The Bethany Mandel “define wokeness” controversy manages to be illuminating and absurd at the same time. Mandel, for the uninitiated, is an American anti-woke polemicist who’s apparently written a book on the subject of wokeness, and generally made a sophistical career of attacking it. She was recently invited to a YouTube talk show on wokeness, and asked to define the term. Turns out she didn’t have a definition. When asked for one, she managed instead to draw an embarrassing blank on her would-be area of specialization, babble a bit, and look like an all-round idiot.

As it happens, I don’t think “wokeness” is all that hard to define. Depending on who’s using it, the term “wokeness” has either a positive or a negative sense. In its positive sense, “wokeness” is vigilance about or alertness to injustice, along with an eager readiness to call it out, and a refusal to accept complicity in it. In its negative sense, “wokeness” is hyper-vigilance about perceived injustices that are alleged to be there but aren’t,  combined with a tendency to engage in carping criticisms or denunciation of venial or non-existent offenses.

The Left tends to favor the first sense of “wokeness,” the Right favors the second, but partisan allegiances aside, both senses refer to real things in the world. There is a laudable form of wokeness: sensitivity to and intolerance of genuine injustice are obviously preferable to their contraries. And there’s a problematic form of it, as well: it trivializes justice and injustice to find a slight in every assertion, or express a grievance about every action, simply because some way of putting things or doing things rubs one the wrong way. The ideal, one would think, would be to find the mean between these extremes–to express alertness to real injustice while expressing tolerance of or magnanimity about trivial slights. It’s harder to pull off in practice than it is to state in words, but not as difficult as it’s often made out to be, and certainly not impossible.

What should be obvious is that the two senses of “woke” involve a difference of emphasis, not a logical incompatibility. Those who favor the positive sense tend to be impressed by the prevalence or frequency of real injustices in the world, and want to go after them. They have a point; there are plenty of those. Those who favor the negative sense focus on false positives: false accusations, excessive denunciation, disproportional punishment, and the like. They too have a point: there are plenty of those. At the end of the day, the difference between the two senses involves a conceptually trivial distinction between those who focus on one thing and those who focus on the other. It is, of course, possible to keep both things in focus. I recommend it, in fact. Arguably, that’s what real wokeness requires. Or call it perspicacity, if you prefer. 

Three add-on observations. 

(1) I find it amusing that for all of the attacks I’ve heard over the years from non-academics about the failings of academics, I can’t think of a single academic philosopher who would have made the rookie mistake that Mandel has made here (much less of calling attention to it, or making excuses for it, or demanding pity for it in Newsweek). No academic philosopher–at least none that I’ve encountered in a two-decades-long career–would walk into an adversarial discussion of “wokeness” without a definition of the term, or at least something intelligent to say about its meaning, and expect to be taken seriously.

Mandel did. Called out for it, she blamed her interlocutor, took refuge in having a “panic attack,” broke down crying, and demanded our sympathy–all in the name of the right to be meaner to people! I doubt that Mandel, in her current incarnation, would survive the first minute of the average Q&A at a philosophy conference. But insensitive as I am, I’d love to see it happen. Maybe it’s time for non-academics to dial back the derision they seem to have for academics, despite not being able to do what academics regularly do.

(2) A corollary of the preceding observation is that our discourse would be greatly improved if people more regularly demanded definitions of controversial terms, as was done in this case. I don’t mean to imply that every term anyone ever uses is susceptible of a crisp definition, but some are, and those that aren’t require special explanation. A “deer in the headlights” look followed by a set of hand-waving excuses and evasions is not an explanation. 

(3) Finally, what’s clarifying about this controversy is how it divides the semantic wheat from the chaff. What the controversy inadvertently makes clear is that the terms most in need of clarification here are not “wokeness” and its contrary (whatever that happens to be) but “justice” and “injustice.” “Wokeness” is a kind of adjunct to justice and injustice; it’s alertness (or not) to those things. So “wokeness” is not, despite the abundance of commentary about it, a term with a determinate stand-alone meaning. It might be time to recognize that, and speak accordingly. I realize that doing so might impede the progress of a lot careers that revolve heavily around “woke talk” as a free-standing subject of its own. But as someone who doesn’t have such a career, and has little patience or respect for those who do, I can’t say that I care. 

In short, the relevant question is not “What is wokeness?” but “What is justice?” Appropriately enough, that’s the opening question of Plato’s Republic, arguably the foundational text of moral and political philosophy in the Western tradition. And strangely enough, by the middle of the Republic–after discussing justice and injustice–Plato himself starts to talk about “wokeness.” Funny how that works. Could it be that “wokeness” is baked into the very foundations of that much-touted but little-understood thing, “Western Civilization”? Possibly. But to figure that out, you have to turn away from the computer screen, and either read a book, or just think hard about things. Revolutionary, I know. Revolutionary by design.