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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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Pierre Poilievre, current leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, recently filibustered the Canadian House of Commons for almost four hours. I do not wish to go over all points made in his speech; rather, I would like to focus on a particular excerpt of it which I find typifies contemporary "woke" ideology and presents an adequate characterization of this mode of thought (despite the oft-toted meme that "woke" doesn't have a clear definition). A transcript of said excerpt may be found here.

We believe in judging people based on their personal character, not based on their group identity, and Liberals used to believe in that too. It used to be the basic precept of a liberal ideology, to look past people's race, their sexuality and their gender and just judge them as individual human beings. [...] We believe in the traditional view of individual freedom and responsibility, where we see each individual as a precious and unique creation who can live out their life based on their merits, and be judged for those merits, rather than being wrapped up in divisive ideologies that base their judgments on race, ethnicity and other irrelevant characteristics.

For all their talk of having been re-educated out of racism, bigotry, et cetera, progressive liberals seem to be the first to make snap judgments on exactly those characteristics they claim not to harbour any biases towards. Consider this paper on the "competence downshift" by White liberals, which asserts:

White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites-that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent. [...] Although Republican candidates did not significantly shift language based on audience racial composition, Democratic candidates used less competence-related language to minority audiences than to White audiences. [...] Internal meta-analyses revealed that liberals-but not conservatives-presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones.

The presumed moral superiority of progressive liberal thought, enlightened from the baser animal instincts of tribal, racist thinking, seems to blind this kind of person from seeing how they themselves are guilty of the very things they stare down their noses and sneer at the "others" for. How did we get to this point, where mere tribal identification to an ideology, a political party, a flag, a word, is able to convince someone that they are the opposite of what they proclaim to be?

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon: it is reminiscent of the organized religions of old, where pledging allegiance to a man who was nailed to a cross for preaching a message of love and acceptance is sufficient to transform a person into one of upstanding moral character; where performing such rituals as making the sign of the cross is enough to imbue one with divine virtue; where prompting one's internal language model with the appropriate passage or hymn is enough to evoke a rote choral response. Just because Christ preached a message of virtue doesn't mean that Christians who purportedly follow in his footsteps actually are virtuous; indeed, there are many progressive liberals who will readily chastise Christians for being antiquated, racist LGBTQ+-phobes, far from the paragons of virtue they profess to be.

Yet, how is the structure of their progressive thought any different from the very Christians they chastise? Does pledging allegiance to the Ministry of Diversity truly make one accepting of diversity, any more than pledging allegiance to the Ministry of Love or the Ministry of Truth means that they are indeed acting in service of Love or Truth? Does flying a pride flag mean that one truly is a tolerant, accepting individual? Conversely, does refusing to fly these colours mean that one is anti-tolerance, anti-acceptance, and LGBTQ+-phobic?

Perhaps this is what is meant by the antiquated injunctions against idolatry and iconolatry; the rote, superficial worship of symbols of divinity blinds one from actually undertaking the journey of inner psychological change and transformation to practice those virtues in the real world. In a contemporary context, the icons of divinity have been replaced by language, terminology, and indeed, new iconography that professes to stand for virtue, the usage of which is sufficient to deem one as an upstanding citizen of good moral character.

Hence the emergence of iconoclasts, who sought to bring to light the artificial nature of these icons and their lack of correspondence to any true underlying reality.

So too with the term, the icon of worship, "liberalism," and the semantic drift that has occurred to transform this word into its complete opposite. It has become a pure simulacrum, untethered from the original referent to which it was intended to point.

Coming full circle to Poilievre's remarks now:

We believe in judging people based on their personal character, not based on their group identity, and Liberals used to believe in that too. It used to be the basic precept of a liberal ideology, to look past people's race, their sexuality and their gender and just judge them as individual human beings. That is what “liberalism” was; that was the meaning of the word. Now, it means exactly the opposite; it means that there is nothing more important than a person's group or other identity.

Despite your woke-as-religion argumentation, you seem to be missing the "Original Sin"-analogue: a major part of the woke worldview is that everyone has internalized biases and everyone should be a work-in-progress of improving themselves by trying to reduce those biases but they will never be 100% successful. From this assumption, they conclude that attempts to ignore group identities will inevitably fail and that creating an unbiased system out of biased individuals requires explicit attention to bias.

Ya i think that’s the problem I initially got at. I don’t think everyone whose woke or religious is doing it in bad faith. I think a lot of similiarities exists. I attribute a lot of the issues with woke to mistake theory and some lack of putting things in a numerical frame.

That being said I do think there are more grifters in woke. Or atleast the corporate types who don’t give a shit but genuflect some to keep their business and money humming bad it’s the dominant ideology now.

I'm confused. I didn't reply to your comment and I don't see how your other comments in this thread relate.

I think I was replying to your “woke as religion bit” and if I describe correctly “wokes are acting in good faith bit, they believe what they say” while incorporating thoughts I wanted to say.

I think you're getting hung up on the word "judging" and reading in connotations that aren't there. Maybe a better neutral word would be "evaluating." In situations where we need to evaluate someone (to determine whether they should get a job, get admitted to a club, qualify for a particular government benefit, etc.), the classical liberal approach says we should only evaluate them based on personal characteristics, not based on group membership.

So how is this Conservative/Classical Liberal valorization of judgement really much better than, or different from, what Poilievre is criticizing the "woke" for?

It's better because we're evaluating the person based on characteristics they actually possess, rather than imputing group characteristics to them that they may not actually possess.

The reason many flawed people don't change is because the people in their lives enable them, which is to say don't properly judge them for who they are. I think that being better judges of people creates an environment that catalyzes people to change for the better.

It seems clear to me he wasn't saying he believes in judging people as in "possessing the personality trait of being particularly judgemental." He just meant that when we assess someone's character, which everyone inevitably does, we should do so based on their actual individual character and not based on which identity groups they're a part of or on their immutable characteristics. At least I would be very surprised if he meant anything else.

I think what’s getting left out is that there’s abundant evidence that Christianity, at least, really does have a civilizing effect on behavior on average. I suspect that other abrahamaic religions lack the budget and or desire to study this, but it’s an entire section in Heinrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World- Christianity appears to have civilized Europe and large parts of the new world, and in isolated mission territories today the difference between converted and unconverted villages/Polynesian islands/whatever is stark. And in the modern west reminding secular-ish Christians of religious themes leads to more honesty, higher fairness, and less rule breaking.

‘Everyone gets together once a week, makes the sign of the cross, sings some hymns, kneels for a while, etc’ really would probably lead to better people on average. I’ve yet to see any evidence that woke does the same thing.

That reminds me of the book The End of the Spear, which is in large part about the conversion of the Waodoni indians in South America to Christianity. Prior to conversion they were infamous killers: nobody entered their territory because it was well known they would probably kill you. They famously killed the missionaries who came to convert them. What's interesting is that after the missionaries were killed, their wives continued the mission. As women they were not seen as a threat and were not killed, and they managed to fairly rapidly convert the entire tribe.

Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction. Steve Saint, son of the slain missionary Nate Saint, is recounting how he and members of the Waodoni took a group of students from the University of Washington on a trip into Waodani territory. After several days travel the students are resting at a Waodani village, among some of the Waodani people when one student asks where the famously violent tribe that killed the missionaries in 50s was. When told that the Waodani were that tribe the student was incredulous:

It was apparent she wasn’t going to accept my word for it, so I suggested she ask the Waodani themselves. “Just ask any of the adult Waodani here were their fathers are,” I suggested. I told her how to say “Bito maempo ayamonoi?” which means, “Your father--Where is he being?” She seemed to wonder what this had to do with her question, but she picked out one of the Waodani men who was enjoying our English gibberish and asked him. He answered simply “Doobae.” I explained to her that the word means “Already.” His father was already dead. I added “Did he get sick and die, or did he die old?”

The warrior snorted at my ridiculous question and clarified with dramatic gestures that his father had been killed with spears.

“Did he just say what I think he said?” the girl asked. “Was his father speared to death? Who would do such a terrible thing?” I informed her that the only people I knew of in Ecuador who had speared anyone in the twentieth century were Waodani…

One of the other students picked a Waodani woman and asked her the same question. Same answer. After one more try with similar results, two girls in the group asked me to ask Mincaye’s wife, Ompodae, the question. From the whispering I overheard, I gathered that they were sure someone as loving and sweet as Ompodae couldn’t have been traumatized by something as horrible as the vicious murder of her father. But Ompodae answered, “My father, my two brothers”--She counted them on her fingers--”my mother, and my baby sister…” There seemed to be more but she stopped there. “All of them were speared to death and hacked with machetes!” Then she pointed at the oldest warrior in camp, who was quietly sharing a stump with one of the male visitors. “Furious and hating us, Dabo killed us all.”...

My feisty tribal grandmother knew what the question was, so she decided to give an answer. She told how her family had been ambushed by another clan of Waodani. When the spearing was over, only she and another girl...were left alive in their clearing. When she finished her narrative, which I hardly needed to interpret because her pantomime was as clear to the students as her words were to me, she pointed to one of the warriors I was sitting with and stated matter-of-factly, “He killed my family and made me his wife!”

One of the girls in the group stammered, “How could she possibly live with the man who had killed her whole family?” I explained that the other girl who was kidnapped with Dawa was overheard complaining about her family being speared. One of the raiders ran a spear through her, and they left her on the trail to die an agonizing death alone, with no one to even bury her body. I explained, “It wasn’t like Dawa had much of a choice.”

Their society was pretty dang violent, but they took to Christianity in a big way. They were eager for it: a way of life where you weren't constantly in fear of getting killed. The anthropologist James Boster wrote a paper about how Christianity served as a way for the Waodoni to escape the perpetual cycle of revenge killing their society had gotten locked into.

More likely the confusion is with the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, which Poilievre was part of and which dissolved much later.

I like the thrust of this post, going a bit deeper into the very surface level 'wokeism is a religion' idea. To me wokeism is a pretty clear continuation of the 'secular' ideologies that have become so prominent in the last few centuries - fascism, nationalism, communism, and of course capitalism. Wokeism at the highest level seems to be a way to square liberalism and the idea of equality with capitalism. People who believe in the ideology hook line and sinker don't want to necessarily throw away the wealth generated by capitalism, but also can't stand certain ideas about who have more merit or value.

Yet, how is the structure of their progressive thought any different from the very Christians they chastise?

I could do quite a deep dive here, but suffice to say there are major differences. The structure of woke thought is much more practical, much more 'temporary' so to speak. The best version of wokeism says that we must make society equal because we are quickly approaching a post-scarcity world. Once that happens, it's crucial that we are on a level playing field or billionaires/the multinational corporate class will eat everything. People will be segregated based on race, sexuality, gender, etc. We're at a hinge moment, and if we don't fix things soon we will lose our chance.

At it's core, wokeism is political and societal.

Christianity on the other hand is extremely individual and personal. To quote C.S. Lewis:

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.

Perhaps we will see a woke iconoclast to come in and set things straight - perhaps not. Either way, I see wokeism as a temporary political movement, and I'd wager most of its adherents do as well.

People are too easily misled by "positive" language and symbols, and think that merely "identifying" with a word, a flag, a cross, is enough to be virtuous. I disagree, and despite the woke progressive liberal's claim that they have embraced secularism, they seem to fall into the same psychological patterns that characterize the (ostensibly) religious.

Yep, this ground has been trod quite a bit by rationalists under the name of status signaling. Christians would likely call it Pride, the worst sin of all.

It's not a new idea, I think the problem is most folks don't really care enough to self-reflect, or aren't challenged enough to ever have to think about how good of a person they are. I think we broadly agree.

To say that Christianity says it's enough to adhere to the rituals and motions to be good is quite a stretch.

Yep I'm not claiming that Christianity says that at all. Like I said, pride is the worst and most pernicious sin for most Christians given that it's the sin of Lucifer. Pride in my view is very similar to status seeking behavior without real belief or sincere humility behind it.

Why are you attacking Christians in this? And no simply confessing loyalty etc and doing signs of the cross is NOT sufficient. Sure there are some watered down Christian sects out there etc but this is low manning Christianity in an unnecessary way to make your point. And simply not true.

Honestly sure there are some interesting thoughts here but there is no reason to deal with a post that attacks an unrelated third group.

I don't know how, but I immediately pegged that part as a Christian criticism of Christianity. I couldn't see a New Atheist, Marxist, nonbeliever, or follower of some other religion making those points. In fact, it took reading your response (then rereading OP) to notice that an "attack" even existed because I've been hearing the same points from priests (and other faithful) for so long that it sounded like preaching instead.

what I am now, I do not wish to label for fear of evoking simple-minded, stereotypical thinking in those who read my words.

Too late, you've already done it. When you start dropping hints and going on about things (and apparently you got the political party name wrong, if comments above are correct, and named a party which no longer exists, so that is the level of accuracy I must attribute to the rest of your maunderings), then you invite people to start trying to read between the lines.

I think there's a drop or two of euphoria leaking out of this piece.

I abide in the truth of knowing who I am.

A state we all should strive to attain.

Ok but Christians don’t regard performance of ceremonies as virtues. Priest are in hell. Popes are not automatically Saints and many are not. People raised to Sainthood are people who are believed to have inner virtue. The reasons ceremonies are performed are to remind yourself of beliefs and virtues etc while also doing things that have specific connections with god - like the Eucharist’s.

I think deep down what you are getting at in your posts is that they realized hbd is true. It’s likely magnified by the barbell strategy of the left where they do well with the top 20% and bottom 30% of society. And the minorities in the left dominate the bottom 30%. With the right doing better in the middle class it means they would have I guess relatively underperforming whites and over performing minorities which would be closer on intelligence.

I think are just showing that they are aware of group differences. But I don’t think it really changed that they “really love minorities”.

I'll not engage

When you decide to not engage--don't engage. @sliders1234 has been moderated and even banned in the past for not responding to what people actually say, so you're not alone. But namecalling is against the rules, always. Don't do this.

Go put words in someone else's mouth, asshole. I'll not engage with people who have a clear deficit in reading comprehension.

Well that was a sudden descent from hoity-toity to Billingsgate! 🤣

where performing such rituals as making the sign of the cross is enough to imbue one with divine virtue

I was going to let this one go, but you are insisting on being treated as you treat others, so you're wrong there, friend. Bone up on the doctrine around sacramentals which do not convey grace of themselves but prepare us to receive it, and grace is not the same thing as "divine virtue" whatever that may be when it is at home.

The sign of the cross is a prayer, a sign of our membership of the Body of Christ, and many other things.

I think your exegesis is on a par with your political knowledge?

When one sets oneself up as an expert on the terms and uses them to make a point, one needs to be sure one is using them correctly, does not one?

You began by attacking a group I care about. And while I will admit I am no longer a good Christian due to my own failings.

You said this, “where is pledging allegiance to a man nailed to a cross is sufficient to transform a person into one of upstanding moral character”

  • No we do not believe that. You did better in your first reply. There are some breakaway Christian sects with lighter messages but the vast majority do not believe that.

It’s like if I held up a picture of SBF and said this is what rationalist/Effective Altruist really are. Embezzle money and donate it to Democrats.

Damn dawg, are you sure you want to enter the "Getting Banned Speedrun Any%" track this early?

At the very least we don't do the whole name calling thing here, as tempting as that is at times.

Certainly nothing Sliders said is deserving of that response.

@self_made_human and @FarNearEverywhere This thread isn't very helpful, please don't.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em 😁

Strong early entry in the Speedrun, but can they keep up the momentum? It's a medium strong maneouvre, and may fall short of more pithy, fiery, and insulting later entries. We'll have to see the rest of the field to judge as time goes by and the mods lose patience!

His account is 5 months old, so a relatively geriatric contestant, but I don't count him out just yet!

This spectating is not actually contributing to the quality of the forum any more than he is.

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