I fear that my dogs are becoming woke.
Once red in tooth and claw, you could point to anything sweet, small, furry and with a functioning pulse out on the lawn, and they would be half way across the garden after it before you had even finished opening the kitchen door. It’s what apex predators do. Except the bit about them never catching anything. Obviously, real apex predators wouldn’t last long on this basis.
But the long, wet winter seems to have got to them, and I now see them dreamily watching squirrels and pheasants stroll across the grass unchallenged. The essence of their argument seems to be that said squirrel has as much right to be here as they do, and that, just because other dogs chase said pheasant, they themselves were put on earth for higher things than all this. Besides, the weather has made them bone idle.
Like I say, I fear they are becoming woke.
By a distance, the best definition of ‘wokeness’ I have yet come across is Gavin Haynes’, in today’s Unherd essay. He calls it a ‘purity spiral’.
‘A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy……a bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power. But while a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is not about morality. It’s about purity — a very different concept. Morality doesn’t need to exist with reference to anything other than itself. Purity, on the other hand, is an inherently relative value — the game is always one of purer-than-thou.’ You can read the whole article and learn a lot more from him than you will from me.
How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral
But it gets worse.
There is a lodge house that we walk past on the daily dog walk, which has no less than six Jack Russell terriers on its payroll, all of whom are up for a scrap, and regarding whom Millie and Boris’ greatest pleasure has traditionally been to race up and down outside their fenced in garden, shouting unpleasantnesses and generally behaving like a canine version of David Warner. The fence ensures that they rarely come to blows, so it has become part of the architecture of a pleasant stroll to watch it all happen.
These days, they’ve even closed down that particular avenue of pleasure, having taken to trotting by without a sideways glance or the faintest guttural snarl on their lips. To be honest, it’s not what we had in mind when we equipped ourselves with terriers all those years ago.
Those who remember Paddy will know what I mean. Paddy came from a long line of inbred Glen of Imaal Terriers, and saw her role on earth to rid it of the burden of other dogs, particularly decorative ones and those, like whippets, with spindly legs. She acquired such a reputation during her time that the vet, even on routine visits, would offer to put her down ‘for the sake of good order’. Then she went blind and that was that with the bad behaviour.
For my own part, I maybe try to make things over-simple. My parents taught me to try to be polite and, within reason, sensitive. So when I see Nigel Farage taunting the EU parliament with his flag-waving childish final ‘speech’, I squirm. Equally, when I see two privileged undergraduates taunting a British Legion collector for ‘glorifying war’, I squirm, too. As I do when a cocky nineteen-year old calls for a statue to be pulled down, or anyone prefaces a sentence with the dread ‘I’m not a racist, but….’. It strikes me that social media has given rise to a culture of ‘unchecked moral outbidding’, and all for no good reason. Not much depresses me about this wonderful world, funnily enough, but the idea that we’ve all forgotten how to dare to be wrong nicely, does.
Robustness, that’s the other thing my folks were big on, the fine art of getting over it.
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