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Europe’s Entry/Exit System (EES) will become fully operational from April 10, 2026, replacing passport stamps with digital records and biometric checks.
EU countries are now collecting the fingerprints of all foreign travelers. They are also taking photographs of travelers' faces. The result so far is that 2 hour lines are common for entry into the EU.
I'm generally opposed to this. For one, I'm libertarian in that I oppose most international borders. The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose. There are ways to justify borders, but no country or entity on Earth is in the position to do that at the moment. The EU does not have a moral right to do this when it won't stop 99% of the harmful immigration into the EU, which is all legal.
This measure is offensive to people with legitimate rights to travel, while not significantly affecting those coming in immorally but legally, for the maybe-upside of catching a few more street criminals trying to come in on a fake passport. Is the point of this that cocaine prices should go up even more in the EU? Why? What is the point? Who is vulnerable to cocaine addiction? Why does money need to be spent on protecting them from their own decisions?
I'm predicting this will spread, too. If the EU is collecting fingerprints of all of country X's citizens that go to it, then country X will want to collect fingerprints for all EU citizens that come into it. Otherwise the EU has an advantaged biometrics database. As a proponent of free travel, every little tin-pot government collecting vast biometrics sounds like it will chill the ease and personal security of traveling. How long until it's DNA?
Fingerprints and photographs are clearly dual use.
On the one side, you can use them to establish that the person in front of you is the same person who was previously in front of you, which seems like a legitimate concern when IDing people.
On the other side, having fingerprints and photographs on file is also a great way to ID people in less formal settings, such as on surveillance cameras or on pieces of evidence they touched. I think this is directionally bad, a state having the fingerprints of all residents/citizens on file will give it more power for good or ill, and I do not really trust states with more power, generally.
I think a better approach would be to have an iris scan of everyone on file, which can be used for explicitly IDing, but not to ID people in less formal settings (until we get further into the dystopian future, anyhow).
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Do you lock your doors at night? Is your bedroom open to migrants? I assume not, for obvious reasons. Why don't those reasons apply to, say, the Longhouse of your tribe, or the City Hall at 3am, or your sovereign nation?
I think the standard argument is that saying "the government should have the same rights over its sovereign territory that you have over your personal property" proves too much.
If they also can't receive social services, that solves some of the problem, but in the world as it exists today, it is not possible to have open borders and yet have the aliens be a permanent underclass who can't receive social services or vote, unless you're Qatar or a similar autocracy. If you really think this, you should hold off on the open borders until you can make this possible first. Libertarians invaribly propose that we open the borders immediately and leave the mitigation as a theoretical thing or not even bother with it at all, even though doing something halfway can easily be worse than either not doing it or doing it fully.
There's also the incentives issue. A foreign government should not be able to mismanage their country and leave the people poor, incentivizing them to come here and compete against locals, thus lowering their wages and in effect exporting some of their native poverty here. Libertarians are really bad at handling incentives, because the individual people who respond to incentives do so voluntarily, so the libertarians won't let us do anything to stop them from reacting to the incentives, even though the incentives are caused by a non-market force that we can't affect directly.
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This is a spherical cow in a vacuum type of argument. What's the difference at the limit between a corporation in control of a large swathe of land, and a government? I think people have the right to buy land and assert sovereignty over it (including sovereignty over who can enter) which means that denying governments immigration authority denies individual human rights.
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Your argument is wholly distinct from dailydogma's and more interesting, granted. But dd was saying that the prevention of a human from crossing a property boundary is a human rights violation. A very strange argument coming from a libertarian. I would like to know which human right that is, what it may conflict with, and the nature of the violation.
And while I agree that my analogy may not hold for various reasons, as it scales up and out, I argue that none of those reasons coincide with or support dailydogma's position. And I would be interested to know the scale at which dd believes it breaks down.
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Bah humbug. I needed to give my fingerprints and a photo to get a drivers license, and it's a heck of a lot easier to not visit France than it is to go without driving.
It seems somebody has been reading Caplan recently...
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I never failed to understand how libertarians could think like that. Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.
And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.
This is very much not consensus.
There are, I think, broadly two schools of thought on human rights.
The first is what I'll call rights realism, and it's the older, more traditional one. Rooted in natural law, it is objectively the case that different beings carry with them different moral duties and obligations. Understanding what something is implies certain normative principles about what can or must be done concerning that thing. In this specific case, humans, simply by virtue of being human, possess certain moral rights and imply certain duties. This is the theory implied by documents like the US declaration of independence ("...the laws of nature and of nature's God..."), and the Abrahamic religions tend to be quite keen on this. 'Human rights' are thus an attempt to recognise and codify these rights and duties. Any given legal regime is almost certainly flawed, even more so in the implementation, but is nonetheless commendable to recognise and try to protect the natural rights of every human being.
The second is what I'll call the constructivist view, and it says that, though rights don't necessarily exist in nature in a direct way, rights language represents a communal decision. It an aspiration - the universal declaration of human rights, say, is a declaration that we as a community have decided that human beings must be treated in this way. Human rights in this sense are a social fact, but no less important or binding for that. Note that the constructivists do not require the state. Social realities can exist outside of and prior to the state.
I note that your rebuttal fails to move both of these schools:
This is like Death's 'atom of justice' speech, and it's wrong for the same reason. Neither school is saying that human rights are physical things. The realists believe that moral rights and duties exist objectively despite being non-physical. They are not materialists. And the rights constructivists fully understand that they're talking about a social reality.
Even a determined materialist isn't going to be moved by your argument, or by Death's. Materialists do not believe that nothing that isn't a physical object exists. Things can be properties of states of affairs. Death is wrong because justice or mercy are attributes of states of affairs, not elementary particles, and no less real for that. Some configurations of molecules are just and other configurations are not, the same way that some configurations correspond to living things and some configurations do not, and Death's entire existence is premised on that distinction. Likewise some arrangements of human beings are humans-rights-respecting, and some are humans-rights-violating. It is coherent to say that a torturer vivisecting someone to look for the 'rights' organ is violating a human right, even though he will never find such an organ.
I think this is unfair to Death, because unlike @Lizzardspawn, he is not arguing for a nihilist materialism.
The model of a living being is a gross but useful simplification. It does not exist in the fundamental description of the universe. Any paradox about Schroedinger's cat or people being revived is strictly with the model, not reality.
For moral conceptions like justice, you can argue that they sometimes make models which can describe the behavior of humans, but that will not convince anyone to behave according to them. I am sure that @Lizzardspawn would concede that "human rights" are as much real as "Huitzilopochtli" in that both concepts explained some of the behavior of humans who believed in them.
As a noncognitivist, I tend to agree with Death that (prescriptive) ethics is not about what exists in the world (or even in more abstract realms like mathematics), but what you should or should not do.
People can have consistent (if horrible) moral systems which deny that one should not rape or even have no concept of consent at all, just as they can affirm or deny the axiom of choice, and there is no observation of reality which could falsify their system. But of course others can coordinate and build and enforce less terrible moral systems, where rape is defined in some law and punished.
For human rights, there is obviously no god who will strike you down with lightning if you break them, nor some special forces which will extract you to the Hague. Sometimes, the only difference will be how much the liberals will whine if someone kills you, few shed tears for Saddam.
But human rights as we have them today are also a preview of a work in progress. A mere 100 years ago, wars of aggression and reprisal killings were still considered normal. There is still more coordination to be done, more case law to be established.
Once again - I claim that rights are created by the state, flow from the state - if you check my previous comment in the thread. They don't exist outside of the state and are impossible without said state.
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Original natural law theory is Catholic doctrine stemming from objective morality and God, it was also more about natural law and less about natural rights, especially in the modern sense that right is personal and individual property. Additionally, modern rights do not have much with duties and obligations. Or to be more precise rights are entitlements absent duty or obligation. You are entitled to your right, you do not have any obligation toward that right.
If that is so, then some other community or even the same community but in different time can aspire to different set of rights which they will declare as universal. Just remember COVID when suddenly all those "universal human rights" stopped working for a prolonged time. Quite a fickle things these rights, they can change their way of existence quite a lot, can they not?
This is sophism. You absolutely understand what he wanted to say. He said that human rights exist as a fiction created by state as opposed to their existence as that of the sun or the moon. It is perfectly fine distinction to make even for materialists. Even materialists understand that let's say Francis Underwood exists as a fictional character and POTUS in famous Netflix TV show as opposed to let's say Donald Trump existing as a real person and POTUS. In similar fashion rights exist as a fiction enforced by power of government, that is all that the OP said and it is perfectly in line with materialism. Without government they still exist as a fiction, but nobody cares in the same way nobody cares for my version of fictional president of USA named Chad Norris or my version of universal human rights, that in my fictional world prevented government spying on email correspondence or property theft over prolonged period named as property tax. I hope now it is clear.
Don't most rights imply a corresponding duty? Admittedly, most of the duties fall on the state, for example the right to free speech implies that neither the state nor its agents should suppress your speech, unless it is in a handful of exceptional categories like fraud, copyright, libel/slander, fighting words, and specific threats of violence.
However, I think that you can make the case that the West historically viewed rights as a bit broader than that. For example, free speech connects with the Greek virtue of parhessia (frankness of speech), and thus in its widest conception free speech implies an obligation to speak truth to power even if you're in a regime where that will get you killed. (And in fact, many Stoic philosophers, like Helvidius Priscus, did just that, criticizing the emperor and accepting their death sentences with poise and equanimity.)
Rights might be legal fictions in some sense, but so is money, or the concept of the United States, or the position of President of the United States. You could grind the atoms of the universe down and you would find no money, no debt, no contracts, because this is a category error. Those things exist as collective beliefs inside people's minds, as data patterns in their brains.
No. This idea is generally a way for tyrants to vitiate rights, with the formula "You have the right to X, you have the duty to only employ X in the way I tell you to"
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Not really, at least not in the modern sense of what rights mean. Christians talked about duties all the time of course even in language of commandments etc. However there is understanding that people are sinful. It does not make sense to talk about "right", as it would entail basically living in an utopian society without sin.
Plus it creates quite a conundrum for libertarians who love to talk about intrinsic rights as property of individuals. If we are talking about duties, we now have collectivist category sometimes encompassing the whole humanity. For libertarian right to life to fully exist, everybody on Earth has to acknowledge and follow up on 6th commandment and duty not to murder.
Again, this is not equivalent position. Christians pray to god every day for miracle of life, that they were gifted by god fearing neighbors who follow the law and they understand that this is by no means given, that people are sinful. They understand how fragile things are. Human right activists approach the topic from entitlement to their rights and they are shocked and indignant if something happens. It is quite a different approach.
It actually leads to quite a different view of society. The original Christian view is that society (or Church if you wish) is generally good, but individual is sinful. The liberal or libertarian view seems to be that the individual is always correct and entitled to rights, but society is oppressive and sinful not to provide for such enlightened individual to exist.
Sure, that is all the OP wanted to say. Rights are fictional and subject to whims of people and governments. In a sense right is just a more fancy word for law. We can talk about various types of law from law from Hammurabi law to Universal Declaration of Human rights. All of them are of the same cloth, just a fiction in certain place and time subject to enforcement of some kind. There is nothing intrinsic to them.
I am not sure that that follows.
Wouldn't the Lockean Liberal view be something more like: mankind is created in the image and likeness of God. Yes, man is sinful, and fallen, but as a result of being made in the image of God, mankind is endowed with dignity which it is sinful to violate.
The set of principles surrounding this inviolable dignity, we call "rights" and it is the duty of us as individuals and as a society to set up governments which do not violate these rights.
I don't think this is quite correct. I actually think the liberal/libertarian view is closer to Jesus' teaching in the Parable of the Talents: we are all given different endowments, and we are expected to make the best use of those endowments that we can as individuals.
The liberal/libertarian simply believes that the best way to set up society is to let everyone pursue the proper management and development of their God-given talents by protecting a handful of core principles: life, liberty and property (or the pursuit of happiness.)
I'm personally glad that we had individuals like Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, Temple Grandin and many others who contributed greatly to society through their unique endowments as individuals, even if a Christian might not otherwise approve of an atheist or a homosexual.
This is a secular view of rights which is actually not in line with at least traditional teaching of Catholic Church. Yes, you are created in image of God and you have dignity, however you diminish your dignity every time you even sin yourself. You are not entitled to absolute dignity, e.g. you do not have absolute entitlement to get free food whenever you are hungry and thus turn this situation on its head by blaming the society for its inability to feed you. Even in Catholic church where they sometimes strategically adopt the language of rights, they are curtailed by additional concepts such as subsidiarity, where the duty starts with yourself. Which then conflicts with the basic definition of rights as entitlement without duty - you are the first to have duty to for instance feed yourself. That is the main difference between catholic social teaching and modern rights-based system.
In fact you can get to completely different conclusions. For instance if somebody who is able bodied and just lazy turns to get food from soup kitchen, it is that person who is committing the sin of sloth diminishing his own dignity. On top, he also steals from patrimony of the poor.
Absolutely not. The fundamental basis of libertarian view of right is that of self-ownership, the Catholic teaching is all about your life belonging to God. In libertarian view state cannot impose duties on you by virtue of self-ownership, exactly opposite is the case from Catholic teachings. And there are no few flaring points, we are talking about things like euthanasia, prostitution, drug sales and many other things.
As for liberal or secular view of rights, we talked about it before. And again, it is complete subversion of social teaching of the Church where individual is entitled to ever expanding set of rights and if not provided, it is society to blame for absence. Again, it is entitlement absent duty.
I am talking about Lockean liberalism, which was not "secular", even if its teachings differ from the Catholic church's.
Surely, "free speech" or "right to property" implies that at least some actors in society have positive duties to act a particular way? Otherwise, how does a Lockean Liberal defend these rights in practice?
There is more than one construction of libertarianism. I tend to fall more in the consequentialist/utilitarian foundation for libertarianism, though I do have a lot of sympathy for the side that starts with freedom as their starting point.
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What universal human rights stopped working for a prolonged time during COVID?
Freedom of movement in article 13, freedom of assembly and association under article 20, freedom of religion under article 18 - all related to lockdowns for starters.
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I'm not a libertarian, but I am sympathetic to their position. I'm not sure I would frame the issue in terms of human rights, but I remember my youth when you could live your life without constantly showing your ID to people. I crossed between the US and Canada many times without being asked for a passport or even a driver license. I flew many times without presenting any kind of ID, let alone fingerprints.
I am not thrilled about the fact that we've drifted into a police/surveillance state type of situation. I do appreciate the lower crime rates, but I think that almost the same thing could have been accomplished if the West had stayed 90+% people of European descent.
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The classic American viewpoint is that rights are given by God. Such as this famous line.
That free will allows for bad humans to trample on god's gifts doesn't make them any less divinely bestowed to the classic American viewpoint.
"The state" is not real, outside of being what we call the most powerful and recognized dominant organization of a given area or people. It is composed of people and in the classic view it is the people's own responsibility to fight for and protect their own natural rights, granted by God, from others who mean to harm them. Hence the American revolution, usurping an abusive state for one of their own.
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States are fictions created by individuals and exist only through individuals. Go to any courthouse, police station, parliament building, do the thoroughest possible search, and you won't be able to find a single state. Just a bunch of individuals! Rights are a Schelling point that let individuals who don't call themselves members of the state regulate the behaviors of those who do. Without these Schelling points, the state is allowed to do anything whatsoever. That's obviously bad.
It may be bad, but states have always been allowed to do whatever they please.
No they haven't. There is no state for which that has ever been true.
Is there an example of a state not being allowed to do as it pleased, up to the point where one or more other states disagreed (by kinetic or economic force), or its own people decided to reform it? There's no World Police to arrest rogue states, and plenty of ongoing, if not universally agreed-upon, crimes against humanity.
This is what I mean when I say they can't do whatever they want.
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There was in the nineteenth century, although their jurisdiction only ran within gunboat range of navigable waterways.
There is currently a hilarious social media row going on in the UK, that began with Nigel Farage saying he would cut off visas to citizens of countries demanding slavery reparations. It turned out that the British Green party officer responsible for campaigning around reparations for slavery and colonialism is a direct descendent of the last Oba of Lagos, who was deposed in 1851 by the West Africa Squadron (with the dynasty retaining most of its wealth) because he wouldn't stop selling slaves (mostly to Brazil by this point).
So the Green Party's campaign for British taxpayers to pay reparations for slavery is led by the descendant of a slaver, who personally benefitted from slavery more directly than any white Briton now living.
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This is the whole idea of a "failed state", no? How reliably have the states of Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, or Haiti been able to do as they please with their "own" people in their "own" territories? Just because our international order assumes the abstraction that every piece of territory belongs to some state with a monopoly on violence within it doesn't make it so. Plenty of places retain pre-state or non-state structures (tribes, clans, gangs, etc) that are more relevant to the individuals living there than the nominal state is. States are an emergent phenomenon, not the ground of political reality.
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This applies to a ton of things though. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, mercy, fairness, god, faith, happiness, race, love, LLCs, etc. The list goes on. Not everything is a physically existing element.
A strictly materialist viewpoint of reality is likely insufferably bleak to the point that no one alive would want to live it.
Even if you are just interested in science, things like squares, circles, software do disappear if you analyse their physical realities. The mathematical laws of physics cannot be expressed without formal concepts like a ratio and a square, or the exponential function. Yet if you break everything to dust and you look at it you won't find those concepts either.
By the way, I'm quite sure that love, pain, mercy and happiness do exist, because just like consciousness I can experiment them directly. Matter, on the other side, might be an illusion.
I think you are missing the point, and have somehow attributed the opposite argument to me.
The argument is: Strict Atomic Existence is sole component of reality (Lizzardspawn) vs Non-corporeal existence is still a component of reality (Me)
You seem to be arguing the later while thinking I support the former...
I was adding evidence to support your argument. It seemed not very elegant to reply directly to lizzardspawn while I was building on your argument. Sorry if it was confusing.
Oops yeah I read that wrong. I'm used to having the opposite opinion of everyone during discussion here. Makes me a bit too in "fight" mode.
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Even a materialist can recognize emergent phenomena is a thing. In fact, a materialist must recognize it to be able to explain what is happening.
I mean are you in support of the original comment? Because just recognizing a phenomena is emergent doesn't mean it has suddenly created atoms of itself. It still does not physically exist.
No, my point is it does. Things exist that are not atoms. Where this idea that if something exists there must be "atom" of it came from? There's no such thing as "atom of temperature", yet temperature is a very material thing. It is a characteristic of the complex system (which is composed of atoms), but by itself it's does not have "atoms of itself". Is wind a physical, material thing? Of course it is. Is there "atom of wind"? Of course not. There's an atom of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and so on - but they are not "wind". Yet wind very much "physically exists". It exists as combination of other physical things - but so are atoms, so if you accept atoms physically exist, even though they are just an arrangement of other physical entities, then wind is no less existent. Ignoring the structure and dynamic arrangement is insanely misguided - not only you'd miss the whole thing called "life", even the most basic phenomena would be completely in-expressible in this framework. In fact, as I mentioned, understanding atoms themselves would not be possible without understanding not only their parts but their structure and dynamics and phenomena emerging from those.
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Dangit, now I'm embarrassed that you got to the Pratchett comparison before me.
haha, it is definitely my favorite quote of his. It has made a tremendous impact on my views.
It is probably my least favourite Pratchett passage - it may not be objectively the worst, but I think it's a terrible argument, and people citing it as inspirational drive me crazy. I want to yell, "It's not inspirational! It's stupid! It's very, very stupid!"
But I might be a little unfair.
Oooo, this might be an interesting conversation, because I like the general outlines of the whole passage. I think it fits well with the general idea of humans as a social, story-oriented species whose need for belief drives our psyche. I think looking through humankind through that lens is very illuminating. Idk about it being aspirational, I take it as cutting, disrobing, shedding of our delusions of rationality.
But I'd be interested in hearing why you think its stupid and a terrible argument?
I'll take this as an opportunity for a longer effort post, so pardon me if I go a bit beyond the brief.
I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien.
Lewis and Tolkien are authors that young, nerdy, or fantasy-inclined Christians, especially those from an English cultural background, read while growing up. They often make a very strong impression on us. I know that I was moved and a lot of my worldview, as an adult, was shaped by these two seminal authors.
Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.
Pratchett, however, was an atheist, and I think his work is, just as much as Lewis' is with Christianity and Tolkien's is with Catholicism, impregnated with atheism and skepticism. Pratchett is in his own way a very cynical author. Yes, there are gods in Discworld, but they are not particularly worth worshipping, and the religion he is most sympathetic to, the Omnians, are portrayed as nice but nonetheless engaging in a kind of sympathetic self-delusion.
Pratchett's real heroes are existentialists, like Sam Vimes, or Granny Weatherwax, or Death. Death admits openly: "There is no justice. There's just me." Vimes is a man who is fully aware that the society he lives in is corrupt, unjust, and miserable, and yet, grumbling all the while, refuses to submit to nihilism, and makes the world a bit better. Weatherwax is a woman who dismisses religion and faith with, "I've already got a hot water bottle", and yet nonetheless spends her life trying, in her own irascible way, to make the world a little better for the people who live in it.
Often I find, when I read a lot by an author, that author has a kind of general tone or mood. Lewis has an erudite yet common-sensical decency to him. Tolkien is wistful, and lost in memory. Chesterton is delighted by paradox. Adams is wrily amused at the absurdity of the world. The mood I get from Pratchett is, surprisingly for a comedian, anger. Pratchett writes with this white-hot anger at injustice, at unfairness, at a world where stupid bullies tread all over ordinary people just trying to enjoy the good things this world offers. More than that, I think Pratchett has a kind of moral outrage at God. God refuses to even do us the decency of existing so that he can be properly accused of neglect!
Lewis or Tolkien look at the world and they see something there, a divine wellspring to creation, a loving creator who fashioned us, in whom we live and love and have our being, and to whom we will return. Pratchett looks at the world and sees none of that. It's not there. The world may be full of powerful beings separate from us, but they don't really care, and they can't give meaning to life. So what do you do?
I think Pratchett's Discworld books are, in their core, about how to be moral in a godless, meaningless universe.
Yes, he writes comedy. That's the other big difference between him and Lewis/Tolkien. The Christian authors are funny sometimes, but they're saying something sincerely. Pratchett is trying to make you laugh, but he's always, I think, got this really sharp bite aimed at all the absurdities and injustices of the world. Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit. The world is frequently garbage and disappointing. There is no avoiding that. But this is the one you've got and it's up to you to do your best anyway.
There is no justice other than what we make happen ourselves. So we had best get to work.
Put charitably, this is what I think the "atom of justice" speech is trying to say. Justice isn't a metaphysical constant; it's not out there, it's not written into the fabric of the universe, and there isn't a god coming to make it happen for us. We have to do it ourselves. If stories about gods or spirits or hogfathers have any virtue, it's that they train us to believe the impossible, to go on seeking justice, despite the emptiness of the universe we're in.
Suppose you were a young, teenage atheist, and a fantasy fan. You like people like Lewis or Tolkien, or even their lesser imitators like Robert Jordan, or Weis and Hickman. However, you cannot share their faith, or make that connection. What can you do? Pratchett comes along and writes equally entertaining stories, in an equally expansive mythos, that addresses this question for you. Here's what you do if you share these values, but can't believe in their metaphysical commitments. You acknowledge this godless universe and then set out to make justice happen anyway. More than even that, Pratchett's theory of "the little lies" actually helps contextualise the Christian authors - perhaps Narnia or Middle-earth are lies, but they are lies that help prepare you to believe, and fight for, the big ones.
(Compare Lewis' Puddleglum: "...I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.")
So, all that said, why do I hate the "atom of justice" speech?
Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.
Maybe I am just an intolerable pedant. But I hope it comes through that I'm saying this from a place of appreciation for Pratchett.
This was well written and definitely insightful. Allow me to mirror with an equally broad interpretation. I am however, much less eloquent, hopefully my ideas will make it through my torturous use of the English language.
Your conception of Terry Pratchett as this ex-theist, now atheist author, angry, shaking his fist into the sky at the injustice of existence. Wishing such a god of his youth would exist, so that he could to be taken to task for the cruelly of the world, is pretty close. But I think your view misses a core piece, though I think you touch on the penumbra's of it. Pratchett is at his core a cynical humanist. He might rage against the absence of the divine but he more rages against the follies of mankind.
One of those follies, is our penchant for delusion. We lie to ourselves a lot. We delude our selves into believing we are nobler, better, purer than we are. We divide ourselves along arbitrary boundaries, other each other, create monsters in the guise of man and justify it with copious amounts of bullshit. We call upon gods of every shape, size, and creed to justify our actions, our lies. We pretend the world is complex and complicated, that there is so much grey.
In this vein, Pratchett positions himself as the magnifying glass, the pickaxe. He does what many comedians of the more cynical bent do. He pulls at that edifice of delusions. He constructs fantastical worlds that at the same time mirror our own, and he uses them to speak truth about the human condition. Sure there is that anger you see, but there is also an unburdening, a liberation to the authentic human experience. I agree Pratchett might have favorites characters like Carrot, and that he really speaks through characters like Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, Havelock Vetinari, and Death. But those characters all to a tee, see through the delusions of mankind.
In a different psychology profile of a section of readers, put yourself in the shoes of a young high-functioning Autist, of agnostic religious belief. Your world is one of lies, people say one thing and mean another. Everyone is constantly claiming this or that faith or creed is perfect, but not that piece of it, that gospel, that word, the "situations" is different, the rules need to be bent, "stop trying to make everything so simple", "can't you see the world is more complex", "stop being so rigid". But in comes fantasy literature. At first: Tolkien & Lewis, their worlds are so much more pure, the good, are noble and good. Evil is bad. The world is black and white, and simple. Complex in its expansive history, its cohesive world, but fundamentally an honest world, full of wonder, and symbolism. More than enough for your extreme pattern-recognizing brain to fall in love with. Then Adams, with his absurdism, you can't help but relate because the real world is so absurd, there is so much bullshit, so much fakery trying to dress itself up. Then you discover Pratchett, cynical, humorous Pratchett. Nobody in Narnia or Middle earth pretends the world is more complicated. Sauron never tries to sell you the "its complicated" argument, Aragon isn't genociding Haradrim while acting like he's a noble king. Gondor's economic policy is not discussed. Discworld however feels closer to reality, it feels more representative of the IRL delusions. And Pratchett peels back the curtain, shows that yes, even the more "complex" world really is simple. In that sense, the fantasy is realer, it requires less make-believe, less suspension of belief, but is still full of wonder and whimsey. It helps that Pratchett is clever and funny.
Of course then in my case, I went onto the darker side, AGoT, Black Company, Malazan, Gene Wolfe, R. Scott Bakker. They help kill the child and prepare you for the cold reality of adulthood in a world filled with the nasty little monsters we call humans.
But the "atom of justice" quote from this lens is not about making our own justice in the world, or even that they train us to believe the impossible in the empty world. It's about the epistemological idea that not all lies, all delusions are bad. There are very real, very important things, to mankind that are not elementary particles. Collective ideas that we have dreamed up. That are core to what makes us human. The unfiltered truth of reality is not some moral bedrock that should be aspired to. It should go without saying, but in case it doesn't, people might not literally believe that justice comes in atoms but they absolutely believe in concepts that don't actually exist in physical reality and they treat denial of those, very not true things, as massively transgressive. So young Autistic child, be less like the Auditors, and more like Death. It is to me, a wonderful expose on how flawed humanity is, how there is beauty in that flaw, and how that flaw is what makes humans, humans.
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I absolutely love Pratchett, as a writer. But while I can look towards Tolkien for moral guidance (a Christian would look towards Lewis too, probably), I would never expect that from Pratchett. I mean, he has moral characters, virtue, and all that, but it's all kind of... floating in the void on the top of a giant turtle. That's not something you can really lean on when you seek moral guidance and support. And, of course, since he's a humor writer, there's a lot of exploiting "clown nose on - clown nose off" thing. Which I am totally willing to allow him as a writer, in fact, maybe I like him even more for that. But if you start to approach serious questions in the strictly "clown nose off" mode, Pratchett is not somebody you can have as your guide. At least that's how I feel. Maybe for many it can be, and standing on top of his giant turtle floating in the void is better than floating in the void alone.
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Good post I mostly agree with, but just an aside:
Something a lot of Christians forget is that many atheists are either former Christians themselves, or have had enough exposure to Christianity that they understand it even if they don't agree with it. We are perfectly capable of reading Lewis and Tolkien and "getting" what they are saying about God and faith and morality.
It's possible this is more true of Americans than Brits, as my impression is that while religion is a pretty weak force in the UK, even among those who still believe, in the US even atheists probably have regular exposure to sincere, hardcore believers. If you grew up in an atheist home and never went to church at all, maybe your only impression of Christianity is a kind of sneering disdain for the god-botherers. But most Americans, at least until the current generation, probably had parents who at least took them to church occasionally. The idea that atheists find religion alien and unfathomable (and that all atheists are militant sneerers) is not true across the board.
I don't know what Pratchett's childhood was like, but he was born in 1948 so he probably didn't grow up atheist. I think you are right that he clearly became one, of the "angry at God not existing" variety.
Yes, it's a straw man in that of course justice doesn't exist in physical particles, and neither Death, nor the author using him as a mouthpiece, thought people did think of justice that way. His point, whether you agree with it or not, is that a lot of people believe in justice and mercy and goodness as intangible but very real metaphysical forces in the world, manifested by divine powers (God, for Christians, obviously). And he's pushing back against that, saying no, these things only exist in our heads, they only exist to the degree that we create them. The metaphor was perfectly coherent to say what the author was trying to say: there is no Just World, there is no deity who is going to make sure that good and bad people get their just rewards in the end. Justice is only what we make of it.
Perhaps it is you, only able to conceive of atheism as nihilism or an angry reaction against religion, who finds it difficult to comprehend the speech from an atheist author's point of view.
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It's worth noting that Trotskyites and their fellow travelers are (humorously, supposedly) saying that injustice is carried by a certain kind of particle.
Good writeup. I sometimes find myself wondering what would Partchett think of the current state of his county, he didn't seem like the kind of person who would be able to rationalize the horrors away (as other prominent British comedian is often accused to do). The closest we have to an answer is probably Thud.
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And even more importantly, he is closer to Vimes as a matter of worldview, but he isn't on Vimes' side because there are no two sides to this question. Carrot and Vimes are absolutely and always on the same side. (And the one time it comes up, Vimes and Brutha are also on the same side). In the Discworld, Good is good no matter whether it is real or not. And part of what is good is systems that work - Vetinari reads as an amoral snake, but he is also consistently on the same side as Vimes and Carrot because what matters is that Anhk-Morpok remains safe, free and prosperous.
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How do you oppose immigration and borders?
That's simple, someone could support government and citizenship as an association of people with every right to exclude who they want from that association, and also believe it immoral for people to place exclusive claim on pieces of God's earth through violence.
Government and citizenship are basically "Hey guys let's make our own group with our own rules on how you can join the group". Borders are "this piece of land belongs to our group and we will hurt anyone who wants on it without permission"
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One could consistently and defensibly desire a status quo of "anyone can physically go where they please, but getting citizenship is difficult and claiming benefits in a country you're not a citizen is impossible regardless of how long you've lawfully been there" (in such a way that one simultaneously opposes immigration as it currently exists, and wishes for the abolition of borders as they currently exist).
Well, sure, but the importation of a vast worker class of laborers without rights is how you get the Emirates or Sparta. It becomes extremely unstable because you do need an extremely powerful military to suppress the strangers you’ve let in who do not incorporate full political rights. So I guess I don’t see what good it does to be logically consistent if the thought experiment falls apart five seconds later. (What does it even mean to support human rights if the majority of humans in your society can’t have them?)
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When I work in a data center, I have to hand over my ID and give a fingerprint. Otherwise, I can't enter. Have my rights been violated?
If so, which rights, and from where do those rights derive? If not, why does the same not apply to another country?
Because data centres don't collectively occupy the entire world between them.
Neither does the EU occupy the entire world.
What makes the EU's photo/print requirement a violation of rights, but not an individual requiring the same thing for a smaller property?
But all the countries put together occupy the entire world, whereas all the data centres put together are only a small fraction of it.
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Essentially all open-borders supporters on this site are libertarians. The standard model of libertarian ethics assumes that ownership of land is, as a matter of morally binding property rights, unitary except when limited by explicit contract, and that the current freeholder is the legitimate owner and the rights claimed by the State are usurped.
Libertarianism is largely an American movement, and in the American context this is justified by saying that the rights of landowners were mostly acquired by a series of voluntary transactions beginning with the natural-law title acquired by a homesteader (and that the exceptions can be ignored as a matter of expediency) whereas the rights of the State were acquired by usurpation under the threat of violence. Ignoring the historical argument about the nature of American homesteading, or about what fraction of US land has been subject to a nonlibertarian transaction that would break the chain of natural-law title, this theory is obviously false when applied to other countries.
So from a traditional libertarian perspective, the difference is that you own your land and the government does not own the country. The government has the right to exclude foreign citizens (or to admit them under arbitrary conditions) from land which it acquired by voluntary purchase, as does any other corporation which legitimately owns land, such as the one owning @celluloid_dream's data centre.
Within the classical liberal tradition, we make the analogous argument in terms of freedom of association. If I wish to associate with Jose, and he is willing to travel to associate with me, but the government won't let him, then my freedom of association is restricted. If we are able to associate in ways which don't violate generally applicable laws or impose large externalities on my fellow-citizens (i.e. Jose is not a criminal or a bum) then this is an unreasonable restriction on the freedom of association of a citizen.
You can make exactly the same kind of argument about private landlords - there is a reason why clauses in leases restricting the tenant's visitors are generally unenforceable except in situations like group houses where the tenant's visitors are inevitably going to be imposing externalities on the other residents.
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“They already failed and let in bad people” - is not a good argument for open borders. It’s actually a good argument for being even stricter which Europe is starting to do.
I don’t think you need to refute HBD every time you argue for open borders but I don’t think you should introduce partially open borders caused bad things as an argument for open borders.
I believe in open borders for Anglo and Anglo adjacent in Anglo and Anglo adjacent countries. I believe this has logical consistency.
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I'm only libertarian up to my country's borders. It may sound counterintuitive, but borders are the most important factor when it comes to freedom. I've realized just how little most people value actual freedom, and how important it is to guard with great vigilance, power, and might, the borders around whatever little pockets of freedom we are able to establish. The reason why the U.S. has a Constitution with a Bill of Rights is that, absent that, all of our natural rights will be traded away for short-sighted wants, and these laws are only as effective as the borders that protect them from interlopers with bad intentions.
Still not sure how that idea even works. If you’re a libertarian up to the borders then you shouldn’t be a libertarian at all. Makes me think of Erdogan’s quote about democracy:
In one sense they care about freedom a lot and in another they don’t care about it at all. Most societies on Earth aren’t actively restricting people’s freedom of movement or motion, but you can feel when you can’t openly discuss a particular issue or criticize the government. And in the US the same condition is present, even with an explicit commitment to free speech. Where the difference lies is that your right to speech doesn’t protect you from criticism, lost social opportunities or other forms of non-violent retribution. What it does do is prevent the government from suppressing your right to speak.
Americans take freedom of speech for granted and don’t recognize its significance until the moment someone comes along and takes it away from them.
The current political paradigm fails though because it doesn’t recognize that borders aren’t just geographic demarcation lines. Borders are also social and economic between people in societies. When legitimacy and central authority begin to fray, governance defaults to the local. Afghan militias followed ethnic lines. In Iraq it was sectarian and it’s interesting to observe how these fiefs and warlord societies formalize into legitimate states over time. Beneath all sovereign governments you’ve still got the power networks of para-sovereigns in society that you have to deal with. They don’t own land outright but effectively control autonomous zones. Gangs do this in the west. ISIS did this in Iraq and Syria. The CCP in China did this under Mao and then successfully took over the government.
If you’ve ever read about the history of Congo they are a great case that makes the point. In the east you had rebel commanders like Laurent Nkunda and Mai-Mai leaders that acted as sovereigns. They taxed mines and border crossings and directly negotiated with multinational firms. It blurred the lines between where rebellion and legitimate rulership began.
In Liberia and Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor benefitted enormously from the blood diamond trade back in the 90’s and used widespread violence on the populations but also held territory. Even though it was brutal, one consequence that fell out of that was that it imposed discipline on the population and they built basic services and then transitioned into a formally recognized power when he won the Liberian presidency. Later he of course resigned under enormous international pressure but it was a testament to how deeply his rule became entrenched.
I'd turn it around; Libertarians are usually "up to the borders", since you need a body, i.e. the state, to actually guarantee rights and freedom. The ones who go beyond the the borders are the other ones (or depending how you see it, a specific small subtype), the Anarcho-Libertarians, who think they do not need a state altogether. Once you acknowledge such a need at all, you further want to protect that state in some way from outside influence, which necessarily implies border control in a western democracy. Non-western democracies can do stuff like long-term non-citizenship, but I don't think that's realistic for us, and I also consider it unstable with actual open borders since you can simply get overrun and regime-changed; There is a reason that the usual examples of Dubai or Singapore are, if anything, stricter about their borders than the West.
Imo the primary point of being a libertarian compared to other democratic traditions such as liberalism is the general intuition that the state should be as small as possible and concern itself primarily, if not strictly, with the protection of basic rights, since otherwise there is no check to it growing out of proportion since the state itself is supposed to be the control. Trying to micro-manage the affairs of men "for their own good" always seems to go down a slippery slope of going ever more micro for ever more men.
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Modern libertarianism has basically concluded the only people capable of living in a libertarian society are whites (some factions).
That is where up to the borders I assume comes from.
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The US does this too, no? We're on this slippery slope already.
A lot of countries do this. I got fingerprinted in Argentina. I can’t remember if Mexico does it.
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I know US entry lines are usually that long, but I'm not sure if they collect finger prints. Wouldn't surprise me, the EU is generally better than the US.
Looks like you are right. The US is truly terrible.
I'm old enough to remember Europeans (online) 20+ years ago complaining that this was a human rights violation to track people like this. Frankly, at the time I was even inclined to agree somewhat.
I'm curious what those particular folks think of this today. My naive end-of-history libertarian streak is definitely a bit jaded with time, and it's not paranoia when some parties demonstrably are out to get you.
Strongly against, as always. Getting fingerprinted should require a warrant. Collecting this data without suspicion of a crime is a human rights violation, the data collected this way will eventually be misused, and almost all of it is ineffective security theater anyway - if you're a danger to society, this won't stop you.
I'm also definitely jaded with time. The stuff is unavoidable, every part of the West is on its way to become a surveillance society. In the intermediate future, car licence plates will be tracked by toll cameras, people will be tracked by facial recognition and gait analysis through surveillance cameras and the new eID systems they're building will be required daily to do anything at all online.
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I think ostensibly they can (are supposed to?) but certainly in my hop across the border from Canada last month I didn't get flagged for anything.
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Shout out to the nice customs people who, the one and only time I went to the US, thought it would be fun to play ping-pong with me:
- [After waiting in line] you're at the wrong window, you have to go to that one over there
- [After waiting in another line] No, you have to go to that window over there
- [One more time..., and this may or may not have been the first window I came to...] Man..., you gotta speak up for yourself, you can't let people treat you like that....
I suppose I should be grateful for the free lesson.
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