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Notes -
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
Interesting article! Thanks for linking.
I've heard these comparisons, and as I've mentioned before I'm extremely bullish on the social contagion hypothesis for the majority of mental illness cases. It's an especially pernicious problem because once an illness becomes too 'saturated' like anorexia has been, the cultural cachet of the diagnoses plummets and the fad moves on. All that's left is hordes of people with broken lives and nothing to show for it.
I'm convinced that the modern world's turn away from religion is the main culprit here. That being said, I've been an agnostic for most of my life, so I don't think anyone is necessarily to blame when it comes to turning our backs on old religions. Unfortunately it's just extremely difficult to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with old religious worldviews. I think what many religious people, especially on this forum, miss is that for many agnostics or athiests it's not that they don't want to believe, rather that they find it practically impossible to believe in a religion which demands they lay down the rules of science and empiricism.
Only because of an implicit scientism that is pervasive in our society, which is particularly popular among liberal atheistic/agnostic types. I can't speak for every religion but the Catholic Church believes that there is no conflict between (Catholic Christian) religion and science, a belief I share.
The issue with this scientism is really quite obvious when you ask a straight-forward question: is all knowledge (or all truths) discernable via science or the scientific method? The answer to this question to me is clearly no, and that some truths (e.g. moral truths) cannot be discerned through science, and this enters the realm of philosophy and ultimately religion or faith. Many a philosopher has attempted derive moral truths through scientific/materialist means (including atheist star Sam Harris, if we want to call him a philosopher), but these projects inevitably end up as failures trying to square the circle. The alternative is moral nihilism and a completely materialist outlook, but very few atheists seem to actually want to bite that bullet.
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
As with all sorts of similar solipsistic arguments, my response is this: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.
I think that was his point, we must believe there is order to the universe otherwise we should just do random shit for no reason, and religion was mankind's first attempt to discern that order, facilitating the advent of science when we discovered religion's limitations.
I agree with this angle. I think the stance of moral relativism is a performative contradiction -as soon as we have an 'other' we have to reckon with a non-relativist morality. I think morality gets mixed in with the locus of care where we apply it. Humans are very good at shifting this boundary and there are different solutions to scaling morality across different groups. Some cultures favour family, tribe over all else, but this is different from moral relativity.
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