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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm reattempting Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Has been collecting dust for far too long.
Recently finished: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. Basically, his thesis is that modern Western society (in its entirety - government, economy, social mores, etc) is destroying the things that enable humanity to thrive - think things like cultural traditions, connection to a particular place going back generations, spiritual practices, and so on. He personifies this as a machine which rips up all in its path, destroying what those things once were and remaking them in a fashion to suit the machine's purpose of expanding without end.
I am not sure what I think of the book. I think at the most basic level, Kingsnorth is right that there's something which has gone wrong with Western society. It hasn't been without benefit (and he himself admits this freely), but we seem to have lost some measure of basic human joy and mental flourishing along the way. I'm not so certain I agree with his framing of the trend as a coherent entity. It's kind of like the idea of Moloch - rhetorically powerful, but also factually inaccurate. And I definitely disagree with some of the author's ideas - at one point he argues that the Machine is quite literally demonic in origin, which I don't believe at all (we humans are quite capable of destroying ourselves without supernatural influence). So I guess I found the book interesting, but not without its flaws (or at least flaws as I see them).
Currently reading the Divine Comedy. I've had a copy of it forever, but am just now getting around to it (mostly because a friend really encouraged me to read it, at least Inferno). It's been interesting. Obviously it's one of the major works of the Western canon, and has had a ton of influence over our culture. So seeing the original first-hand is pretty cool. I think I'm looking forward to Purgatorio and Paradiso more, just because I know absolutely nothing about them, but am enjoying Inferno as well. It's pretty funny the extent to which the work is Dante just showing everyone he dislikes in hell. I can't imagine it made him many friends at all, though perhaps he didn't care because he was exiled anyway. I find poetry kind of a slog to read (even short poems like Robert Frost etc), so it's certainly a challenge to read long-form poetry like this. But hopefully I'm able to stick to it because I do want to finish a classic of this magnitude.
I would frame it as nothing more than the result of imposed religious tolerance. In order to stop the religious persecutions that were commonplace in the second half of the last millenium, Europeans and their descendents, and particularly city-dwellers, had to blunt some of their innate moral instincts: those that would chafe at the presence of heretics and apostates. For a few centuries this gave them a big boost, but long term it turns out some of those moral instincts might have been load bearing to civilisation, as we find ourselves atomizing into individualism under a universalist philosophy that forbids us from creating an exclusive shared identity.
That's an interesting way to look at it. What's kind of ironic is we don't seem to have actually rid ourselves of those instincts, so much as changed what it's acceptable to apply them to. Like, look at how the left treats JK Rowling for example. There's precious little difference (except for no violence) between the way people treat her, and the way someone in the 15th century would've treated a heretic. Perhaps those instincts are too deeply embedded in our genes to be eliminated completely.
The justification for the hatred she gets fits within the restrictive moral framework of the people Jonathan Haidt identified in The Righteous Mind as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic): she's evil because she's harming trans people. WEIRD pretty much only see the care/harm and fairness/unfairness as far as morality go.
Personally I am/was raised WEIRD, and while I cannot express why specifically, some examples Haidt used to test moral foundations outside of harm and fairness still trigger primitive negative emotion in me even if I cannot find a way within myself to condemn it intellectually. The real, original moral instinct as to why JK Rowlings is so hated might still be because she's undermining the consensus (not going along with the group is an affront to the loyalty moral foundation), or from expressing ideas considered sacrilegeous, but having a negative reaction to someone because of that is not allowed by our universalist mindset, so it has to be laundered as her being harmful.
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