I won’t tell anyone anything by noting that so-called Wokism has been controversial for some years. I have tried to stay away from this debate because I find it flawed. I have the impression, as soon as I approach it, that they are trying to lock me into a false dilemma imposing on me to choose my side between Donald Trump and the Quebec anarchist Francis Dupuis-Déri. I refuse. This is not my way of participating in the discussion.
what is a woke, basically ? Among the available definitions, that of Robert seems to me the best: “Who is aware of and offended by the injustices and discrimination suffered by minorities and mobilizes to fight them, sometimes in an intransigent way. »
Basically, everything is there, that is to say both the bright side of this current of thought, the rejection of injustices, and its dark side, the lack of nuance and intolerance.
The dictionary Usitowhile taking up the first part of this definition, adds a precision to the second by mentioning that, “among the most radical militant groups”, wokism “can go so far as to legitimize recourse to the banishment of points of view expressed by representatives of groups perceived as discriminatory or dominant”.
The whole problem is there: not in the refusal of what we perceive as injustices nor in the critical discourse that ensues—all that is up for debate—but in the intransigence, in the refusal of dialogue, in the call for censorship often launched by people who subscribe to this current, which I prefer to describe as neo-progressive, a French term more beautiful and more neutral than Anglicism woke.
One can, without being a supporter of the Trumpian or Zemmourian right, refuse these neo-progressive diktats. In The duty of November 28, Gérard Bouchard, who cannot be described as a reactionary without covering himself with ridicule, expresses his disagreement with this thought “which equates our whole past with a vast colonialist and racist enterprise, based on a white and sexist supremacism in exclusion basis”, as if Quebec were the United States.
Our nation, recognizes Bouchard, has its share of responsibility in the sad fate reserved for the First Nations, but “is it not appropriate to exempt the greater part of the people, long doubly dominated from inside and from outside »?
There is no perfect state or spotless nation, but Quebec, continues Bouchard, “has made significant progress in respecting human rights”. One example among others: in 2020, according to Statistics Canada, its rate of hate crimes was lower than that of other major Canadian provinces, yet all attached to the concept of systemic racism. If we want, concludes Bouchard, that the commitment of Quebeckers to social justice will continue and be strengthened, we must refuse the “radical and misleading discourse of fault, ignominy and shame, likely to destroy our legitimate motives of pride”.
Like the academics Yves Gingras and Thierry Nootens, Normand Baillargeon, clearly identified on the left, goes in the same direction by worrying about this new left which rejects secularism and contests freedom of expression, universalism and the ideal of scientific objectivity. These ideas, he argues, discredit the left in the public eye and fuel the right.
Baillargeon writes these words in the preface to The woke thought (Liber, 2022, 184 pages), an essay by the young intellectual David Santarossa. The latter, defender of center-right nationalism, is quite close to the thought of Mathieu Bock-Côté, but in a less controversial, more nuanced version.
In this analysis of Quebec neoprogressivism, Santarossa criticizes an essay by Judith Lussier on censorship, an anti-racist documentary directed by Nicolas Houde-Sauvé and hosted by Fabrice Vil, as well as an essay by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and Deni Ellis Béchard on the issue of racism experienced by First Nations.
Santarossa does not always manage to avoid throwing oil on the fire – his irony about talking animals, poetically evoked by Kanapé Fontaine, is not to his credit – but his criticisms of the abuses of neo-progressive thought often fly.
Has the latter, as he says, become dominant? In the general public, certainly not, but it is true that many important institutions – cultural, media, political, educational and entrepreneurial – comply with it, without such a decision, specifies Santarossa rightly, having been preceded by a real democratic discussion, as if we had the choice only between neo-progressivism and injustice.
In the name of reason, of democracy and, yes, of Western culture, let us not be trapped in this false dilemma.