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Contra Nick Fuentes, Hitler, Nazis on Antisemitism: An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright.
Over the past several years I’ve come to terms with accepting the reality of HBD and its implications on my political views. Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level: Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.
The left-leaning, mainstream-media-liberal explanation for these observations in the disparity between group outcomes seem to… not notice it at all. When mainstream media liberals are reluctantly forced to explain these differences in outcomes they will blame a “bad environment” or blame white people for the legacy of colonialism. These hypotheses both reject the agency that minorities have over their own wellbeing and ignore the vast amount of data in intelligence research and group differences in psychology that predict the bad outcomes that we observe.
I think that understanding HBD just means that you realize that bad people CAUSE bad environments, not the other way around. The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.
While it’s obviously social, romantic, and career suicide for any individual to openly admit that they understand HBD (i.e. admit that they’re racist), the Right at the very least tends to adopts policies that people who are openly racist would support. The right tends to support stricter immigration laws, harsher penalties for violent criminals, and to support law enforcement in their goals of catching and deporting people who are here illegally. As a HBD understander, I like these policies.
While many metrics paint the western world as the most divided it has ever been, there is something that the right and left both seem to find agreement on recently: hating Jews. Young people in particular and especially in academia are supporting antisemitic beliefs in America at record rates probably not seen since 1930’s - not only about Israel the state but also about Jews the people.
If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us. The tax revenue from those high earning Jews can go to investing in roads, schools, healthcare, food stamps, social security, public housing, and other government benefits that make Western countries so great to live in. I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.
Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.
But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism. And this makes me especially sad because I would otherwise call the political right my ideological allies on every other issue. The rising popularity of Nick Fuentes obviously is the most noteworthy example, and of course being an intellectually curious person I have listened to several hours of Nick talk about Jews. His main criticisms seem to be over the US’s support of Israel, as well as the undue influence that Jews have over US policymaking. And most critically, Nick believes that the Jews are using that influence to try to tear down the West.
My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.
Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.
For the most part, I agree with Nick’s “America First” agenda. So you could convince me to axe the “give free stuff to Israel” from the US’s budget. But Nick getting so nonsensically angry over such a small line item on our nation’s balance sheet is just wildly disproportionate. I don’t really care about giving a small amount of money to Israel.
What I do care about is that the government of every Western country is stealing money from the productive White/Asian/Jewish middle class (via tax dollars) only to give that money to dozens of immigration non-profits. These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.
Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.
The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.
Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.
Tl;dr: Nick Fuentes is wrong. Happy Hanukkah. Be nice to Jews, and definitely don’t put them in gas chambers.
The problem is that this whole «human capital» philosophy that treats humans as interchangeable stuffing of different grades in the American pie is premised on some extremely degenerate assumptions about human nature at this point.
I notice you don't mention China except as something to beat, while extolling «Japanese», «Taiwanese» and «Asians». It's peculiar because of course Taiwanese are Chinese, most American [East] Asians are Chinese, and indeed, they're doing very well! Low crime, high SAT, sizable tax contribution, and as I've said in my last long post, when an American Jew (Zuckerberg) wants to build an American Superintelligence Lab, 20 out of 30 research scientists turn out to be Han Chinese. In fact, 18 of them even hold PRC citizenship. This is about how it looked at the absolute peak of Jewish dominance in the American cognitive elite.
And yet, and yet – the US is having a decade-long meltdown about strategic competition with China. Even these researchers are suspected as potential spies who'll leak our precious inventions (their own work, largely) to the Red Dragon. There's a lot of vitriol directed at the Chinese, smoothed over with unconvincing noises to the effect of «no no I don't hate Han people, love my Hapa children, much beautiful ancient culture, wow very friendly very nice, I hate the CCP [also nuke three gorges dam]». Well, but the CCP is made of 100 million Chinese people, it has a sky-high approval rating (no it's not fake), and it genuinely represents their collective will to be a successful race, a superpower with hegemonic potential, rather than an assembly floor and source of high-skilled labor for Americans (including Jews).
White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.
What kind of war against Islam are you envisioning? It's pretty funny because militarily, Islam is not a threat to the West at all and has no potential to become a threat. It is, of course, a moderate but real threat to Israel, which is why pro-Israeli actors will hype up the Islamic threat to try and have you fight their wars. The Saudi money works, if it does, because your ruling class is hilariously corrupt and disinterested in the long-term prosperity of the populace. The main danger scenario is illustrated by the case of the UK, with slow population replacement by a mix of different immigrant groups and the low-status people (low human capital, so much less interesting for «the UK» than Jews or Asians) converting to Islam out of desperation. To stop this, you don't really need high-IQ Jewish generals and nuclear scientists, you need to learn to think of yourselves as «a people» that have intrinsic worth not denominated in tax returns or exam scores. But that's at odds with those very «values» you hope to have the Jews protect for you.
All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.
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I'm also no enemy of the jews but I don't think you're really engaging with fuentes.
I think the Fuentes position is more that he thinks a strong nationalist country is the ideal and that "World Jewery" has had preventing the rise of a strong nationalist country at the very top of their priority list since the holocaust. He sees members of this class to have a strong influence on national politics. That in pursuing the prevention of a strong nationalist country forming they supported immigration on the grounds that it would water down any singular racial element taking control could cause problems if certain immigrant groups had their own antisemitic problems is just the classic golem attacking its master trope. He, probably correctly, thinks that if he worked with the Jews to get rid of the muslims then the jews would return to undermining his project at every turn.
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"Destroy" seems like a bailey to a motte of "exploit"/"keep from realising their full potential", to which this objection does not apply. Compare "if slavery abolitionists are correct that slaves are slaving away for their masters, then why would the masters want to [do bad things] to those slaves?"
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I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig headed fool.
I notice, you are prejudiced, he is acting out his insecurities through violent bigotry.
I'm going to register that I think this is a troll post, the quality is so low that I have trouble believing in it. Numbers pop up only for one side, ethnicity and religion are conflated in different ways for different groups, hatreds are elided at random.
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Nick Fuentes's ideas have zero intellectual worth. He is a mega-church pastor for the religion of inceldom. Incoherence is key to his movement. At least Candace Owens is schizophrenic. What's Fuentes' excuse ?
I'm not convinced that average-IQ is singularly responsible for societal-IQ. They're related, sure. But, IQ differentials have existed for millennia. If the correlation was so direct, then high IQ nations would've achieved insurmountable gaps between them and other nations. This hasn't been the case. Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia are high-IQ regions today. But, they were relatively backwards throughout history. That there is flux implies that IQ is not the primary factor in creating stable and flourishing societies.
Can't read goy without replaying the meme of a rabbi crashing out at Barney the dinosaur.
This is anti-HBD. Between Muslims, Blacks and Indians (presumably you mean south asians), you're looking at 4 billion people. Say their average IQ is
90. Let's call them group A. Let's say group B constitutes non-chinese desirable immigrant groups with an IQ of105. (I'm assuming most western Europeans do not want to immigrate to the US and Chinese are the rival civilization). Group B will have around 500 million people at best.Doing some ChatGPT math, Group A has around 90 million people above IQ 120, and group B has about 80 million people above IQ 120. IQ is measurable and group A is more strongly motivated to immigrate. Therefore, if IQ = HBD and HBD = societal destiny, then the US will end up importing a very large number of blacks, south asians and muslims.
Personally, I believe cultural compatibility is just as important as the intelligence of the people you're importing. But, if HBD becomes the primary driver of immigration policy, then it will inevitably sample the cream of the largest (4 billion strong and growing) cohort.
No. I increasingly believe that liberal policy is a direct result of deeply internalizing HBD. (By liberal, I mean the American center-left, neo-libs, academic elites and NYT types. Not the communists). You can't tip-toe around landmines this effectively unless you know their precise location. I don't want to derail the discussion, but IMO, American liberals are the result of trying to reconcile protestant ideology with the realities of group IQ.
American Protestantism ties a person's self-worth to their economic productivity. It claims that people are created equal, and given equal opportunity, the hardest working will be the most productive and most moral. Working hard (sanctity of work) reflects good moral character, and the primary observable metric of hard work is economic productivity.
If IQ is real, heritable and puts a ceiling on an individual's productivity, then the whole moral framework stops working. Corporate America stops working. It's impossible to motivate hustlers, aspiring grinders and temporarily embarrassed millionaires if IQ is the primary contributor to outcomes.
If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ? If you'll never be able to intellectually compete with the nerds, then why play their game at all ? Why be a peaceful participant of a system that guarantees your loss ? Better to bring it down instead. The natural conclusion is to use populism & violence to reclaim power and set up a tribal society instead.
Liberals need the lower class to believe that they can make it if they try hard enough. So, they set aside a few visible roles for all races, so that everyone keeps believing in protestant morals. They know that in the absence of a 'DEI', the elite will look so different from the base population, that a revolution is inevitable. Liberals want to set up socialist safety nets, because they understand that low-IQ people can't lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
Liberal policy is an uncomfortable compromise of believing in both HBD and protestant values. The resulting cognitive dissonance is why even the smartest liberal suddenly loses 50 IQ points when talking about certain issues.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salaryidentity depends on his not understanding it.""Success" is generally a function of both effort and talent. Anecdotally, I'm aware of lots of cases and situations where "smarter" isn't enough alone, and often loses to someone willing to work harder. The folks at the very top have both, and outcomes generally scale with effort at all levels of talent, although there are levels where "have you considered trying something else?" becomes a reasonable question.
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A lot of the hate for Jews comes from the following areas:
I personally agree that Jews are pretty great overall, and it seems like they've been having a slow-motion awakening on the threats of mass-migration. A good chunk of them are becoming socially conservative, but are leaning towards a more intelligent conservatism rather than the conspiratorial populist rightism. Maybe they'll be the ones to eventually salvage the Republican party, doing the job that the tech-right was supposed to do but utterly failed at.
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I shall support no such thing, because "living in a low crime society" is not the whole of my utility function. In fact, there were plenty of dystopian low-crime societies.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should realize that @FireRises' version of the Madagascar Plan will not end with the deportation ships (or chimneys) being dismantled once the last Black US citizen is deported to the general area from which his ancestors were kidnapped. Because once we have accepted that it is moral to get rid of undesirables who are statistically more likely to commit crimes, there is no reason not to apply the same standard to Whites, after all, HBD applies to them as well. Probably a White guy with a close relative with a history of violence is more likely to commit violence than your average US Black, so we should surely get rid of him as well. Low education attainment is probably correlated with a genetic predisposition, do we really want to keep such suboptimal citizens in our brave new world? And in the long term, East Asians have great work ethics and are a lot less unruly than Whites often are.
Liberal Jews have long recognized that the best way to safeguard their safety in the West is to support a general principle of tolerance, rather than relying on the public perception of them being a net positive minority, which can always flip with another Epstein or SBF.
Why do you think that is a bad thing? After all, the PRC has plenty of advantages from your perspective. A clearly dominant culture, fewer ethnically undesirables, no woke snowflakes crying genocide when you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette, strong leaders making decisions with the long term interests of the state in mind rather than trying to win the next election. The PRC conquering the US, wiping out the present population and settling Han Chinese there is perhaps the likeliest way to end multiculturalism in the US.
While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.
@FireRises I'd go further and say "opposed"; if you want to keep Jews in the West, you don't want them to "go home" to Eretz Yisrael.
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Bari Weiss isn't the head of CBS because of her great charisma, intelligence or talent but because she's Jewish and she's willing to unconditionally do the bidding of a Jewish billionaire. Jeffrey Epstein wasn't wealthy because he was an intelligent, hardworking person high in conscientiousness (his emails make that clear enough!), he was wealthy because he had no ethical limits whatsoever. Les Wexner and Henry Ford might both be rich entrepreneurs who pay lots of taxes but the latter was unfathomably more beneficial to his society and the world at large than the former. Whether Jews are actually significantly more intelligent is debatable; some would argue Jewish overrepresentation in positions of wealth and influence actually has more to do with nepotism, corruption and a total lack of moral inhibitions.
Like Berlin, 1925?
Of course, one could just as easily say "the left is wrong about every social issue, so of course they're wrong about Hitler" and come to the exact opposite conclusion.
This isn't what Fuentes actually says.
What he actually said was: Jews wanted to replace the previously (relatively) anti-Jewish Anglo-American order with a new one, only to discover that their new left wing allies apply the exact same logic to Jews, causing Jews to switch to backing the right instead. He never claimed Jews are "secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover of America", he's actually said that Jews intentionally inflame bonehead counter-jihad type politics for their own benefit. If you wanted a testable prediction, his pre-election prediction that Trump was going to be dragged into conflict with Iran would be a pretty clear example of Trump acting against his political interests on behalf of a powerful foreign lobby.
That's only counting direct subsidies. If you were to count missile interceptions (the "12 Day War" cost a quarter of the global interceptor stockpile!!!), the cost of constantly moving carrier groups to defend them, protection money for their neighbors, wars fought on their explicit behalf ("Prosperity Guardian"), wars fought on their behalf implicitly (most sandbox wars), soldiers killed by them directly (USS Liberty), soldiers killed on their explicit behalf (Beirut barracks bombings)...
For all that accumulated cost, it would have been far more cost efficient had America turned Israel into a parking lot back in 1948, then America might have some allies besides Israel. It certainly would have cost far less than $300 billion. Or, of course, America could simply stay out of the sandbox entirely, as it did for the overwhelming majority of it's existence.
Perhaps there wouldn't be so many Syrian refugees if the US didn't bomb the shit out of Syria on Israel's behalf and then put al Qaeda in charge. Perhaps fewer sub-Saharan Africans would flow through Libya into Europe if the US didn't overthrow Gaddafi for Israel's benefit and create a power vacuum. One directly leads into the other. That's why people give a shit about Israel, actually; because it destabilizes all of its neighbors as a matter of policy and leaves its "allies" (read: dupes) to pick up the mess.
Correction: we helped the Jews beat Hitler. Every single Jew could have dropped dead spontaneously in 1939 and America would have still had basically the exact same capabilities to beat Hitler.
Pollard sold the Soviets American secrets and then was given refuge in Israel, they played both sides and could just as easily have claimed to have helped the Soviet Union beat America had it gone the other way.
In reality, the Jews sell American military secrets to China, much as they sold American secrets to the Soviets.
Correction: the Jews want "us" to fight their enemies for them, again. America doesn't need to "beat Islam", it simply needs to stay out of the sandbox and reject their migrants.
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Rather, jews do not like living in homogeneous states. They don't want to live in societies with strong cultural and norms that don't include them and prefer cosmopolitan rootless cultures. Jews don't want to be the only visible minority in an area. At the same time they don't have the same affinity to the local culture and people as gentiles in the same area. Multiculturalism is required to have another culture, aka jews there. Therefore jews promote multiculturalism.
Throw in a jewish hatred for Rome, Christianity, many Eastern European ethnic groups etc and it isnt surprising that jews are overrepresented in promoting mass migration.
Throw in wars for Israel that end up swamping Europe with migrants and the jewish problem becomes evident.
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You can't claim to be a HBD understander and then confuse ethnicity and religion, then merge together hundreds of different ethnic groups in single categories. C'mon, bringing up Islam in that way is literally contradicting yourself. Bosnian Muslims, Iranians, Senegalese people and Indonesians are all Muslim and all have completely different genetic backgrounds. And it's not like there's a sharp distinction between "White" and "Middle-Eastern". People from the Levant can be whiter than many Southern Europeans.
Or if you talk about Jews, again, that's not a single ethnicity. Israel is a melting pot of Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc, while the majority of Palestinians are Jews that converted to Islam centuries ago.
If you actually believed in HBD, you would be pro-immigration of Igbo, Iranians and Brahmins elites, who have lower crime rates, higher educational achievement and financial success than White Americans.
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I agree with you that Muslim-majority countries usually underperform non-Muslim countries with similar biological stock (North Africa vs Southern Europe, Muslim Africa vs Christian Africa, Pakistan vs India, Iran vs Indian Parsis), but critically Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.
It's true that Muslims are not a racial group, and so the label isn't a biological one.
But 'people who marry their cousins and so suffer from inbreeding-related mental retardation' is a biological category, and well...
Funny thing about inbreeding is that unlike protracted heavy inbreeding (where a family has no new blood for an extended period), protracted mild inbreeding (lots of cousin marriages but not systematic) will eventually tend to weed out most of the alleles responsible for inbreeding problems (as it exposes them to much-stronger natural selection).
Do also remember that if someone heavily inbred marries someone else heavily inbred - but unrelated - the offspring are not inbred at all.
Islamic cousin marriage tends to be much more systematic than cousin marriage outside Islam.
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Islamic genetic potential tends to be worse than for their Christian neighbors, though. Often because Muslims marry their cousins at crazy high rates.
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Yeah but when the religious-culture doesn't really permit an easy offramp due to actually taking anti-blasphemy and people leaving the faith somewhat seriously, the two become very tightly linked.
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Yeah this is the line @2rafa has argued often in the past, quite convincingly. I agree that Jews in general are some of, if not the most, single strongest genetic group in terms of IQ and other desirable traits.
I do wish Fuentes and others would work more on getting Jews aligned with the general nativist agenda as opposed to re igniting blood libel. Unfortunately they feel betrayed because Jews have admittedly been huge pushing the overall progressive consensus after the Holocaust. It’s a tricky subject, but I’m much more on the side of converting Jews instead of kicking them all out or murdering them.
Israel has low PISA scores
A handful of studies showing marginal gains in IQ by measuring elite jews in NYC doesn't say much. If arab IQ was measured by testing in fancy parts of Dubai their scores would be impressive as well. Try Iq testing some west bank settlers for different results.
That's not too surprising. It is 20% Arab, and of the (school-age) Jewish population, most are Sephardi, and of the (more intelligent) Ashkenazi, a large chunk are Haredi, who do poorly on PISA because they reject secular education, not because they're stupid.
When people talk about Jewish intelligence, they're talking about the Ashkenazi Jews, because they make up about 80% of global Jewry, and almost 100% in western countries.
The interesting question is what happens when the Haredi take over the land between the River and Sea demographically. They're smart, but a population where the men spend most of their time studying the Torah and refuse military service is gonna struggle surrounded by hostile neighbours and dwindling global support. Israel needs to work out how to keep the Haredi pumping out children while putting them to more productive use.
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Wow, that's a solid stat pull. I'm genuinely surprised by it.
Ashkenazim are a minority in Israël, and are outperformed by the local Arab Christians(who also probably have high average IQ).
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Ah sorry if this subject is well-worn territory. I haven't been as active of a Motte-izen to keep up with the conversational metagame here.
No worries. It can be good to go back through old topics anyway, not a problem at all.
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What will come after post-modernity? From my perspective we are already seeing the postmodern lens break down a bit, as religion is getting a bit of a upswing, and many leading intellectuals are turning away from the post modern lens, or rather incorporating it into their thoughts. Examples here are John Vervaeke, Charles Taylor, Jordan Hall, David Chapman, and many others.
In addition, there seems to be a tacit admission amongst the secular humanist crowd that their worldview no longer has the appeal or swing it once did. Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker, in a recent podcast discussion, went over how humanism seems to be somewhat dead and there aren’t many bright young humanists out there. Cowen also said the same thing about young liberal thinkers with another podcast guest recently, Cass Sunstein.
If you look at the death of the effective altruism movement, and the shift from rationalist to post rationalist, I believe there’s a similar trend.
To me the question becomes less “will old school meta-narratives” return, and more: what will be the ground of future exploration?
Will we adopt “metamodern” stances as they become useful and abandon them just as quickly, as Chapman suggests? Or instead will we rescue the transcendentals, and understand classical theism & morality through a more relational and dynamic lens, as Vervaeke and others are working on?
While the modern chaos can be exhausting at times, it’s also a moment of great opportunity. I’m interested to see what comes next.
We first have to answer what comes after Capitalism. Capitalism is universal solvent, it slowly melted through every ethnic or ideological or traditional or religious barrier that tried to hold it back. It ate ethnicity, it ate religion, it ate nationalism, it ate gender, it ate the narrative of progress itself.
It will not be possible for a new narrative to assert itself until it first slays Capitalism.
And even within our science fiction, we can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of Capitalism.
While Capitalism is in the causal chain that ate those things it is the massive amounts of wealth created by capitalism that that eats everything.
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Yeah fair points. Capitalism is indeed a mighty beast, slouching towards Bethlehem. Sigh.
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Not a thing, source 1 source 2 source 3. At most you could say that the decline has levelled off by some metrics, but statistics keep showing that the importance of religion in peoples' lives is slowly but monotonically going nowhere but down.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "postmodern" here other than as a vague gesture at a blob of liberalism-wokism-rationality etc. Perhaps the Right will come to dominate. Currently, the Right is dominated by conspiracists like Candace Owens, Just Asking Questions connoisseurs like Tucker Carlson, and shitposters like Catturd. As bad as it is right now, I have faith that it will eventually be replaced by something even worse.
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I think you may be using the term "post-modern" in a nonstandard/confusing way. AIUI postmodernism is specifically a rejection of the "modernist" ideology that flourished in the early part of the 20th century. We can vaguely gesture at some word associations:
So it seems what you're gesturing at is more accurately binned with the "modern -> postmodern" transition, which has been going on for a while now. Or do you claim we're entering a new stage, of "post-post-modernity"?
I am referring to postmodernity as basically, the falling away of beliefs and overarching, meta narratives and more broadly the idea that there is any sort of objective truth. Another way to put this is the turn away from cultural relativism, identitarianism esp wrt trans, etc is what I’m broadly referring to. I could be more precise.
I think this never existed. There was an academic project for this in the 60s but practically nobody bought in and its immediate successors constructed their own overarching metanarratives (identity politics, gender, decolonization, etc). People sometimes call this postmodernism, because it refuses to give itself a name, and I'm fine with doing that as long as one doesn't also bring up the core tenets of "real" postmodernism, as you do here.
My opinion is that postmodernism instantly died because it's an unserious intellectual exercise. It's woke descendent isn't postmodern, it's pre-modern, specifically it's christianity without the bible, it's "we can be more pious without the bible".
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The first sentence contradicts the second - cultural relativism and identitarianism assert that we are inescapably bound to the particularities of who we are, and are therefore precisely a rejection of overarching metanarratives and objective truth. So it's not clear what stage in the process you think we're undergoing now.
Well yes, much of the postmodern corpus is inherently contradictory and illogical. That’s a part of the whole thing. Didn’t stop it from dominating higher levels of the academy and culture for much of the last few decades.
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Is religion really getting an upswing? Every statistic I've seen suggests a huge drop in the number of practicing religious people in most developed nations in the last decade. There seems to be a small number of right-wing young men going back to church, but it's not large enough to counteract the overall decrease in religiosity, which is especially pronounced in women and people left of centre. I've personally seen more an increase in a sort of generic spirituality than organised religion.
Religion seems largely stabilized by generational cohort overall in the US- but plenty of churches are still dying. Gen Z isn’t any less religious than millennials, but they’re both less religious than their silent gen great grandparents. As older people die off congregations shrink, but they’re stabilizing at a lower level.
Theres also denominational shuffling, where some groups gain at the expense of others.
Btw theres not really a good way to get actual church attendance rates- surveys are biased upwards and cell phone tracking is biased downwards(phones ping more often when people are on them). Internal records from churches are probably pretty close to accurate but can only tell you absolute numbers, not rates.
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To clarify, I’m looking more at the leading edge of academia / the intelligentsia as a whole. Overall population numbers with religion are extremely sketchy, especially given that many people will nominally identify as religious while not holding genuine belief. I may be in a bubble regarding the intelligentsia as a whole, but this still seems to be the case. Let me know if you think I’m wrong.
However FWIW, I have read from Ryan Burges who specializes in this field that the falling numbers of religious identification have been arrested, while trans identification is sharply down in the last few years. Again I wouldn’t update too far on these major pop numbers but it’s something to go on I suppose.
The rise and fall of trans self-ID was a phenomenon that happened entirely within the subset of the Blue Tribe who might use tumblr to share something other than cat pictures or pr0n. I don't think these people have gone away, I just think a lot of them are identifying as something other than trans. In the educated British circles I move in, "neurospicy" people (and particularly "neurospicy" people with vaginas - noughties autism advocacy was a bit boy-centric) can now identify with and be proud of their "disability" without needing to question their gender identity.
[The more cynical would say that this is because the Yookay will give you a subsidised Motability car for having a mild mental illness but not for being transgender, but as far as I can see the same vibe shift is happening among people who wouldn't think of rorting Motability]
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