The 100 year history of ‘woke’ in 2 minutes.
At ARC 2026, Paul Marshall traced the intellectual roots of the worldview that now dominates our universities, our institutions, and our public discourse It begins with Nietzsche, who declared there was no absolute truth, only perspectives.
Then Foucault went further: in the absence of truth, everything should be interpreted through the lens of power. The world divided up into victims and oppressors. My truth vs. your truth.
Foucault is now the most cited source in all of academic literature. After World War Two, these ideas crossed the Atlantic, were incubated in American universities, and mutated into critical race theory, critical gender theory, intersectionality, queer theory, and postcolonial theory — a full toolkit for deconstructing Western civilisation.
This is the intellectual landscape that permeates today’s world and has shaped how a generation of young people think.
The fruits of this ideology? A society more fragmented than ever, filled with people who only know who they are by who they’re against.
Perhaps it is time for a new way of thinking – an Age of Reconstruction.
Watch the full ARC 2026 talk from Paul Marshall….
Melanie Phillips on how the West lost confidence in itself.
Battles over identity are raging across the West – over race, sexuality, sex and gender. Long-held ideas about society, history, even biology, are being swiftly overturned. What connects all these things together? And are today’s culture-war debates really all they seem? In the showdown between radical feminists and trans activists, for instance, are we actually seeing one form of identity politics fight it out with another? Melanie Phillips, commentator, broadcaster and columnist for The Times, joined spiked’s editor to discuss all this and more on the latest edition of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here. Continue reading ‘We are living through a cultural meltdown’