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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tno6nPT66RM

Have we talked about Georgia Meloni’s powerful speech? A few days ago half my twitter feed was talking about.

I believe she is fundamentally correct that we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.

The consumer stuff gets a little silly but whatever it sounds good. Need to have an enemy your fighting against.

My pro nouns are

Man, American, Catholic, Son.

I think makes a strong implication that gender identity and whole pronoun thing is for those without roots. Empty people.

Had started writing a commentary on Meloni’s speech myself but as this thread is here I'm just going to piggy back off of it.

Long story short I think that you and pretty much everyone amongst the dissident-left are alt-right are getting the causality backwards by accepting the default progressive framing of identity as correct. It's this framing that Meloni is explicitly rejecting. It's not that gender identity (along with the rest of the progressive stack) are for "empty people". It's that empty people latch on to those things as an identity because they don't have a strong identity of their own. An individual with a strong sense of self does not require affirmation of their identity from others, an individual with a strong sense of community doesn't care what his neighbors look like or how much the make so long as they are good neighbors. Preoccupation with gender identity, race, class, etc... are down stream of the social atomization. As you yourself note: @Stefferi's critique of Meloni's position could almost be read as making her point for her.

Meanwhile @DuplexFields talks about progressives fighting against the purity spiral, but was that really ever they case? Some of the oldest critiques against the entire post-modern and progressive movements come from Christian Apologists of the late 19th and early 20th century like Kipling, Lewis, and Chesterton. The characterization of progressivism by it's critics was that they were never interested in fighting oppression so much as weakening the structures that stood as bulwarks against it. They dismissing binary views of black and white, good and evil, truth and untruth as "simplistic", only to replace them with an even simpler view, a unitary view where there is only grey, and do as "do you will". Or as a more recent critic put it "when everyone is 'Super', no one is"

I think that Meloni's choice of closing quote makes this interpretation makes this interpretation explicit so here it is in it's proper context...

It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought “dogmatic,” for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought “dogmatic” to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic. Or, again, we see nothing “dogmatic” in the inspiring, but certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that we should collect facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless as sticks and straws. This is a great and suggestive idea, and its utility may, if you will, be proving itself, but its utility is, in the abstract, quite as disputable as the utility of that calling on oracles or consulting shrines which is also said to prove itself. Thus, because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts’ sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live– a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.

Let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search. Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. In the course of these essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.

  • G.K. Chesterton, Heretics 1905

...and before anyone tries to paint this as an uncharitable weakman I must ask "what is a woman?".

...and before anyone tries to paint this as an uncharitable weakman I must ask "what is a woman?".

No need to reach so far, we in fact literally had disputes on whether 2+2 = 4.

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