site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

12
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."

Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:

Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.

The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.

... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...

If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.

One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:

“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Gas Chamber Simulacra

The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.

They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").

The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A way Forward

Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism.

Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.

[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.

What's the difference with the other monotheistic religions? Thinking others are destined to hell is worse than believing them to be less than a fully formed person. In any case it doesn't matter what people believe, only their actions matter.

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief. It was debated in the first century, and Catholics (eg) believe righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation). But it’s also different for another reason. A hypothetically hegemonic Catholicism allows anyone to be 100% Christian and 100% loved by God. A hypothetically hegemonic conservative Judaism excludes much of the world from ever being 100% loved by God, or Jewish in the eyes of religious authorities. So you’re cutting people off, excluding them purely based on DNA. That’s a huge zero day bug in the religion’s code that demands criticism and condemnation. How, in 2023, do we have a religion where the most important criterion is not what you do, or even what you believe, but your DNA? How can you really have a religion that says a child immediately adopted by a Jewish woman will never be loved by God?

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief.

Yes it is. It may not be fashionable in the biggest denominations today, but it is both the historic teaching of the Catholic Church and the current belief of many influential denominations.

"Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins" - Unam Sanctam: Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302

This statement meets all of the criteria outlined in The First Vatican Council for an ex-cathedra infallible teaching. The idea that, "righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation)," is modernist bullshit. Any orthodox Catholic prior to 1800 would have immediately recognized that proposition as heretical.

Someone who dies and is buried in a graveyard goes to the grave. But christians also say that he goes to heaven or hell. As far as I understand it, its impossible to go to two different places at the same time, so what gives? If that phrase is not to be taken literally, then they should start using a more sincere phrase to describe that notion, maybe like 'a copy of him is created in heaven/hell', or 'recreated in heaven/hell'.

Really?

Baptism of desire isn't something new or even controversial I assumed?

And yet, Protestants.

I'll add that, in my experience, I've heard this as a common Islamic criticism of Judaism as well. Islam is very clear that everybody is made good and beloved by God and is of equal intrinsic worth. God sent prophets to every nation, and everyone regardless of ethnicity or race or culture can become a Muslim and be saved. That door is always open, and sometimes I talk to Muslims about how they could never sympathise with Judaism because it excludes so much of humanity. Jews are no better and no worse than anyone else.

It makes for an interesting contrast with Christianity. In Islam, the history of Israel is in a sense unimportant. God sent prophets to all peoples to teach them his ways, and eventually summed up and collected them all in the Final Prophet. Israel is a historically relevant case of this happening, because it influenced so much of the rest of the Middle East, and provided cultural context for the final revelation, but it isn't theologically relevant, in any deep sense. We know the prophets of Israel well because they're described in detail in the Tanakh, but the prophets of Israel are not intrinsically any better than any other prophets.

For Christians, on the other hand, the history of Israel specifically does matter - Jesus is the messiah and king of Israel, the summation of that nation's history, but in a way that somehow 'breaks out' and expands to the entire world. The New Testament is full of quite painful wrestling with what this means, and how you get from Israel to the New Creation in which all are one in Christ. So Christianity still has to reckon with Israel in a way that Islam doesn't.

most of the stories in islam are plagiarized from judaism and most of the prophets mentioned in them are jewish prophets. for example, islam claims that the kibla shrine in mecca (holiest place in islam) was built by abraham, the father of the jewish people, even thought this is false and mohamed said this just to legitimize the place that was previously a pagan shrine.

Certainly Islam is very strongly influenced by Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an is full of stories and references from the Hebrew scriptures.

What I want to argue is that as a theological category, Israel doesn't cause the sort of problems for Islam that it does for Christianity. Israel is relevant for Muhammad and early Islamic Arabia in a contingent, historical sense, but only in a contingent sense. God's covenant with Israel matters because it happens to have been a very influential one in the region, but that's all. The Final Revelation to Muhammad isn't dependent on the covenant with Israel.

That is, Israel is not special in Islam. It had a covenant with God and prophets sent from God, but so did every nation - see Qur'an 16:36 and 40:78.

This is not really the case in Judaism or in Christianity. In both of those traditions, you sometimes get the idea that God might have spoken or sent prophets to other nations to warn them, but this is relatively radical. Rather, both seem to take the view that God revealed himself only to Israel. That's why in Romans 1:18-21 Paul need to present an argument as to why the Gentiles are at fault for failing to recognise God. Likewise in the sermon in Acts 17, he invokes 'the times of human ignorance', suggesting that there was some period in which God was not known to the Gentiles, which might be a mitigating factor for their ignorance.

So Israel retains a central significance for them. For better or for worse, it was the place where God first made himself known to mankind, and everything proceeds from there.

That said, both Judaism and Christianity have the idea that in some sense Israel is supposed to illustrate or reveal God to the nations. As I understand it ancient Judaism was somewhat more 'evangelical' than modern Judaism, and allowed for actively going out and attempting to convince Gentiles to worship the God of Abraham, but even in modern Judaism, there is the idea that because of Israel's faithfulness all the nations will come to recognise and worship God. They will not become Jews, but they will know God.

Exactly how this will happen has been disputed. There are passages that you can read as implying a sort of empire, e.g. Deuteronomy 15:6, but that is not a common understanding now, and I believe now it's usually thought to be a sort of global moral influence, as in e.g. Exodus 19:6, with Israel as a 'kingdom of priests'. At any rate, there's the idea of Israel as a light on a hill - God using Israel as a vehicle for the salvation of the world.

What that would look like is, again, unclear, and sometimes it might be something left for the messiah, so all Jews need to do now is follow the mitzvot and live righteous lives, as good examples to the world. Sometimes I believe very liberal Jewish teachers have suggested that Jesus or Muhammad might have been means by which God made himself known beyond the Jewish people. That doesn't mean endorsing everything in Christianity or Islam, but prophets to the Gentiles, so to speak. That said that is a very liberal move. At any rate, I think the exact way it will work continues to be a matter of reasonable debate among Jews.

Christianity, at any rate, does think it knows how God used Israel for the salvation of the world. For Christians, Israel becomes a sort of prelude to Christ - it was, like John the Baptist, there to make straight the way. This does not indicate any special righteousness on behalf of the Jewish people, for all have sinned equally and fallen short of God's glory, but merely that this was the history that led up to Christ. Israel's relevance is subsumed within Christ's relevance. The old covenant with Israel is not negated - on the contrary, it is fulfilled - but it becomes part of the new covenant in Christ's body, which is for all people.

There's still massive debate within Christianity as to exactly how this works, and I won't rehearse arguments over supersessionism or dual covenant theology or anything else, but I think pretty much all Christians would hold that Jesus in some way fulfils the covenant with Israel or is the culmination of Israel's history, and inaugurates a new creation in which all people are saved.

So to broadly summarise:

Judaism: Israel is the community of the covenant, a people that God has chosen and reserved to himself out of all the world. We are those people and we must follow his commandments.

Christianity: Israel was a theologically important nation, the product of a covenant which led up to and was completed in Jesus, God's only Son. In Jesus all divisions between peoples and nations have been abolished. We are born to new life in Jesus and must carry this gospel to the nations.

Islam: Israel was a historically important nation, and one whose prophets are known particularly well to us and are especially dear to us. However, all nations received prophets, for God neglected none of his people. All revelations to all nations have been collected up and completed in the revelation to the final prophet, however, and it is this revelation that all people must now follow. We are the people of this final revelation and must issue this call to all people.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats