ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2d ago
If I could, I'd like to take a rain check on this. I have an effort post in the works, and I think it's going to include this (at this moment, there is a minor chance that a narrow component of this will get edited out of that one and pushed further, so please remind me if it does).
In the meantime, here are a few comments/chains which contain some elements.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Yeah, it was brought up pretty much immediately in the prior (linked) discussion. I haven't read it, so I don't have much to add besides that it generated a little bit of discussion last time, and I wasn't strongly persuaded either way from what I saw. I'll probably just have to read it sometime to see if I find it or parts of it convincing.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
I'm not really following. Sure, "Science" has been the calling card for many a scientismist for quite a long time, core to their being as atheists. One question is whether this is truly "Christian heresy", but all these atheists have, indeed, been around for a long time. Plenty stretching back to antiquity and in non-Christian societies.
Then, within this group of scientism atheists, there are remaining questions. The standard "big four" being epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. I think we're mostly skipping the squabbles on the first two, as I think you're focusing on the latter two (ethics as "correct Just Being A Decent Human Being behavior" and politics is called out by name). These have, indeed, been tough questions for atheist sects for a long time. I've observed plenty that The Ethics was always a sore spot for Internet Atheism; they just couldn't figure it out, and they ran off in a bunch of different directions with mutually-contradictory sects, some trying to prop up some form of "science-based" "objective" version and others often running headlong into naive meta-ethical relativism. Interestingly, you see both forms in Wokism, depending on how hard you scratch and how far up the priesthood you inquire.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't note that even more recently, we're seeing the anti-woke atheist Counter Reformation still grasping with these problems, thinking that they're going to get game theory to do their work for them. I've noted before that most of these attempts misunderstand the basics of game theory, and you can see by their actions that the Wokists actually understand some elements of game theory better than their opposing sect.
I think the TL;DR is that you're probably just mistaking what they're doing as replacements for specific Christian things, whereas it's more that the pieces you've described are just versions of Ethics/Politics. They were all already atheists, and then they split sects depending on how they wanted to build Ethics/Politics, where in these topics, Scott points out that hamartiology turns out to be important. This is unsurprising, since so many atheists think that they've grasped the Problem of Evil and think that it's a big deal for them. Hamartiology is pretty naturally paired with it.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
It is all the abstracted christian heretical sect
As I wrote before:
That's [wokism as Christian heresy] an interesting claim, considering that it came significantly out of atheism. E.g.:
Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.
I'm pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that may have undergirded some of the trend, one would find a pool of Christian heretics, either. I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim) and that Wokism is just atheist heresy, blink and imagine some form of transitive property, you might be able to think that Wokism is just Christian heresy.
The last time, it seemed like most of the response was to actually entertain the idea that atheism is just Christian heresy rather than contest that Wokism was just atheist heresy. There was some discussion on whether or not that was justifiable, but no real discussion on whether any sort of transitive property could be used to make Wokism a Christian heresy through the intermediary of atheism.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
In theory "we" the stockholders could cut their CEO's pay
This seems like something that "we" the stockholders can do. There are stockholder votes. Moreover, if "we" the stockholders "decide that a CEO is just too expensive", then "we" the stockholders can sell (or even short) the stock. No need to be organized about it, either. It's more likely that you just find yourself in a situation where many other stockholders disagree with you, and so you are not, in fact, a "we" that has "decided". You just "decided" on your own and want to imagine that you have a "we". You might even be upset at the fact that you don't have a "we", and so come up with things like....
or "we" as voters could pass a law limiting all CEO pay
And here is the rub that I figured you were getting at. What does the general population of voters have to do with it? Should the general population vote to "decide" that some company's investments in AI are "just too expensive"? How about the bill they pay for janitorial services? "Just too expensive". Or anything else? Why should it be across the board? A CEO could be massively "just too expensive" for Starbucks, but downright cheap for another company. You'll probably screw up both cases with a naive law like this.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Surely there should be some limit where we decide that a CEO is just too expensive, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in corporate America to limit it.
Who's "we"? What does this "we" have to do with it? What would it mean for this "we" to "decide"?
I can certainly think of mechanisms in corporate America by which individuals can "decide" that they think a company is wasting money on a CEO and take actions based on that decision. If enough of them do, then I guess maybe one could call that group a "we", and the results can range from simply insulating that "we" from any negative consequences to providing a signal to directly causing a change.
I don't know that I would. But I think that's kind of not my point. My point is more that I saw the reasoning as being, "Look at these people, having an Ethics and Politics; that's Christian!" (Yes, that's a simplified caricature.) I don't think that qualifies it as being a "Christian heretical sect".
In general, I should probably make an effort post on what it would be to be a "______ heretical sect". Tentatively, I would expect that one would find some folks in that sect writing within the context of the tradition that they are being heretical from. I think it likely that you would find them claiming that what they are doing is that tradition, while others in that tradition are saying that their work is actually heretical. I highly doubt that if we go look at the folks who developed the frameworks for wokism and the like, we will find them writing, "Jesus Christ is our Lord; we are doing our best to follow Him as we find guidance in the bible. Here are the parts of the bible that support our woke doctrines and guide our sect."
There may be other ways to argue that folks are a "______ heretical sect"; thus the need for a larger effortpost. But that would be, I think, the top-tier type of evidence.
I think you put a lot of stock in the universalist axis, and I don't think it's that load-bearing. Again, it's a bit of a superficial relation. Not quite "Hitler was a vegetarian", but yeah, I think we can find a range of views on the universalist axis across all sorts of traditions.
Oh boy. This one takes a whole lot more actual theology, but I'm not really sure how it's germane to the question at hand of the provenance of wokism.
This is a within-atheists fight between sects, which I wrote about:
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