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Notes -
Past peak woke? Don't count on it
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. Jan 20, 2025.
1. The culture war
In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:
America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.
Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.
2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism
It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,
I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.
Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.
Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.
Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:
Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?
Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.
3. The constitution of the people
So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.
In every nation, at all times, the militant, tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].
Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.
Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?
To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If we do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If we then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is coming to us.
As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.
You write:
My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?
The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.
A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.
So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.
But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.
Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.
I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.
If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.
And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.
Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.
Thanks for this comment...its good to hear these perspectives.
You make a distinction between the medium and the message...but isn't the medium the message? Whether it be BLM and LGBT in 2010-2022 USA, the "woman question" and "serf's rights" in 1870s Russia, or the Jacobins in 1770s France; the superficial message may change, but the medium stays the same: the attainment of power through societal disruption, revolution, and chaos. It usually begins and ends in blood. In Dostoyevsky's Idiot and Demons there are conversations and confrontations in those books that could be ripped straight out of a 2020 struggle session.
But, if you must make a distinction between the two (and acknowledging that I am not the OP and he/she may have a different take): yes; I dislike both the medium and the message. I think racism is sub-optimal and is a "lesser" sin of envy, but not "abhorrent". Humans cannot have an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare because these things depend on other humans. Did Robinson Crusoe have a right to shelter and healthcare? (He did, as an aside, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). I think it is a moral imperative to restrict LGBTQ rights and acceptance (uh oh, there goes our shot at a pluralistic society).
In short, I fight both wokeness and extreme progressivism, if it is even possible to disambiguate the two.
To be more exact, NelsonRushton made that distinction, or in any case, affected to make it. I was questioning whether he really believed in it.
But if we define "wokeness" as the cancel-culture apparatus and associated phenomena, then it seems clear to me that they can be "disambiguated". Here I stand, living proof. The temptation of blood-soaked revolutions is one of mankind's greatest ethical pitfalls, but reducing all ideologies used by power-hungry revolutionaries to superficial excuses seems absurd. Taking the French Revolution, surely a majority of Americans would describe themselves as anti-monarchists, and that doesn't inevitably make them Robespierre's useful idiots.
My view is that any violent revolution can be hijacked by power-hungry sociopaths. This is a very good reason not to start violent revolutions, no matter how right you feel. But it is not a reason to unilaterally condemn or ignore any political or moral position that some people, at some point in history, have been tempted to start a revolution about. I should hope that things like the abolition of hereditary monarchies and the abolition of feudal serfdom are recognized by a majority of Americans today - indeed, by a majority of the developed world - as morally-justified causes. Their righteousness is precisely why they were able to generate mass popular support the nearest charismatic sociopaths found themselves motivated to redirect for their own ends. It has no bearing on the underlying question of right and wrong.
That, I never doubted. That is why you are in fact a right-winger. As a true liberal I do not begrudge you - or indeed Nelson! - the right to that opinion.
However, Nelson's rhetoric implied that he had special animus for the medium in and of itself, distinct from his dislike for progressives qua progressives. He wrote wrote of wokeness as a specific phenomenon which it was urgent to quell, while he is happy to live-and-let-live with non-'woke' progressives (who he explicitly believes needn't be "natural enemies" to conservatives "in a sane world").
The impetus of my post was as follows. If this truly represents Nelson's beliefs and priorities, then it seems to me that he could and should, for his own side's interest, enter into an alliance of convenience with principled progressives like myself in the war against runaway political-correctness/cancel-culture/"wokeness". Then we can slay the dread beast and go back to fighting each other civilly on the object-level questions of policy and morality. This is self-evidently the rational thing for both of us to do, particularly if, as Nelson also argued in the OP, most progressives aren't actually pro-"woke" but are just going along with it out of apathy and fear.
And yet - I observed - Nelson, and people like Nelson, seemingly can't stop themselves from letting their object-level disagreements with progressivism into arguments which they profess are only about the meta-level. Conclusion from this progressive: either
1- for the sake of a few incidental jabs which have no bearing on his overall argument, Nelson is stupidly discouraging us progressives from entering into an alliance that would be mutually satisfactory
or
2- he isn't really serious about this business of reserving special hatred for cancel culture and being willing to play fair with progressives who play fair in return.
If it's #1, people like Nelson should reconsider their argumentative strategy; if it's #2, they should stop lying. It's wrong. And serves no purpose in a place like the Motte where they would face no backlash for stating that they just hate progressivism itself, as you have done.
It seems that you consider fighting radical progressive ideas ("the message") to be as high a priority as fighting cancel culture etc. ("the medium"), meaning you have no incentive to enter into an alliance with a Reform Progressive. If you admit as much then I don't have any intellectual disagreement with you on how you're conducting yourself - only the ordinary object-level disagreements about the nature of good and evil and all those superficial little details.
Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.
But that brings me to my more politically-relevant point, which is that I don't recognize a difference between the right to life and the right to healthcare; one is the implementation of the other.
There is, of course, an enduring moral question of action-vs-inaction. Granting that I have a moral obligation not to drown my fellow man, do I also have an obligation to save him from accidental drowning if I happen to be passing by? But I think the "good Samaritan" question doesn't apply in the case of the State which has actively pledged to proactively protect its citizens' lives. I, personally, may or may not have a duty to intervene to save a random stranger from drowning; but then, I am not generally regarded as having a moral obligation to save random strangers from being mugged at gunpoint, either. The State has pledged to safeguard my life, and already takes measures to proactively save me from being shot or battered or strangled. In my book, that should extend to proactively saving me from disease, starvation, and exposure.
It's about you committing a category error. Nobody would think that saving Crusoe would be bad. However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is. "Right to life" has never entailed immortality, it merely means that society should not take or needlessly risk your life. If you're alone, there is no society to threaten you (I guess you can kill yourself). If there's two, the "right to life" principle merely states that neither of you should (lightly) take actions that threaten the other's life.
Once you have some fuzzy number n and you need a leader or a group of leaders (called government), it means that those leaders shouldn't take actions against your life, and protect you from deathly threats from the other members of your society (ideally also other societies, but that is not always feasible given size differences, so again not really a right). A society can always protect its members from itself, if someone can take your life with a gun they can necessarily also protect you with the same gun. It's merely about whether they elect to do so. Yes you can confuse this by dividing a society strictly into government and non-government, but this is mostly evidence of a failed society; In a functioning one, the relevant parts of a government can always be extended or reduced (though this process may take some time).
The obvious retort here may be, but what if you have subsistence farmers so busy that they can't even organize the most basic militia to protect themselves from each other? But the answer is equally obvious, namely that if you spend all your time on your farm and can't spare any time outside of it in a militia, you also have no time forming a society in the first place; in which case you're, again, only a society with yourself, the other farmers merely geographically close but not part of the same society, similar to how irl tribes can be quite close without having any (positive) interactions whatsoever.
So in short, it's about how a society ought not being in the way of each other's life, liberty and happiness. Outright helping each other achieve it is of course desirable, and almost all societies try! But the degree to which it is attainable is dependent on many outside factors, so it makes no sense to construe it as a right, and the way progressives try to pretend they're special by doing so is simply presumptuous & arrogant.
And this distinction is still critical nowadays, since in particular healthcare is a black hole capable of eating arbitrary amounts of money. Ironically, the primary difference between America and other western countries isn't that Americans have worse healthcare outcomes (let alone "thousands dying due to unavailable treatment") - in fact, if you compare like-for-like, such as, say, japanese in America vs japanese in Japan (and most other groups), then Americans actually have significantly better healthcare outcomes then most others. It's merely that they spend excessively more compared to modest improvements; But this is simply a function of the fact that healthcare has starkly diminishing returns, the same can be seen for rich vs poor people.
Construing healthcare as a right, on top, has terrible incentives. It means that the moment a new technology to save lifes is developed, it needs to be used on everyone who needs it, costs be damned. In other words, developing new technology becomes negative sum for a society. Modern western countries have somewhat found a way out of this conundrum by labeling all new technologies unsafe and unusable by default (usually even for those who can privately afford it!), and only if you can prove it is safe by running a large-scale study (which incidentally is only really feasible with somewhat cost-effective treatments) it is allowed to be used.
But it's no accident that the overwhelming majority of new treatments is developed in America, since the incentives are much better aligned if you can develop a new treatment, let it be used by everyone who can afford it, it then gets improved (or discarded) depending on performance, and then the masses get access. Ironically, it de-facto also turns the richest into (willing, at least) guinea pigs. But of course, this is then easy to present as some sort of evil rich people conspiracy, keeping the good treatment from the regular people and letting them die. But in the rest of the western world, the people also don't get the good treatment (in fact they get it later or it doesn't even get developed in the first place), it's merely more equal by keeping it from the rich as well. This should be considered an abhorrent outcome - literally everything is worse for everyone - under most reasonable ethical systems. But the superficial optics are better, so it's favored by the easily swayed.
I think we were talking about different things. I was talking about moral rights - natural rights - inalienable rights. You know, the one imbued into Man by his Creator, if there is such a being (but He is, in this context, a convenient philosophical abstraction whether one materially believes in Him or not, provided you are some manner of moral realist). These are famously distinct from legal rights. So when I said that human beings had a right to healthcare, I meant that it is prima facie morally wrong to withhold it from them; that they ought to have it. What moral rights the state turns into legal rights, by pledging to proactively safeguard and guarantee them, is a very different question, and involves plenty of trade-offs and choosing the lesser evil.
I view the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happines"" as acknowledging three of these natural rights and writing them into law as a pledge on the part of the US government to protect these rights as best it can. For all the reasons you outlined, "as best it can" doesn't mean it can actually keep you alive forever, or even really guarantee that you'll only die of old age. Sure. So if you want to argue something like: yes, if the US government had infinite money and we had infinite medicine, it would have a duty to distribute that medicine to everyone, but resources are scarce, and it's just not an effective use of the limited resources to die on the hill of universal healthcare - that's an object-level conversation we can have. I'm not intractable; So - I don't oppose triage in an imperfect world. Actually, triage is probably the hardest and most important job of any government.
What I do want, however, is for everyone to be on the same page with regards to the moral truth that in an ideal society, everyone would have access to healthcare. I would like everyone to agree that this is what we're working towards in the long term, whatever the current state of affairs permits. The right-wing position I was reacting against (by which of course I mean a position that is comparatively common on the right, not universal) is the denial of that moral right to healthcare; the sentiment that healthcare is simply a luxury good. Something you or I can quite naturally desire, perhaps; but not something which adds a black mark in the book of Mankind for every day that goes by where someone is deprived of it.
I notice this is similar to one of the places the race subthread ended up, and I think it's a crux of my biggest meta-issues with the right: where the progressive position is "X is desirable, so we should do X", the right-wing will be a coalition behind the banner of "not-X" that lumps together people who think X is desirable, but impractical at present; and people who think X isn't desirable. I can never shake the sense that despite appearances, the "not-X because we can't" people's natural allies are the "yes-X"ites much moreso than the "not-X because we shouldn't" people. After all, there's only object-level uncertainty separating the "yes-X"s and the "not-X(1)"s, whereas the "not-X(1)" and "not-X(2)" seem to have much more fundamental value differences. Whenever I get into an intelligent conversation with a not-X(1)-ite like yourself, I just mourn that I can't full-throatedly collaborate with their bloc because I suspect it to be full of not-X(2)s.
I believe in a Creator but I do not see how He could have endowned mankind with an inalienable right to healthcare given that we haven’t had any for 99.99999% of our existence.
The same works from the philosophical perspective IMO: if you start from the position that ‘healthcare’ is a marvellous thing that we only invented very recently, then people aren’t being deprived of it but instead they simply don’t have it.
I know you say that you are merely arguing that it would be immoral to deny people ‘healthcare’ in a world where that was practically achievable, but I think that talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it. For example, I think that it would be poor form to actively deny air conditioning to everybody if the alternative is practically achievable but I would find it very odd to say that ‘mankind has an inalianble right to air conditioning’.
In general, you are also confusing the issue a lot by using the term ‘access to healthcare’ as if it were a singular thing with an agreed-upon definition. Are we talking about setting broken bones? Antibiotics for sepsis? Polio vaccines? Talk therapy? Hair loss treatment? In our perfect society, do I have an inalienable right to a team of doctors dedicated to optimising my biochemistry for maximum happiness and performance on a moment to moment basis, and who is going to be made to do that for me? These aren’t rhetorical questions, I think you need to clarify your position, because in my opinion it would be immoral to deny some of these and not others.
I think this line of thinking proves way, way too much. 99.9999% of human history consisted of brutes braining one another with carved rocks. Does this disprove the right to not be murdered? No, it just proves that immorality is rampant/the material world doesn't care about what hairless apes believe to be the moral law. I find this point obvious both from an atheistic (there is no external source of morality outwith ourselves; the world isn't inherently just) and Christian (the terrestrial world is imperfect; the whole point of human life is the struggle to do right by your fellow man despite the odds) perspective.
Again, I regard healthcare as a necessary part of the the practical implementation of the right to life first and foremost, and of other rights in a secondary capacity - after all, it is difficult to describe an unaided paralytic, or indeed an unmedicated madman lost in delusions, as possessing anything that could fairly be called freedom, and either situation makes the pursuit of happiness a tricky proposition. Granted, it is not impossible to be free and happy in your own mind no matter how wretched your circumstance, but at that level of pedantry, it becomes meaningless for the State to pledge to protect these rights, since one starts to wonder what infringing on them could even look like. Hence the forms of healthcare you list are the right of any human being to the extent that they are necessary to preserve that person's life, agency, and capacity for happiness. Not maximize them - preserve them. Broken bones, antibiotics, vaccines: yes. Therapy: it depends. Hair loss treatment: nah. (I mean, you can imagine some mentally ill person for whom, for whatever reason it would make such a difference in quality-of-life that it'd be worth it. But that would have to be vouched for by a psychiatrist and fall under psychiatric treatment.)
Still, if you think "talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it", I don't want to get hung up on a turn of phrase. "I believe giving everyone access to healthcare is the moral duty of the state"? "I believe we should institute universal healthcare if at all possible, because it's the right thing to do"? Put it how you like; I don't really see how this would make you less confused about what I'm advocating.
Oh, but by the way -
…this seems to be refusing to take the premise of the thought experiment at its word. The perfect society is defined as one in which things like medical staff shortage are handwaved away, spherical-cows-style. I don't know if this perfect society has foolproof robot doctors, if it's got money to throw on incentivizing promising students to join the medical profession, if it has really inspiring educational programs that get doctors and nurses to work for a song and the satisfaction of helping their fellow man - whatever. Unless you outright believe it is literally impossible without actual magic to get everyone in the country healthcare, ever, making the thought experiment void, then the specifics of the thought experiment are besides the point.
You make this distinction as if it's obvious, but I'm not sure it is. If an 80 year old is blind, deaf, arthritic, has a gimpy knee, and then breaks his leg, what healthcare is he owed in our perfect society? Are we just going to fix his leg, and tell him, 'Rejoice! We have preserved your miniscule ability to pursue happiness'? Do we fix him back to the physical and mental condition of an athletic 18 year old as a kind of human baseline? Do we immediately fix any negative physical/mental damage as he's growing up, preventing him from becoming old and blind, but ignore the fact that he's genetically stupid and inclined to depressive melancholy?
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Whether your demands require actual magic or not depends strongly on exactly how you're going to define healthcare. If your proposition is 'in an ideal world, we should not refuse to fix people's obvious ailments as long as it doesn't cost us any meaningful amount of money or time to do so' then I'm right there with you, but you seemed to be aiming at a much more far-reaching proposal. I suppose even this limited proposal rules out darwinian 'the weak should perish to strengthen society' philosophies, if that's what you're going for?
I have quarantined this in a separate section because it would derail the conversation:
Quite so. How can we have an inalienable right (an absolute moral guarantee) not to be murdered if it happens all the time? Say that murdering people is immoral all you like, and I will agree with you. But I think lots of things are immoral: do I have an inalienable right not to be cheated on by my wife? To not have my colleagues speak languages I don't understand in the office? Is a black mark placed in the book of Mankind every time these things happen? From where I'm standing, you're using grandiose moral claims about the nature of the universe to back up your personal preference about how much it should cost to go to the doctor. This is exactly why the concept of 'rights' in last half-century has become so fraught: because everyone asserts their personal moral code as if it is an inalienable fact of the universe that never has to be compromised upon (how 'rights' is usually used in conversation and rhetoric).
As far as I'm concerned, the Declaration of Independence was written by revolutionaries high on their own supply: a fairly transparent attempt to claim that not wanting to repay the Crown for the money that was spent protecting them from hostile nations was a grand moral project, as if nobody else had ever thought that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were pretty nice as long as they didn't get in the way of anything more important. And indeed I note that the US government is quite happy to kill people, imprison them, or otherwise inhibit their pursuit of happiness in order to achieve goals that it thinks are more important.
Addendum: For example, even the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not obviously without complexity. If you believe, as I do, that what people (those flawed beings) do with their time is not necessarily what will make them happy in the long term, it seems entirely possible to deprive them of some of their liberty to ensure their right to pursue happiness. So I find it hard to see these three things as inalienable gifts I have been given by my creator. I am much more comfortable with the inalienable duty to Do Your Best, Do What I Told You To Do, and Don't Fuck It Up.
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