It's Not All About Power

How a focus on power kills complexity, turns us against each other, and undermines justice. Part 4 of a series on ideas behind the woke movement.

This is part 4 of a series on the ideas underlying the woke movement. If you haven’t already done so, you might find it useful to look at part 1, part 2, and part 3.

In the last post I described a way of viewing society that is at the heart of the woke perspective: It’s all about power. 

I tried to capture what this means in three interrelated points:

1. The central dynamic in society is the struggle for power between groups who are oppressors and those who are oppressed.

2. The norms, structures, laws, and institutions of society are an expression of power and serve to keep oppressors on top.

3. The most important political and moral imperative is to uncover and subvert these structures, liberating the oppressed.

As I admitted last time, there are important grains of truth here. I don’t think people who embrace this perspective are crazy. Power struggles between groups are real and paying attention to them is sometimes illuminating. There are people who are oppressed and others who oppress them. Institutions, norms, and other aspects of culture can function to reinforce the dominance of some at the expense of others. And all of this matters. 

And yet the conviction that it’s all about power, as it stands, is ultimately unsatisfactory. It has at least three serious problems: it is overly simplistic, it encourages a false and destructive way of conceiving of social conflict, and it undermines the idea of justice.

Overly Simplistic

There is something about human nature that attracts us to simple explanations, but reality is seldom simple. Is it really true that we can understand everything that is going on in terms of power? Or that, as Batliwala writes¹, power is “at the heart of every social problem”? 

There are a number of contending perspectives. A sociobiologist like E.O Wilson would tell us that everything going on in human behavior and social patterns can be understood in terms of our evolutionary past, encoded in our genes:

“Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.

Our quarrelsomeness, our intense concentration on groups and on rivalries, down to the last junior-soccer-league game, the whole thing falls into place, in my opinion.”²

A conservative thinker like Edmund Burke would assert that many social institutions and norms are the solidified form of slowly-accumulated and hard-won human wisdom operating under the guidance of divine providence.

Historian Tom Holland has recently argued that fundamental aspects of Western culture reflect the working out of central premises of Christian theology, a religion built upon the elevation of the weak and powerless. Christianity’s influence has tended towards overturning oppression, rather than propping it up. Ideas like universal human rights, far from being an expression of power, have been one of the most potent defenses against its abuse. 

No doubt economists, social psychologists, and historians of all stripes could add to the catalog of perspectives at some length. 

Moreover, as we reflect upon our own behavior, we will discover a rich variety of motivations at work. Dominating others? Sometimes, yes. But we also act from love, curiosity, greed, laziness, desire for beauty, and dozens of other reasons. 

What is the point in these observations? To see everything in terms of power is to strip human society of its actual richness and force everything through one narrow explanatory lens. 

And what’s wrong with that? Most importantly, this inevitably distorts what we see, preventing us from understanding and responding to the world rightly. As the expression goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yet there are relatively few circumstances in which a smart blow from 16 ounces of steel is what is most needed.³

If the view is too simplistic in its understanding of the action on the stage of human history, it is also too simplistic in its understanding of the actors. The woke perspective often treats groups as monolithic entities with uniform experiences and interests. 

This is clearly visible in the case of the antiracist domain of woke thought. In a book like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, we read about white people and black people in the United States as though these are two clearly delineated and homogenous groups. 

Yet within the boundaries of those considered black are Ivy-League educated CEOs living in Manhattan and unemployed highschool dropouts in rural Arkansas. There are recent immigrants from Kenya and the descendants of slaves who have lived in this country for generations. There are offspring of broken homes growing up in the midst of urban violence and children raised in suburbia in stable, two-parent households.⁴ 

The same differences are found among whites. And we don’t even have in our culture an agreed-upon sense of who is supposed to count as white. Are Italian Americans white? What about Arab-Americans? What about the children of mixed marriages? Where do Hispanics⁵ and Asians fit into the picture? The boundaries of groups simply aren’t that clear. 

Even if the boundaries were clear, it seems, finally, like an oversimplification to elevate race or sexual orientation as perhaps the most salient characteristic of a person, in terms of which his place in society is to be understood. John McWhorter expresses the problem this way:

“[The woke perspective] calls for everyone who isn’t white to found their primary sense of self on not being white and knowing whites don’t quite ‘get’ me. [It] forbids us non-whites from being individual selves, out of an idea that white racism is so onerous that our self-definition must be fashioned against it, despite that this vastly exaggerates the role of racism in most black lives.”⁶

Maybe, for instance, whether one grows up in a two-parent household has much more explanatory power. Maybe people of every ethnicity who are raised without both parents have more in common in terms of their life experiences with those who had a similar upbringing than with those who happen to have the same skin color. Or maybe economic class, as the left has traditionally thought, is the most important factor to consider. 

Or maybe the course of human life is complicated and any one of these factors we may point to is at best only one part of an individual’s story. To make it the whole is, again, to distort reality, ignoring both complexity and human agency.

The Good vs. The Evil

If the view that it’s all about power is too simplistic, it also fosters a pernicious way of thinking about each other in the midst of social conflict. 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the problem in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. He argues that human beings are wired for tribalism, a tendency to divide the world up into two groups: us, and the enemy. When we are in this mode, he writes,

“We bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. Independent thought becomes heresy, heresy leads to ostracism, and ostracism could be a death sentence. In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenges our team’s narrative.”  

Haidt finds this way of thinking characteristic of the woke movement, with its emphasis on identifying the oppressors and the oppressed, the good guys and the bad guys. Given our tendencies towards tribalism, “What happens,” he asks, “when, you train students to see others—and themselves—as members of distinct groups defined by race, gender, and other socially significant factors, and you tell them that those groups are eternally engaged in a zero-sum conflict over status and resources?”

Simple. You wind up with a widespread mindset that, “Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.”

There are two problems with infusing a culture with this perspective. The first is that it is simply untrue. Though we find it attractive to divide the world up into the good and the evil (flattering ourselves that we are in the former group), each of us is a mixture of these things. As Solzhenitsyn put it so well, 

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

The second problem is this neat division of the world into the good and the bad, the oppressed and the oppressors, tends to dehumanize the group deemed evil and pave the way for them to be treated accordingly. 

It is instructive to notice that the most appalling occasions of human slaughter and oppression in modern history — whether in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, or the killing fields of Cambodia — all take place within a context where this way of thinking has taken hold.

Those who have embraced the woke perspective aren’t slaughtering those they identify as oppressors, but it is possible to see the violence that so easily accompanies this perspective just below the surface of things. As I wrote about earlier, the places where woke ideas have penetrated most deeply were also the places where the atrocities visited upon Israelis last October were either downplayed or celebrated. 

Polling numbers point to a connection. Among the 18-24 year old demographic, those who have been most exposed to woke ideas in their education, 79% support “[the] ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed…” For the same group, 67% think “Jews as a class are oppressors,” and 60% “think the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” 

This way of thinking about groups is simply toxic. It attaches crimes that require action and culpability (like oppressing someone) to persons simply in virtue of their membership in an ethnic group, as though being an oppressor is an inherent quality, contained in the genes. Toxic beliefs inevitably poison those who hold them and lead to toxic actions.

Undermining Justice

Finally, the idea that everything is about power undermines the idea of justice. This might be a surprising claim, inasmuch as justice is a prominent theme for the woke movement. Yet what justice means is transformed by their view of power.

How so? Let’s look again about point number two:

2. The norms, structures, laws, and institutions of society are an expression of power and serve to keep oppressors on top.

In other words, norms don’t reflect some universal truth but instead reflect what benefits the powerful. That means our culture’s understanding of justice (and every other moral norm) is just another piece of the overall power structure of oppression.

Philosopher Tommy J. Curry, who endorses this view, puts it this way:

“The mythology of good and evil allows powerful groups and nations to construct weaker groups, nations, or races as inferior or evil—and thereby in need of remedy…The question of what is good or bad depends on the power and will of the group(s) in power to protect their own position and interests. So the political conditions which are often the expression of the dominant group(s) who hold power in a society ultimately dictate what can be thought of as good or bad.”

If the view of justice that has had currency in our culture is just a reflection of the interests of the powerful, what then? It would make little sense for those who believe our most pressing task is liberating the oppressed to think of this in terms of pursuing justice — since “justice” is part of the problem. 

This is no doubt why the woke movement tends to neglect or even reject a traditional understanding of justice, which has to do with norms governing the treatment of individuals⁷, in favor of social justice, which is concerned with how different groups in society stand in relationship to each other. The same shift can be seen in the move from a focus on equality, understood as a commitment to treat everyone the same, to equity, a state in which everyone has the same.

Someone from within the woke perspective might see this shift in the following light: It is a movement away from an understanding of justice that props up the powerful to one that empowers the downtrodden. 

Yet notice what this shift cannot represent: A movement from a corrupted understanding of justice to the true one. Why? Because all social norms are constructed by a culture to preserve the power of the dominant. There are no universal, “true” norms that transcend a particular culture. What we have, instead, is simply a struggle for power, with particular notions of justice being one of the weapons with which the battle is waged. 

In other words, if it really is all about power, then ultimately moral norms have no authority, and there is no reason to let them stand in the way of winning the power struggle. At its core, it is a nihilistic view that undermines the moral norms that function to keep human behavior within certain boundaries. 

And the fruit is clearly visible. Think again of the polling data noted above: 67% think “Jews as a class are oppressors,” and 60% “think the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” Murdering, raping, and torturing civilians can be justified as long as what we’re up to is overcoming oppression.  

Milder forms of running roughshod over the rights of others for the sake of fighting oppression abound. As I noted in a previous post, surveys found 37% of college students said it was acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech, 62% said shouting down speakers was okay, and 20% said violence to stop a speaker was at least sometimes acceptable. 

It is worth noticing, again, the historical record in this regard of regimes animated by this same perspective about power. For the Bolsheviks in Russia, for instance, there was nothing that could not be justified in the pursuit of ending the oppression of the property-owning classes. 

Alternatives

To summarize, then, the view that it’s all about power has three problems. It’s too simplistic, distorting reality and hence distorting our understanding of how to respond to it. It inculcates a tribal understanding that neatly divides society into the good and the evil, dehumanizing the latter. Finally, it undermines any substantive notion of justice, opening the way for any behavior to be justified in service of the goal of ending oppression.

I have no doubt that many who think of themselves as in the woke camp would strongly dislike some of these implications — for instance, the dehumanization of others. And yet, it seems clear that these are the places the root ideas lead. 

So what’s the alternative? Is there a more fruitful way to think about inequality, discrimination, and oppression? 

It’s a great question and I intend to hazard an answer. But not yet. Next week, we’ll continue an examination of the woke perspective by considering its view of knowledge. 

1. This is a reference to a quote I included in the last post. The quote comes from the booklet All About Power by activist and author Srilatha Batliwalar.

2. From a story on Wilson in The Atlantic.

3. To illustrate the problem, think of the Soviet Union, founded on the notion that the essential problem with the world is the unequal distribution of resources inherent in the capitalist system of private property. Solution? Abolish private property and equalize the distribution. Needless to say, this did not result in utopia. The problem, defenders might suggest, was that the plan wasn’t really carried out thoroughly enough. There remained stratification and pronounced inequalities, with those in favor with party leadership enjoying a standard of living much higher than those outside this protective shelter. Yet the seeming impossibility of avoiding this sort of thing reveals that the idea that society can be fixed by toying with external arrangements ignores the actual complexity of the springs of human behavior. 

4.  Kendi is not unaware of these differences and mentions them at various places in the book. Yet they don’t seem to connect to the main argument of the text which is consistently framed in terms of monolithic groups. 

5. Just in case anyone reading this wonders why I’m not using Latino or perhaps Latinx here, I’m using the term overwhelmingly favored by members of the population in question to refer to themselves.

6. John McWhorter, Woke Racism, p. 112.

7. For instance, that it is unjust to convict a person of a crime she didn’t commit or to steal another’s property.