Episode 2493: David Rieff on the Woke Mind

It’s a small world. The great David Rieff came to my San Francisco studio today for in person interview about his new anti-woke polemic Desire and Fate. And half way through our conversation, he brought up Daniel Bessner’s This Is America piece which Bessner discussed on yesterday’s show. I’m not sure what that tells us about wokeness, a subject which Rieff and I aren’t in agreement. For him, it’s the thing-in-itself which make sense of our current cultural malaise. Thus Desire and Fate, his attempt (with a great intro from John Banville) to wake us up from Wokeness. For me, it’s a distraction. I’ve included the full transcript below. Lots of good stuff to chew on.

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Rieff views "woke" ideology as primarily American and post-Protestant in nature, rather than stemming solely from French philosophy, emphasizing its connections to self-invention and subjective identity.

* He argues that woke culture threatens high culture but not capitalism, noting that corporations have readily embraced a "baudlerized" version of identity politics that avoids class discussions.

* Rieff sees woke culture as connected to the wellness movement, with both sharing a preoccupation with "psychic safety" and the metaphorical transformation of experience in which "words” become a form of “violence."

* He suggests young people's material insecurity contributes to their focus on identity, as those facing bleak economic prospects turn inward when they "can't make their way in the world."

* Rieff characterizes woke ideology as "apocalyptic but not pessimistic," contrasting it with his own genuine pessimism which he considers more realistic about human nature and more cheerful in its acceptance of life's limitations.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Andrew Keen: Hello everybody, as we digest Trump 2.0, we don't talk that much these days about woke and woke ideology. There was a civil war amongst progressives, I think, on the woke front in 2023 and 2024, but with Donald Trump 2.0 and his various escapades, let's just talk these days about woke. We have a new book, however, on the threat of woke by my guest, David Rieff. It's called Desire and Fate. He wrote it in 2023, came out in late 2024. David's visiting the Bay Area. He's an itinerant man traveling from the East Coast to Latin America and Europe. David, welcome to Keen on America. Do you regret writing this book given what's happened in the last few months in the United States?

David Rieff: No, not at all, because I think that the road to moral and intellectual hell is trying to censor yourself according to what you think is useful. There's a famous story of Jean Paul Sartre that he said to the stupefaction of a journalist late in his life that he'd always known about the gulag, and the journalist pretty surprised said, well, why didn't you say anything? And Sartre said so as not to demoralize the French working class. And my own view is, you know, you say what you have to say about this and if I give some aid and comfort to people I don't like, well, so be it. Having said that, I also think a lot of these woke ideas have their, for all of Trump's and Trump's people's fierce opposition to woke, some of the identity politics, particularly around Jewish identity seems to me not that very different from