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Notes -
Thoughts on Shifting Definitions and Models of Religious Liberty
I've been thinking a lot lately about how the definition of religious liberty has morphed in my lifetime. The legal definition of religious liberty seems to be expanding outward legally, while at the same time the feeling of liberty of belief for actually existing religious people feels like it is shrinking. These expanding protections feel necessary to maintain a degree of freedom, rather than expanding it. But so much of it is that the model of public faith has changed. The two quotes above give me my model of what religious freedom was, and how the context has changed.
The framers envisioned a society of men with three hearts when it came to religious liberty: a false secular heart in their mouths in public spaces, a sectarian religious heart in their chests that they shared with their friends and family and coreligionists, and a real true heart of their beliefs that they were entitled to keep private and that no one could punish or penalize them for. One's true personal third heart might be atheist or animist or deist, one's sectarian second heart might be Catholic or Quaker, but everyone agreed their first public heart would be secular and nonsectarian and that no one would be punished for their other beliefs. This view of religious liberty envisioned a country in which men could hold any religion, in which men would collectively acknowledge a kayfabe of secularism in public so that no one creed predominated, while all men would hold a private religion together with their friends, and where all men had the right to believe or not believe anything in their own heart without punishment or censure.
This is distinct from other visions of religious liberty historically. Many empires allowed variants of a different kind of religious liberty, confessional liberty, freeing the second heart but restricting the first and the third. Groups had some right to practice their own religion privately (second heart), even allowed to punish their own apostates (third heart), but in public they had to acknowledge the divinity of the imperial faith (first heart) and had no freedom to contradict it.The Jews under Roman rule could practice their religion amongst themselves, but they must engage publicly in worshipping and acknowledging Caesar Augustus, because the Roman cults were the public religion Jews would always be second class citizens. At the same time, individual Jews like Jesus were subject to punishment under Jewish religious laws for their own private beliefs, there was no individual right to freedom of worship.
In America, Quakers and Babtists and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and even a few Jews and hey maybe a couple Muslims too all worked off the same system. None really believed in the secularism taught in schools but they would go along with it and agree with it., because everyone knew that everyone else went to church/synagogue/meeting on Sunday and learned something different that we agreed or disagreed about it in parts that weren't worth arguing. And it was understood that atheists were probably in those pews as well, but no one was going to launch an inquisition against them, that was their own business.
But in the 21st century, fewer and fewer Americans are actually operating on three different hearts. The rise of the "Nones" or secularism or wokism or successor ideology or whatever you want to call it, is the combination of the first and the second hearts. Max Lynn Stackhouse, when defining religion, called a religion "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted." Wokism meets all those criteria, while failing the Merriam-Webster definition of having supernatural elements (arguably). Because Wokes skirts the traditional lines of "religion" they are able to advocate everything they want in the public sphere, where traditional religions are restricted to only advocating half their beliefs. Wokism is, in many ways, a religious memetics that has evolved to avoid being restricted by traditional freedom of religion law. It offers answers to universal questions that feed the need for the sacred which all humans possess, while also being entirely within the rules of public discourse.
That is what Roberts, Barrett, Scalia (RIPower, King) are groping towards but not yet saying out loud. Traditional religions are fighting off the back foot, they aren't allowed to advocate in the public square because traditionally that was a method to avoid religious conflicts and persecutions. But Wokism has adapted to that circumstance, and now provides a full binding metaphysical moral vision in public that must be bowed to, Wokism seeks by monopolizing the first heart to destroy the freedom of the second and third hearts. For traditional religious pluralism to survive against this evolved competition, as the founders envisioned, we have to allow religions to fight on an even playing field. The religious freedom advocates on SCOTUS are groping towards this, but are restricted by their textual originalism, they are looking at the text of the constitution when what matters it that the circumstances have changed, the founder's vision is no longer possible when one competitor has adapted to the rules. So much like the NFL or MMA will change the rules of the game when a strategy emerges that ruins the spirit of the game, so freedom of religion must be changed to allow for the competition envisioned.
So how do we level the playing field, without shredding the constitution in ways we'll regret later when we live in Rick Santorum's Iran? I'm interested in all ideas. Here are a few I see.
School choice seems like step one. Religious schools already deliver better results at a lower cost, offering vouchers to as many students as want them would allow religious schooling to exist on a level playing field with secular schooling, and see who wins the Trans-Black-Lives-Matter School or the Sisters of Perpetual Ruler Snapping.
Restrict Atheist speech in the same way that religious speech is restricted. One should be just as loathe to say that there is no God as one is to say that there is only one. The traditional point of conflict is Biology class, which I think is a case of religions failing to adapt to facts, one can make evolution about the way the world works rather than how it started quite easily.
Restrict claims of religious faith to those who hold genuine religious beliefs more strictly. The phenomenon of fake religious trolling by atheist-Jews claiming that abortion-on-demand is a religious rite, or fakakta Satanists putting up statues of the Dark Lord because someone else put up one of the Ten Commandments, needs to reined in. How do we do that without instituting Santorum-Iran? I'm not sure.
Make and allow for more non-sectarian expressions of religious belief. I was an Eagle Scout, and for years the Chaplain's Aide of our troop, I've given tons of prayers in the name of a faux-Lenape "Great Spirit" that stood in for the member's of my troop for our personal beliefs in God, Allah, Jehovah, or Krishna. That worked, we all understood what was meant. How do we develop that secular stand-in that would work universally? Maybe we choose to honor Amerindian beliefs as a nation, invoke the Great Spirit? We should expect our presidents and our politicians to invoke a God, and assume everyone has the maturity to understand that it also means their God. Make America Believe Again.
ETA: Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. If you don't celebrate it, I recommend it. A feast of gratitude towards the almighty is a positive tradition, and should be exported.
There is another option: recognize that socialism is a religion, an old religion, that has changed little over the millennia, and obtain a legal victory establishing this view in the courts.
I think everyone interested in this subject should read The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich available on archive.org for free or otherwise on Amazon. Thanks to Ilforte for this reference.
Paging @07mk @sliders1234 @aaa : I was going to reply to your comments but posted here instead.
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No they didn't; states had individual established churches for years after ratification, and laws at the communal and state level (of course not mentioning the common extralegal clashes) targeted disfavored religions or sects at various times for two centuries.
We just need to face it - communal strife over questions of morality and cultural allegiance are deeply American, and probably endemic to our system and culture absent wild outliers like the post-WWII period
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Is there any evidence for this? Maybe I'm projecting my own libertarianism, but I don't think they had a very specific view of how everyone's beliefs worked or should work. They definitely believed that virtuous behavior was important (e.g. "A virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed." - Ben Franklin) but it seems less clear to me that they thought specific organized religion was important (as I recall, Thomas Jefferson was more or less a Deist).
I don't think I follow here. Freedom of speech protects religious statements and beliefs; you can go to public squares and proselytize, or make a religious radio show or TV show or website or discord server or whatever. Certainly many large institutions support "wokeism" but that's not a legal advantage. There are ongoing battles about to what extent secular concerns can override freedom to practice religion, like limitations on gatherings during COVID or if a religious organization can choose not to cover abortion in their health insurance. And... it seems like traditional religion has been doing ok? It's not perfect but it's certainly not completely 1 sided either.
So my question, what problem are you really trying to solve with this laundry list of suggestions? To what extent is religious speech currently restricted? How do you determine what is "genuine" religious belief? One of the major goals of the first Amendment was to prevent sectarian conflict, as had been common in Europe. Do you think that declaring a bunch of religions not to be valid is going to help with this?
A variety of founding fathers were openly deists. Jefferson and Madison for sure, probably Franklin, maybe Washington. It was a hip Enlightenment way to be Protestant-adjacent. These were men who spent a lot of time theorizing on the natural law.
I don’t get the impression the founders distinguished between the second and third hearts. They certainly didn’t put deism in the secret third.
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Let’s note what the first amendment says first:
So, 1) congress can’t establish religion or prohibit it. 2) a bunch of nonreligious rights.
The state being neutral doesn’t actually mean favoring traditional religions. I mean, it certainly can favor traditional religions(as a whole, it can’t pick and choose which ones) vs Marxism but about race and gender. All neutral means is that the state can’t ban religious exercises or pick one to elevate above the others. And it doesn’t mean the state can’t favor Christianity, or one particular sect of Christianity, in more subtle ways, either. You just can’t have an official state church or a religious test for public office.
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The three hearts are an interesting model. I’m not sure I buy that it was considered by the founders. They seemed pretty sincere about the sort of deism that underpinned “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” ten years before. That’s a universalist heart, not a secular one, and speaks to the fundamentally Christian context of the founders—who drew up a secular Constitution anyway. The second heart was never separated from the third.
I have some nitpicks about the main argument. Denominations were not keeping kayfabe in schools, both because America was wildly Protestant and because public schooling wasn’t remotely compulsory until the 20th century. Federalism in general suggested that the Constitution wasn’t going to touch local practice. The concept of a “successor ideology” is cribbing off Nietschze’s “slave morality,” except applied to things that reactionaries don’t like, which makes for a lousy category. Tarring atheism as a tool of the enemy easily predates wokism.
But the main problem is that you fail to justify why the Constitution ought to be crumpled to defend classic religion. Given that the line has always been drawn between the first and second hearts, intentionally strengthening the second is a terrible way to fight an ideology grounded in the first. Any gains are guaranteed to come with an erosion of that barrier. Is it any wonder that conservative justices are wary?
Christians and atheists alike are perfectly allowed to stand in the public square. They are not allowed to monopolize it, nor to wield public power against their competitors. (Yes, this means science teachers should not be evangelizing atheism. It does not mean the Satanic temple needs to be reined in.) A finger on the scale for generic Christianity is not closing a loophole. It is making it easier for victories in the first heart to dominate the others.
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The woke don't particularly care about litigating the existence of God, they care about hiring Black women as coders and transitioning kids. The existence of God isn't even in the top 10 things I'd love for wokies to shut up about. They don't need to argue the existence of God because they have their own god named The Science who must always be obeyed and must never be questioned.
This is too much of a boo outgroup post. 1 day ban for user.
Isn't this just obviously true?
Things can be true and still against the rules. Many of our rules are about courtesy and how you say things. For example, saying "I think someone is [insult]" is almost always true and almost always against the rules.
The part you quoted wasn't the worst part of the post, this was:
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I assume you mean that religions aren't allowed to advocate using government funds whereas "wokeism" is allowed to do so? That is true afaict, but quite distinct from saying religions aren't allowed to "advocate in the public square". Religions are 100% allowed to do that.
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This is an absurdly broad definition of "religion." Under this definition why isn't utilitarianism, for example, a religion? Libertarianism? Heck, philosophical liberalism? Kantianism? Virtue ethics? If your definition of "religion" is so broad that it contains not just those things thought of traditionally as religion but functionally any normative system I have to question the utility of your definition.
What about people whose sincerely held beliefs cannot be easily squared with the facts of how evolution works? Is school biology class required to be scrupulously neutral between "Animals evolved the way they did due to natural selection processes without any divine input", "Animals evolved the way they did in accordance with a plan set out by God", and "There's no such thing as evolution, all the evidence of it is a lie told by Satan"? And what about non-Christian or non-Abrahamic accounts of how animals and the world came to be? Are schools required to teach all of them equally?
I am in need of clarification. Do you think putting up statues of the Dark Lord or a religious rite for abortion on demand are things that cannot, due to their nature, be sincerely held religious beliefs or merely that no people who claim they are sincerely held beliefs are being truthful? If the former, what about them means they cannot be? Especially if "wokism" is a religion, entitled to all the protections you mention here. If the latter, can you give me the evidence you apparently have of insincerity by all the people espousing this belief?
More generally, do we really want courts (more) involved in the question of sincerity? It seems like this could easily go in a direction that would be against what you want. "We find defendant's beliefs that his religion requires him to avoid entanglements in gay weddings to be an insincere cover for his hate for gay people. Bake the cake bigot."
From my atheist perspective there is no such thing as a "non-sectarian" expression of religious belief. Their are perhaps ones that are more or less inclusive of various kinds of beliefs but there is no such thing as a religiously neutral expression of religious belief.
Welcome to the world of legal disputes when it comes to question of religion. For instance in 1961 during Torcaso v. Watkins the Supreme Court indeed defined religion very broadly in the famous footnote number eleven.
I like how James Lindsay thinks about religion as defined by its theology. The role of religious theology is to organize related epistemology, sociology, axiology and cosmology in one united view, it gives it a direction and coherence. In that sense theology incorporates ontological definitions of what is reality and what is human, it explores people's moral duties and ways to organize in society including in accordance to its system of knowledge. So for instance in Christianity the world and people were created by god, they have moral duty in accordance to god's laws as revealed in holy scripture, they should organize themselves in churches overseen by clergy that provide specific guidance for local policies and they should study scripture and god's creation for further expansion of knowledge of god and the world.
If I would take upon myself constructing similar "woke" theology, it could look as something like this: Our [social] reality is a social construct imposed by society that was is in turn created by man in his attempt to bring his ideas into practice - The Theory and Praxis dichotomy. Our current [social] reality is very imperfect as it was created by privileged people who posses privilege of certain class, race, sex, sexual orientation in their various intersections and who oppress the population in order to reproduce this imperfect society. Our moral duty is to criticize the current society, center the marginalized people who posses both slave and master side of the knowledge in order to promote Social Justice. In that sense the knowledge as well as other things needs to be looked upon through lenses of power relations of oppressor/oppressed. Our society should organize so that we create special departments to promote Social Justice and promote Social Justice in holistic approach ranging from schools to corporations in order to engage the population in the process of conscietization where everybody will able to engage in dialectical Theory/Praxis process where they act and then reflect upon results of their action through The Theory to perfect the society.
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This is one of the best post in a while. I’ve long thought wokeism was a proto-religion. I had not yet quite put together how it has these advantages over traditional religion in the public square and this broke the compromise that public schools were mostly neutral grounds.
The other is with freedom of religion and to requote:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; -- First Amendment to the US Constitution”
The power to tax is the power to destroy. Public schools have always been a problem for the “free exercise thereof” because public schools require tax dollars to fund them. Being that people do not have unlimited funds the taxes limit the ability of people to fund religious schools instead of public schools. As the US state has grown more areas have become “public” and their funding has come from the power to destroy. The extreme would be like communism where everything is “public” and all funding is thru the state and taxes are 100%. At that point there would be no private life to practice religion.
I started noticing that wokeism (or rather, SJW as it was called back then) was a religion back around 2015-2016, and since then I came to realize that its great innovation over other religions was in convincing its followers and proponents that it wasn't a religion. An Evangelical Christian might be just as passionate and devout in her beliefs as any idpol activist, but she would almost certainly not deny that she is religious and fighting for her religious beliefs, and acknowledging that fact necessarily places certain boundaries around her arguments. But a devout follower of idpol would likely refuse to acknowledge the religious nature of her beliefs and arguments and thus she would have no compunction about running roughshod over boundaries placed around religion in our society.
It's really an ingenious adaptation to an environment that has placed restrictions around how religious beliefs can affect public policy. By laundering religious beliefs this way, they get to enjoy the dogmatic fervor that religion is known for and the overt sociopolitical influence that religion is at least ostensibly restricted away from. It's having your cake and eating it too, and even though I didn't see progressivism going this way back in the 90s and 2000s, in retrospect, it's almost obvious.
This is new but it isn't an innovation. Scientology did the same, early on. They still tell their newcomers that it doesn't make transcendental claims and it is completely fine to be christian and a scientologist. I think one of their big mistakes was to claim to be a religion for tax exemption, they would have made more money if they had kept paying taxes.
If you include strong ideologies, then communism did the same more than a century ago.
I think the great innovation of SJWs is to deny its own existence, it doesn't give itself a name and any name that is ascribed to it gets rejected as inaccurate or as a slur.
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Your history is off. You may be basically Madison's and Jefferson's views and the policies of Virginia, but you are not describing the early republic as a whole. Individual states were allowed to have official state churches, Massachusetts had Congregationalism as established and taxpayer supported up until the 1830s. Religious tests for office (requiring office holders to sometimes be Christian, other times Protestant) lasted into the 20th century. School teachers could actively teach religion in class up until at least the middle of the 20th century. The original idea behind the First Amendment was simply as a truce between the religious sects that were dominant in various states, the states could intertwine religion and government but the federal government as a whole would not choose sides and enforce one particular sect upon the entire country.
But by the late 1800s state constitutions banning "sectarian support" was starting to be used as anti-Catholic cudgel. State support of protestantism was ok, because protestant was not sectarian, according to this logic, but Catholicism was sectarian so could not be taught in a local public school.
By the 1950s and 1960s the First Amendment became a cudgel to use against mixing of any Christianity with government at any level. The novel "incorporation doctrine" was used to apply the First Amendment down to even a local public school of a town of a 1,000 people. The federal government was being used to quash the religious choices of a local community which was the exact opposite the original intent. At the same time, the hegemonic ideology of the United States shed its last connections to Christianity, and thus mutated to make itself immune to First Amendment charges. This hegemonic ideology -- an ideology that has no name, and defies all attempts to be labeled, any time a name is placed on it it tries to shed its name -- gained tremendous state support not only financially but in law (Civil Rights law has morfed into becoming a speech code and ideological test for high-status employment).
This isn't new to "Wokism" -- I wrote a school paper 20 years ago about how "Civic Americanism" basically had almost all the properties of what we normally call religion. Moldbug wrote the same back in 2008 in his "How Dawkins Got Pwned Series" -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/ I'm sure other people noticed the phenomena before.
Who is "we"? The powers that be quite like being able to suppress the ideologies that traditionally code as religion, while being able to turbo-charge their own ideology with funding and legal support. They don't want a level playing field.
Fundamentally, I think the idea that religion could ever be separated from politics was an error. Politics at the end of the day depends on raw military power, and raw military power depends on people willing to risk their life for their God and their Sovereign. Politics also is all about making sure various groups and people get along, thus needs to teach a common morality, or at least a meta-morality. Politics is about forming durable group alliances -- which is what much of what religious ritual and sacrifice is about. "Religion" can only be separated from politics if you basically water down religion to just meaning a random grab-bag of stuffy old superstitions. Historically, and even in many contemporary societies, there isn't really an equivalent of our concept of "religion" that was separable from just life itself (in the same way American schools that teach "values" don't separate this value system as a separate category from just life itself.
My best take at defining religion that cuts reality at joints (and doesn't arbitrary distinguish between adhering to a "deity" versus "universal principles") is that a "religion is the binding agent of a non-kin or super-kin tribe." Things like creeds, stories, beliefs about ultimate meaning, rituals, sacrifice, are all components that help bind the group together and enable it to take collective action. I am unsure whether I would call "American hegemonic ideology" or "wokism" a religion, or a cancerous and metastatic mutant form of a religion, that is out-competing and strangling real religion.
I think the problem with this definition is that it defines garden variety civic nationalism as a religion. In theory, I could agree with that, but if we define my actions as a citizen (voting, jury duty, taxes to pay for social and defense spending) as a binding agent with my fellow Americans -- which I unironically believe, then the entire idea of separation of church and state is nonsensical to members of the Church of American Democracy.
Honestly I do somewhat agree with you, but I think it doesn't resolve the ambiguity of where "church" ends and "state" begins. I certainly don't see an obvious line of delineation despite wanting one to better define policy.
With excellent timing, a federal judge struck down Florida's anti-woke law while approvingly calling woke college professors "Priests of Democracy"
So I think you're probably right that no distinction between religion and ideology is possible.
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Yes. I believe that the "no establishment" clause has failed and no longer makes any sense. If it ever made sense, it was only in a historical context coming out of the post-reformation wars of religion, where a general truce between sects was desired. It made sense in an era where Christian or at least Abrahamic belief was assumed, the federal government had little role in education or ideology, and thus the First Amendment was merely the government not taking sides among Abrahamic sects. Ever since the rise of communism, fascism, liberalism, American civic liberalism, etc, and the main faultlines and fighting lines were among things that no longer coded as "religions" the First Amendment no longer makes sense.
Back in 2007 Moldbug bit the bullet and said that to really make a delineation that makes sense, you would need complete separation of state (ie, the organization with monopoly on force) and information -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/separation-of-information-and-security/ He later changed his mind in the opposite direction and basically accepted that control of information/ideology/religion is simply a fundamental property of sovereignty and cannot be split off. I have made the same intellectual journey myself and come to the same conclusion.
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This is a bullet that I bit a long time ago. The “religion vs. ideology” distinction is fake, and is a result of Enlightenment thinkers who believed, incorrectly, that humanity could rise above religion and replace it with something fundamentally different that would act as a coordination mechanism for society. I think that on a primal evolutionary level, anything that can function as a large-scale non-physically-coercive coordination mechanism for non-kin individuals is indistinguishable from a religion. Whether or not one decides to deploy discussion of transcendent/supernatural elements as a rhetorical device is irrelevant to the underlying structure of the coordination mechanism.
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I think you raise interesting points, and I agree with much of your perception of the "successor ideology" filling a religion-shaped void and your suggested prescription of reining it in under the same mechanisms that our society evolved to deal with plurality of traditional religion, but at the same time I bristle against your offhand conflation of all atheism and secularism with the successor ideology. This strikes me as wrong in both straightforward (I'm an atheist who is not woke) and implicational (there are major secularist countries that have not so far shown a tendency to evolve towards anything obviously shaped like Abrahamic religions at all, such as China, and in much of continental Europe the religion-shaped thing that grew to fill the void absent American influence was environmentalism, not racial wokeness) ways.
Moreover, it resembles another important instance where I've been under the impression that American right-wingers sabotage their persuasiveness by being unable to let go of old grudges, which compels them to argue that the new enemy is actually just a guise over an old ancestral enemy and if you had listened to them back then when they said the enemy must be eradicated then you wouldn't have this problem now - that instance being the insistence of labelling wokism with various versions of "Marxism" or "Leninism". To the yet-unpersuaded reader, that just winds up sounding like a barely-concealed "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have child labour uranium mines and totalitarian company towns", and this sounds like "the actual problem with BLM is that you aren't letting us have Jesus Camp where the creepy pastor beats kids with a switch for having impure thoughts".
This is an absolutely bizarre take, given that the actual academic, theoretical basis for the constellation of ideas popularly called wokeness is explicitly Marxist and was conceptualized by self-identified Marxists. These Marxists - who, again, are not subtle or covert about their Marxist analytics framework - then cultivated and recruited a legion of protégés and catspaws to populate a vast network of entities, both public- and private-sector, to institute this ideology on a mechanical policy level.
You can look up the Frankfurt School and its roots in Gramsci, or you can look up Paulo Freire (about whom I have previously spoken in this forum) and his profound and wide-reaching impact on modern “woke” education. You can look up Rudi Dutschke and his advocacy for a decentralized “march through the institutions” which was then implemented throughout North America and later Europe. These things are not difficult to research, and the only way these people’s explicit Marxist convictions and methods are not better-known is that they’re counting on people like you not to put in the effort of trying to learn about it.
It really seems like you don’t want to know about it. You have formed mental associations between anti-Marxism as an ideology on one hand, and your outgroup on the other hands. You’ve pattern-matched “hates Marxism and is vigilant about it” with “mustache-twirling villains and theocrats”, which is precisely what Marxists want you to do. They want you to continue to associate “socialism” with “lovely middle-class Sweden in the 80’s” instead of “Maoist Red Guards” and you seem to be perfectly comfortable with not seeking out the information that would undermine that association.
Wellllllll....it depends on how you do the intellectual history. If we're doing the 2015-move and blaming the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer et. al.) for this, then the theorizing is at least as much Freud as Marx, and the Marx that's left in there is a pale shade of the original; a double-distillate by way of Gramsci and Lukacs.
In fact, Frankfurt school critical theory had to fight for acceptance on the left in the 60s because it notably did away with the basic analytical assumptions that lay at the heart of standard Marxian analysis: first, that economic relations are prior to cultural or ideational ones, and second, that market production must necessarily destroy political domination of the proletariat through overproduction and repeated, escalatory crisis, from which the proletariat would arise victorious.
Without those two things, what they had left from the Marxian analytical tradition was...an over-developed theory of "classes" trapped in dialectical conflict by some quasi-Hegelian "historical process," a taste for describing that conflict in overwrought terms (though that might just have been the German romanticism in the metaphorical air), and a general dislike for modern capitalism (even as they had lost their foundational mechanism for criticizing it).
As you can see, there's not much substantive there; what's left is a general framework which got filled in through some mish-mash of Freud (see, e.g. Marcuse's Eros and Civilization), and a bric-a-brac of pet theories about the rise of Nazism focusing on culture, psychology, sociology, and sex to the exclusion of the analysis of political, legal, or economic structures (e.g. Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychosis of Fascism; Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, etc., but c.f. Neumann's Behemoth).
So yeah, there is a line between Marx and the intellectual movements that kickstarted modern wokism. But the Marxism is just part of the analytical framework, and not at all part of the substantive analysis. The vast majority of the problem lies in a lot of 20's and 30's-era anthropology and psychology work (and the weird, weird philosophical work that went along theorizing about the nature of social scientific research in the first place). Through all of this I'm mostly following Martin Jay's line in The Dialectical Imagination.
Of course, this sort of deep theory doesn't really shed much light on the actual current-day goals or practices of woke and woke-aligned movements and scholars. The whole question is kind of supercilious; when they're changing the APA guidelines to make anything other than immediate affirmation of any kid's self-proclaimed sex- and/or gender-changes tantamount to abuse, does it really matter whether they're doing it out of a Marxian view that capitalist production necessarily recapitulates itself in sexual domination, or a Freudian attempt to liberate pure Eros from the constraints of das Genitale? Either way, you still have to answer the question of what to do about it.
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This is the Moldbug fallacy A descends from B, therefore A is B, you don't like A therefore you must also not like B. Ideas are all interconnected if you applied this principle rigorously you could refute western thought all the way back to aristotle, the trick is picking an arbitrary place to stop.
Wokism does descend from marxism but in a sense it also represents disillusionment with it, with the failure of class consciousness to materialize in the west and with the fall of the URSS simultaneously. Marxism says little about race and gender and is very preoccupied with economic class; wokeism is basically the opposite, to the point where you can make a corporate friendly version of it that disregards class entirely. Marxism is, in principle, materialist, wokeism is not.
For this argument to be valid, the salient features of A do not actually carry over to B. You argue this:
...But this argument is based on a particular interpretation of which portions of Marxism are salient. Others disagree with that assessment, and dismissing their arguments out of hand is not a productive strategy for good-faith discussion.
Both Marxism and Wokeism are fundamentally revolutionary, and in a very similar way. The arguments they deploy have very similar shapes, make similar mistakes, are persuasive for similar reasons, appeal to similar groups, and result in similar failure modes and, it seems likely, final outcomes. The aim of both is to secure radical social change by fomenting class conflict. Specifics of the classes and their features and grievances do not seem terribly relevant to the question of how and why the ideologies operate.
To some extent, what we're talking about here is the difference between Marxism internally and externally. For a doctrinaire Marxist of some particular strain, I've no doubt that Wokeism is absolutely heretical bullshit. But I am not a Doctrinaire Marxist, and I in fact do not see how the doctrine is terribly relevant or important in any way to anything I care about, any more than an American Indian should care about the doctrinal disputes between Lutherans or Anglicans in the 1600s. With regards to how Marxism impacts me, there is no significant difference between the old version and the new version: they appeal to the same people, they're pushed by the same people, they attack the same important social structures in the same ways, and the arguments against them are more or less isomorphic. Pretending otherwise mainly seems to be an attempt to maintain the suppression of social antibodies to a monstrous ideology that should be exactly as taboo as literal swastika-and-sieg-heil naziism.
This is actually not true, but you'd barely know it because the actual Marxists are so weak and have had their theory so exploded and bypassed by time that it just doesn't make sense anymore. The Trotskyist 4th International was actually one of the first places to host major historians pushing back against NHJ's 1619 Project, and some of the most prominent contemporary Marxist economists like Adolph Reed have been vocal critics of the current cultural turn in left activism.
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Not similar at all. Aim of Marxism is indeed radical social change, while aim of wokeism is preserving society as it is, only with more rainbow flags and transgender toilets.
When Marxists get their way, billionaires are expropriated. When wokeists get their way, billionaires are richer and more secure than ever before.
Actually existing Indians well understood differences between European colonialists and played them for their advantage as they could.
Your attitude is more like of the most hardcore and dumbest Salafist Muslims of today:
"Christianity and Hinduism? It is all idolatry, the same pagan filth."
I do not get why boomer conservatives insist on pushing "Marxist" straightjacket on everything, why they insist calling "Marxist" people who know nothing about Marx and never claimed to be Marxist.
If you asked woke activists about Marx, 90% would answer "What is Marx?" and 10% would say "Fuck this white racist colonizer".
Is it their childhood programming that taught them that Marxism is the worst thing in the world, and all bad things must be Marxist?
You do not have to be "doctrinaire Marxist" to understand it - here is what one lifelong hardcore Christian fundamentalist anti communist fighter Gary Kilgore North has to say.
Cultural Marxism Is an Oxymoron
Ignore Anyone Who Says Marxism Is a Threat
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IMO the contention that the salient portion of Marxism is not economic class is a pretty contorted view of how marxism has been generally interpreted in the past 150 years.
They don't, communism appealed very much to the working class. You may not see this because communism was basically illegal in the US, but where it did exist the parties were staffed by working class people and that's where they received votes. Wokism main centers of power are journalism and HR.
What would that be? I don't know where you are going with this, but often people say "the family" so I'll pre-empt that. All strong ideologies "attack the family" to some degree:
in the 10 commandments, allegiance to the family comes after allegiance to God and to the Church
fascism followed suit, proclaiming allegiance to "God, country and the family" (Dio, patria, famiglia) in that order
Jesus says "For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother" as well as many others to the same effect
Scientology practices disconnection from anyone who is declared SP, including family members if necessary
Isolation from family members is a common cult technique
Maybe for you.
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I agree with your point but I think 'conservatives' and the like are correct in playing this association game for a different reason. In short it would be bio-leninism + high heritability of certain political ideas.
The fact that a person is a devout marxist isn't a coincidence most of the time. Depending on what type of marxist they are and why boils down to biology. They have brain chemistry that makes them like X more than Y. And 'conservatives', for a lack of a better term, like Y over X. So it's not about the academic intellectual tradition being a poisoned well, it's that the people who can stand to drink from it are different from you in ways so drastic that you can't trust anything they have to say. Everything that extends from their thought process, by dint of their divergence from you, is therefor most likely toxic to you and the things you care about.
The fact they were 'marxist' or something else is just a signal or a uniform of sorts that helps you mark them as being neurologically different from you.
You could also try to fit Jonathan Haidt's work, specifically 'The Righteous Mind', into this.
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Well said. This, above, is how DiAngelo came up with the term “white fragility”. She, being seemingly blind to economic class, could genuinely not understand why American workers would dislike their bosses requiring them to attend meetings where they were psychoanalyzed in front of their coworkers, with the penalty for not submitting themselves to her quackery being running afoul of HR in a country where affordable health insurance in bundled with employment.
Robin DiAngelo didn't come up with anything per se. She just published and popularized a very salient critique against white liberal/progressive/leftist inaction in the face of the enormous gaps between blacks and whites in the US. A critique that had been floating about in academia for a while. (It should come as no surprise that she cites Noel Ignatiev & friends a lot.)
Most people don't understand what the term "white fragility" means and what it's useful for. White Fragility is not just about skin color. It's about your stated beliefs + your skin color. To give an example, if you are unapologetically racist and white you are not fragile. But if you are white and believe yourself not to be racist? Well... Why aren't you helping the blacks more? From that point onward every word that exits your mouth is white fragility in action. Why do you think blacks are poorer? Have worse educational outcomes? Have worse jobs? Everything you say here that isn't explicitly racist is either white fragility or an invitation for DiAngelo to ask you why you aren't doing more to help. And every answer you give to that question that isn't 'Yes Mam' followed by extensive plans for action is white fragility in action.
Robin DiAngelo walks into institutions filled to the brim with white self-described anti-racists and tears them a new one for not actually being anti-racist. And she is right. A person who says they care about racism and all the gaps between blacks and whites but doesn't do anything about it is either a hypocrite or a liar. Why shouldn't a group full of self-described anti-racists be called out on their lack of action? Black people are literally dying whilst you fret over what is for lunch.
Robin DiAngelo isn't breaking any rules here. Why shouldn't people who say they care about matters of race and the oppression be forced into action? Why should the plight of one overprivileged fragile white person who loses their job and healthcare matter more than the plight of millions of black people? Why should their personal worries be allowed to act as a bulwark against real anti-racist action? Why should the free market system that ties jobs with healthcare be used as a rhetorical moral shield for white people when it has been used as a sword against black people for centuries?
Robin DiAnglo talks about why she named her book what she did because she needed a term and an explanation for why white people were getting upset when exposed to her nonsense. And she couldn’t grok that people go to work to pay their rent/mortgage and not to publicly interrogate their subconscious as it is portrayed to them by $6,000/hour grifter consultants. I’m 💯 sure the managerial/executive class at many companies does prattle on in an empty manner about EDI, but this loops right back around to the underlying class conflict EDI deprioritizes.
The Blocked and Reported pedants did an interview with someone who went through one of DiAngelo’s company’s sessions. She was a graphic designer who, for her job, made a poster for the Odyssey. It was a minimalist poster that had a ship on a white background with the familiar blue-and-while Meander pattern you find on paper coffee cups in 80s movies. DiAngelo’s consultants told her coworkers the ship was a subconscious manifestation of colonialism and the Meander was a subconscious manifestation of Nazi swastikas.
Normally, going around telling someone’s coworkers they’re a secret Nazi will land you in HR. But you’re supposed to thank an EDI consultant and not be upset if they do it?
All you’ve offered are the espoused goals of EDI consultants. But you exempt mention of their methods, which is why DiAngelo had to come up with an explanation about why she was reducing people to tears that eased her conscience while the consulting checks kept cashing. And it’s definitely a class issue when management subjects workers to this stuff as a PR move.
Nothing you say changes the fact that self-described anti-racists are sitting on their asses in positions of power doing nothing to help black people who have been suffering for centuries. Sorry but no one should care about the crocodile tears of white overprivileged liars and hypocrites when they are finally confronted with the reality of their being.
All you are doing is shifting the conversation away from the plight of blacks and instead focusing on the fact a privileged white person doesn't like being called what they are. If you don't believe black suffering matters stop pretending and get out of the way of progress. The free market, that white people love when it benefits them and helps them exploit others, is now finally, in the tiniest way possible, affecting the most privileged people on earth slightly negatively by comparison. Forgive me for not caring when this 'inconvenience' is contrasted with literal slavery.
I don’t care one way or the other what you do or don’t care about. But you’ll need to define “the most privileged people on Earth” more broadly than the the capital-owning class to make your point, which proves mine.
Also, what evidence do you have that even a simple majority of people subjected to bizarre EDI sessions are “self-described anti-racists”? Tons of not-online normies who go to work for a paycheck work for companies who do, on the other hand, have a C-suite willing to hire “self-described anti-racists” as consultants and officers to provide a bit of a prophylactic against potential discrimination lawsuits.
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Because people aren't being hypocrites for fun; they're being hypocrites because they're forced into it. Attacking hypocrites under these circumstances is just adding more force.
Forced at what stage?
If they are forced into identifying as anti-racist then they are just racist cowards. Why shouldn't we apply more force to racist cowards?
In any case it seems you are valuing the comfort of white inaction above the suffering, oppression and death of black victims.
That's like saying that if you have to be forced to obey the Patriot Act, you're a non-patriotic coward.
The demands that you have to follow in order to be an "anti-racist" and keep your job have little to do with actually being anti-racist.
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You are engaging in some degree of messenger-shooting here. I know all these things! My point is that most people associate socialism with middle-class Sweden in the '80s, and you are fighting an uphill battle trying to overturn the association. What is even your purpose in convincing people that actually socialism means DEI commissars, if not to make people who are against DEI fight to become less like '80s Sweden through the backdoor? Assuming the latter is not your goal, what would successfully rewriting the association gain you in the fight against DEI commissars that would offset the loss of would-be allies who are concerned about being bamboozled into torching their neighbourhood Vårdcentralen?
Uh what? I mean, I don't think the modern DEI initiatives are my first association with socialism either, but neither is Sweden.
My first association is the Soviet Union. After that is China, North Korea, and Cuba.
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So did communism and socialism and many other ideologies.
The key distinction is how they treat axioms. For all that they try to avoid talking about it, non-religious (the kind where you don't find someone espousing belief in deities or supernatural entities) ideologies cannot refuse the charge that their axioms are ultimately arbitrary. You can debate a communist and in theory, persuade them to some other view.
Religions, however, do not admit or accept this. As far as they are concerned, there is an objective moral standard and everyone is obligated to follow it. Here, you can only convince someone they are wrong about their beliefs to the extent they are either misinformed or inconsistent about their own ideology.
Here on Earth, the costs to a person to disavow their former ideology or religion are identical: social pariahdom from former friends, psychological pain caused by having to completely reassess very deeply-held views, etc. and people tend to grasp this quickly. Sometimes this is after they change their views and then run back because they can't bear the costs. But the cost to the religious believer is much higher, because religions often carry explicit warnings that if you turn from the faith, you will be subject to divine punishment in the form of Hell or something else. In the former's case, you're talking about infinite punishment.
This is why religion is a protected class and ideology/political beliefs are not. The former cannot be reasonably changed if you are a sincere believer, but political views can be.
There may be value in saying that political ideologies should be treated like a religion. But it would be another brick in the foundation which treats a man as not a rational human capable of making his own decisions. I don't think people necessarily want to lay that brick. It supports more than you assume.
You think Wokism doesn't have this feature?
As I said, it and other non-religious ideologies try to dodge the question, but they are ultimately relying on an axiom or axioms somewhere, and all of them are humanly chosen. I think they may try to hide the fact that human-chosen axioms require the bearer to be more humble about how certain they are, but a rational believer would recognize this and adjust accordingly. I don't think religion requires the same humility. Why would it, most of them tell you that you and everyone who agrees with you is correct on one of the most important questions of all time.
They can absolutely do this. The whole reason postmodernism and critical theory were invented was to get around having to defend anything properly. Wokism posits that blacks are holy. Push them on why this should be and you will eventually get an answer roughly equivalent to "God said so," plus they will be very upset.
Sure, if you want to be pedantic, then they can refuse to acknowledge what they're doing. I'd call them out as irrational at best and liars at worst. My point is that they don't have the ability, like religion, to claim that their morality is objectively true because a divine and superhuman being gave it to them.
This is an irrelevant point, one that I already addressed. Yes, it's true that they masquerade on this point as if they are religious in nature, but they fundamentally are not. They do not justify their beliefs with reference to God(s) for the most part, though you can certainly find religious progressives who one might argue are misled about what their own faith compels them to believe.
Equality and fairness are their gods.
This is meaningless and suggests you're more interested in scoring anti-woke points instead of actually grasping my argument. You know damn well they do not engage in worship of a god like Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam do.
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You have been posting a lot of naked assertions that consist of little more than weakman sneering.
You actually need to argue things here. You don't get to just assert them. You don't get to just wage culture war. You also need to be civil.
You've been warned about this before, and you're filling the mod queue with these sorts of low-effort "boo wokes, blacks bad," etc.
Heed this warning.
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No, it doesn’t. They will be very upset because you’re strawmanning.
Can you give any examples?
Yes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Lives_Matter_street_murals
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/okay-to-be-white-halifax-1.4887174
I promise this is not meant to be a low effort sneer. The treatment of these two slogans only makes sense if they are religious icons and heresy, respectively.
We make public statements, even murals, for things other than religious icons. Is New Deal art religious? Is everything funded by the National Endowment for the Arts?? I could see a case for the Lincoln memorial bordering on religious, but what about the Washington monument? The Capitol proper? These are big artistic projects explicitly symbolizing our culture—but they remain firmly in the realm of the secular.
The same applies for unappealing speech. It’s a much broader category than heresy. You could replace those posters with pornography, slander, even proselytizing and see a similar article. Offending/intriguing the public enough to get a news article does not require a religious schism.
Yeah, but ignoring the ideological significance of art for a second, people do not get nearly as upset when regular art (especially low effort stuff) is besmirched or even vandalized. Can you imagine the police investigating some tire marks on a crosswalk, were it not a religious symbol? The same thing has happened with BLM logos as well.
Consider that the slogan "black lives matter," was painted by the government (or sanctioned) in huge letters on countless prominent streets in America. Then consider that the nearly identical but less assertive "it's ok to be white" on 8x11 sheets of paper launched police investigations and news articles about how racists are among us.
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I don't know what this means. Who is doing the restricting? What is meant by "restrict" here?
It means the Christians can sue the government for violating the establishment clause when they believe it's doing something to establish humanism as the state religion.
Is this not possible?
They can sue, but they have no chance of winning, because humanism isn't a religion.
It seems what is needed then is not to reinterpret the establishment clause in an apparently incoherent way, but to add a new clause.
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Tell self appointed missionary, whether religious or secular, to shut up, no one likes unwanted preaching.
Ah, so a very mild restriction, and one that chiefly doesn't happen right down due to the decisions of people who are too meek to stand up against what they don't want at more or less zero cost (except perhaps an angry preacher).
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If you mean doing this by social pressure, a (very) soft version of this already exists in the form of "Atheism? lol, euphoric, fedora, reddit" style trolling.
I mean doing this by policy. It should be equally restricted to offer a secular answer to universal truths or sacred questions as to offer a faith based one.
Is this not already the case? I don't think it would be legal for say a public school to explicitly teach that there is no God. (Teaching evolution and the big bang theory is not the same. These are well supported scientific facts)
Probably true, but they can for example teach that homosexual sex is perfectly normal and desirable.
But that's neither a universal belief among atheists nor an exclusively non-religious belief, so it's not an example of atheist speech.
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Not OP but I think OP means something along the lines of the only answer the government could support/teach to a question like "where did the world come from?" would be something like "no one knows for sure, many people believe different things."
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