttling of the discipline), in political science and in sociology - where this ideology tries to saturate the space for reflection - and even in the hard sciences: biology, physics or mathematics - thus, certain American schools conceptualize special mathematics for African-Americans, supposedly segregated or excluded from this discipline whose particularity is precisely universalism.
The question that haunts me is how and why respectable scientists and academics, from disciplines beforehand very far removed from the initial experimental grounds of wokism, which are sociology and political science, which believed they had to reinvent themselves so as not to sink into the repetition of the same, are in turn won over by this ideological virus? Some, as we have mentioned with regard to classical literature, even risk provoking the self-annihilation of their discipline, since the very object of their science, seen through the prism of wokism, is at once inappropriate, patriarchal, Eurocentric, macho, the incarnation of white thought, discriminatory and useless. Others, as scientists - I am thinking of the hard sciences - risk not undermining their science, but discrediting themselves and losing all credibility in the eyes of their colleagues. The death drive is, it is true, constitutive of our being.
But beyond a certain idleness, which evokes these algae which follow the mainstream, there are objective and rational reasons for the contagion Woke can be noted and understood. Some, even the majority of activists, are interested first in themselves, and would like the world they perceive as oppressive, to be interested mainly in them, their group and their particularities. Others, for lack of a guaranteed future in research or in higher education - since our State, for decades, has produced 7 times more doctoral students than the university and public research are able to absorb -, invent a new disciplinary approach, even if it is essentially ideological: this allows them to apply and apply for positions created on purpose. This material interest is well understood. Similarly, secondary teachers, lacking a magisterium or disciples, invent a false science of which they are assured of becoming the masters es-qualità. The maneuver is clever, classic and understandable. Still others, driven by a nihilistic, narcissistic or revolutionary passion, want to do away with the world we have inherited, in order to create a new one of which they hope to become the heralds, precursors or master thinkers.
But in view of the growing number of advocates who have appeared in recent years, including in the disciplines beforehand the most hermetic to this ideological way of thinking about the world, following and rationality do not exhaust the range of commitments. Let us therefore add on the one hand mimicry, and on the other conformism to our modernity.
In our intellectual academic petty bourgeoisie milieu, which structures the milieu of professors and researchers, mimicry is the norm. The intellectual world of the 19th century shared scarcity with the aristocratic world. Mass society has massified culture and created an intellectual class to ensure the transmission of knowledge. The figure of the magisterium has been destroyed. Then under the Fifth Republic, the State was taken over by a narrow clique of senior civil servants, piloted by the bank and large companies, moreover increasingly distant from intellectual speculation and knowledge - both in the Humanities and in the hard sciences. Driven out of the State, the "paid intellectual class" lives in a position of relegation. The massification of the academic body has caused its social and financial positions to regress, and the university massification has led to a change in public which has finished degrading its social image and its very propensity to practice its profession.
In this partly declassed world, which reigns over a student mass, unfortunately partly impoverished financially and intellectually, a double social movement is produced. An individualization of professional and social behaviors, which has killed intellectual debate and controversy; the scientific community is today made up of an infinity of small chapels isolated from each other. And on the other, the reign of ideological mimicry, through hostility to the old modes of operation relating to mandarinate, clericalism or intellectual magisterium. One of the most common criticisms addressed to the study days on decolonialism organized by our Observatory in January 2021 at the Sorbonne was to have invited non-academics, notably Pascal Bruckner, who would therefore not be suitable for academic debate. The thing is at the very least comical. In a situation of intellectual mimicry, ideological conformism is the best way to go unnoticed, while demonstrating one's loyalty to the group. By virtue of which, thought Woke flourishes as long as it is fashionable.
The other base on which thought can grow in our circles Woke is due to the imperialism of novelty, of revolutionary emergence, degraded into bougism and innovation at all costs. The British intellectual GK Chesterton deplored the "degrading obligation to be of one's time". Being of one's time, or keeping up with the times, today means that one must not miss the latest progressive intellectual or ideological fashion, especially if it comes from the United States, that it asserts its revolutionary dimension, that it presents itself as a just and absolute thought, strong in its religious dimension - which escapes the French public, but which is no less real -, capable of restoring the mountains of injustices resulting from our history. Revolutionary aspirations, Judeo-Christian guilt revisited with a post-modern twist, conformism towards the new dominant thought, all the more legitimate as it would be carried by the representatives of the last of the last in our political imagination - racialized people, women, fat people, the handicapped, etc. - everything converges so that the new ideology triumphs.
Conformism small burgher, anti-intellectualism, great fatigue of the West, modernism at all costs, mimicry, refusal to think for oneself and to distinguish oneself from the group, downgrading, sheep-like and corporate spirit, woke, imperialist or masked thinking invades the academic field. The harder will be its fall.
Pierre Vermeren, historian.
Recently published by Tallandier, France downgrading, from deindustrialization to the health crisis, Text, Paris, 2022.
