Deacon Kyle Eller: What ‘woke’ is, and why it’s a problem

Mere Catholicism 

In late February, my Android phone alerted me that I had received an upgrade: a new “assistant,” in the form of Google’s “artificial intelligence” chatbot, recently renamed “Gemini.” 

I had been using this AI — formerly known as Bard — off and on for many months through its web interface, switching back and forth between it and its more famous competitor, ChatGPT. I preferred ChatGPT, which I found more functional and less biased. But initially I was kind of excited to see Gemini getting a major roll-out with new features, notably the ability to generate images upon request. 

However, soon after this mass release, absurd screenshots began flooding social media: Gemini being asked to create an image of the American founding fathers or medieval European kings and producing images with no white men in them; Gemini refusing to generate an image of a white family because it could cause harm while creating images of families with other racial backgrounds without issue; Gemini not being able to answer who, between Adolf Hitler and Elon Musk, had done the most harm to the world; Gemini refusing to write an essay on why someone should have a large family and instead volunteering to provide arguments on why people should have no children. And on and drearily on. 

I tested it out, generated examples of my own, prodded at it, pushed back at its logic, or lack thereof. Sometimes it would admit the discriminatory and biased treatment, sometimes not. Sometimes it would mount vigorous defenses of its behavior, accompanied by scolding, sanctimonious lectures.  

And in many such cases, its defenses were comprehensively grounded in a set of assumptions that are, in society, highly controversial but which its programming treated as self-evidently true, namely that familiar constellation of interrelated theories and political ideologies that has come to act as a kind of secular state religion: intersectionality, critical theory, DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”), etc.  

In a word, it was “woke” — woke taken to the most absurd reductio ad absurdum, woke enough to publicly embarrass even the company that deliberately made Gemini this way. 

I don’t much care for the term “woke” and normally avoid it. It’s not particularly descriptive, and I believe it’s more fruitful to critique ideas than it is to debate labels. But it’s commonly used, and I know it’s become a popular rhetorical “gotcha” to declare that people criticizing wokeness usually can’t even define exactly what they mean by it. While it’s tempting (and true) to point out that many of those trying to dunk on the anti-woke can’t even coherently define basic, ordinary words like “woman” or “marriage,” that would be a deflection. Those concerned about this ideology should be able to specify what they mean. 

So, here is exactly what I believe deserves critique: The notion that you can legitimately divide the world into victim and oppressor classes based on categories such as sex, race, gender identity, and sexual orientation and then base discriminatory policy decisions on the perceived power dynamics between those classes. I think that way of looking at the world is reductive and false and flawed and dangerous, and that however good the intentions behind it are, it has, as it has come to rule many institutions, contributed mightily to deepening polarization and divisions plaguing us and which truly threaten our ability to live peacefully together.  

An astute observer old enough to remember global communism may note that this ideology sounds very familiar. Original Marxist thought frames the world in a similar way, except on the basis of economic class, framing the world by a conflict between workers and their supposed class enemies, such as capitalists and aristocrats. 

For us Catholics, while our response to this emerging variant of that mentality is still forming, our response to the old one, based on divine revelation and natural law, is already helpful.  

Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical that effectively launched modern Catholic social thought back in 1891, forcefully refuted and condemned Marxism as a response to the world’s injustices. Marxism was false in its principles and often evil in its means. But Leo did not deny that injustices Marxists were exploiting to advance their ideology existed. He affirmed that some of them did exist and were quite serious. He spends much of the document critiquing not Marxism but the errors in belief and practice in the forms of capitalism prevalent then that caused those injustices. Clarifying the true demands of justice in the social order, his aim was to help remedy real injustices and correct errors and, in so doing, foster the solidarity that should prevail between classes of people, rather than the never-ending conflict and ideological revolution Marxism prescribed. 

His example is instructive. Utopian dreams notwithstanding, this world is still fallen, still twisted by original sin. There are still injustices and evils. Racism is still around, not just in the form Gemini is programmed with but in its old-fashioned form, which has had an appalling resurgence in recent years. Sexism, not just in the (no doubt Gemini approved) modern forms of demeaning men as inherently toxic and dangerous and putting biological males in women’s prisons, abuse shelters, and locker rooms, is still around in its old-fashioned forms too. Bullying and demeaning people who struggle with their sexuality are still around. 

The answer to those evils is certainly not excusing or ignoring them. Likewise it’s never going to be found in reducing people to such identities or deploying as remedies new forms of discrimination and hostility between different groups of people. As in Leo’s time, it will only ever be found in an authentic understanding of the truths of the human person and society and of the solidarity and justice that we owe to each other, and in the ongoing conversion of heart we all need, by virtue not of various other identities but of our humanity. The answer can’t be found in censorship and Orwellian memory holes but in good faith dialogue in mutual respect for human dignity. 

As of now, those are not the answers being promoted from the news and entertainment media, from the halls of academia, from many of our politicians, or from most of our large corporations, most particularly the powerful and influential tech ones that control so much of the public conversation. It’s not the kind of answer that got rolled out to countless millions of smartphones and will likely soon be integrated into some of the most widely used computing services in the world, including the Chromebooks of school children. 

And that’s a big problem. 

Deacon Kyle Eller is editor of The Northern Cross. Reach him at [email protected].