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Notes -
I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
I get this reminder when I head back home to the rural area that I grew up in. I think some introspection reveals to me that I'm inherently something of a contrarian and inclined to be disagreeable with what seems like unthinking enthusiasm for shibboleths. Living in a deep blue city, this means I get annoyed with rainbow flags, BLM, Ukraine flags, and so on. Then I head home and I see the crass stupidity of people that hang "Fuck Biden" flags on their houses and realize that I'm not actually a Red Triber either.
This is one of my favorite things about the Motte--that so many of us have this shared experience with being mystified by the overwhelming prevalence of unreflective dogmatism and group identity. I most strongly identified with right-wing politics when the right was preaching small government and libertarianism, but Republicans can't seem to keep sight of their own principles once they land a spot in the federal government. I most strongly identified with leftist politics when the left was using things like free speech and atheism to undermine opposition, but once the "religious right" receded sufficiently for the left to capture the White House, suddenly it was all about embracing Islam and banning "hate speech."
I've long since given up hope that intelligent people will ever be allowed to intelligently govern the United States of America. I assume this is at least in part because even the intelligent people who manage to get elected or appointed or hired into important positions seem inevitably to get captured in short order by Moloch or some other destructive egregore.
But it's nice to have others with whom to commiserate.
It's not even dogmatism as such - my experience in life is that most extremely dogmatic people are actually relatively intelligent. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence coupled with a sense of intellectual rigour to be really dogmatic. If you've put in the effort to understand a large system of doctrine and to commit yourself to it, you need to understand lots of ideas, how those ideas inter-relate, and so on. You can't do that if you're not intelligent enough to think in an abstract way.
The true fanatics for a set of dogmas can be very frustrating, but I don't think 'stupid' is the word I would use for them.
What somehow still manages to surprise me when it comes to general stupidity is how unreflective most people are, and how unwilling they are to engage in even the most cursory checks on the consistency of their own beliefs. They just float around and believe whatever seems to be convenient or trendy, and if you try to ask for consistency, for them to relate any of their ideas to each other, they either get angry or immediately retreat to some sort of cliché about how people should just live and let live.
There comes a point where I want to shake someone and yell, "But those things you've said contradict! You can't hold all those things at once! The jigsaw doesn't fit together! You have no idea what you're saying!"
I actually have a half-written effort-post sitting on my desktop that I've been trying to decide whether to post. I'm reluctant in part for privacy reasons, but also because I can't decide whether there's any value to it beyond me carping about people I know.
But to describe the post as presently constituted, basically it's mostly vignettes of conversations I've had with colleagues over the past couple years. These are people with PhDs in a variety of fields--English, Biology, Math, quite a variety really--who in the space of a single conversation have expressed to me totally contradictory things without seeming to notice. And in one case when I actually took the time to point this out, I was told--as if this made any sense at all in the context of logical contradiction--"well maybe in theory, but I'm more of a practical thinker."
I'm sure there are inconsistencies in my beliefs, insofar as I have any; I have the quokka's curse of always suspecting myself to be wrong. It's not the inconsistencies that worry me. What worries me is the casual way people encounter these inconsistencies in their own speech, and seem to either not notice or not care, as if they haven't even been listening to themselves. I know there are a lot of people who find the rationalsphere's apparent obsession with "signalling" tiresome, but I can't think of a better explanation for what most people seem to be doing most of the time when I talk to them. They want to signal intellect, or group membership, or status... but they simply do not value truth or logical consistency in any discernible way. "Social signalling" is the strongest hypothesis I've encountered for vast swathes of human interaction. And I don't even mind too terribly, when it's not actively frustrating my goals--sociability is an important advantage of our species--but I do not enjoy being reminded that it is rare even for highly intelligent or highly educated individuals to be able to consistently see beyond the signals.
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Don't worry to much about intelligent people controlling the levers of power; because intelligence has no correlation with values.
There are intelligent people everywhere at all times on all sides; Eg, I would bet dollars to donuts that the smartest presidents were Jefferson, FDR, and Adams, and they are all wildly different in terms of political philosophy.
This is surely true, but I do often seriously suspect that my outgroup's values, intelligently executed, would still result in a better world than my ingroup's values, foolishly executed. And I don't even get that, what I get instead is a world where almost everyone's values are totally decoupled from their actions and people just go through life giving each other powerful electrical shocks all the time but no one can afford to defect from the status quo.
Ah, the human condition! What a pain in the ass.
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Agreed! That's why I love the Motte, and rationalists more generally. Sometimes I do wish I could fall into the mindless dogmatism camp though. Being a contrarian skeptic can be quite personally difficult sometimes!
Lack of certainty is great for getting at the truth, but humans are much happier (I'd imagine) when they have certainty.
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Intelligent people who get elected do it by saying things that unintelligent people want to hear.
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