Are you Woke? It was not too long ago that such a question would have been greeted with a puzzled disdain for its grammatical barbarism. It is now the question of the moment, no longer limited to college campuses as part of the initiation rites to higher learning. In certain political circles, it has already become the code word for being taken seriously on policy questions.
The puzzling thing about Wokeness is not that it is fashionable among a small subset of the Campus Left. One should never be surprised by what is fashionable among college faculty and students. The curious question is how these ideas broke out of the academic asylum and met acquiescence among a large group of people who should have known better.
The answer is found in a book which should have never fallen off the radar: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First published in 1941, it was—along with 1984—one of the great books about totalitarianism written in the 1940s. Widely praised when it was published, the book was enormously influential in fostering the consensus view of post-war anti-communism. In 1998, Modern Library published a list of the 100 best English novels of the 20th century; Darkness at Noon was ranked eighth, five places above 1984.
Read the rest at Law and Liberty
[…] and its friends in Big Business and Big Tech is to meld mob rule with government power to subject individuals to the all-powerful state. The Left firmly believes no individual has a right to oppose the state […]