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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32665 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.

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.

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