The Woke Soul: Woke Soulcraft

It's hard to think of a spiritual need more central than understanding the times before birth and after death-or the animating spirit that makes us unique. How can Wokeism meet those needs?

The American Spirit Essays #21

Previous:  The Eschatology of Climate Change

(This essay is adapted from my July 2022 article in Human Events)

Science and Metaphysics

The previous essay plucked the lowest hanging fruit in the new religion of Wokeism.  The parallels between climate change and the more traditional tales of Armageddon are hard to miss.  It’s unlikely that you heard them here for the first time.  I find it curious that the unmet spiritual need Wokeism has addressed most cleanly is the need of and end-times tale when so many other needs seem more pressing and more personal, but that’s a topic for another day.  This essay focuses on unmet spiritual needs found far closer to home. 

Consider the sort of basic metaphysical questions we’ve all likely asked ourselves at some point in our lives?  What makes me me?  Where were my children before I met their other parent?  Why do I feel a sense of loss when a loved one dies—even though I can still see their lifeless bodies?  These questions are deep.  They’re difficult.  They have no answers within the physical realm. 

Traditional faiths—all traditional faiths—provide answers to such questions.  The mechanism they use to answer them is a metaphysical concept called the soul.  Specific conceptions of the soul may differ, but all faiths recognize the existence of a timeless spirit that inhabits the body.  All faiths recognize that people combine an intangible essence with a physical shell—and furthermore, that it is the inner essence that defines the true self.

What, however, can be said of the spiritually starved elite at the heart of America’s spiritual crisis?  Don’t they ask themselves the same penetrating questions?  Don’t they need answers as badly as do those of faith?  Doesn’t their rejection of spirituality and metaphysics deprive them of those answers? 

It’s hard to think of a better example of an unarticulated spiritual need.  America’s scientifically-oriented, credentialed, professional elite must find some way to generate answers without leaving the empirical realms of science—realms that very clearly cannot provide answers to these very important questions.  That’s where Wokeism comes to the rescue: With a theory and a movement that speaks the language of science, and keeps the actual answer cloaked, yet serves precisely the role that every traditional faith assigned to the soul. 

This essay thus dives deeply into the metaphysics of Wokeism—the areas that the Woke like to pretend are scientific despite clear evidence to the contrary.  That evidence is easy to see: Science is a process of inquiry about observable, testable phenomena.  If something can be neither observed nor tested, science can have nothing to say about it.  That’s not to say that such phenomena are unreal.  In fact, many essential, defining beliefs of every traditional faith system are neither observable nor testable.  The faithful nevertheless believe deeply in their Truth, and it is far above my paygrade to determine who among them may be wrong.  The same is true for Wokeism. 

This essay demonstrates that the entire Trans Movement is nothing less profound than the Woke rediscovery of the soul