David Rieff Foretells The Fate Of Woke

Donald Trump’s relentless attempt to erase the slightest trace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – it used to be called “woke” – from American institutions has pushed DEI to the margins of a political conflict that is growing more intense by the day in the US. In fact we’re now well beyond the culture war that DEI used to be part of: the administration’s strategy of using DEI as a pretext to reconfigure generations of custom and law almost makes you want to leap to its defence. From health agencies to the Federal Aviation Administration to the Department of Defense and beyond, Trump is firing tens of thousands of people under the pretence of removing agents of “woke”, savaging the American state in the process.

But make no mistake about it, before Trump’s efforts to engineer a new America, DEI had its own project of radial social transformation, with Maga often as its own pretext. Liberals will not be able to confront Trump successfully now unless they renounce DEI themselves. And there is no better place to start this necessary shift in paradigm than David Rieff’s Desire and Fate (2024), the profoundest reflection on woke culture yet to appear. More than anything, though, this book is a rare, breathtaking instance of an exquisite moral imagination in full flight. 

The essence of this collection of strikingly original pensées appears in the course of Rieff’s suggestion that the “radical homogenization” imposed by modern society that Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World could, as Rieff writes, “take place while garbed in the motley of individuality”. That is to say, the outcome of pursuing an ideal might well be that ideal’s very nemesis. Or as Rieff puts it, “the sense of being able to fulfil all our desires [is] the way we experience the tragedy of our fate”. You might, for example, think that “expressing” yourself in all your motley of individuality puts you at the apex of originality and freedom. You might well be wrong. It could be that you have actually placed yourself in the comfortable harness of a pointless individuality and a simulated freedom. Masses of people have a louche little TikTok channel like yours. They still cannot afford healthcare, or college, or a house, or a car. Expressing yourself and thinking for yourself are two different things.

The philosophical immediately extends to the political. Though you might declare membership in a protected group that has been, truly, marginalised and afflicted by the status quo throughout history, the marketplace welcomes you with open arms. As a result of Black Lives Matter, more black people appear in adverts than ever before – an innovation not lost on legions of economically struggling white people who were abandoned, first, by an insular, self-infatuated neoliberalism, and then insulted by an insular, self-infatuated regime of diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet the reading and maths scores of poor black children remain as low, or lower, than they have ever been in the modern age. Everyone at the bottom still loses. Welcome to a stronger, nimbler status quo. Rieff rightly cherishes this quote from the “hard left” writer Adolph Reed: “The real project of Woke was to diversify the ruling class.”

The idea that fate weaves a counter-motion to our desires as we pursue them is the double helix of the moral imagination. Oedipus unwittingly marries his own mother; Lear’s smug and arrogant exercise of his power destroys his kingdom. Desire and Fate is a study in the often sordid counter-motion behind idealistic certitude. Using DEI as a sort of palimpsest of human folly, Rieff demonstrates how the road to a repressive hell of emotional cluelessness, surreal precepts, philistinism, intolerance and retribution is paved with a public style of “kindness”, “caring” and “healing”. He writes that in the name of “a secular vision of the religious idea of redemption… [of] a society from which all human cares have disappeared”, an “irate fragility” softly whispers its domination. But, then, Rieff tells us that the vision of “a society from which all human cares have disappeared… is the form of a utopianism that I have spent most of my long life as a writer trying to call into question”.

Rieff’s latest work is a concise continuation of his long life as a writer, and of the theme of fate both completing and astounding the desires of individuals, organisations, nations. Rieff began his career with shrewdly observed yet open-hearted books about Miami and Los Angeles, deeply reported and prescient portraits in which, on one level, America’s desires were transformed in the fates of its immigrants. Unique among American writers, Rieff evolved into an intellectual determined to immerse himself in the destructive element; that is, to test his ideas about the world in the world.

Woke ideology appals him precisely because of the way its airy armchair radicalism – “subjective idealism” Rieff calls it – spins fantasies about the reality before its very nose. America’s “therapeutic culture”, Rieff writes, has been “weaponized politically as traumatic culture”. The central principle of this new moral atmosphere is “the idea that the psychological is absolutely equal – if not superior – to the material”. Historical injustice is more alive than present injustice; biological gender is fungible; “capitalism and White Supremacy are inseparable”, despite the fact of “outright Chinese pre-eminence within the capitalist global system”. It is like looking at a horse and being told it is a sparrow.

Rieff deplores woke’s “contrast between the willingness to expend huge efforts to protest psychological harm and the undeniably much lesser willingness to protest material harm”. What you get as a result, he writes, “is the pathological nihilism where more energy is devoted to renaming buildings on campuses and removing public monuments than to advocating for small business loans, better mass transit, or the expansion of health care”. If not already obvious, Rieff himself is a man of, if not the “hard” left, the old left. “I’m not a liberal,” he writes dryly.

All his writing career, he has kicked the world, as it were, and declared, “Thus I refute a disastrous utopianism.” He has always been what you might call a transcendental materialist. He will not make judgements about reality until he has experienced it, and then he draws his conclusions with the stern second sight of a born moralist. He writes in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr, who said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.” Woke demands universal love. Rieff would passionately assent to this sentiment from Burke: “The Law punishes delinquents, not because they are not good men; but because they are intolerably wicked. It does bear, and must bear, with the vices and the follies of men, until they actually strike at the root of order.” By refusing to tolerate the vices and follies of humans, DEI is pushing society towards the deadening fiats of authoritarianism, all while we observe the creeping abolition of human will and particularity at the invisible hand of artificial intelligence.

[See also: Correlli Barnett: The prophet of the new right]

Sartre once said that the excruciating paradox of a writer was that they could not have an experience and make sense of that experience at the same time. Rieff seems to have taken that up as a challenge. He thought and wrote his way as a reporter through the tragedies in Rwanda and Bosnia, putting his life where his words were. Over the years, with a kind of ruthless moral courage, he documented the West foundering on its own principles in its responses to genocide, and NGOs losing their purpose in the reversals of power and politics. Even as, true to his Socratic intensity, he defended the West at points, and conceded the NGOs their moral singularity.

Rieff’s masterpiece, Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), told the story of the dying and death of his mother, Susan Sontag. In that remarkable testament, he cannot tear himself away from the horror of a mind, so rare and precious, slowly succumbing to the very antithesis of all the mind is. There is nothing like this book, an act of love and suffering, a confrontation between the illusion-weaving intellect and the thoughtless, wordless, absolute apathy of death. It is impossible to fathom how Rieff faced, so unsparingly towards himself, the unravelling of his mother’s dream of life, the unwinding of the particular shape of her desires, as fate, and her fate, overtook her. And her son.

In lovingly acknowledging in Desire and Fate the ideas of both his mother, and his sociologist father, Philip Rieff, it is as if Rieff were offering a lesson to the twisted intellectual currents of our time. The past is not a rebuke to the present. Rather it is a dare to the present to be fully alive. And what passes for trauma, in so many degrees, is really a human heart breaking, again and again, as it cannot escape doing.

Rieff sees his father’s concept of the “triumph of the therapeutic” everywhere in the way psychology has displaced material conditions. In his seminal 1966 book of the same name, Philip Rieff argued that Western civilisation had passed from religious, economic and political phases to one that was purely psychological. The last represented the “triumph of the therapeutic”, which defines our present moment. In this phase, humans have no commitments to communal values, neither in the form of religious injunctions nor in the form of social bonds embodied in economic or even political ties. Humans are entirely devoted to gratifying their own desires. And such gratification has nothing to do with social inequality, social injustice, power relations, the clash between capital and labour. People navigate by what is inside their heads, not outside them.

Thus David Rieff’s “triumph of the traumatic”, his characterisation of a culture that trivialises the experience of trauma – tied always to an external event – by redefining trauma as hurt feelings. It is the tenderest homage to Philip Rieff, a concept derived from the earlier one as the son was, as it were, derived from his father. Sontag, who wrote the classic text Illness as Metaphor (1978), which argued against literary or abstract interpretations of physical illness, is brought to life as well. She lives in Rieff’s attacks on the way some contemporaneous doctors have degraded the sacred word “heal” to mean reconditioning themselves to use gender-neutral pronouns. “What is new and harmful in all this,” Rieff writes, “is the metaphorization of the idea of healing, in that it erases any useful distinction between being good at what one does and being a good person.” The indifference to real suffering, and real healing, is stunning. Rieff sees in this “debasement of language” a “crushing of linguistic realism” that will lead, he says, to no decent future.

Yet for all his mordancy – today’s adults are “overgrown children with sex lives and money” – Rieff writes, to borrow Whitman’s phrase, out of the cradle, endlessly rocking; his dialectical scrupulousness soothes his fine outrage into an equally fine understanding of human complexity. He understands, as John Banville puts it in his sharp, sagacious introduction to this book, that “on the freeways, in the streets, in bars and restaurants, and even in private houses, every other person seemed to be in a fury. About what? Nothing, mostly.” Enter DEI. Enter Maga. Enter the tweeting, trolling, enraged personality of our time.

Rieff recognises that all this constitutes “an era of anxiety and generalized moral and material panic”. On one level, every conscientious person is trying to cope the best way they can, and he knows that. He doesn’t accuse the proponents of DEI of bad faith. They are caught up in some illusory promise of goodness: “One rarely goes wrong in assuming most people think they are doing the right thing.” The idea of systemic racism, of collective guilt, Rieff rejects on the grounds of common sense and common experience (the notion of systemic racism is “too binary”, he writes; it ignores the countless gradations and degrees of act and intention, of actual injustice and imagined harm, of the manifold obscurities of good and evil). But the impoverishment of the idea doesn’t blind him to the horrific history and reality of race in America. He speaks of the “reparations movement – which I have long fervently supported”. He understands the frustrations behind the boost to an economically bludgeoned self-esteem that is conferred by woke’s moral outrage. His heart goes out to the young, the afflicted, the historically excluded, on whose behalf DEI destructively pronounces.

There is an anguished clemency to this book. This fearless reporter on humans in extremis, this dazzling intellect, this loving, broken-hearted son watches as a world struggles to swim in its own sea of untruth. Rieff, the uncompromising transcendental materialist, ends in a Sophoclean key: “Fate… will have the last word, it always has.” Think of Desire and Fate as a Gideons Bible for the independent spirit. In our moment of super-efficient unreason and malevolence on one side, and paralysed thought and action on the other, Rieff’s sensibility in action, to borrow a phrase, is a precious act of civil disobedience. Relish his voice, not just as an incomparable, essential, bracing antidote to the expanding Dunciad all around us, but as a gift to that deepest part of yourself that hungers, in its mortal solitude, for the company of truth.

[See also: The left after Trump]