Ron Desantis Does Not Know What a Definition is
He hates “woke” but has no idea what it means
Governor of Florida and GOP presidential candidate, Ron Desantis, has declared a “war on woke” and brags that his state is a place where “woke goes to die.”
What does this mean? Well, in practice the war-on-woke means the banning of teaching black history in public schools and universities, outlawing of drag shows, and laws that permit doctors to refuse to treat patients who are gay or are perceived to be gay. But if any of this is to be justified on the grounds of combating woke-ness, we need a definition of “woke.” Otherwise it is a meaningless term used to label any and all targets of right-wing fear or disdain.
Fortunately, Desantis was given an opportunity to define the term a couple of weeks ago when questioned by NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns on this very point. Unfortunately, he failed to give any meaningful definition whatsoever while also demonstrating that he does not know what a definition is.
Here is a full quote of Desantis’s answer:
Look, we know what woke is, it’s a form of cultural Marxism. It’s about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics, and it’s basically a war on the truth. And as that has infected institutions, and it has corrupted institutions [sic]. So, you’ve got to be willing to fight the woke, we’ve done that in Florida, and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die
So let us look at the first definition. “Woke” = a form of cultural Marxism. Anyone who knows anything about the work of Karl Marx knows that “cultural Marxism” is non-sense. First off, Marxism is an economic theory. It is concerned with production, commodities, labor, exchange, property rights, wages, and markets. It is not concerned with culture, which for Marx is epiphenomena.
According to Marx, everything that falls under the broad category of “culture” — including fashion, art, entertainment, customs, religion, political doctrines, law, social mores, public opinion, values, role expectations, and more — are merely a reflection of the material conditions of society. How we as a society think and feel (culture) is determined by the concrete facts of how we live our lives (material conditions).
“Cultural Marxism” is thus as meaningless as “scientific religion” or “nutritional geometry.” Desantis was probably thinking along these lines: “Woke is the new right-wing bogeyman; and Marxism is the old right-wing bogeyman. So maybe they are connected.”
Ok. But that was not the only stab at a definition that Desantis offered. We also have this attempt: “woke” = a war on the truth. According to that definition, Republican politicians and conservative voters would be the wokest people in America. More than 60% of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, even though many of them admit that there is no evidence of any voter fraud. If Desantis is such a champion of truth, why hasn’t he publicly challenged the Big Lie?
There is still one definition left: “woke” = putting merit and achievement behind identity politics. This is the closest Desantis comes to something that looks like a definition of the term. But it is obviously inadequate because it bears no connection to his anti-woke policies. How do laws that prohibit teachers from saying that slavery was bad promote meritocracy? What does achievement have to do with denying medical treatment to gay people?
More importantly, the three definitions that Desantis gives —cultural Marxism, war on truth, and anti-meritocracy — bear no coherent relationship to each other. Does “woke” have three distinct meanings? Does it refer to three unrelated things? Or are these just different manifestations of some deeper concept?
Desantis seems to have no idea of what a definition is. But that leads to the question, What is a definition? And what makes one definition better than another? The obvious answer is that a definition is a statement of the meaning of a word or phrase. But that only leads to harder questions. What is meaning? And what determines the meaning of a word?
A better way to understand and evaluate definitions might be to start by distinguishing different kinds of definitions. The three most prominent kinds are 1) stipulative definitions, 2) lexical definitions, and 3) philosophical definitions.
A stipulative definition assigns a precise meaning to a new word, or to an already existing but overly vague word, for the purpose of argument or theoretical discourse. For instance, the word “force,” in ordinary English, refers to any kind of power or energy that can manifest change in the physical world. But in physics, “force” refers specifically to mass times acceleration. Stipluative definitions must be precise and unequivocal. Desantis’s attempt to define “woke” clearly fails on that measure.
In ordinary, non-theoretical discourse, definitions are typically of the lexical variety, i.e. dictionary definitions. Lexical definitions describe how competent speakers use the term. The definitions Desantis give for “woke” fail on this measure too. His proposed definitions do not even correctly describe how he himself uses the term. He says it means one thing (cultural Marxism, war on truth, and/or anti-meritocracy) but then uses it to refer to other, completely unrelated things (LGBTQ rights, free speech, legal equality).
Finally we come to conceptual analysis, or philosophical definition — the kind of definition that Socrates was obsessed with. This involves articulating more precisely the vague or intuitive conception we already have for the word. For example, we might know what the term “justice” means, but we have a hard time putting it into words. This is different from a lexical definition in that it is normative or evaluative. Lexical definitions merely describe how people actually use a word, even if that use is vague or incoherent. A conceptual analysis, by contrast, prescribes how we ought to use a word by clarifying the concept it designates.
Desantis’s definition of “woke” fails again on this measure. He seems to have no clear concept in mind when using the word. Nevertheless, his use of the term is not arbitrary; it is guided by a conceptual meaning, whether he realizes it or not.
So what is this proper definition of “woke”? Former Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, Peggy Quince, can answer that: “The term woke,” she explains, “simply means to be aware of and alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” (We might want to add “… and having some understanding that such prejudice and discrimination are unjust.”)
Not only does Quince’s definition capture the original use of the word— as opposed to how it has been willfully misused by conservatives — it also accurately portrays how Desantis himself uses it. His war-on-woke is nothing more than a war against equal rights, tolerance, and awareness of discrimination. Given the Orwellian Newspeak of Desantis’s definition of “woke,” it is also a war against language, reason, and justice.
