woo woo and the lunatic woke virus

say what you really mean, Suella.

Don Draper realising the limits of capitalist thought

Until I started working in publishing I’d never come across the term ‘Woo Woo’ before. Every so often I would hear colleagues use the word as unsubtle shorthand for ‘we-shouldn’t-take-this-author-seriously-because-it’s-all-a-bit-new-age.’ The phrase would often be accompanied with a wrinkle of the nose, as if the very thought of publishing the book gave way to a bad smell.

Slightly confused, I went home and googled the term. There didn't seem to be much of a consensus about its origins, with some attributing it to the American science writer Michael Sherman and others suggesting that it was used in popular culture from about 1980 onward. The earliest reference I could find was in a 1983 edition of New Age journal, where the musician George Winston ‘who practices Yoga’ (I guess it was noteworthy in the eighties!) suggested that there was ‘real New Age stuff that has substance, and then there's the woo-woo. A friend of mine once said, 'George, you really love these woo-woos, don't you?' and I said 'Yes, I do love them,' and I do. I mean, I'm half woo-woo myself.’ 

Whatever it’s origins, the term typically seems to have been used to make a value-judgement about the degree to which a practice or belief system should be taken seriously by others. At the sharp end of this spectrum are the ‘new-atheists’ or ‘sceptics’ like Michael Sherman, who argue that all forms of spirituality embody a form of irrationalism. Writing for the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra (reigning Scout Master of the new-age camp) argues that Sherman’s 'broad brush would tar not just the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who happen to recognize a reality that transcends space and time.’ Chopra, a long-time advocate of holistic medicine and transcendental meditation, argues that Sherman ‘takes Darwin as purely as a fundamentalist takes scripture.’

I think Chopra’s criticism is broadly right. During my time in publishing, I noticed how words like Woo Woo were used to critique not just books that perhaps warrant such scepticism, but pretty much any mode of writing deemed ‘spiritual’ or rooted in a non-Western epistemological framework. I gradually realised that it’s ultimately a discriminatory term, which enables us to close ourselves, and more worryingly others, off to ideas which don’t align with a Eurocentric, secular world view of the world.

A good example of a book that could have easily have fallen victim to this dynamic is Braiding Sweetgrass by the Native American writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, which has become a seminal text exploring the relationship between ‘Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’. Following it’s American publication it took two years to get published in the UK, and a further five before the book hit the New York Times Bestseller list. It’s success has subsequently birthed a whole sub-genre of publishing that explores the relationship between ecology and life itself. Take the biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s ‘Entangled Life’, which considers how Fungi ‘change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster’. His book has enjoyed huge acclaim and been long or short-listed for pretty much every nonfiction prize going.

Reviewing the book for The Guardian, Richard Kerridge wrote that:

A great deal of ecological thought now asks us to take more note of the relationships of interdependency that embed and sustain us, including many too large or small for unaided vision. The interpenetration of these systems raises questions about the boundaries of our selfhood. It is difficult now to think simply in terms of inside and outside, or self and not-self. Sheldrake uses the term “involution”, coined recently to shift emphasis from the evolution of separate life-forms to the emergence of these systems.

In other words, ecology is challenging traditional scientific thinking by demonstrating that there are connections between humans and plants which do not conform to conventional ‘us and them’ modalities. Interestingly, Merlin’s Dad, Rupert Sheldrake, is also a biologist and writer whose work was dismissed ‘as an exercise in pseudo-science’ by Nature journal in the eighties.

When we write-off whole swathes of thought, we are forcing our own culture to remain in a static condition, perpetuating only ‘acceptable’ ways of thinking. This problem goes much further than our use of the word Woo Woo. In the past ten years, we’ve seen the introduction of numerous phrases which have been weaponised within the ‘culture wars’ to make a similarly unsubtle value judgements. Take a word like Woke, which the OED defines as— ‘Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert (or awake) to racial or social discrimination and injustice.’ It’s an African-American word which is rooted in the movement for black political consciousness. In 1923 the Jamaican philosopher Marcus Garvey used the idea of being ‘awake’ as an epigram for his political writings: ‘Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.’

During the British election campaign, this culturally specific definition appeared to have been displaced by a far more nebulous phrase, ‘Wokeism’, which is being used to tarnish any policy that contains even the faintest whiff of progressive politics. Tony Blair has recently warned Kier Starmer of ‘avoiding any vulnerability on wokeism’ whereas Suella Braverman has gone as far as to blame the Conservative electoral defeat on a ‘lunatic woke virus’. Kudos if you have any idea what either of them are blathering on about.

In both cases, words like Woo Woo and Wokeism are used to avoid saying what we really mean: I don’t take this seriously because it a) doesn’t speak my language and b) makes me feel uncomfortable. It’s a way in which we intellectually discriminate because ‘we’ are the superior, rational culture, whilst ‘they’ still rely on primitive belief systems which lack a scientific basis in fact.

This begs the question: are ‘Western’ epistemologies really so great? Where, exactly, have they taken us? In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully highlights the hypocrisy of assuming cultural superiority when it comes to our treatment of the environment. She describes the Onondaga Lake in upstate New York, which forms a crucial part of the ancestral homelands of the Onondaga People. In the 1880s the lake was well-known for it’s whitefish ‘served freshly caught on steaming platters alongside potatoes.’ People spoke of the lake with pride, which mirrored the Onondaga belief that ‘Water is life, quenching our thirst and providing us with strength’.

But now, after a century of industrial development ‘the lake known as one of North America’s most sacred sites is now known as one of the most polluted lakes in the United States.’ Chemical waste has destroyed the ecosystem of what was once a pristine lake, meaning no swimming or fishing can take place due to the high levels of mercury. Ironically, the company responsible for the lake’s destruction claims that the formation of mudboils on the lake are an act of God. ‘What kind of God would that be?’ asks Wall Kimmerer.

The biggest problems we face as a species cannot be solved by Western-science or hyper-rationalism alone. The continued destruction of our earth, and the subjugation of whole populations, demands that we ask spiritual, metaphysical questions of ourselves too. Questions like: why did we allow this to happen? Why aren’t we doing all that we can to reverse it? As we do this we will quickly come to realise that a worldview which consistently places the needs of human beings above the earth (and each other) is one which can only lead to the death of us all.

Happy Thursday!

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Recommendation Corner: Broadening Your Mind edition

• The NYT are currently running a feature entitled the ‘100 best books of the 21st Century’ whereby prominent writers and cultural figures are being asked to nominate the ‘best’ books they’ve ever read. I enjoyed reading

  Nick Hornby
  ’s analysis of proceedings.

• I’m currently reading ‘Enter Ghost’ by Isabella Hammad, a novel in which a woman returns to Haifa, Palestine and joins a production of Hamlet. It’s superbly written, but also explores that feeling of alienation we feel towards ourselves in relation to our complex histories.

• The process of compiling my birthing playlist has commenced! I’ll be listening to ‘Home’ by A Song For You on repeat.

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Some thoughts on a new government and why competency alone isn’t enough. An essay about melting ice-lollies and altered states. A brief review of Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time.