The folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood teaches us a timeless lesson: sometimes infirm, and seemingly harmless, familial figures like grandma are, in fact, wolves in disguise. And the cultural wolf that is, by far, the most fearsome in today’s world is wokeism.
Rarely defined with any precision, many social commentators describe wokeism as the modern secular religion of today’s western elites. It is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a fundamentalist one. Whereas reasonable conversations can be had over its various topics, when the woke banner is unfurled, there is no longer room for debate, and those who dare to question its precepts risk modern-day witch-burning in the form of job loss and social ostracism.
The woke simplistically divide the world into oppressor and oppressed. Historically tied to the political left — which once championed liberal ideas like free speech, equal opportunity, and equal justice under the law — wokeism has now morphed into something wholly illiberal; it is authoritarian and censorious, and far from even-handed when dispensing its own gospel laws.
The alphas of the woke wolfpack are black belts in linguistic jiu-jitsu. Their vocabulary is notably vague and flowery at the same time. They are gifted in the art of creating new words and twisting definitions such as privilege, racialized, and Latinx. They even managed to change the meaning of racism, which was once defined as prejudice towards people of a different race based on immutable characteristics. Now, you’re racist if you don’t take skin colour into account.
Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci provided the ‘takeover template’ for Marxism and its social justice derivatives in his Prison Notebooks, in which he identified five major domains: religion, family, education, media, and law. Do you think the woke have checked off all the boxes in our society yet?
There are also conversions by the sword in the form of fealty oaths to 3-letter acronyms, for example DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). DEI contributions can get you advancement as a faculty member at many universities. And, as Professor Leigh Revers and I have recently exposed, the proposed revision of CanMEDS, or what it means to be a Canadian doctor, seeks to espouse DEI as foundational values in our Canadian health-care system.
Wokeism is characterized by paradoxical opposites. DEI, in its execution, stands for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination. It discriminates through racial quotas and by holding higher standards for non-preferred group identities (often whites), excludes those same groups by prioritizing others based on group identity rather than merit, and indoctrinates by presenting its principles as unquestionable dogma. My new book, Lost and Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us—and Three Keys to Fix It, explores the counter-argument to DEI mandates, among several other faulty belief systems.
For all the howling DEI proponents raise when there’s insufficient “diversity,” there’s a startling silence over professional sports, making it one of the last bastions of meritocracy. Professional sports draw us in because we can be confident that the very best talent is on display, untrammeled by calls for intersectional identity. No one would claim that the lack of South Asian representation is the reason why the Leafs have not won a championship since 1967. If we demand the most capable individuals in this high-performing arena, then we should demand the same for other high-performing professions, especially medicine.
Anti-racism, another spoke in the wheel of woke, is a misnomer for the sanitized predation of whites, Asians, and Jews. Anti-racist high priest Ibram X. Kendi coined the phrase that best encapsulates anti-racism, and hence wokeism more broadly, in his book How to Be an Antiracist, when he wrote: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.” Is this how we live happily ever after? In a way, Kendi helped expose the retributive nature of the entire woke movement.
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is another 3-letter acronym that falls under the umbrella religion of wokeism. The new CanMEDS proposal explicitly calls for medical students to imbibe its poison. Social commentator and author James Lindsay astutely summarized its highly controversial and self-contradicting catechism as the following: CRT calls everything you wish to control ‘racist’ — until such time as you control it.
Wokeism has sunk its claws into our most prestigious medical journals. Women have been erased; routinely, we now say “pregnant people.” The European Society of Cardiology removed being female as a risk factor for stroke because the inclusion of gender “complicates clinical practice.” Looking to publish? Then simply talk about race or gender, and brush up on your woke vocabulary. Medical podcasts are increasingly sprinkled with one-sided political content, as are American medical school curricula. And just a few months ago, an independent report found that ever since UCLA medical school instated a “diversity” mandate waving through lower admissions standards for minority groups, medical student test scores have been dropping. Is this what we really want here in Canada?
Toronto Metropolitan University’s (formerly Ryerson) new medical school starts next year, and they have an explicit mission to “purposefully admit” Indigenous, Black, and other “equity-deserving” students, which 75 per cent of the spots are specially earmarked for. The new dean states that “many groups face barriers in both applying and being admitted to medical school,” which is code for not having high enough MCAT scores and GPA. Study habits and aptitude be damned, it’s important for them to get the right ethnicities.
Wokeness is already deeply and pervasively embedded in western medicine and needs to be reversed. It takes at least ten post-secondary years to train a doctor, and much damage has already been done. We’ve let these wolves devour our entertainment, education, military, and now healthcare. To rinse it out of even one of these dimensions, we need to oppose this new religion throughout society. Instead of worshipping 3-letter acronyms, let’s fight for merit, colour blindness, quality of character, and free speech. Like a grown-up little red riding hood, we need our wits about us to keep that very obvious existential threat, the wolf of wokeism, far from our door.
Mark D’Souza is a Toronto-based physician and author of Lost and Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us—and Three Keys to Fix It
National Post