When I first heard the term, ‘woke’, I had an immediate sense of cognitive dissonance. Both the tone and the context were condemnatory. It reminded me, bizarrely enough, of my physics education. As Eddington famously said, albeit in the context of thermodynamics, if you are woke, ‘I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.’Yet the word itself seemed to hold only the most positive of connotations: I have awoken; it was as if I were asleep, but now I am awake, I can finally see; the scales have fallen from my eyes.

The two didn’t fit. Perhaps generation xyz had once more bungled their disinvention of the once great English language.I am woke, or at least I hope I am. It seems to me that a member of the political Left cannot survive socially in that world if you are otherwise, and, despite the blood-letting of my initial posts, I have not turned my back on that world.

Far from it. I can remember clearly a time when I was not woke, when, growing up in the fifties in small town Wales, there were restrictive expectations for men and women, while those of other cultures and colours were discussed with the emotional and cognitive distance you might expect.

Fortunately, I have always had an open mind, or so it seems from my inside view. I have always taken people as they come. I have always had friends who are better off than me and significantly worse off, that are women and gay, that are ethnically diverse, that are noticeably younger and older, though the last of these has been diminished by time and loss.

When I have been a counting agent, I have been just as interested to chat to those of other political persuasions as to my own team.I love especially to chat to Greens, while never being tempted to affiliate. At one count, having been reproached for this dalliance, I went for a natter with the UKIP group instead. Also charming people, though that nomenclature dates the event somewhat. It seemed perverse to me that each grouping is so insular. Isn’t it by definition too late for any indiscretion to influence the result?

This behaviour especially puzzles me for the Left, since we challenge that tribalism in wider society.In the 1960s, I was shocked by the dearth of women in engineering, my first degree-level course. By the seventies, I was in awareness groups in Birmingham when the national Women’s Liberation Movement conference came to town.

Three thousand attendees all but overwhelmed the venue, the conference and the concept, and it was in consequence the last of the series. I was one of those who literally manned the crèche.So what is woke? For me, it is the awareness of inequality. As a while male, it is not something that is constantly slapping me in the face like the wet fish in the Monty Python sketch.

For me there were no ‘whites only’ bathrooms, no career restrictions, no negative stereotyping in my minor dealings with law enforcement, no physical impediments to entering shops and offices, no rape, no lynchings. Awareness required intent, effort and involvement, and as it turned out, a lot of hugging.Woke would seem to be an obvious force for good. The fact that it isn’t obvious has a great many undesirable social consequences, not least the recent race riots. The reason that it isn’t is also of intellectual interest.

My start point is the controversial socio-biologist E.O. Wilson, who studied ants.Wilson observed that individual ants will sacrifice their own lives for the benefit of the colony, for example by battling invading termites and forming a bridge across a stream.

He considered that this altruism was clearly a part of the ants’ genetic make-up and applied his thinking to humans.Modern theory – and I’m not sure how universally this viewpoint is held – suggests that altruism has a benefit to the species and therefore becomes established in the gene pool.

It is an evolutionary justification of my own instincts, but there is a twist. In socio-biology, it is suggested that too much altruism in a group will lead to it being taken advantage of by a more selfish one, and eventually dying out as a consequence. You can very easily get into trouble by advocating this position, as Wilson did, as the concepts and arguments are very close to those of the rioters!

While I will continue to advocate for more altruism rather than less, some will point to the remarkable resistance of Ukraine as evidence of the need in a society for killers as well as carers. More universally, gamesmanship in sport, also called cheating, is widely supported. We have large numbers of heroes that are competitive and single minded, and smaller numbers that are thoughtful and nuanced. Which is to say, it’s complicated.Nevertheless, there is joy in caring and in being woke, so I hope that I am.