In Looking back on the Spanish Civil War (1943) George Orwell writes, such is the power of totalitarian thought control and how language is manipulated, we now live in a world ‘in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past … If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs’.
Whereas Enlightenment thinking is committed to rationality and reason and the ability to weigh and analyse arguments to more closely approximate the truth of things, Orwell argues: ‘Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science” “Jewish Science”, etc”.
Fast forward to today’s world of Woke ideology and it’s obvious what Orwell feared most about totalitarian regimes is even more pervasive. As noted by Roger Scruton in Culture Counts, ‘the belief that rational inquiry leads to objective proof’ has been replaced by ‘a new cult of darkness’ where knowledge is condemned as a social construct imposed by the dominant elites.
Instead of a liberal education based on the search for wisdom and truth, the academy is now dominated by a rainbow alliance incorporating neo-Marxist critical theory, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and radical feminist, gender, and postcolonial theories all intent on overthrowing rationality and reason.
While the arts and humanities have long since been infected the situation is now so dire even mathematics and science have fallen victim to the long march. Academics at the University of Sheffield condemn UK science as ‘inherently white, since the discipline developed from European scientific enlightenment’.
Students are told ‘science can never be objective and apolitical’ and that European science must be ‘decolonised’. Students at the University College London also argue the way science is taught must be radically reshaped in terms of Critical Race Theory and postcolonial ideology.
Students argue Enlightenment science is the product of imperialist white hegemony and must be rejected as it ‘reproduces power and thought which is racialised as white, psychologically/physically fit, wealth-rich and heteropatriarchally/cisgenderly male’.
A guide to advancing health equity produced by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association also illustrates how pervasive Woke ideology now is. The guide argues it is wrong to emphasise ‘biological factors in understanding the treatment of diseases’.
Prospective doctors are told illness is caused by structural classism and racism inherent in capitalist, white society and cannot be dealt with ‘without explicit recognition and reconciliation of our country’s twin, fundamental injustices of genocide and forced labour’.
Australia’s national curriculum also suggests mathematics is a cultural construct. Students are told to study Indigenous algebra and that, ‘Content elaborations in Mathematics have been structured around identified themes in Australian First Nations Peoples’ mathematical thinking, understandings, and processes.’
While not widely known in Australia, the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce in The Crisis Of Modernity offers a compelling analysis explaining why the West has undergone such a far-reaching epistemological and cultural change.
Whereas classical Marxism is primarily economic in its focus, Del Noce argues the establishment of the Frankfurt School in Germany in the mid-to-late 1920s led to the rise of cultural Marxism involving the infiltration and takeover of institutions including universities, schools, the media, and the family.
The academics involved, including Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, embraced a revolutionary stance, one Del Noce describes as ‘a radical affirmation of the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom’.
An approach drawing on critical theory that presents itself as ‘the end point of progressive thought’ involving ‘a process of liberation from authority, theological or human, transcendent or empirical’.
In addition to critical theory cultural Marxists, drawing on Louis Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus, argue capitalist societies reproduce themselves by controlling what constitutes essential knowledge and the way education is structured.
As a result, Del Noce argues long-held certainties, whether the belief in a higher spiritual and transcendent order or the Enlightenment’s belief with reason and logic it is possible to better understand human nature and the wider world, are all undermined.
One of the examples Del Noce refers to illustrating the influence of the Frankfurt School is Wilhelm Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution and Reich’s belief the traditional, monogamous family must be overthrown as it was capitalist society’s ‘repressive social institution par excellence’.
Whether condemning objectivity and rationality as examples of white, Eurocentric supremacism or arguing knowledge is a social construct to be critiqued in terms of power relations Orwell was right when arguing what he feared most, instead of bombs, is the destructive nature of totalitarian mind control and group think.
Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute and author of The Dictionary Of Woke.
