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Notes -
Arnold Kling on Michael Huemer on Thought Crime
It kind of goes without saying, but inherent in the notion of "thought crime" are both crime and punishment. If it doesn't deserve punishment, then it's not a crime.
Amen, brother. But is this just preaching to the choir? Consider: A whole lot of NPCs and talking heads sure ate up The Narrative. Propaganda is effective, to an extent, but beyond that extent it is deeply corrosive, particularly to any intellectual class, who become disillusioned and cynical. Thought crime is next.
Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are all about thought crime. You have to take the salvation of Jesus into your heart or something, and if you don't, have fun with eternal damnation. I can accept Aquinas, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. These are men who appealed to reason, writing to convince and persuade.
I imagine only atheists see the appeal of comparing woke (progressive, successor) ideology to a religion of sorts, likely filling some kind of primitive need for tribal loyalty, purity tests, and expensive signals (rabid adherence to nonsense). I'd love to hear Antonin Scalia's take though. Or L. Ron Hubbard's. Perhaps what we are seeing with successor ideology is not an individual need for such, but instead just the character of mass movements, the nature of power, its patterns of growth and movement and perpetuation. Are propaganda and thought crime inevitable?
Let's take it back to 1984. Orwell demonstrates the existential horror of a regime that can successfully deploy thought crime. Didn't he make it blindingly obvious for everyone? I'm pretty sure we were all nodding our heads in 8th grade English class about the evils of totalitarianism, only a few years after the USSR fell. I suspect this issue is particularly salient for me, as a libertarian.
Anyways, I'm not mad, just disappointed.
I think that in reality, people who persecute others for "thought-crime" tend to genuinely believe at least at the conscious level that the "thought crime" is demonstrably false, but also that the person being persecuted is too stupid and/or evil and/or brainwashed to have his mind changed by non-coercive persuasion. This applies both to Christians and to the woke.
Most true hardcore Christians - that is, the kind who would persecute others for disagreeing - seem to genuinely believe at least on the conscious level that not being a Christian is irrational. However, I do agree that on the subconscious level they may have doubts which partly explain their desire to persecute.
Likewise, most persecutory wokes seem to genuinely believe at least on the conscious level that, for example, racism is irrational and stupid.
There is also a second issue to consider: the notion of "thought-crime" encompasses both opinion-crime and preference-crime. Unlike opinions, preferences in principle cannot be argued against rationally, yet "thought-crime" inquisitors are nonetheless willing to persecute people for having "the wrong" preferences. For example, if they believe that it is wrong to dislike bananas, they will be just as happy to persecute a man for disliking bananas because he thinks they taste bad as to persecute him because he thinks that they have poor nutritious content.
Why is this? I think it is probably because persecutors tend to treat preferences to some extent as if they were opinions, and will try to argue people out of them as much as possible. To be fair, many people who get accused of "thought-crime" do the same thing, and tend to try to defend what are actually deeply emotional and personal preferences as if they were opinions.
But secondly, persecutors insist that even if your preference (or for that matter, your opinion) cannot be changed, you must nonetheless at least not just act but also speak as if it had been changed. And in this way yes, we do see one of the ways in which persecution of "thought-criminals" can indeed be a dominance move.
The desire to control others does not always and in every case emanate from the persecutor's deep-seated psychological desire to dominate. It could at least in theory also be emanating from disgust or some genuine desire to defend the community. For example, a man who demands that racists not just act as if they were not racists, but even speak as if they were not racists, even if their dislike of other races cannot be changed, is not necessarily demanding this out of a deep-seated desire to dominate others, although I would guess that in many cases such people actually are doing it out of a drive to dominate. I am just not convinced that it is all of them.
But in any case, clearly at least sometimes the desire to persecute others for "thought-crime" does emanate primarily from a desire to dominate.
In any case, I think that free speech can be defended, at least theoretically if not pragmatically, independently of considerations about what drives those who wish to restrict it to want to restrict it.
Lastly, some comments on Orwell. I think that the person you are quoting is using the concept of "thought crime" in a way that is a bit out of sync with Orwell's horrific vision.
Orwell's O'Brien does not care much whether the ideas that he tortures people into accepting are demonstrably true or false, actually he would probably prefer that they are false because for him the point is to have utter and complete power over others, and you have more power if you force someone to believe a thing that is demonstrably false than if you force him to accept something that is true. And to take it even further, O'Brien even claims that essentially, reality outside of what The Party claims is unimportant.
In real life, I think that other than a pretty small number of hardcore sadists and power-hungry sociopaths, most people who persecute others for "thought crime" are not like O'Brien. That is, unlike O'Brien, they have no desire, at least on the conscious level, to force anyone to accept things that are demonstrably false. When they try to force people to change their minds, they believe that they are trying to get them to change their minds to believe in something more true. And, no matter how much religious or woke jargon they might spew, they do believe that there exists an objective reality that matters.
I e always taken the thought that a good deal of the unacceptability of the thought deemed a crime was at least pushed by two things.
First, that the very idea itself is too dangerous to be publicly expressed. This goes back through religion and state power and other belief systems and basically the legitimacy of people who rule. In much of European history, publicly questioning major Christian dogma was, in modern terms, thought crime. Being openly non-trinitarian was treated as a terrible crime. But likewise, questioning the legitimacy of your king, suggesting that he’s not a legitimate heir to the throne is treasonous. These things call directly into question the legitimacy of the institution being questioned. If Charles III isn’t the son of Elizabeth II, he’s not a legitimate heir to the throne. This isn’t a big deal now (in fact royalty following Twitter has often claimed that both princes are the product of different affairs, without harassment) but saying the same thing in an era where the king has real power and others vying for his throne, and it’s not something the authorities are going to ignore. Democracy’s legitimacy hinges upon the idea that the will of the people should determine the leadership. Thus, the claims of election fraud are still treated as dangerous ideology.
The second I hung is that the claims have to be at least plausible, if not true. If I claimed that Biden was using black magic to cause fires in Hawaii, that’s not a thought crime, because nobody really takes claims of black magic seriously. Likewise, claims like flat earth, faked moon landings, alien autopsy videos, or cryptids are not thought crimes. At best people laugh at the idea of the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot. Make other claims like two genders, Hunter’s laptop, HBD, biological differences between the sexes, or lab leak theory, and it’s a serious thought crime.
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Yes, O'Brien is not the prototype of thought crime but its demented endpoint. I suppose this is a slippery slope argument now, but the entire category of thought crime seems cursed to me.
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I'll echo what others have said, in that I suspect you are self-congratulating here. My experience has been religious folks very much identifying the religious features of woke-values.
Is it because they recognize the conflict of like-kind epistemic demands or is it because they are more likely to be on the right and see the progressives as a mirror from the left? Not sure.
Overall, i think it is not necessarily being religious or even on the right that makes one recognize wokism as a proto-religion, but overinvestment in idealized liberalism that makes one miss it. Part of this is because progressivism intentionally very much uses the langauge of frank liberalism to hide from the social and often legal barriers to forced ideological commitments. I don't personally care about the sociological implications of wokism being like a religion nearly as much as the socio-legal gerrymandering of what counts as 'neutral human decency' and what counts as imposed ideology.
Take for example the idea of using preferred pronouns. The liberal understands it as a acknowledgement of liberal desire to define oneself autonomously and sees undermining it as on a spectrum from a competing right to liberal self-expression or an affront to secular decency all the way to an invalidation of the other person's freedom. Meanwhile the religious person recognizes it as expression of an ontologolical truth in line with "Muhammad is the true prophet" or John 3:16, and understands it on those terms.
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I think it’s the opposite, religious folks see the parallels between wokeism and other faiths more readily.
We’d all be better off if wokeism were treated as religion and thus unable to proselytize via authority figures in schools and workplaces.
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Huh. Well, more traditionalist Christianity is not shy, at all, about recognizing other religions as existing. It just often considers them all to be evil / bad at worst or distorted and having a glimmer of partial truths at best while still preventing the worshipper from coming to to true salvation in Christ.
The biggest divide within humanity, from the earliest days of Christianity, was between Christianity and paganism, which was clearly recognized as false (but very real in the sense of existing) religion. And even there, traditional Christians have often thought pagan religions are worshiping real, existing spiritual forces - demons or whatever. As a matter of fact, the people I grew up around saw New Age woo in exactly this light.
In that sense, "woke-ism is religion" actually fits very, very cleanly into traditional Christianity's existing world view.
I think, ironically, it's an atheist conceit that "theists" believe that "religion" is generically good.
On the one hand, this is true in the sense that traditionalist Christians do think "freedom of religion" is good, if the alternative is the state overtly oppressing their religious practice. And it is true that there's no shortage of more militant atheists or even just progressives who, when push comes to shove, really are more concerned with "freedom from religion". And they really are comfortable with the state and/or society's sense making apparatuses constantly redefining religion downwards until it's nothing more than subjective thoughts in a persons head that they should keep to themselves and not have impact the public square, with anything else being hate speech. See also the actual existing history of the Bolsheviks and their process of erasing religion in the Soviet Union for a history traditional Christians sometimes are more aware of. Anyway, that's "freedom of religion", not "religion", as a public good, according to traditional Christians.
But on the other hand, that doesn't exactly mean that such Christians would necessarily see other actual particular religions themselves as good things in the world. They take the differences between faiths very, very seriously. If you ever poke around in conservative spaces where, say, conservative Catholics and Evangelicals and Mormons and Orthodox Jews and conservative Muslims (and other traditions) share space in dialog with the general goal to find solidarity in promoting conservative politics, it's not that rare for topics concerning their differences to crop up, and in such cases, the topic either needs to be smoothed over and tabled almost immediately, or it can immediately flare up into intense acrimony. The differences are not small, and people take them very seriously. And again, this is a mental framework that absolutely can make sense of woke-ism as an alternative, much more hostile religion.
The detractors of those religions have a habit of deciding that the differences between different religions traditions are actually pretty trivial, and that the ire between faiths is a function of the narcissism of small differences and power jockeying. But, at least in this detractor view, the different traditions are materially and functionally really about the same (and believers of such often occupy roughly the same class position), the sects maintain the same role in propping up old, traditional power hierarchies, and so on. From that perspective, "religion" turns into a gray blob that all "religious people" value. But that says a lot more about the people who believe that critique than about "religious believers".
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Maybe, but conversely the more you try to tell me that opinion X is the Truth They Don't Want You to Know, the more suspicious I become. In general, it seems silly to try to second-guess our way to conclusions based on how those trying to persuade or dissuade one of a particular view behave. Just think about the issue on its own terms.
My guess is that for as many 'NPCs' you think 'ate up' the Narrative without thinking, a similar proportion of those who believe in the lab leak did so simply because they wanted to plump for whatever was the opposite of what they perceived the establishment position to be.
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I think you go to far to say religious can’t see woke as a proto-religion. The woke can’t because they don’t want to be labeled a religion. In fact I think woke is specifically a Christian religion. Jesus made the slave the equal to the emperor and ate with prostitutes etc. Woke is just the same thing of picking the people they think are the lowest in society and putting them on top. Where it differs is Christianity made the slave equal to the emperor whereas woke seems to want to put George Floyd above the POTUS and the black transvestite above George Floyd. A reverse pyramid instead of equality.
On thought crime I think Kling hits on some truth that thought crime only matters when it leads to elite insecurity. I think of Marxism and communism where I don’t have any big issue restricting their speech but that only comes into play when I see a threat they will win. Knowing the end game of Marxism makes me not have a problem with punishing their thought crime.
The older I get the more I realize libertarianism is a second order belief after you have a good culture. Humans are social creatures. Nobody would want to live in a world where 90% of society becomes fentanyl zombies. You’d rather just ban fentanyl.
The last will allegedly be first in Christianity too, this is just pushed till the eschaton. Wokeness obviously doesn't have this luxury and so tries to make a theological claim manifest in politics, with ludicrous consequences.
The other thing is that it seems Christianity has a more substantive concept of the Good, which acts as a guardrail. The "meek" may nominally be praised (or at least seen as opportunities to display Christian charity) are not allowed to demand a blank cheque because there are other priorities.
Wokeness is a revolutionary ideology that almost celebrates not just the violation of old norms but the upcoming obsolescence of even previously progressive versions. Which leads to weird, unconstrained ideologies and outcomes.
'Meek' is actually translated as something like "those who know how to use weapons, but keep them sheathed." At least according to Jordan Peterson.
EDIT: Actually reversed my opinion when reading further.
The Beatitudes seem to be actually referring to the objectively downtrodden or humble. The whole point is that a reversal of fortune is coming for the actually-lowly and devout. This is especially clear in Luke (Matthew seems to spiritualize it as "poor in spirit").
I only have one relevant Biblical commentary on hand - Luz Ulrich's Matthew 1-7, screenshots here, p194- and he does note that the concept - which is also translated as also "gentle" or "humble" - is applied to Jesus in Matthew 11:29 and he does seem to read it as meaning something more complex than "powerlessness". Which makes sense...for Jesus. His membership in this class is of a particular nature. He models a certain behavior and elevates the class by his conduct ("if you did it for the least of my brethren...") but he's not hemmed in by an absence of choice.
In that case...I'm going with a tentative yes? This is reminding me why I bottomed out on my Biblical scholarship hobby; without putting time into learning Greek certain rabbit holes become even deeper.
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That's an interesting take. Much more appealing to me, honestly.
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If the meek demanded a blank cheque, then they're no longer meek and no longer qualify to inherit the earth. Problem solved!
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I think part of this is that acknowledging "woke" as a religion would run into the First Amendment: you can go much further with your quasi-religion (flags in classrooms, pledges in public proceedings) if you refuse to acknowledge it as such. I don't disagree with your claim that it descends from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the vibe feels like that of two generations ago where I can easily imagine a jurisdiction deciding to put up a Ten Commandments statue at the Capitol because "it's just an acknowledgement of Truth and our respect for the tradition of Laws and Western Values," implicitly claiming that it isn't religious in the same way that a Pride flag merely recognizes historic injustices rather than promulgating explicit beliefs.
I'll be honest I don't think a completely belief-agnostic society is necessarily possible, but I can see how obsequious Progress displays bother many people (frequently, myself included) in the same way that blatant religious symbolism masquerading as tradition bothers the FFRA/New Atheist types.
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Also when existential risks are involved. Martial law sucks, but it is sometimes necessary.
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This is very confusingly written, since no-one actually refers to anything as a "thought-crime" expect in reference to claiming a martyrdom/dissidence status for some view they themselves hold. Ie. "The fact that I can't tell the truth about vaccine deaths without being cancelled makes my vaccine skepticism a thought-crime", not "You are a thought-criminal for doubting the efficacy of the vaccine, even though the vaccine undeniably works". Or, if there are actual prominent examples of the latter as a mode of discourse, I certainly haven't encountered them.
Let's taboo "thought crime". It's just meant to be a convenient label / handle, but with extra salience from Orwell's 1984.
I'm talking about society's seemingly reflexive need to punish wrongthink. This is corrosive because it's very difficult for society or its agents to determine exactly what an individual thinks. Furthermore, only acts (and not thoughts) have relevant consequences. We generally think it's ok to wish harm on one's neighbor for a brief moment.
Simple examples of thought crime include hate crimes, hate speech, accusations of being a racist rather than doing a racism.
In the US, at any rate, hate speech is not illegal. And "hate crimes" are crimes in which the victim is chosen because of his group membership (real or perceived). No hatred or other ideas need be shown. In that sense, a hate crime enhancement is not very different from a gang crime enhancement. Neither is really a "thought crimes." The problem is really the last one on your list, better known as cancel culture.
I thought the context of this punishment was extrajudicial canceling, etc. Not that the criminal justice system prosecutes wrongthink.
That is what I thought, until he explicitly mentioned hate crimes.
As I've attempted to demonstrate in another reply, I mean hate crimes in the colloquial sense, not necessarily the statutes in the US (but possibly so). When people described the Jussie Smollett hoax initially as a hate crime, I don't think it was a claim that the crime would meet the statutory burden for a hate crime, and I think they are largely describing a thought crime on top of a purported actual crime of assault or whatever.
I think you need to be more clear about what renders some crimes motivated by the victim's group membership a "thought crime" and others not.
Sure. I don't think most people who call JS a "hate crime" are making a claim about how the victim was selected. I don't think they understand the statutory burden to declare an act a "hate crime". When people call JS a "hate crime", they are saying "they attacked JS because he was black, because they hate the blacks". This is a different sort of claim, and it revolves around thought crime.
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But it sure is punished. The test is not illegality but punishment.
I am rather certain I can find examples in the US in which someone was charged with a hate crime, possibly convicted, where it is simply not possible to know why the victim was chosen. By your standard, any typical rape of a woman is now a hate crime, as the female victim was chosen because of her membership in the group of women. I believe the intent and wording of hate crime statutes go beyond your standard and presume to read the mind of the perpetrator, mostly as inference from actual acts (speech or otherwise) committed.
It isn't my standard; it is what the laws typically say. See Lucas v. United States, 240 A. 3d 328 (DC: Court of Appeals 20200 ["the District's Bias-Related Crime Act is different from most states' hate-crime laws, in that the "majority of [state] statutes define a hate crime as one in which the actor committed the offense
because of,'by reason of,' or `on account of'" another person's race or other protected status." Zachary J. Wolfe, Hate Crimes Law § 3:8 (June 2019) (surveying statutes). Instead, the "demonstrates ... prejudice" language of the District of Columbia's Act does not expressly require a causal connection between bias and the criminal act and would appear to punish "the fact of being prejudiced," Shepherd, 905 A.2d at 262-63, thus raising constitutional concerns."]And courts are not that dumb. Breest v. Haggis, 180 AD 3d 83 (NY 2019) ["not every rape is a 'gender-motivated hate crime'").
Yes, of course they ask the jury to read the mind of the perpetrator; almost every criminal law requires that, because they typically require the jury to determine [the mental state of the perpetrator[(https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/mens-rea-a-defendant-s-mental-state.html) (did he intend to steal? Did he intend to kill? Did he believe that his life was in danger? etc, etc, etc, etc). The issue is what mental state the law asks the jury to infer:1) the defendant's views about race/whatever (ie. wrongthink); or 2) the reason the defendant chose the particular victim. it is number 2.
And the broader point is that your legitimate concern gets lost if you start throwing in hate crimes per se as a putative example. See, eg, the facts of Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476 (1993):
That is an example of someone's punishment being enhanced because of the basis on which he chose his victim, rather than because he held "improper" ideas about race .
I suspect there is a bit of motte and bailey going on, where there is lots of activity in the bailey that I find concerning, but your position is wrapped up tight in the motte.
For example, two women were charged with a hate crime for burning a Trump sign. Arson is the underlying crime, with apparent hatred (towards what protected group?) adding an additional hate crime: http://web.archive.org/web/20210624142206/https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-trump-sign-charges-20170418-story.html
Here is another take on hate crimes in the US: https://mises.org/wire/how-much-problem-hate-crime
This reads more like the bailey I am familiar with. Is it possible that the bolded section is true? Can painting a swastika on the side of a building be considered a hate crime? Not in the motte. What about in the real world?
Here is the state of NJ, according to the ADL (Anti Discrimination League, Jewish): https://www.adl.org/resources/media-watch/hate-crime-laws-cover-everyone
Bolding mine. It looks like the typical rape is a hate crime in NJ. Obviously this is not an accurate summary of the statute, and the ADL does not have the definitive take. Take the Jussie Smollett hoax. Widely described as a hate crime, but without any of the necessary evidence like "watching a racially charged movie beforehand, then discussing hey let's beat up that black Empire faggot".
Note ADL says the crime must be inspired by hate. That's not in the motte. Again, non-definitive, but still, there is a concept of a hate crime which is largely thought crime.
Here's Oberlin College: https://www.oberlin.edu/campus-resources/bulletins/condemnation-anti-asian-violence
So Joe Random Blogger is going to somehow witness a "hate crime", including the watching of a racially charged movie beforehand and then the witnessed discussion to target someone because of their protected category, and be able to rightfully intervene?
No, it isn't. It might be evidence that the victim was chosen because of their religion, but simply spraying a swastika is not a hate crime. See R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) and Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343 (2003).
The law in NY is the same. Again, courts are not stupid.
An odd example, since the fake facts, had they been true, would IIRC have been evidence that he was targeted for his race or sexual orientation.
They are wrong. Did you see my quote from the DC Court of Appeals, describing how most states define hate crimes? Who do you think knows the law better, the ADL or the DC Court of Appeals? Who has an incentive to be inaccurate?
I don't understand. The link doesn't define hate crime.
The law does not provide a greater right to intervene re hate crimes.
Did you not see the link to the article saying that the charges were dismissed?
While I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument that "statutory hate crime" is carefully defined to avoid constitutional issues, I am talking about "hate crime" in the colloquial sense, as gets reported on in the news etc as demonstrated by my several links.
Briefly:
I think these illustrate that the colloquial sense of "hate crime" dominates the "statutory hate crime" in human discourse. I also believe that without the constitutional protections in the US, hate crime statutes in Europe adhere more to the colloquial sense. Note further that the FBI (not necessarily a statutory authority) was quoted in one of the linked pieces:
T H O U G H T C R I M E
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