On moral and social hypochondria - Susan Neiman in NYRB:

‘Wokeness is hard to define because it’s an incoherent concept, built on a contradiction between feeling and thought. It’s fueled by emotions traditionally held by the left. When in doubt, stand by those on the margins: the tired, the poor, the hungry, those yearning to breathe free. Those emotions, however, are undermined by beliefs that have traditionally belonged to the right. What are called identity politics—misleadingly, since they reduce our rich and various identities to our ethnic and gender origins—assume that you will have real connections and deep obligations only to those who belong to your own tribe, though others may be useful as allies. Calls for justice are sometimes viewed as liberal attempts to impose (Eurocentric) values on others; anyone who claims to be acting for the sake of a universal humanity is deceptive.’

(…)

‘Rieff wisely doesn’t try to define wokeness, but with fierce wit and a fine balance between anecdote and argument, he presents telling examples of the sort of thing many of us usually excoriate in private, sotto voce, after a glass of wine. For instance, there are many things short of giving back the continent that could be done to improve the lives of Native Americans. Solemnly reciting a land acknowledgment is not one of them. Rieff writes, “The performative guilt of today’s professional managerial class bears the same relationship to real shame and real guilt as Astro Turf does to grass.”’

(…)

‘Only the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour has been self-reflective enough to offer a public mea culpa for his own contributions to public distrust of matters of fact. With Republicans using scientific uncertainties to oppose vaccines or measures addressing the climate crisis, he wondered if he had been wrong to help invent the field known as science studies, which emphasizes the political and social dimensions of science. “What’s the real difference,” Latour wrote in 2004, between conspiracists and a popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick reading of, let’s say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu…? In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say…. Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless.’

(…)

‘But he also notes that the usual markers of class, like having a relation to high culture, no longer mean anything. So why think that substituting class essentialism for racial essentialism is a winning strategy? It’s increasingly clear that great inequalities of income and wealth poison our societies as well as the earth itself, but reducing human beings to their class identities is even more senseless than any other form of identitarianism. I’m skeptical about reviving the notion of class just at the moment when Ph.D.s may drive Ubers for millionaires who do not read. If the concept of class was clearer in Marx’s day, it’s barely recognizable in ours.’

(…)

‘The right is not wrong, Rieff writes, to see Disney as woke. His problem is not Disney’s adoption of what’s called inclusive language but the fact that “as long as these underrepresented groups are represented, the identitarian left has little to say about the nature of Disney’s product.” Whether you object to Disney’s hidden imperialism or simply to its ability to flatten every human emotion into treacly kitsch, you’re unlikely to sharpen the skills needed to criticize its movies at a contemporary university.’

(…)

‘According to Harris’s main super PAC, Future Forward, Trump’s antitrans ads, broadcast shortly before the election, shifted the race in his favor by 2.7 percent for voters who watched them. Harris lost the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. Most events, like this election, have more than one cause, but “Kamala is for they/them” was a fiendishly clever pitch.’

(…)

‘The new normal, he says, is utter fragility: “Ours is an age in which people routinely, even ritualistically, speak of feeling unsafe when in fact what they are is offended…. This is why Woke is, at its core, an expression of moral and social hypochondria.” Rieff hints at but doesn’t explicate the connection between this observation and his claim that “we now live in a culture in which not to consider yourself a victim is a pathology…or else, whether you realize it or not, or are willing to admit it or not, it is to be an oppressor.”’

(…)

‘Still, many progressives seem to believe that symbolic struggles can be a force of resistance to this administration. No serious opposition is possible without a movement that disentangles left from woke. In strengthening such a movement, Rieff’s book will prove a valuable tool.’

Read the article here.

The moral and social hypochondria have an origin, the vulgarization of the remembrance culture of the Holocaust. This remembrance culture was so successful that in the end everybody wanted to have his or her own Holocaust.

And yes, a culture based on keeping the trauma alive will be a dangerous culture, dangerous for people of the own tribe, dangerous for others.

Latour (sometimes) liked to make himself more important than he is. Even without Latour and Foucault people would have found reasons and ways to distrust the elite and their truths.
Symbolic struggles can be useful and important, in the end often they just undermine the cause they are claiming to be fighting for.