No to Wokism, Yes to Gentleness

June 26, 2022 Sociocultural Issues No Comments

In another blog, I define wokism as woke fundamentalism, being an abuse of wokeness as a positive striving to fully respect and tolerate people of many different kinds.

I am very woke, but not at all a wokist.

Woke should be gentle.

Without gentleness, woke tends to fall into the opposite, being intolerance. Woke is about active tolerance.

With gentleness – very different from weakness – woke is necessary for a good society. In my view, woke people should therefore pay utmost attention to being gentle ― a quality emerging from the inside.

Difference not made

I have the impression that the difference between wokeness and wokism is seldom made. Tossing both in the same bin provides no room for gentleness ― wokeness being denigrated for what it isn’t.

With gentleness, wokeness can best be seen as the more socially active part of gentleness itself. In a gentle society, wokeness is a matter of fact.

So, where has gentleness gone in many parts of society?

I think it has gone down the drain of anxiety. Also, many ‘isms’ (fundamentalisms) result from anxiety, being an inner happening with many outward projections.

In this view, apparent opposites come together.

For instance, wokism and anti-wokism

Both are opposites of awakened wokism. The only difference lies in the object of their agency. Both act out of fear for what appears ‘alien’ to what they hold on to be themselves. They project in different ways, but they project nevertheless. From a distance, the difference is unimportant.

Both lack gentleness.

“Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.”

This line from the Catholic New Testament [John 8:7] is not understood by either. Jesus didn’t mean that crooks need to go free, but that we are all, in the first place, human beings who need to be treated with much gentleness. Jesus was indeed himself a very gentle person ― most of the time. He may have been the wokist person ever setting foot on earth, whether in a story or reality.

In this vein, I say yes to gentleness, no to wokism.