How Woke Won review – an anti-woke screed lacking in subtlety

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason by Joanna Williams (John Wikes Publishing, £9.19).

Anger is big business these days. It’s no longer simply a matter of wearing your antagonism on your sleeve. You can now wear it on your t-shirt, your office mug, as well as on your Twitter profile. Particularly your Twitter profile…

It’s also very inclusive. So long as you take science, culture, or politics devoid of nuance, then you too can be part of that increasingly angry section of our society which enjoys modish catchphrases: “snowflakes”, “gammon”, “fascist”, “Antifa”… There’s a whole buffet of nibblesome nonsense out there for you to sink your teeth into.

All of this brings us to the new book by Joanna Williams, How Woke Won, a 250-page screed against “woke” culture. It’s meaty stuff sure to raise your blood pressure. We have the story of a man called Brian Leach sacked from his ASDA job after posting a Billy Connelly routine on his Facebook page. We have people calling for Sir Winston Churchill’s statue to be removed from Westminster. We have the BBC axing Land of Hope and Glory from the Last Night of the Proms. We also have LNER apologising to non-binary passengers for the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” in an announcement.

Doesn’t it make you angry? Each is an indefensible example of woke culture and surely proves how “woke” is pernicious and harmful. It’s why How Woke Won surely achieves the laudable aims of kicking woke in the shins, poking it in the eye, and sending it off with a flea in its ear….or so you’d assume. 

Except, despite William’s insistence throughout on nuance, How Woke Won is strikingly short of subtlety. It presents itself as the antidote to intellectual intolerance, but this isn’t the calm objective reading of the “woke” phenomenon that we perhaps need. It is published by Spiked, which says a lot about its ambitions, as well as where its faults lie. It is akin to Jeremy Clarkson lamenting the puerile decline of the travel documentary when he is largely to blame for the puerile decline of the travel documentary.

Take, for example, the four stories mentioned above. Each would be an example of what was previously called “political correctness gone mad” but also require the kind of clarification that’s rarely made. Brian Leach got his job back after ASDA recognised its mistake. Sir Winston’s statue still stands outside Westminster and was never seriously threatened. The BBC didn’t axe Land of Hope and Glory. And LNER didn’t sack its employee but explained, quite reasonably, that “[w]e’re not bending over backward to accommodate any one person, we’re doing our best to accommodate every person. There’s the difference.”

And that’s also the missing ingredient. For all the claims that the world has gone “woke”, it really hasn’t. Comedy clubs are thriving in this supposedly humourless society and people are a lot more tolerant in this apparently intolerant age. We certainly see more inclusivity around us, considerable kindness, and, even if there are occasional examples of overreach, for the most part, we aren’t walking around fulminating at the madness of it all. Say it quietly, but society has got better in many respects.

Not that you would feel that whilst reading this book. Having lived with it for two weeks, your normally mild-mannered reviewer noticed how he was in a perpetually bad mood. I was snapping at friends and family and, for the first week, I couldn’t decide why. Then I realised how the woke/anti-woke argument was exploiting the microaggressions we all experience in a world that sometimes feels bureaucratic, illogical, and downright incompatible with our software. 

But that’s not entirely it. It’s also the mean-spiritedness of the argument; the hypocrisy and particularly the cant. It encourages unhealthy cynicism. It is the gateway drug to serious addiction and bigger and darker intolerances. Too often anti-wokeism is merely nimbyism dressed up as “common sense”.

They want free speech until it’s the wrong free speech; they lament cancel culture until they are doing the cancelling; and they criticise identity culture whilst being the most active in deciding what identity should or shouldn’t be (wear a damn poppy, sing the anthem, don’t kneel unless it’s for the Queen!)

One can’t shake the feeling that its old-fogeyism reinvented as ideology; a perpetual shaking of the fist at anything, from art to behaviour, that doesn’t conform to their model of the world and its people. It doesn’t even vaguely consider human anthropology which teaches us about the very different ways human culture has manifested itself across the globe and at different times.

Humanity is here set to Victor Meldrew Model 1.0: western, white, heterosexual, the nuclear family of the late 20th century, believing Judaeo-Christian values, and where women pay 20p to use a public loo and men pay nothing and that’s the way God made it!

It might well be highly persuasive if you buy into it and, judging from the plaudits from other cultural warriors on the cover, plenty will. They will happily ignore how Williams is a protagonist acting as an impartial observer.

Her book veers between academic introspection (Dr Williams was Director of Kent’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education until 2016) and editorial posturing (she is also an associate editor of Spiked), often switching between the two as quickly as a sentence can turn on a comma. 

This characterises so much of the book, undercutting much of the good work Williams does, such as tracing woke’s origins in the civil rights movement and how it began as a term of self-identification within predominately black US culture. But she also does enough to make one wonder if “woke” really has such a clear definition. One is instead reminded of how faddish – and indeed parochial – it feels.

Before “woke” there was “politically correct” and, before that, we had the “hippies” and, before them, the “beats”, “bohemians”, the “sheikhs and flappers” of the 1920s, and, going even further back, the cult of sensibility and the dandies. There could hardly be any group more “woke” than the Romantic poets. “Oy Keats!” you can imagine somebody shouting. “We don’t want any of that drowsy numbness around ‘ere!”

Woke becomes, then, more of a modern projection of a range of behaviour we’ve always recognised in society. Often, it feels like an extremely lazy simplification, especially around the subject of class (referenced 211 times in a mere 250 pages). Indeed, much of this book lauds the “working class”, defending their values in a reductive way.

“The woke project,” she concludes at one point in How Woke Won, “is not a distraction from cost-of-living concerns, but another form of attack on the working class.” This explanation works if you are happy to patronise the working classes by assuming they are of a single opinion. The same is true of the metropolitan or cultural “elite” (262 references in 250 pages). Your reviewer identifies as the former but, based on his reaction to the book, would be accused of being the latter. Something here doesn’t make sense. 

The conclusion – and read this as advice, if you wish – is to give it a miss: all of it, the books about “wokeism”, the online spluttering, the debates about identity. Give it a few years and this argument (and this book) will feel dated, as the contrarians over at Spiked move on to froth about Martian tourism, artificial brains, or dolphins taking our jobs.

We are an evolving species that makes great art, invents wondering things, and discovers increasingly fascinating facts about our universe and our place within it. Be kind to yourself and others. There are far better things to do with your time than exist in a persistent state of intolerant fury.