Postmodern Woke philosophy does not advocate a substitute morality that one might have the option to endorse or reject; indeed, it does not provide an ‘elective’ morality but insists on a compulsive new world order that requires the destruction of the old. Postmodernism demands that we make a tabula rasa, a clean slate of anything achieved in the past by our so-called oppressive Western Civilisation.

The question is: How did we get to this point? How did we get to a situation where individual human rights no longer exist and where humans are captive to their individual cultural backgrounds over which, it is claimed, they have no influence? You are either black or white, oppressed or oppressor. You are the product of your own culture and remain captive to it.

At first glance, such a narrow-minded view of humanity appears absurd.

To explain how our journey took us to where we are, we need to understand that four distinct ‘seeds’ have been planted in our present ‘garden of destruction’ and that four successive ‘water pours’ have contributed to the growth of the present weeds of despair.

Some opposition to the cult of reason and science prevailing in the first part of the 18th Century started to emerge around 1750 when a Counter-Enlightenment movement arose. Concerns were expressed at how irreligious and immoral the world might become if everything were to be assessed in the light of cold, intellectual logic.

One of the key players of this Counter-Enlightenment movement was Immanuel Kant.

Kant pointed out that there is no guarantee that all our reason, all our cognitive faculties, will lead us to discover objective reality.

Kant was a religious person and wanted to give reason the place it deserved, but no more. He wanted to ensure there was a place for faith. However, by acknowledging that our finite cognitive capacities can give us a distorted image of objective reality, the scene was set for what was to follow: the loss of absolute truth. In other words, what is considered absolutely true in one era could be absolutely untrue in the next.

The loss of absolute truth was the first seed that gave birth to our present catastrophic state of affairs.

The loss of reason was the next. Philosophers such as the Danish-born Kierkegaard opined that since not everything could be explained by reason, an irrational leap of faith was often required on the part of Man to justify his conduct. A typical illustration of this would be the biblical account of the botched killing of Isaac by his father, Abraham.

Entered then, Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger was an early 20th Century German philosopher who refused to have his thinking dominated by logic. He thought reason and logic were superficial elements that prevented us from finding meaning. So, in contrast to cold logic and reasoning, Heidegger emphasised the role of emotions and, particularly, boredom, fear, guilt and dread. Coupled with his negative emotions, Heidegger paved the way towards the philosophy of nihilism. There is no sacred reality and there is also no profane reality. No absolute truth, no absolute lie. Instead, we have nihilism, the ‘God-is-dead movement of Frederick Nietzsche.

Nihilism was the third seed planted in our present garden of despair.

Nihilism became the world of the absurd, or as the sower of the fourth seed Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre would observe, the world of nonsense, created by a society that demands conformity and alienates its citizens from finding the truth of their existence, their authenticity.

The search for the authentic self… Here is the fourth seed and maybe the most important. It is this search for the authentic that offered left-wing intellectuals the strategic turning point they had been looking for to regain the upper ground. By then, with increasing living standards and relative opulence, the old economic communism of Karl Marx had fallen into disrepute. The Left had to ‘reinvent’ itself, searching for what is really true and authentic outside the religious faith of its elders.

A desperate search for what is authentic in a world that denies God continues to haunt our current identity-focused 21st Century generation whose people are also completely obsessed by the so-called need to choose one’s own gender and sexuality.

Having planted four seeds, the loss of absolute truth, the loss of reason, the rise of nihilism and the search for the authentic, how did the precursors of our present woke movement maintained their momentum?

Four forces of influence poured water over the seeds of this destructive philosophy.

The first was the rise of what is generally referred to as the ‘New Atheism’. Atheism, the absence of belief in a divine Being, has always been around. However, the New Atheists differ from the old.

The Old Atheists were largely part of the God-is-dead movement but they were not waging war against religion in the same way as the Woke movement does nowadays. For instance, Darwin, in his famous book, The Origin of the Species, made his case for evolution and opposed anyone who believed in a divine Creator. His work was further developed by others who gave us a variety of explanations, such as the Big Bang theory. Yet, the animosity that is currently displayed towards any religion, and particularly Judeo-Christian, did not arise until the advent of the New Atheists.

The key figures of the New Atheists movement are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. For these new atheists, all religion (maybe with the exception of Buddhism) is inimical to happiness and freedom of thought and expression. Their position represents the first drops of water poured over the four seeds planted by the precursors of the woke movement.

More recently, of course, a second ‘water pour’ has gushed out; this was facilitated by the rise of a terrorist version of the Islamic faith and the revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated in some section of the Catholic and Protestant Christian churches.

These turns of events unfortunately gave a bad name to religion in general and, unfortunately, the subsequent rise of a conservative Christian voice endeavouring to regain the higher ground for people of faith only further galvanised the zeal of the New Atheist movement. The more efforts were deployed to uphold the value of faith and in particular that of the Christian faith, the stronger the dissident voices of the new atheists arose. This increased animosity towards anything religious provided a third ‘water pour’ over the previously planted seeds of destruction.

However, the new atheists have also been very effective in facilitating the rapid growth of the fourth seed, the search for authenticity.

By discrediting the values of the traditional family and of religion in general, the new atheists removed much of the purpose of life message that had been offered by the institutions of church and family to previous Australian generations.

Having lost the ‘old’ sense of purpose, it was therefore necessary to forge a new one to restore meaning to life. This explains why the search for the authentic self, initially launched by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, has unfortunately taken a new direction: the search for group identity.

The desire to belong to a specific group, tribe or clan, has always been part of the human psyche. However, the degree of intensive longing now expressed in bearing a specific group identity is something new.

It is no longer a private individual quest but rather a political movement supported by the media, the teaching institutions and the corporate world.

The search continues but in the wrong direction. Meaning will never be found in artificial group identities but only the restoration of human dignity. The acceptance that after all, Mankind only has dignity because it was created in God’s image.

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This is an edited authorised excerpt from ‘Silent, Fragile and Isolated’, a book authored by Philippe Jaquenod (Linellen Press, 2022) and available for order from Amazon and other leading publishers.

French-born Philippe Jaquenod is a father of three adult children who made Australia home some fifty years ago when he arrived in Sydney as a young adult. Now, living in Western Australian, Philippe has a rich background in social activism, business, finance and political research. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Macquarie University and is an Australian-accredited translator in the French and English languages.

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