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05 Dec 2021, 10:57 am

Europe’s War on Woke - The Nation

Quote:
On my 32nd birthday, I agreed to appear on Répliques, a popular show on the France Culture radio channel hosted by the illustrious Alain Finkielkraut. Now 72 and a household name in France, Finkielkraut is a public intellectual of the variety that exists only on the Left Bank: a child of 1968 who now wears Loro Piana blazers and rails against “la cancel culture.” The other guest that day—January 9, less than 72 hours after the US Capitol insurrection—was Pascal Bruckner, 72, another well-known French writer who’d just published “The Almost Perfect Culprit: The Construction of the White Scapegoat,” his latest of many essays on this theme. Happy birthday to me.

The topic of our discussion was the only one that interested the French elite in January 2021: not the raging pandemic but “the Franco-American divide,” the Huntington-esque clash of two apparently great civilizations and their respective social models—one “universalist,” one “communitarian”—on the question of race and identity politics. To Finkielkraut, Bruckner, and the establishment they still represent, American writers like me seek to impose a “woke” agenda on an otherwise harmonious, egalitarian society. Americans who argue for social justice are guilty of “cultural imperialism,” of ideological projection—even of bad faith.

This has become a refrain not merely in France but across Europe. To be sure, the terms of this social-media-fueled debate are unmistakably American; “woke” and “cancel culture” could emerge from no other context.

In Europe, what is labeled “woke” is often whatever social movement a particular country’s establishment fears the most. This turns out to be an ideal way of discrediting those movements: To call them “woke” is to call them American, and to call them American is to say they don’t apply to Europe.

In France, “wokeism” came to the fore in response to a recent slew of terror attacks, most notably the gruesome beheading in October 2020 of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty. After years of similar Islamist attacks—notably the massacre at the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the ISIS-inspired assaults on the Hypercacher kosher supermarket and the Bataclan concert hall in November 2015—the reaction in France reached a tipping point.

Soon its ministers began railing against “islamo-gauchisme” (Islamo-leftism) in universities, Muslim mothers in hijabs chaperoning school field trips, and halal meats in supermarkets.

But most of all, they began railing against the ideas that, in their view, somehow augmented and abetted these divisions: American-inspired anti-racism and “wokeness.” Macron said it himself in a speech that was widely praised by the French establishment for its alleged nuance: “We have left the intellectual debate to others, to those outside of the Republic, by ideologizing it, sometimes yielding to other academic traditions…. I see certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States.”

In October, the French government inaugurated a think tank, the Laboratoire de la République, designed to combat these “woke” theories, which, according to the think tank’s founder, Jean-Michel Blanquer, Macron’s education minister, “led to the rise of Donald Trump.”

As the apparent emissaries of this pernicious “Anglo-Saxon” identitarian agenda, US journalists covering this moment in France have come under the spotlight, especially when we ask, for instance, what islamo-gauchisme actually means—if indeed it means anything at all. Macron himself has lashed out at foreign journalists, even sending a letter to the editor of the Financial Times rebutting what he saw as an error-ridden op-ed that took a stance he could not bear. “I will not allow anybody to claim that France, or its government, is fostering racism against Muslims,” he wrote. Hence my own invitation to appear on France Culture, a kind of voir dire before the entire nation.

Finkielkraut began the segment with a tirade against The New York Times and then began discussing US “campus culture,” mentioning Yale’s Tim Barringer and an art history syllabus that no longer includes as many “dead white males.”

Three days after our conversation, Finkielkraut was dropped from a regular gig at France’s LCI television for defending his old pal Olivier Duhamel of Sciences Po, who was embroiled in a pedophilia scandal that had taken France by storm.

I tell this story because it is a useful encapsulation of France’s—and Europe’s—war on woke, a conflict that has assumed various forms in different national contexts but that still grips the continent. On one level, there is a certain comedy to it: The self-professed classical liberal turns out to be an apologist for child molestation. In fact, the anti-woke comedy is now quite literally being written and directed by actual comedians who, on this one issue, seem incapable of anything but earnestness. John Cleese, 81, the face of Monty Python and a public supporter of Brexit, has announced that he will be directing a forthcoming documentary series on Britain’s Channel 4 titled Cancel Me, which will feature extensive interviews with people who have been “canceled”

Hardly anyone can support “cancel culture” in good faith, and yet it is never sufficiently condemned, because people call out such tactics only when their political opponents use them, never when their allies do. “Woke,” on the other hand, does not necessarily imply public shaming; it merely signifies a shift in perspective and perhaps a change in behavior. Carelessly equating the two is a convenient way to brand social justice activism as inherently illiberal—and to silence long-overdue conversations about race and inequality

But Europe is not America, and in Europe there have been far fewer incidents that could be construed as “cancellations“

‘Wokeism” is really a phenomenon of the Anglosphere, and with the exception of the United Kingdom, the social justice movement has gained far less traction in Europe than it has in US cultural institutions—newspapers, universities, museums, and foundations. In terms of race and identity, many European cultural institutions would have been seen as woefully behind the times by their US counterparts even before the so-called “great awokening.” Yet Europe has gone fully anti-woke, even without much wokeness to fight.


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