The Woke North
The Canadian Perspective and Ignoring Exceptional Thinkers
The Canadian Perspective and Ignoring Exceptional Thinkers
In a nutshell, this is a book about the west from a Canadian perspective. In order for it to be worth the paper its written on, or the flickering digital screen its presented on, it must do at least four things:
Explain where wokeism came from, and why it’s a problem.
Explain the current state of wokesim; include many examples.
Offer solutions to defeat, and/or alternatives to, wokeism.
Explain Canada’s role, and why the rest of the world should care.
But there is also a fifth less pressing and more gratuitous aim I have. Since this book can only be, in any authentic sense, a Canadian perspective (as I am a Canadian), its a perfect and possibly desperately needed opportunity to balance all of the ugliness and divisiveness of the culture wars with some of what makes Canada and its people so remarkable. I introduce you to Canadians who add to our culture, who want to contribute something to the world, and contrast them to woke ideologues who only contribute criticism, outrage and destruction.
Forbidden knowledge, or things that seem forbidden since they never get discussed openly, is another area of focus for this book. Since it is these forbidden subjects that often garner the most woke mob censorship and violations of free speech, this book does not shy away from controversial or taboo subjects.
Exceptional thinkers like Thomas Sowell, who’s assessment of economic and social issues contradicts the prevailing social vision in many ways, is rarely discussed in polite society. We are told scholars like Charles Murray, James Flynn and others, who study class, race and gender differences in IQ, are white-supremacist. Warren Farrell, “father of the men’s movement” is of course misogynistic for daring to assert that men and boys have rights too.
All of these men are considered giants in academic circles, but unless their scholarly writings and talks consist of social/economic criticisms squarely within the range of Overton window acceptability, they get no air time! Noam Chomsky, another non-conformist scholar ignored by the mainstream, lays it out in his famous expose of the media Manufacturing Consent.
“Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power.” - Noam Chomsky
This explains why thinkers who think outside the constraints of social orthodoxies don’t make it through the pre-selection of the right-thinkers and their “internalized preconceptions.” Today wokesim is the internalized ideology, and “ownership, market, and political power” has adopted/acquiesced to, the tenets of wokeism.
The following chapters will include a few bits and pieces of writing I’ve published on social media and other places. To close this introduction I would like to include a post I published on Facebook. A book report (yes I post book reports to Facebook) of The Torchlight List: Around The World In 200 Books, by James Flynn (an extraordinary scholar we will revisit later).
As I’ve mentioned self-improvement can be seen as a political act, a counter-woke statement. Independent scholarship is an important form of intellectual self improvement, and reading is the principle habit to develop the intellect. The 200 books James Flynn covers provide historical and cultural knowledge of the world beyond any given local culture so that, according to Flynn, one need not be “confounded by the world.”
From Facebook:
Not Just Books...Tickets! To The Magical Realm Of Independent Scholarship,
Recommendation #1 : The Torchlight List: Around The World In 200 Books by James Flynn.
James Flynn was a beloved professor emeritus and intelligence researcher known for, among other things, the Flynn Effect (one of his findings in the field of intelligence showing continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores throughout the world).
He is the author of many books on a variety of topics ranging from intelligence, education, free speech, politics and environmental issues. This book is about books...200 books! It originally grew out of a small list of five books Flynn would routinely recommend to his students (meant as extracurricular reading not specific to their discipline).
But more than just recommending books, Flynn discusses what he calls “the Magic Realm” of reading. A place where if one spends ample time, can begin sorting out the “confounding” and confusing maelstrom of events in one’s own time, place and culture. If you understand historical contexts or cultural contexts of cultures different then your own, you don’t need to “sulk in the corner” with frustrated cynicism and the inability to sense-make.
From M.B. Crawford, “Science Education and Liberal Education”
“...to enter truly into the great works of the past, or of other cultures, requires an effort to free oneself from the present and its certainties. A cultivated willingness to make that effort is perhaps the cardinal intellectual virtue.”
The title of Flynn’s book was inspired by his uncle, an independent scholar who educated himself by reading books by “Torchlight.” Flynn covers 200 important works (of history, literature, science, philosophy, the human condition - spanning the globe and many key historical periods) by giving fascinating commentary, providing context, and compelling interest with quotes and moral questions.
In discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Flynn says:
“The only characters with ideals are Tom, obsessed with a crazy ideal (the need to keep down the colored races), and Gatsby, infected with a quixotic fantasy that he can abolish the past and reclaim his long-lost love as she was as a girl, unmarked by her marriage and adult life. Fitzgerald asks what America has been all about: no more than a scramble for money and status that blinds people to the fact they are empty of purpose.”
From the first chapter - Born into the Magic Realm:
“I try to give people the concepts they need to comprehend the complexities of the modern world. I want them to be free. I want them to be able to understand the world, rather than just be swept along by the river of time with no real comprehension of what is happening to them”
I highly recommend checking out “The Torchlight List.” And if you want more, Flynn also published a second Torchlight book all about contemporary works!
This is the fourth installment of “The Woke West: The Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, Radical Activism And Forbidden Knowledge Dividing The West...And What You Can Do About It!” - A book by James Pew, published serially to The Turn Substack.
Thanks for reading! Next Up, Two Woman That Can't Be Bullied: The Rise Of Cancel Culture And The Erosion Of Free Speech.