Unawakened ideology can be deadly

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2023 (805 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HOW should we compare the human costs of “woke ideology” to the costs of unawakened ideology when using suicide as a measure? Should we use the emotional appeal of a single case or the hard social facts of demographic statistics?

An example of the former appeared in a Manitoba newspaper recently under the title Pushing Woke Ideology Can be Deadly. Richard Bilkszto, a white, male, middle-class, professional educator who most recently worked for the Toronto District School Board was reported to have taken his own life in July.

His family attributed the cause of his self-inflicted death to the workplace harassment and bullying he experienced due to the contentious views on racism in Canada he expressed in a professional development session. His allies in the culture war then rushed to eulogize him as a heroic martyr. But does his death make a compelling case, or even provide further evidence that “woke ideology can be deadly,” and therefore justify its further condemnation and dismissal?

Over a century ago, Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, famously used comparative rates of suicide across Europe to establish the reality of social facts apart from physical and other facts. Social facts, he argued, were external to the individual, and constraining on, even coercive of, the individual. And they were at least as formative of someone’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviour as psychological “facts,” if not more so.

To exemplify this assertion, the thesis of Durkheim’s empirical study was that suicide, which is often considered the ultimate, incomprehensible individual act, was actually socially patterned and thus relatively predictable behaviour. There were social categorical variables that increased and decreased the probability that someone would complete suicide. (Note the terminology: suicide is not something committed, as if it were an error or a crime.)

What Durkheim found from his massive international data was that males had higher rates of suicide than females, singles had higher rates than marrieds, Protestants had higher rates than Catholics, and so on. What he theorized was that, though each category of gender, marital status, religion, and so on had variables of its own, what they all had in common was what he termed anomie, or what we might call normlessness. Higher suicide rates were the sad result of being less integrated into society.

So, when someone completes suicide, should we look only at the particular experiences of their personal life, or should we also take into account the social categories and cultures to which they belong? Given the reality of the social facts of categorical differences in rates of suicide based on, for example, race, gender, or age, it’s best to be awakened to those variable conditions, and attempt to mitigate them.

As tragic as any one suicide is, the greater call is to give equal respect and concern to all those about whom we never hear because they are disprivileged minorities, out of sight and out of mind. Their unchosen lives are far more rife with harassment, bullying, systemic discrimination, and intergenerational trauma. Their chosen deaths are equally tragic, and far more numerous.

For example, currently in Canada, Indigenous Peoples have much higher rates of suicide than non-Indigenous people — Inuit 6.5 times higher, First Nations 3.7 times higher, and Métis 2.7 times higher (Vital Statistics of the Canadian Mortality Database). Beyond suicide rates, as a measure of the general quality of life, the life expectancy of Indigenous Peoples is much less than non-Indigenous peoples — Inuit 11.3 years less, First Nations 9.3 years less, and Métis 4.8 years less (Indigenous Services Canada Report to Parliament, 2020).

But we only hear stories about and lionize the relatively privileged Bilksztos of our world, and some so inclined use them to make their ideological contentions, however unconvincingly. Perhaps it would be more instructive and beneficial to follow Durkheim’s lead and respond to broader social facts than to use a preferred case, however effectively disturbing and regrettable it is.

But of course, for those committed to railing against being “woke,” acknowledging social facts would be inconsistent with their characteristic practice of ignoring them. Yet the inconvenient truth is that being unawakened and uncaring has proven far more “deadly” for far longer in Canadian history.

As the saying goes, when directing the query “Is it ignorance or apathy?” to the unawakened, their reply is seemingly “We don’t know and we don’t care.”

Dennis Hiebert teaches in the department of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba.