Woke Culture Isn’t Nihilistic

“If the woke activists who are willing to wake up at 5:00 am to march for racial justice are nihilistic, they sure seem to find nihilism plenty meaningful and inspiring.”

“The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. ‘Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal’—that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: ‘Never make equal what is unequal.’ That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this ‘modern idea’ par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Several months ago, no less a figure than the former Prime Minister of Canada, the Right not particularly Honourable Stephen Harper, decided to throw his two cents into the ongoing culture war. In an interview with the American Optimist podcast, he denigrated the “adolescent egos of the woke university crowd” for holding on to an impoverished philosophy unfit for governing society. For those of us familiar with his government’s antics, which included associating with the late crack-smoking Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, accusations of puerile adolescence on the part of one’s political opponents elicited a few yawns. The former Prime Minister then went on to make a more interesting argument, asserting that woke ethics were “entirely nihilist” and bent on “ripping down everything” to “end the democratic system.” Given his own government’s long rap sheet of anti-democratic behavior, as well as Prime Minister Harper’s soft spot for would-be authoritarians like former President Donald Trump, we will put aside his newfound pieties about democracy. But the claim that woke culture and activism are nihilistic is undoubtedly provocative, echoing similarly sober rhetoric by figures such as Sohrab “Purple Hair Will Be the Death of our Civilization” Ahmari and Ben “The Handyman” Shapiro.

Accusations of nihilism have become so ubiquitous on the political right that the term has, ironically, become almost meaningless. Most often, it just seems to mean “anyone who challenges established value systems.” This, then, could include everyone from Socrates to Jesus. Given how often conservatives complain about woke values becoming the new hegemony, perhaps it is actually conservative critics like Prime Minister Harper who are the real nihilists, attacking our new sacred dogmas. In fact, in the following essay, I will argue that this joke has more truth than one might expect. This is because woke culture is not, in fact, particularly nihilistic. In reality, it is much more accurate to say that what defines wokeism is precisely that it is the opposite of nihilism. The whole world becomes supersaturated with moral significance, leading to an often pious demand that the entire past be redeemed in the present for the sake of a better future. Following Nietzsche, we could even characterize woke culture as a secularized continuation of the Christian millenarian project by other means.