I. Certitude as a Cross-Ideological Poison

In the modern culture war, the most dangerous weapon isn’t censorship or cancellation—it is certainty. Certainty that your worldview is the only legitimate one. Certainty that dissent equals harm. Certainty that debate is violence. This mindset—what I’ve previously called sociognostic certainty—is most visible in the ideological left, but it is increasingly mirrored on the right.

The woke movement often silences critics not through reasoned rebuttal, but through moral accusation: you’re not just wrong—you’re a racist, bigot, or transphobe. But as anti-woke voices grow louder, many fall into the same trap: purity tests, denunciations, and rhetorical gatekeeping in reverse. The danger isn’t just that woke ideology dominates—it’s that we become it while resisting.

We’ve seen this before. The New Atheist movement began as a defense of rationality and open inquiry. But its leading voices soon traded in dialogue for dogma, responding to disagreement with sneers and smug certitude. It became a mirror image of the religious authoritarianism it once critiqued.

So how do we fight the woke juggernaut without turning into zealots ourselves? The answer lies in rediscovering the epistemic foundations of liberal democracy: open-ended inquiry, equal participation, and structured disagreement. These norms are what thinkers like Jonathan Rauch, Karl Popper, John Stuart Mill, Jonathan Haidt, and James Lindsay have defended—often against powerful ideological tides.

II. Liberal Science and the Culture of Disagreement

In Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch identifies two rules at the heart of a liberal society’s truth-seeking tradition:

  1. No one gets the final say.

    “Every idea is open to challenge, no matter how sacred or widely accepted.”

  2. No one gets to say who may speak.

    “Everyone has the right to participate in the conversation. There are no gatekeepers of legitimacy.”

Rauch calls this “liberal science”—a decentralized process that evolves through open critique and trial-and-error. “The liberal regime is the only one ever devised that systematically seeks out and corrects its own errors,” he writes. It is a system designed for humility.

This insight builds on Karl Popper’s concept of falsification: that scientific progress happens not by proving ideas right, but by exposing them to the possibility of being wrong. Popper warned that ideologies insulated from criticism drift toward totalitarianism. Liberal societies flourish not by avoiding mistakes, but by remaining willing to correct them.

III. Why These Norms Are Being Abandoned

Woke ideology, rooted in the practice of consciousness-raising, assumes that those who have not been “awakened” are epistemically and morally inferior. This produces what James Lindsay has described as “a knowledge regime based on belief, not inquiry.” It assumes that disagreement is not just misguided, but oppressive.

As Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose write in Cynical Theories, “Woke ideology doesn’t merely assert ideas—it positions itself as the one true way of seeing the world. It replaces knowledge with belief and inquiry with obedience.”

This ideology treats opposition as evidence of guilt. White Fragility teaches that resisting anti-racist training proves one’s racism. Ibram X. Kendi insists neutrality is impossible: “You’re either a racist or an antiracist.” These are not empirical frameworks. They are gnostic in character—immune to criticism and uninterested in falsifiability.

But the anti-woke response is often no better. The populist right, with its own culture-war crusades and purity tests, increasingly mirrors the very forces it claims to fight. Declarations of moral emergency are replacing liberal norms of debate.

In Canada, we’ve seen this from both ends. When the University of British Columbia postponed a speech by philosopher Mark Mercer on academic freedom, critics called it “institutional cowardice,” yet some of those same critics support political interference in other academic expressions. Meanwhile, psychologist Jordan Peterson’s ongoing regulatory battles with the College of Psychologists of Ontario highlight a broader cultural breakdown in tolerating dissent—no matter the direction it flows.

As Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Coddling of the American Mind: “When we teach students that their feelings are always right, and that disagreement equals danger, we do not prepare them for citizenship in a pluralistic society—we prepare them for life in a war zone.”

IV. The Classical Liberal Antidote

To escape the cycle of tribal certainty, we must return to the liberal framework that allows for conflict without coercion.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill made a timeless argument: suppressing even false opinions robs humanity of the “collision of ideas” that refines our understanding. “He who knows only his own side of the case,” Mill warned, “knows little of that.”

Rauch extends this into our age of information: “Liberal science does not protect feelings. It protects the process by which we challenge claims and revise beliefs.”

This is not about defending speech merely for its own sake. It is about preserving a culture of mutual correction. That means:

  • Tolerating speech we disagree with, not because we approve of it, but because suppressing it corrodes our capacity for self-correction.
  • Engaging rather than excommunicating, even when our interlocutors are wrong or offensive.
  • Resisting the tribal call to certainty, even when we feel most justified in wielding it.

To do this, we need courage—not the moral grandstanding of cancel culture, but the intellectual humility of listening, debating, and sometimes losing the argument.

V. Conclusion: How to Win Without Destroying What We’re Defending

If we truly want to defeat woke ideology—or any ideology that claims moral and epistemic supremacy—we must do more than oppose it. We must model a better way.

That means rejecting the tools of coercion, purification, and outrage. It means embracing fallibility, tolerating disagreement, and recommitting to open inquiry as a civic virtue.

We won’t always win the argument. But we can keep the argument alive. That is the foundation of liberal society—not that it always gets things right, but that it remains willing to be wrong.

Lose that, and we don’t just lose to the woke. We lose the very civilization we’re trying to save.

References

  • Rauch, J. (1993). Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. University of Chicago Press.
  • Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge.
  • Mill, J.S. (1859). On Liberty. [Various editions].
  • Lindsay, J. & Pluckrose, H. (2020). Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Pitchstone Publishing.
  • Haidt, J., & Lukianoff, G. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind. Penguin Books.
  • DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility. Beacon Press.
  • Kendi, I.X. (2019). How to Be an Antiracist. One World.