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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error). But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokeism. Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople". Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but atheism typically gets a free pass. Even the philosophers on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.

Does this happen because atheism is largely not viewed as a threat anymore (since its birth of wokeism is already in the past) and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and atheism is vaguely internet-weirdo-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokeism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that atheism makes go so far beyond typical constraints of the scientific method that one actually does just quietly make an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation (and people just fail to ever mention such)?

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Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".

This is a very strange thing to say, because whatever else "wokeism" might be, it's not relativist. Wokeism has a very strong, dogmatic view of the world, and judges everyone and everything by its exacting standards. There's a reason people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are cancelled by woke puritans - they judge these complicated men by modern, woke standards and find them wanting.

I mean, as much as the stereotype is that wokeism treats Islam with kiddie gloves, or is happy to excuse anti-woke practices if they come from a minority culture or religious group, I actually think that's only a practical constraint for coalition building. If the woke have their way, then the only permissible forms of Islam will be those that have been reformed from the inside to be woke-friendly, and every indigenous culture will be turned into a hollow shell of their former selves that woke totally-not-colonialist propaganda forces them to be.

I think this can only be said to be due to the incoherence of wokeism and the impossibility of pinning such people down to making defensible claims rather than argument-by-protest. All I can offer is my own experience trying to determine if there was any substantive 'there there'. Goes all the way back to grad school, from the time before wokeness had taken over. I was starting to see the beginnings of something happening in the space and couldn't quite understand what was underpinning it. I had previously had the experience of looking at subjects like the Supreme Court's docket and SIGINT through the prism of popular reporting, wondering how any of it could make any sense at all, then digging in and learning that there was at least some level of coherence underlying the whole shebang, even if I didn't agree with all of it. So I thought maybe I'd do the same here, and I took use of our University's ability to audit courses. I wanted to go straight to the horse's mouth.

Whelp, best I could tell, there was very little there there. Maybe a little, but not nearly enough to support the whole edifice. Regardless, one thing that was very clear from my experiences was that they were utterly committed to the idea of relativism if you even tried poking at their philosophical underpinnings. It seemed like nearly a reflex to just deflect having to worry about it. Like, just go read Foucault if you want to know more about why relativism, but relativism means we don't have to give objective reasons for our moral positions, and oh by the way, you're a bigot if you disagree with our moral positions. They hide the contradictions just well enough and the masses are now just blinded enough to noticing broken philosophical underpinnings that they can mostly skate along without accounting for it.

It's a strategic relativism. They use relativist arguments to "deconstruct" and undermine opposing views and "structures". Relativism is a weapon, and you use weapons against the enemy, not yourself.

I don't doubt there are parts of academic "wokeism" that are relativist, but to the extent that those ideas have trickled down to the Tumblr and Twitter masses, I think they lose a lot of of their relativist character. Ask the average Twitter user with pronouns in their bio what Foucault thought, and you'll get a blank stare. Ask them what "stand-point epistemology" is, and it's probably the same. But you could probably get them to go on a thousand mini-rants about "micro-aggressions", and what media is "problematic", and who from history was good and bad in absolute terms.

I don't disagree at all. I would be curious to see where the current balance lies if we actually just asked them, "Is there an objective morality?" We might be so far along that we'll get blank stares to that, too.

To the extent woke people purport to disagree with objective morality, I think it's a combination of two things:

  1. They interpret the phrase "objective morality" to mean western/Christian morality.

  2. They interpret "objective morality" as supporting the idea that the powerful should be able to impose their morality on the oppressed.

So even though they do believe in "an" objective morality, they associate the phrase "objective morality" with views they disagree with and therefore claim to not believe in it.

If I'm being flippant, I'd say that my observations of the internet wars were that both sides had major problems, but probably the biggest area that atheists felt like they were constantly getting crushed on was the argument from morality. They tried lots of things to try to fix this. Ultimately, I think they were so unsuccessful that they just did everything they could to bury the topic and ridicule anyone who even thought about morality as a thing.

...directly leading to exactly the phenomenon that you describe.

This is like reading a dispatch from a completely different timeline. Are you talking about atheists like Sam Harris, who literally wrote an entire book, The Moral Landscape, explicating a sophisticated defense of his non-theistic conception of morality? You can say, as I’m sure you would, that this book was a colossal failure and that its arguments are bad, but it is just verifiably false that atheists attempted to “bury questions of morality”. It’s also especially incoherent to then try and link the New Atheists to “the woke” - whom you fail to identify” - when the vast majority of “woke” people I knew during the height of the atheism wars either hated the New Atheists, or, far more often, had no interest in atheism whatsoever and formed their worldview in a way that was totally orthogonal to questions about the existence of God(s).

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