Well, there’s only one letter in the “exchange” so far: from Sarah Haider (co-founder and development director of Ex-Muslims of North America) to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The exchange will appear bit by bit at the Letter site (click on screenshot below, and you may want to subscribe):

The exchange will not be about Islam, as you might expect (both Haider and Hirsi Ali are vocal ex-Muslims, critical of the faith), but about “wokeism”, which intersected—pardon the word—with Haider’s criticisms of Islam to inspire the coming dialogue.  We all know that although Islam is, in general, an oppressive religion, seeing gays as immoral and women as inferior (this of course is not true of all Muslims), it is still defended by the Woke, who regard criticism of the faith’s tenets as “Islamophobia”. The Left’s defense of Islam is based on one reason only: Muslims are seen as “people of color”, and so their oppressive practices become immune from censure. That immunity does not extend to faiths like Catholicism or Protestantism, which are seen as “white” faiths. This is also one of the reasons why the Woke blast Israel at the expense of the much more oppressive Palestinian Territories, for Palestinians are also seen as people of color, although Palestine is really the “apartheid state” that Israel is said to be.

But I digress. Haider’s eyes opened to Wokeism when she couldn’t find people who would join her in criticizing Islam. Excerpts from Haider’s letter:

In fact, it was my activism with religion that first drove me to investigate this issue many years ago. When I first began speaking publicly about Islam, I quickly found (as did you), that those whom I anticipated would be on our side viewed me with suspicion. My criticisms of Islam were based on the very principles that those liberals claimed to champion, and yet I was swiftly rejected by them. This behavior left me stunned and confused, so I set out to understand it.

Very quickly, it became evident that the hesitancy to critique Islam actually had nothing to do with Islam. Educating my fellow liberals would not be enough—as ignorance was not the root of the problem.

Over the previous few decades, a new ideology had taken hold throughout liberal and progressive circles: writer and cultural critic Wesley Yang called it “the successor ideology,” but now it’s more usually called wokeism. At its core, this ideology is a delegitimization project—and it targets the very foundations of humanist, Enlightenment values. Wokeism is not the only movement to exploit the same programming that makes us vulnerable to religion. But it has achieved astounding success because it has also managed to neutralize liberals, who might otherwise stand against religious impulses, by hijacking our caring instinct, and by ruthlessly exploiting social dynamics to crush dissent.

It’s curious that the aspect of Wokeism that leads to the hesitancy to criticize Islam—the movement’s embrace of Critical Race Theory, so that Muslims are seen as oppressed people of color—isn’t mentioned by Haider, and I’m not sure why.  That is in fact the dominant impetus of Wokeism, and can’t be neglected. Yes, Wokeism denigrates some Enlightenment values, like freedom of speech, but it also embraces (to an extreme and unwarranted extent) an Enlightenment value: concern for the underdog. It’s not a battle against all Enlightenment values, but a dog’s breakfast of extreme Enlightenment values (the holiness of the oppressed) and anti-Enlightenment values.

At any rate, Haider thinks the Woke have won—for the time being. She’s right, for they’ve hijacked the universities and the media, as well as other organizations, including scientific societies. They’ve won because nobody wants to be seen as a racist, and so people have, as John McWhorter said, gone along to get along.

Haider:

I believe that what we are witnessing is not the dawn of open war, but its conclusion. The woke have won, and decisively. But all is never truly lost, and this is not a prelude to submission. My approach is one of pragmatic optimism: In order to fight this—and we must fight it—we need to understand what lies ahead of us.

. . .Wokeism has won because it has captured our cultural and sense-making institutions.

Nearly all our educational, media, and non-profit institutions (including major grant-making organizations) are advancing in one direction. Meanwhile, the hearts and minds of the global elite are almost uniformly supportive of this new secular faith.

. . .it is no anomaly that the New York Times can hire and stand by an employee who speaks of white people as “dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” but cannot publish an op-ed by a sitting US congressman without a major staff insurrection. The conditions required for the extremists to thrive already exist. The door is open; they only need to walk through.

One may object, however, and point out that the majority of Americans are not woke. I believe that this is true. I also believe that it doesn’t matter. When so many of our fundamental institutions are in cult-like consensus, when the richest and most powerful among us routinely display public allegiance to one faith [Haider mentions that Jeff Bezos has pledged nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars to “social justice causes”], the preferences of the average American are largely irrelevant.

We must adjust our approach accordingly. To put it rather dramatically: we are not meeting the barbarians at the gate; we are rebelling against the empire.

So what does Haider think we must do? Well, she argues that to fight Wokeism we must first understand it, and you can do that by reading Pluckrose and Linday’s book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  They provide a scholarly but lucid account of the roots of Wokeism.  Yet once you see Wokeism as a religion—the topic of McWhorter’s next book—you might agree with him that “battling it out” directly isn’t the way to fight. That’s no more efficacious than trying to engage the faithful to make them give up their religion. As with “militant” atheism, I’m with McWhorter in thinking that no, we shouldn’t engage the Woke directly. They will not be moved, and will simply call you names and try to ruin your life.  The way to fight them is the way atheists have been successful in eroding religion: mocking your opponents, refusing to buy what they’re selling, and writing books taking Wokeism apart.

I am not buying the stuff any more, and will mock it despite the possibility of being called a racist. And so should we all, for we need, as did atheists, to appeal to those on the fence—the uncommitted and open-minded. As for writing those books, well, Pluckrose and Lindsay have a good one, and McWhorter’s will, I suspect, be a powerful salvo against Wokeism.

In the meantime, keep your eye on the Haider/Hirsi Ali exchange.

h/t: Luana