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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.

Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.

Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.

It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology... Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.

In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.

On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Pretty sure I agree with you. May I request a reading list / articles / blogs that have helped you form this.

Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes

  • "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
  • A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
  • Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
  • this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
  • Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
  • Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
  • William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.

Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that

  1. Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
  2. All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
  3. As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
  4. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
  5. Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
  6. The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.

I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:

  1. Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
  2. People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
  3. None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
  4. We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
  5. The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
  6. Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.

Have you read any of Alasdair MacIntyre?

I'm particularly reminded of his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. I haven't read all of it, but the point you highlighted about different visions of morality and rationality coheres rather nicely with what I understand to be his views.

Truth, in the sense of material factuality is indeed sacred, but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism.

I can't put my finger on it, but this just seems wrong somehow. It feels to me like moral uprightness and artistic beauty are sacred because they cohere with truth -- not necessarily bare "material factuality" but "reality as it really is," "existence as it really is," "humans as they really are." The strongest claims for moral uprightness are always undergirded by an appeal to things being in line with what they really are. It was decidedly not the enlightenment thinkers who synthesized the concept of natural law, nor was it them who developed a teleological approach to ethics.

I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.

I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:

  1. The denotation of "truth", most strongly suggested by the use of the word, is material factuality.
  2. "Truth", whatever it is, is irreducibly sacred, if not the fountainhead of sanctity itself (as when Jesus said "I am the truth, the way and the life).

In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.

In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

I would not actually renounce that material factuality is part of truth, nor would I hold that material factuality lacks sanctity. But rather, by describing "bare material factuality," I was describing facts without reference to what we're actually supposed to do with them. You need both, or there is no sanctity.

While material factuality taken too far leads to nihilism (because it separates facts from values), truth-as-non-concealment taken too far leads to relativism (because it separates values from facts). My view would be that material factuality is sacred when tied in with the proper disposition towards factuality and with the larger ontological questions of what reality is. It is sacred to seek the truth, and it is even more sacred to find it. But moreover, the sacredness is applied to the sum total of things and experiences; it's reality that is sacred, sanity that is sacred.

Jesus was indeed describing himself as the full and unconcealed revelation of God, but it is only because that revelation points to something really real, factually real, actually real, that this matters. It would mean precious little for Jesus to be the unconcealed revelation of something that does not correspond to reality. That's not Christianity as the New Testament understands it. It is precisely that his audience believed in the factual existence of God that his claim to be the revelation of God meant anything to them, whether for good or for ill.

Put simply, I think the dichotomy between truth-as-factual-correspondance and truth-as-disposition is a false one, and frankly I see it as a means to smuggle in the epistemological nihilism of Postmodernism. Every discussion I read about the topic sounds like a thousand words saying nothing. There is a reality, and there is a means of humans reaching closer correspondence to it; this is not an enlightenment theory but one that is necessary for human existence in general, anything else also leads to nihilism. It beggars belief to state that when Plato or Aristotle wrote long discourses about the nature of justice or logical deduction, that they did not intend their views to approach material factuality. Whence else cometh the metaphor of the cave?

My disagreements with the Enlightenment have precious little to do with such a dichotomy, and everything to do with their intellectual overconfidence (the "self-evident" phrasing you cited) and limitation of the means of reaching an understanding of material factuality ("according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics"). That doesn't mean the tools of science and mathematics are useless in reaching truth, just that they're limited, and cannot at times approach the value of a good story or a compelling narrative in stating and revealing the truth of things within their purview, like human social relations.

This is what I am talking about when I am referring to the religious "gish gallop" style of operation. This whole screed could have been done in 3 sentences.

  • -17

If it's any consolation to you, I had already seen your post on religious "gish gallops" but didn't think much of it. As soon as I had noticed Nelson's long post (and I admit I did recognize his name) and the long reply, and skimming the posts showed certain words, I immediately thought, "hey this is like one of those religious posts that guy was talking about."

(Personally I think I got bored of the CW thread because all that's been said has been said, to a first approximation)

Actually, could you do that (Do the comment in three sentences)? I'd be impressed. It doesn't need to get quite everything, but the gist.

I don't think it's really a gish-gallop, as those make too many points to reasonably address. You're saying it's not dense, so that's just making a few points repeatedly or slowly. That's not a gish-gallop.

Anyway, here's a (brief) case for Christianity, that might even seem rational from a secular, moral-free perspective, at least if you're motivated sufficiently highly by reason and argumentation:

  1. Pascal's wager seems to require that we give up everything to avoid infinite harms and seek infinite goods, if we are to do what is in our own interest. That is, it is instrumentally rational to do so.
  2. It's hard to get infinites accessible to you assuming that atheistic, supernatural-free, no-other-big-surprises model of the world is right.
  3. So you're best off if you bet everything on that being wrong, regardless of how unlikely you think it is.
  4. We need some way to know what's beneficial with regard to infinites, if we are to act.
  5. We don't have any more likely way to know things about infinite rewards accessible to humans than through purported supernatural revelation.
  6. Religions are the most likely sources of revelation of that variety.
  7. Large religions are more likely to be an authentic divine revelation, if God has an interest in giving humans knowledge (which, given that we're assuming divine revelation already, is probably fairly likely). So large religions are the most likely.
  8. Abrahamic religions are the only large religions offering infinite rewards, or escape from infinite torment.
  9. Judaism, in its prescriptions for gentiles, requires fairly little, so you get that one nearly for free, so the main consideration is Christianity vs. Islam. At least, if the rabbis got that right.
  10. And then, Christianity is more likely, as it seems more likely likely to be genuinely new revelation (e.g. attestation of a resurrection from the dead by 500 witnesses seems kind of new) whereas Islam seems to be cribbing off of and trusting Christianity, and grants that Jesus is a prophet, so then, if you were Muslim, you'd have to justify, why Christianity is actually false when the Quran seems to say it's not.
  11. You should be a Christian, if you want what's best for you.

Step 10 is what currently seem sketchiest to me; I'm not too familiar with Islam, unfortunately.

I don't expect you to care about arguments enough to do this (but not doing so is a really low expected value move on your part, if I'm right), but I do think this is fairly defensible, and I think you're irrational insofar as you don't act accordingly.

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What exactly have you contributed to the discussion here?

We have Nazis and Holocaust Deniers and white nationalists and pedophiles and Repeal the 19th (and the 13th and 14th...) party members here, and people who really really fucking do not like them manage to refrain from posting "You suck and your arguments are bad" every time they post.

So far, this is not the "mind-blowing" politeness you promised, and this is about your last warning because I'm sick of seeing these low-effort potshots in the queue just because you can't control yourself.

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I'll accept a ban for this if need be, but this type of comment from this specific user is getting really old. It's near-constant, disdainful, antagonistic, and never changes, and never gets punished. We get that you don't like religious people, but nothing in your above characterization is remotely reasonable, fair, or calculated to lead to any useful discussion of the topic.

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