Wittgenstein Vs. The Woke

A generation of activists has imbued words and sounds with superstition.

- By Crispin sartwell

Last summer, protesters from Baltimore to Bristol defaced statues and dumped them into rivers in an iconoclastic spasm, providing a momentary diversion from what the new progressives take to be the real agents of oppression: words. Words matter, they say, plausibly enough. Words have power and consequences, and there must be accountability, they add. These generalities are supposed to settle such matters as whether President Donald Trump calling the coronavirus the “kung flu” caused anti-Asian sentiment, which caused the Atlanta spa shootings, with no factual evidence required. That words have power is commonplace, but then again so are observations that talk is cheap and that you’d better put your money where your mouth is.

The view that words drive events is the spiritual orientation of youthful leftism. But it’s hard to think of a view that would more directly contradict Marxist ideas about history, according to which words are frippery or ideology, concealing the material conditions of production. That sort of realism, which presupposes that we inhabit a physical universe, seems passé. Contemporary social justice movements focus on semiotic injustice, on the alleged violence perpetrated in and by words and images. We appear in this conception to live in a world that we are making with symbols, in a history driven by the production of signs and sentences rather than widgets.