System as spirit, body as host
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System as spirit, body as host
Visions for a post-woke methodology of social engagement
Some recent happenings in the Metamodern Spirituality group led by my friend and colleague Brendan Graham Dempsey, host of the Metamodern Spirituality podcast and the Metamodern Spirituality retreat, inspired me to explore this subject. When a member of the group, whom I shall refer to as “Icarus” (name changed to protect this person from doxxing and/or harassment), came under attack by another member for using the term “yt,” a series of interactions and escalations ensued, resulting in the exodus of Icarus from the group and the slandering of Dempsey as a covert racist.
Icarus’ argument has seemed to be that he was being silenced and marginalised in the group—not because of the value of his content, nor the quality of his behaviour, but because he is a neurodivergent man of colour in a predominately white, male, academic space. But is that the whole truth, or an oversimplified understanding of a far more complex and difficult issue?
First, I must admit that I am not unbiased in my understanding of the events here; I have not had many positive experiences with Icarus, meanwhile Dempsey is a colleague and collaborator of mine. Surely, from the outside, it looks as if I have more to gain from “siding” with Dempsey. However, one must remember that I am also a non-academic, neurodivergent person of colour, operating in a predominately white, male, heterosexual, and academic space. I, too, often feel out of place on the Liminal web. I don’t disagree that spaces like this are—as a consequence of their proximity to institutions that have roots in colonialism, imperialism, and elitism—inadvertently designed in such a way that they are less accessible to folks like Icarus and myself.
And yet, how do we go about improving the situation? Is it appropriate to green-flag Icarus’ tendency to dismiss and manipulate, or to argue in bad faith, due to his marginalised status? How do we discern when a decision is being made from a place of pure racial bias, versus when it is being made from a place of true discernment about who is being collaborative versus who is being rivalrous?
This is the issue that has had me slowly, over the past few years, migrate away from mainstream woke culture and toward a “post-woke” vision for social equity. I use the term “post-woke” to differentiate from mainstream woke culture, which uses absolutist language, shame-based tactics for behavioural modification, social ostracisation based on black-and-white moralistic views, and virtue-signalling behaviours that lack depth. The term “woke,” however, remains a crucial element in the term.
“Woke” is originally a slang term that comes from the word “awake,” and implies that the user is actively engaged in a process of increasing their awareness of social issues and is actively engaged in the process of systems change. Retaining this as part of the term “post-woke” implies that certain values from woke culture have been implemented—such as a desire for an equitable society, acknowledgement of systems of oppression and exploitation as well as the deleterious effects that these systems have had on people and the planet, and awareness of discrepancies in the distribution of resources based on social signifiers such as race and class.
While anti-woke rhetoric serves only to increase divisiveness, deny the existence of oppressive and toxic systems, and lend legitimacy to extremist ideas, a post-woke methodology of social engagement offers strategies that are able to collaborate with the human nervous system rather than over-stimulate it and shut it down. This would, in theory, lead to an increased success rate in the advancement of values of equity, systemic awareness, and empathy, among others.
What differentiates post-woke ideology from mainstream woke ideology is not so much values, but methods. Rather than using the methods listed above, I propose the following:
1) Holistic/pluralistic language
Mainstream woke rhetoric uses simplistic language that targets specific individuals based on racial and economic signifiers. While the gist of the information is more or less accurate, it is also reductionist in the sense that it does not acknowledge the complexity and breadth of the impact that oppressive systems have on groups and individuals. Absolutist language (i.e. “all white people are racist”) does not acknowledge that the behaviour of oppressive systems is expressed through the individual interior (UL quadrant in AQAL) and the objective exterior (LR quadrant in AQAL) in a feedback loop. In other words, the system moulds the individual in such a way that they cannot understand themselves outside of the context of it. This is how the system perpetuates itself–it is, metaphorically speaking, akin to a parasite or a spirit of sorts, non-locally inhabiting multiple hosts.
This is true for anyone inhabiting the system, not just people with a particular set of racial signifiers. This is where it gets tricky; how does one avoid reductionism in the other direction, that discounts the concept of racial disparity and socioeconomic privilege altogether? It should be made clear that racial and socioeconomic privilege are not static and pervasive qualities of any given individual’s experience. They are contextual. A person of colour may not feel safe in predominantly white spaces as a result of either direct racialised trauma or racialised trauma by proxy. Many of the POC that feel this way would feel safer in a context that is affirming of their identity and experience. This is a very real truth, and there is a universality to it: our biological systems naturally relax around people that we interpret to be safe (whether or not they actually are). This does not necessarily translate to white spaces being unsafe; it merely reveals that there is an unconscious heuristic at play whose primary function is self-preservation.
It is important to note–again, without reductionism–that this heuristic is the same function of self-preservation that, when left unchecked, leads to racial biases–and in some cases, acts of racial violence. Hopefully, this sparks curiosity and intrigue in you, because it does so in me. On a basic, human level, this heuristic exists in everyone and it exists to keep us safe–and it is not violent in and of itself. Plenty of woke people use this heuristic to keep themselves safe, to the detriment of others–using the values and virtues they claim to align with as justifications for abusive behaviour. The means are used to justify the ends in some situations.
Consider the above statement again: “all white people are racist.” A less reductionist framing of the issue might be as follows: “all people exist within a system that encourages and supports the development of unconscious racial biases as well as acts of racial violence. It offers them mythologies that unconsciously affirm these biases and justify these acts. This affects white people, on average, in specific ways that differ from the ways that it, on average, affects other groups. Some of these ways include…” etc.
Because racial inequity is a symptom of a much larger and complex problem that affects the human mental and emotional systems on a mass scale, it is important to acknowledge the system first as its own entity that acts upon individuals, then as something that is reinforced by said individuals in unconscious ways. Woke ideology only acknowledges this in the context of POC, but has different standards for white people. This is not only troubling, but ineffective, because it assumes that socioeconomic privilege automatically translates to an individual’s capacity to impact their environment in positive ways. This is erroneous, because socioeconomic privilege does not automatically translate to mental wellness, nor a well-developed set of social-emotional skills, nor metacognition, values, or degree of social influence.
2) Encouraging behavioural modification through proposal of win-win strategies
The contagion heuristic, amongst other intuitive methods of self-preservation, leads us to seek distance from that which does not reflect our values or reinforce our habitual self-justification processes. The result is often a desire to openly demonise, criticise, or even attack the antithesis of our values. This is at play in woke culture via the phenomenon of cancellation. Cancellation seeks to encourage behavioural modification through ostracization and withdrawal of support. The idea behind this strategy is that it will encourage the desired behaviour by way of associating the undesired behaviour with negative consequences. This method of behavioural modification relies upon activating the stress response–which can lead to anxiety, nervous-system shut-downs, and eventually, even chronic illness. In some cases, this method serves to actually reinforce the unwanted behaviours and ideas.
The truth is, methods like cancellation exist to discharge the emotional distress that results from living in a complex and highly toxic system–but they do not necessarily implement meaningful change. Because individuals are easier to target than the system itself, much of woke culture ends up validating this emotional dumping and claims that it will eventually lead to social change. It’s true that expressing anger and distress is an important step in the process, but the way in which it is done is equally as important.
Anger is a valid emotion, and we need to consider that the anger many people of colour (or women, or queer people, or whomever) are carrying cannot be reduced to the individual-interior. It is a transpersonal feeling state–a feeling state that is sympathetic in nature, and in some cases is inherited. Another term for this is “collective anger.” The size, scope and complexity of such a feeling state is impossible for any given individual to healthily and responsibly express. Because this anger is transpersonal, it must be dealt with in a transpersonal ritual context. Intuitively, much of woke culture seeks to encourage this. However, without the necessary relational skills, this anger ends up being displaced onto people that symbolically represent the system.
What we need are relational strategies that allow us to somatically process this transpersonal anger and grief in healthy ways–in collaborative ways, rather than combative ways.
3) Collaborative rituals of grief and atonement; system as spirit, body as host
Coming to the realisation of the atrocities human kind has enacted on itself is heartbreaking, and it sucks. We have mechanisms to protect ourselves from feeling such a heavy degree of grief and such profound cognitive dissonance. Most people dissociate or try to find someone to blame; the reality is that there is really no one person or group or entity that can hold such a magnanimous responsibility. Colonialist, imperialist systems of control, division, and domination have no origin. They have always existed, increasing in scope and embedding themselves in cultures over time. This reality, in many ways, makes it harder to cope and even harder to find solutions.
It may sound hopeless, but the truth is, this is actually quite promising. There are ways of abstracting and interacting with systems and hyperobjects in the healing process–and the good news is, humans have been doing this since before the dawn of civilization. One can interpret animistic spirituality as a way of interacting with complex systems through metaphor and anthropomorphisation–and if one does that, one can conceive of something like capitalism as a god–an angry, ravenous Saturn devouring his children. Metaphorical methods of abstraction provide us a layer of distance from the systems we seek to change, giving our bodies the chance to remain regulated as we process difficult emotions and making us privy to perspectives that could afford us novel solutions.
What if we conceived of whiteness as a spirit? Of racism as a mischievous ghoul, possessing the hearts of humans who remain spiritually wounded and disconnected from their true ancestral power? How would our approach to systems change be different if we shifted the blame to the beyond, where it belongs?
I am not encouraging a regressed or “pre-rational” style of blame-shifting here–that would be relatively disempowering–but rather a psychodramatic emotional processing practice. The abstraction of systems into non-physical “entities” could allow for us to interact with them without hurting each other—without expecting individuals to shoulder the burden of centuries worth of anger, grief, domination, and enslavement. The work of Bert Hellinger and Jacob Moreno was and is still therapeutically effective in part because of its ability to transform trauma into meaning through imaginative play. Chloe Valdary’s work with antiracism applies a similar philosophy; her “Theory of Enchantment” acknowledges the power of mythology as a common tongue. We need not appease the old gods so much as we might need to see them as reflections of ourselves and the complex systems of which we are a part.
4) Authentically performative virtue-signalling
Everyone poops, and everyone virtue signals. It’s not only inevitable, but necessary. Like a smoke signal or a turn signal, virtue signalling is a type of communication. Every interaction with another living being–human and non-human alike–consists of rapport-building rituals that communicate whether or not you are safe, trustworthy, and a viable relational investment. If you have a dog, I am sure you are familiar with the canine gesture of pinning the ears down towards the head and avoiding eye contact. This is your dog virtue signalling that it does not intend to be aggressive towards you.
The problem in many spaces–woke ones included–is that virtue signalling is often compulsory. We often virtue signal as a way to acquire group acceptance–and, consequently, safety. What we often don’t do is check in with ourselves about whether or not the group values reflect our personal values. Some people never learned to balance personal integrity with consensus, and as a result, fall prey to groupthink. There is nothing wrong with consensus. However, a false consensus can easily be achieved when a group stress response is triggered and individuals are desperate for safety.
How can we know if a group’s values reflect our personal values if we don’t virtue signal? If we don’t share what it is we find virtuous, how can we come to authentic consensus about what is and is not virtuous? All adventures come with risks, including adventures in intersubjectivity. Can we perform our virtues authentically, trusting that the integrity of our hearts will guide us home?
An ironic distance from the concept of virtue provides the perspective that humans are nondual beings. Virtue is, to rely upon a hyperbolic metaphor, one side of an infinitely-sided coin. Let this not guide us away from the incredibly useful concept of the good, and instead allow us to engage with it from this distance, from this knowing that all behaviours are a performance of sorts. We can interact more creatively when we view our persona for what it is–a mental tool that helps us navigate the complexity of the relational world.
This is by no means a conclusive list. Like all ideologies, post-wokeness will look different in practice than it does in theory. But upon observing the difference in effect between Robin DeAngelo’s version of anti-racism and Chloe Valdary’s Theory of Enchantment, I am confident that these methods will be more effective in not only healing racial and socioeconomic wounds, but in creating sustainable communities that will eventually outcompete the current parasitic ones.
Resources and references
“Can Chloe Valdary Sell Skeptics On DEI?” - Conor Friedersdorf forThe Atlantic
System as spirit, body as host
Oh my, your writing is so incredibly articulate and apt. The insight you manage to pack in—somehow without falling prey to verbiage, and yet still remaining warm—is so inspiring. I don’t think I have quite seen post-woke so well put. Thank you for all that you do.
We’ll said! I spent a decade as an active contributor to anti-oppression movements, but in recent years, I dropped out of the movement because of all of the ad-hominem attacks against straight white men. In reality, I felt pushed out. It makes me sad that I don’t feel comfortable in these spaces anymore, like I’ve lost a huge part of my identity.
I’m glad I found your writing, because you’re someone who makes me feel welcomed back into the fold. You see the way out of the divisiveness and vitriol, and are an example of someone who wants us to do better, but not at the expense of decency, kindness, and respect.