Making My Case: Wokeism Against Blasphemy

The Woke didn't invent cancelation. They simply recycled anti-blasphemy laws, designed to protect the gullible from the false ideas that might lead them astray.

The American Spirit Essays #41

(continued from The Concepts Formerly Known as Human Rights)

Learning from Islamists

By the end of 2020, Wokeism faced a major challenge: How could it best deploy its enormous power to destroy those who continued to cling bitterly to outdated Biblical morality, traditional religions, and the American spirit?

The history of religion contains many useful lessons.  The Woke were hardly the first new faith to find itself ascendant among a population that was less than fully on board.  How had past faiths defended their Truths against the scurrilous lies of the irredeemably evil?  Fortunately for the Woke, the most directly applicable historical lessons are entirely consistent with Wokeism.  If bad people are going to say or print things designed to mislead those the Woke seek to convert, well, THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW AGAINST THAT!!!  There’s a name for such laws: Anti-blasphemy.

The world has never had any shortage of such anti-blasphemy laws.  They exist, in explicit form, in many parts of the world still so subject to a dominant religion that the lines among faith, economics, society, and culture blur.   In recent decades, Islamists running the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have sought to internationalize their anti-blasphemy laws using the misleading term “Islamophobia.”  Islamist organizations and communities throughout the Western world have attempted to import them.  Those attempts have proved controversial everywhere, for the simple reason that the West did away with anti-blasphemy laws centuries ago.  The illegality of questioning, challenging, undermining, deriding, or even mocking the beliefs or practices of a faith is incompatible with the ethos that has dominated Western life for a very long time. 

Anti-blasphemy laws are explicitly counter to the American spirit.  The right to reject religion is inherent in the free exercise of religion.   And the minute you reject a religion, the elements of that religion that require faith begin to look a little silly.  Every faith embodies beliefs whose justifications lie beyond the narrow realms of facts, history, logic, scientific inquiry, open debate, and rationality.  Wokeism is hardly the first.  Jefferson’s introduction of America’s ethically based civic religion was uniquely honest on that account: We hold these truths to be self evident.  Look down Jefferson’s list of allegedly self-evident truths.  Try validating them as self-evident using pre-1776 facts, history, logic, scientific inquiry, open debate, and rationality.  At best, you’ll show that they’re good ideas worth trying.  They weren’t remotely self-evident. 

“We” hold these Truths is a pretty good description of the core particularistic beliefs of every faith.  It doesn’t take much to figure out that indiscriminate murder is detrimental to societal stability.  That’s why the prohibition on murder is more-or-less universal.  Try using only logic and science to derive God’s impregnation of a virgin to bring to earth His only son, whose own death on the cross would atone for the sins of humanity.  It can’t be done.  As a 2000 year-old faith, however, Christianity has matured to the point that (at least most of) today’s Christians understand that though such faith may be central to their lives, those who lack that faith are not a threat.  Wokeism, as a young an immature religion, shows far less self-confidence.