This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link