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I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.
We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.
I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.
So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.
When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.
from wikipedia: By the mid-16th century, there were approximately 10,000 Africans in Lisbon, around 10% of the city's population. probably the reason there isn't large amount of blacks in Portugal now because they they all assimiated, this might be part of reasons why the country transitioned from a superpower to "hey, actually portugal belongs to eastern europe" tier.
I find this pretty hard to believe. I've found multiple sources from people that are looking to show lots of non-whites in England and have written books about it, and most of them claim that London in 1750 was 1-3% non-white at most. This would have been about 10 to 15 thousand people from the colonies. So from contact with non-whites from the age of exploration, in 100 less years their capital had 10x the amount of Africans? And looking at Portugal today, blacks are only 2% of the population. The source for that is an Al Jazeera article here (https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma) that I just skimmed but I am skeptical of its veracity to say the least.
The argument re. London / England is indeed largely bullshit but the evidence that perhaps 5-10% of Lisbon was black in the 16th century is not inconsiderable, the Portuguese were in part the progenitors of the a European slave trade to the Americas, but the effort started with slave plantations in Madeira which was settled from the early 15th century. After the ravages of the Black Death Portugal was a weird place and, again, modern Portuguese do have significantly more sub-Saharan ancestry than other Europeans (including Spaniards, so this is not simply a matter of mixing during the Moorish era), including those in very rural parts of inland Portugal that have seen no major immigration for centuries, which is further evidence for the hypothesis.
It may be possible, but I'm not going to take that Al Jazeera article written by a clearly biased author as proof.
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I think the main reason is that Portugal’s population was much smaller than the big Western European powers (especially England) and so they were quickly supplanted in Asia. The second golden age happened well after the 16th century and was finished off by the great earthquake and subsequent war.
Portuguese do have more sub-Saharan African ancestry than other European peoples (iirc around 2.5%) because of African slavery in places like Madeira and domestically in Lisbon before they started large scale plantations in Brazil, but their PISA scores are comparable to other European countries with much lower percentage SSA DNA, so I don’t think the reason for their decline can be expressed primarily in HBD terms.
England was at smaller side on population, its huge growth is a 19th century thing. At 1500 England had smaller population than Portugal.
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The steelman of this is claim is imo that conservative christians have been the primary enforcers of the current political landscape where the (mostly secular) center-left is tolerating and even regularly allying with the far-left fringe, but the center-right (which is almost entirely the aforementioned conservative christians) is not even tolerating, let alone willing to ally with the far-right.
For concrete examples from my own life experiences, being a literal card-carrying full-blown stalinist communist apologist at university will certainly make you fringe and most probably bar you from the highest formal position of powers in the university itself, but you're unlikely to get kicked out for it and you can wield considerable influence through student activist groups, unions or similar. A professorship is also not out of question if you're otherwise sufficiently savy. On the other hand being even just a suspected Nazi-Sympathizer can easily get you kicked out from Messdiener or the Landjugend (the two primary rural christian youth groups, at least where I'm from).
As such, it's unsurprising that the far-right is especially negative about christian conservatives; They ought to be allies (at least occasionally), but really aren't.
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The Christian memeplex is the biggest driver of tabula-rasa like egalitarian belief. A your usual christian boomers will not be sold on ethnonationalism or racismlite while they believe we all have souls that are the same created by the same being who just so happened to sprinkle them randomly in the people of the earth.
So yes, the alt-right is completely right about Christianity and even more right about the catholic church which has leaned heavily into thirdworldism, taking the white population as granted and gunning for as many black and latin targets they can get their geriatric hands on.
I grin smugly in satisfaction that the anti-Popery hysteria of the 17th century has never gone away, it's just under a very thin veneer of outward secularism: it's all the fault of Christians and by Christians we mean THE ROMANISTS!!!!
Here, have some sinister geriatrics on their way to grab some targets 😁
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Christians in Europe and America were not historically egalitarian though. You and the alt-right keep repeating that and yet there's almost 2,000 years of the complete opposite behavior. And the modern conception of tabula rasa came from the Enlightenment which Christianity was often very hostile to. The post-Civil Rights and neutered Christianity of today is not the same Christianity of Charlemagne or Victorian England. White Christian Europeans conquered and ruled the whole world and put themselves firmly at the top end of the hierarchy. People like Richard Spencer will say that whites are descended from conquerors and settlers yet conveniently leave out what religion those people believed in. White Christians historically behaved in a complete opposite manner from what people like you and him predict they would.
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The culture that these people all seem to want to “R E T V R N” to is pretty explicitly not just Christian, but Catholic, isn’t it?
The idea they are supposedly criticizing, that human beings have dignity, is not a “slave mentality”, it is the foundational idea behind ending the standard where the vast majority of humans were subjects of their King. Christianity is a liberating ideology at its very core.
Of all the dumb, grifting things that people like Richard Spencer have said, this is perhaps one of the dumbest. This puts him into the same category as people like Andrew Tate; just absolute luke warm IQ people who would be working some low intelligence job if it were not for social media.
William Luther Pierce of Turner Diaries fame came up with Cosmotheism: Darwinism and German romanticism all wrapped with some early spiritual transhumanism and white supremacy. No slave morality whatsoever, he quotes Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Spengler, Shaw in support of the ethos.
It didn't catch on, it withered away when Pierce died. You need a certain kind of prophetic authority and a bit of luck to make new religions, failing that enormous amounts of money and manpower.
I need a good bio of him for my book report, do you know any? Obviously I can't trust anything from Wikipedia.
The only one I'm aware of is The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. It's quite interesting, the author got to interview Pierce for many hours at a time, I think he was around for the funeral. Pierce explains a fair bit about his time with Rockwell, about the trouble of forming organizations, selecting recruits, getting the right people... It includes the whole story of his life, his experience with conservatives, the books he wrote.
You can get the book physically or read it on Unz: https://www.unz.com/book/robert_s_griffin__the-fame-of-a-dead-mans-deeds/
Thanks, that's something to chew on. I was only going off the novel, looks like I was on the right track about his takes on religion.
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Both seem to be intelligent people with some sociopathic traits.
Spencer will probably be more successful without social media and his politics.
Tate would be less successful, but he was successful before social media, albeit he used cam whores, or allegedly might have engaged in illegal activity as a pimp.
They would likely be successful, for a time, in various systems too, but also might get in trouble by overstepping legal and moral boundaries.
How can you separate "just hating on them incredibly uncharitably" from simply noticing the stupidity of their arguments?
Are they? I've listened to an uncomfortable amount of Richard Spencer speaking, and haven't been able to avoid almost as much Andrew Tate (and this is often stuff he curates himself!). I'm not blindly "hating" them. What Spencer is doing here is just historically and philosophically illiterate, and it does seem comparable to what other very online people like Andrew Tate sell.
I don't agree with Spencer's viewpoint, although I don't agree with the destroy nations, or european nations ideology. I am more team ethnopluralism than team one ethnic group dominating the others.
Tate, makes some true and astute observations that trigger people, and also says dumb stuff, and promotes also exaggerations in the semi ironic, just joking, but am I really, way. For the dumb and later parts of Tate's rhetoric, being annoyed is understandable. He also has this sketchy history and it is understandable to gain dislikes from that.
You can disagree with them, and even dislike them, but obviously that doesn't make them stupid.
Also, stupid philosophy, =/ underperforming idiot, fortunately or unfortunately.
Both the way they talk, their notoriety, and accomplishments, don't show them to be the underperformers you label them as because you dislike their views. Spencer was an editor IIRC before his notoriety too.
And why is their success with social media, not something that demonstrates some ability? For Tate especially. Being charismatic is a helpful trait for success, and just like it and other behaviors helped him with social media, it might have helped elsewhere. Or he could take advantage of the same idea of trying to cultivate a following, in other instances.
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I think they want to return to pre Christian Germanic paganism, aka a remnant of the time of living in mud huts like the Africans they love to hate.
Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story that’s perfectly compatible with reactionary ideas about things like the place of women.
I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life, or find that their autistic NEET edge lord behavior is otherwise unwelcome in IRL Christian reactionary communities so try to go further back. Twitter edgelordism is escapism whether it’s on the left or the right.
Citation needed on this claim that somehow Christianity is the source of the technological advancement required to advance out of mud huts. Particularly when for the most of this time period everyone below a noble and a few wealthy merchants, still lived in mud huts.
The claim comes from The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, in which he demonstrates
Thanks, I got the book and I'll check it out.
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Varg certainly does. Literally burning down historical churches and making a whites only pagan tabletop RPG.
Himmler was big on this, but other Nazis made fun of him behind his back about his faux Germanic pagan mystical stuff.
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I think everyone wants to go back to some idealized Rome. Our art features it's stand ins, half of Europe speaks a hand me down version of Latin, Americans use the mile Latin for thousand paces even though most people have no idea what it measures lb is the abbreviation for Libra and makes negative sense for pound, out calendar has 4 months that count months in Latin, and we still celebrate people forgetting when Rome moved their New Year, and our planets bear their gods' names. Not even the originators of those deities, the Greeks names for them.
I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.
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I'm not so sure, given that the Christian reactionaries I know IRL can get pretty racist, despite (or maybe even because of) being mixed-race in some cases (Elwood "Chief Red Cloud" Towner was not unique).
Twitterati edgelords are on a whole other level; being a Christian reactionary myself I'm well aware that politically incorrect racial attitudes are common in the community. But going on unbidden rants on the subject doesn't seem particularly common, nor does unqualified praise for Hitler or support for ethnic cleansing or population control.
Agreed
No, because they've got jobs to keep, because they've got kids to feed. But in private conversations, or anonymous online spaces…
I know a trad-Cath civil engineer who hates suburbs, and argues that instead of the "white flight" retreat that drove their growth and "urban decay," whites should have defended the inner city by "just shoot[ing] all the n*****s." (He's also a rabid antisemite of the "gas the k***s" variety, and has been on some TRS podcasts.) Then there's the Russian Orthodox Native guy who said that of all the terrible things the white man brought to this continent, the worst, above alcohol and smallpox, is black people.
This is probably because he, like most IRL tradcaths, believes commie-coddler powers that be engineered the civil rights movement to direct the worst of the white flight generating violence against Catholic neighborhoods in an effort to break the cultural power of Catholicism(on the upswing in the 50’s and early 60’s due to very high fertility rates and strong group identity), not because he literally believes blacks should be exterminated.
Did you miss the part where he literally believes Jews should be exterminated? We went to high school together, so I've seen his views evolve from the Heinleinian right-libertarian sort to Trad-Cath Fascist (that's not an insult, that's self-identified).
I have never met a mentally OK enough to be basically functional tradcath who believed Jews ought be exterminated(and I have met a lot of tradcaths, including many who voice politically incorrect ideas and strong antisemitism quite freely), but I have no trouble believing you’ve found one- you wouldn’t be the only friendly or neutral observer who claims to have. I admit to being curious as to his attitude towards converts from Judaism, who would be ethnically Jewish but not religiously.
I recall, particularly, a traditional Catholic priest who once told me that bishop Williamson was of course right about the Holocaust, but he shouldn’t be allowed to say it because he doesn’t believe it would have been a tragedy if it had happened. Even if not exactly mainstream within traditional Catholicism, I don’t harbor delusions of bishop Williamson being one of a kind.
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You really do encounter some idiosyncratic characters now and again. It sounds fake, but the boyfriend of one of my good friends, an Arab woman, for about a year at college was a black Muslim African guy (raised in Europe, but first generation and his family mostly still lived in their home country) who was a huge fan of Moldbug and Pat Buchanan. He was ambivalent about HBD/The Bell Curve (which I’ve always found is a remarkably widely-read book for wrongthink) but would discuss it with almost everyone he did coke with, which was a lot of people.
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I was chuckling and looking for the retweet button before realizing this is a different site. Your friend sounds like he posts bangers
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Also the problem is that almost all modern paganism is a LARP. Since there are no unbroken continuities of pagan faith in Europe (apart from the Mari native religion within the Mari Republic in Russia - though Mari pagan organizations have cooperated with the Muslims in Tatarstan), any "revivalist" efforts are basically based on imagining what such a group surviving to modern age might look like.
Of course if you have a racist Asatru group or whatever, formed by people who have explicitly left the Christian tradition because they think Christianity is Semitic and cucked, you're going to have a group that's more racist than Christians on average, but that's also obviously pretty circular. Other pagan groups think otherwise - most pagans that I've met tend to be far left. It doesn't really explain in any way whether a hypothetical pagan Europe without Christianity would be more "based", or whether a hypothetical future one where Christianity has gone away would be.
I'm aware that most pagans are into hippie nonsense, not racist nonsense, and that even most pagans with conservative tendencies are not particularly racist- the radical esoteric traditionalist crowd is truly fringe of the fringe- but if we're talking specifically about radical esoteric traditionalists, well, they're truly extremists and I suspect have a large fraction which just Does Not Play Well With Others, same as any other frighteningly extreme fringe of the fringe group.
The median pagan just wants to do drugs, and maybe sleep with some rebellious hippy chicks. Most racist pagans are in prison gangs. The 'ethno-conscious paganism as an ideological choice' thing is a small enough group that it's worth asking why people who claim to want reactionary social norms don't join the much larger communities which offer much more reactionary than average social norms which actually exist.
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The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.
They wouldn't. Best they could get, they'd be some kind of household staff dealing with running the kitchens and stores for the real LORDS AND MASTERS. Worst case? They'd be ground down into the dirt. "But I am so smart and big-brain!" "Yes, and I have big sword. Which of us wins this contest?"
Flashback to Follett's Pillars of the Earth in which the IQ 150 builder gets bullied by the IQ 90 teenage son of the local noble.
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Absolutely agreed when it comes to the Spencer set.
Meanwhile, there are those of us who want the "lords and masters" that we already have to stop with the lies and pretense, and just admit that they're in charge, and that they don't actually care what us "ignorant, servile, and downtrodden" peasants think. That, and preferably to have "lords and masters" who aren't Blue Tribers unremittingly hostile by nature to the continued existence of the Red Tribe as a culture.
(This piece in Tablet from B. Duncan Moench is somewhat relevant, though — as always — his solutions are a bit lacking.)
Like I keep telling people, I don't want us to replace meaningful elections where the people select representatives who wield power on their behalf with a semi-hereditary elite who believe themselves entitled to rule as they see fit without care what the peasants think, I want us to admit that this already happened generations ago.
That is the problem, though. The dream is to replace the current overlords with our lot, not their lot. But having overlords who can impose their values over the wishes of the mass of the ordinary people is the antithesis of the slave morality accusation; that's the powerful exercising power as they see fit. There is of course a lot more to the whole concept of master morality versus slave morality, but it doesn't matter that 'the lords and masters are favouring their pets and favourites' except this time they are 'minorities' makes it slave morality; the lords and masters favouring their pets and favourites is what masters do, before the message of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" comes to be widely accepted (and even afterwards).
Having X Tribe lords and masters who, despite that, take into consideration the existence of Y tribe as a culture and accept that they have a right to exist - that's slave morality Christianity.
I don't disagree with any of this. I'm not one of the Nietzschean "master morality" types. That's why I've been commenting on this thread — because some have been talking as if every non-religious person on the "far-right" is this sort of "boo Christianity, boo slave morality" sort. And that isn't so.
Indeed; and I see much more of that here on the Red side than the Blue.
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This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.
In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.
I am sure that with some people, this actually is a moral principle. Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people". There are a number of other such right-leaning (by modern standards) intellectuals who seem to have genuinely been motivated by at least some altruism.
A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission. Think of those Nazi uniforms and the Nazi cult of the virile young man, and the adulation of Hitler as some sort of almost living god, for example. and in general, think of the whole Prussian style of life, with its stern fathers and hyper-focus on discipline, social rank, and obedience. Or think of Mishima, whose life speaks for itself. In the modern day, think of the Bronze Age Pervert / Greek statue Twitter style of aesthetic, with its emphasis on toned male bodies and the constant dancing around the fact that many of the actual ancient Greeks enjoyed having sex with men very much. Nothing wrong with some gay sex, but it is funny to see the sublimation in action. Even if they have never heard the word, such people long to be part of a Koryos - although, if in reality they actually did get to be a part of some such group, with its intense hazing and male bonding, they might wish to flee from it quite soon. They have their admiration of masculinity bound up with their psycho-sexual natures. While they might be horrified at the idea of being an older ancient Greek man's young companion who gets both mentored and dominated, maybe even fucked, they long for the softer version of something similar that can be found in Fight Club, or in movies about the tight bonds between soldiers. There is a strong psycho-sexual need for an older brother or a "daddy" of some sort. Now, we all could use a nice older brother or a loving father, but among some of the highly online right it is clear that these archetypes have become fetishized.
Such people often have a powerful obsession with the idea that modern society lacks transition rites to turn boys into men, that it is missing a Koryos of some sort. The modern highly online right has a high over-representation of people who for some reason feel like they need to become men by doing something. Now, normally this just happens as one goes through life. One meets challenges, faces them, sometimes gets defeated and learns something to come back to the fray, at other times conquers the challenge and advances to new heights. Over time, one gains a stronger and stronger sense of one's own power.
Men who, for whatever reason, get stunted in this power process, to borrow a term from an infamous writer, make up a large fraction of the people who get drawn to extremist politics with strong sexual connotations. This is perhaps the grain of truth behind the meme of "young anime-loving autist boy has two possible paths in life: either become a super-leftist transgender with pink-and-blue socks, or become a Nazi LARPer who hates women and posts online going by the name of GasTheKikes1488". In either case, these people seem to have a powerful feeling that something key is missing in their self-image.
The 10% of the right that is made up of actual humane intellectuals is simultaneously struggling with the weight of the 80% of the right who have about the intelligence level of a piece of wood, and with another 10% of the right that is made up of raging, messed-up edgelords.
From 1943 letter of Tolkien to his son Christopher:
People see homoeroticism in things like this for the same reason they see it in pretty much every anime, TV show, and movie under the sun that appeals to the right crowd. Can you prove that Harry Potter isn't secretly in love with Draco Malfoy?
I believe the correct term is homosociality rather than homoeroticism, though there is an element of homoeroticism in some of these groups of course (like you can find an element of anything in some group involved in anything at all).
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I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
I think that for the most part, I came to these conclusions independently, being a big history buff. The intense psycho-sexual atmosphere of the typical authoritarian childhood upbringing and the homoerotic, fetishistic quality of fascism and Nazism are so obvious that it doesn't really require any profound insight to notice them.
To be fair to the far right, leftist totalitarianism also has this homoerotic, fetishistic quality to some degree.
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I agree. I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields (economics and psychology, respectively). Not even repudiated, really, it's more like "not even wrong"- they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls. No doubt it was shocking stuff to the victorians to talk about labor revolutions and sex but it's not that shocking today, and we have a lot of real social scientists studying this stuff.
And yet, they're still taken as this huge intellectual cornerstone to the modern humanities. It's like not even questioned, just of course marx and freud* were right, the real question is how do we go beyond their work to update and adapt it for the latest developments. So they take Marx's idea of a class struggle between an oppressive conspiracy of capitalists vs the mass of oppressed proletariats, and mad-libs that to every single other priviledged/underpriviledged group under the sun. it's really amazing. Why can't they read a different book?
Hell, there's even a term for it: Freudo-Marxism. I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing. You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.
With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:
Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear. We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions. But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.
Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something. We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time. I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases. Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.
Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain. You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates. For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all. But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.
Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project. Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there". You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire. And what criteria do you use to make this inference? There are a lot of difficult edge cases. Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.
Are these cases of genuine desire? If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire. But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here. The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has. We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.
But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria? What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time? Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse. She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here. On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships! She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire. (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on). If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident. So, does she have this type of desire? If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like. If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.
So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it. But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story. Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable. Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling. You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.
The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement. There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is? How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
I'm not any kind of expert myself- just a couple undergrad classes and what I've skimmed from wikipedia. So I'm not trying to do battle with you here. If you tell me that you've studied it extensively I'll believe you.
But, from what I've read, this really doesn't seem like an accurate summary. It seems more like you're talking general phenomenology/theory of mind stuff. Lots of philosophers have talked about that, and it goes back way before Freud. (I'm not sure what the first would be- at least Descarte, and arguably all the way back to the Greeks). Of course it's a hard problem. Still, psychologists have found ways to grapple with it. At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
If anything Freud was the opposite. He seemed to believe that he could accurately diagnose people's subconscious minds and innermost desires, even better than they themselves could. Like he somehow came to believe that all his patients who came to him with horrific tales of being sexually molested as children, were in fact just lying and telling him a fantasy of what they wish had happened. Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor". He made all sorts of really bold claims about other people's minds.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell. And even better, it's a perverted sexual desire, which most people aren't comfortable talking about. No one wants to have a public debate to try and prove that "actually no I'm not trying to have sex with my mother." So you can win a whole swath of arguments by tarring your adversaries with dark accusations. It's like the Oscar Wilde quote- "Everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power."
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I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I think the appeal is that both of them describe how people are shaped by their environment, thus implying that intelligent control of the environment could allow shaping of people, which is an incredibly seductive idea even if most people won't admit it. The contradiction is that Freud says that people are shaped by their families and social circles, and Marx says that people are shaped by their socio-economic class and the economic structure of society.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
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Yeah, as I'm reading about it now that sounds right. To be more specific it was this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Civilization which really argued the idea, and it got popularized by the Frankfurt school and spread through all of the postmodern academic humanities. What a trip.
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Marxism is popular because its the only anti-state movement that managed to on the face of it capture a powerful state entity. Syndicalism, anarchism and other movements all failed to capture states, so there is no extant example to suck in all the intellectual energy. Marxism, by having ostensibly captured one major european population, points to a proximate success story to coalesce intellectual energy around. That marxism/stalinism/communism collapsed into failure is attributed to how It Wasn't Real Communism, and when there was Real Communism it was glorious.
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There certainly can be an intimate link between politics and sexuality. But I don't view this as inherently delegitimizing or discrediting. The type of phenomenon you describe (and other analogous phenomena) certainly could be a perfectly legitimate expression of individual will, individual creativity, etc, although this determination ultimately has to be made on a case by case basis.
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I mean, I yield to no-one in my admiration for the 13th century, but these guys don't want the hierarchical orderly beauty of the Great Chain of Being, they want some imagined ideal Roman Empire where they're lolling around in togas being Great Thinkers and Masters of the Universe, while getting to order around their inferiors without all of that pesky nonsense about women and foreigners are also children of God. Where the strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must, and they imagine they would be the strong, of course. They're wrong, and what's even more is that they have no idea how much of what they want has been shaped by the influences of Christianised Western society for centuries, because it's the water these fish are swimming in.
Chesterton wrote about the dream of the ideal beauty and order of hierarchy, the temptation of it, and the way it can be subtly twisted to the wrong, in The Ball and the Cross, and it's a dream that tempts me because it appeals to my own instincts and what I find beautiful, but these types who sneer about 'slave morality' are not even strong enough to lose or humble enough to be proud; they seem to admire the same kind of show of strength that some gang boss in a grubby slum exhibits in a drive-by spray and pray:
You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.
Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting and enlightening to argue against the strongest version of the position you disagree with? If you're going to critique anarchism, wouldn't you rather go after Bakunin and Kropotkin, instead of teenagers who just like to light shit on fire?
That's slave morality right there, friend. The old and weak should know when to yield to the young and strong; if they're social inferiors, they should always be aware that they must defer to the squire and get out of his way, or better yet not get in the way in the first place. If they're equals or superiors, they should graciously yield (or, depending how far back we want to get, be slain in combat by the new, virile, younger challenger who ascends to the top of the dungheap over the corpse of the previous alpha).
See my post elsewhere in the thread on the nature of slave morality, and read essay I of Genealogy of Morality if you want a deeper elaboration. Or just read the whole book. It's unbelievably beautiful.
I've never found that in previous attempts to read Nietzsche, just ever-more "I really would like to slap this guy hard" reactions.
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Respect for the wisdom and status of the elderly is a feature of many societies including those that Nietzscheans would not consider to practice slave morality.
Based on status, though; the old widow gets shoved to the edge of the village to beg or starve, the old male former chief is a respected elder with a voice still in the councils of the village. The old peasant male who gets in the way of the young noble gets shoved out of the way or is supposed to be aware of his surroundings enough to get out of the way.
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It's Chesterton, not Lewis, and the argument explicitly is not that people should beat old men because they don't cross the street fast enough. The argument addressed is:
and
and
For this particular brand of argument, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that. There is no stronger version. That's the position, one can either accept it or reject it. @BurdensomeCount wrote quite a lengthy and well-argued post hammering on this exact thesis not too long ago. It's the point of view people argue from here when they cite Nietzche and start throughing around terms like "slave morality". It's the steeliest man of this particular viewpoint that there is.
Sorry, I was typing on autopilot, I had AhhhTheFrench's posts on the brain.
Anyway, with regards to Nietzsche's perspective on these points:
Nietzsche was, above all else, a meta-philosopher. Despite appearances to the contrary, the ultimate object of his critique and analysis was always, in the last instance, philosophy itself.
His aim was not to give a theory of justice (justice has much too long a history for that - "Today it is impossible to say precisely why people are actually punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined." - Genealogy of Morality II.13), nor was it even to explain the historical processes by which people might arrive at an incorrect conception of justice. Rather the properly Nietzschean question is to examine the phenomenon of inquiry into justice (or other philosophical concepts) itself - what exactly are you doing when you ask what is justice, or what is beauty, or what is truth? What is the nature of this practice we are engaged in, where we adopt "positions" and give "arguments" to support these positions? What is the origin of this practice, to what uses has it been put, where did it come from and where is it going? (See On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, and also the chapters "The Problem of Socrates" and "Reason in Philosophy" from Twilight of the Idols)
He certainly does spend a great deal of time outlining what appear to be straightforward first-order positions on ethical questions, but these are frequently subject to qualification, revision, and contradiction at various points in his corpus, because his ultimate concern is with the dyanmical unfolding of thought itself rather than with any fixed static position. Less "you believe X" and more "how did you come to hold X? What type of person holds X? What are the conditions of possibility of holding X?"
All that being said as a necessary disclaimer, to show that determining "Nietzsche's conception of justice" is a very fraught question; I'm not sure where in his work you're pulling the claim "Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual" from. To the extent that he ever says anything about the purpose of society as a whole (he is far far more interested in the analysis of individual archetypes, their psychological properties and motivations, etc), he basically thinks that the best thing society can do is to create the conditions for the highest types of individuals to flourish. Society being subordinated to the (or a particular) individual, not the other way around. I can't recall any instance where he talks about a relationship between "discipline" and society. There are innumerable passages where he talks about the opposition between "the herd" and the higher individuals. Gay Science I.3 comes to mind.
Sure. You can get away with being haughty if people already think you're cool. Trump gets away with antics that most normal people couldn't get away with. A lot of people are fine with this. So I don't think this is a particularly controversial statement, nor does it need a philosophical defense.
There is a passage strikingly similar to this in Genealogy of Morality III.14:
But it's worth examining the language closely here (as well as the context of the surrounding passages) to see exactly why Nietzsche is suggesting that "the healthy" should be kept separate from "the sick". It's not because he just thinks, like, being a dick is awesome and fuck sick people. Rather it's because the higher individuals have a special task ("they alone are guarantors of the future"), and this task could be jeopardized if they get bogged down by an excess of despair over the plight of the suffering masses.
The failure mode that Nietzsche is thinking of here would be something like Effective Altruism - maybe you could be a great artist or philosopher, or maybe you could just have a beautiful wife and five kids and a white picket fence, but instead you run yourself ragged working at a job you hate just so you can send all your money to people on the other side of the world who you don't know and who will frankly never reach the same heights of culture and civilization as yourself. Nietzsche doesn't think that's right. Lucky people shouldn't destroy themselves to bring themselves down to the same level as the unlucky.
(It's also crucial to point out that Nietzsche was desperately ill due to a chronic neurological condition for much of his life and frequently bedridden, in addition to just being kind of a loser in his own lifetime who got no personal or professional recognition, so whenever he refers to "the sick", you have to assume that he's at least considering that he could be included in that category as well - and it is precisely this intrusion of the philosopher into his own work, the way the speaker deforms our reception of what is spoken, that is one of the primary meta-philosophical points that he wants us to keep in mind as we read.)
In general Nietzsche is just way too nuanced of a thinker to boil his positions down to a few sentences. There's no substitute for actually reading his original works in their entirety. Just one more example, most people assume that he thinks "the strong" are just straight up better in every way and "the weak" can go get fucked, but look what he says about strength and weakness in All Too Human V.224:
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I completely agree. All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good standing or an academic or on the politburo.
But I also think you need to look at our current level of economic development. If a Western country became an absolute monarchy tomorrow there wouldn't be millions of peasants because farmwork has been largely automated; it would just look like a modern country that is an absolute dictatorship, and there are many examples of those.
Also, as a separate point, as a monarchist/feudalist, I get this sort of critique sent my way quite often: "you only support that because you want to be king/you think you'd be a lord/etc." (despite my protestations to the contrary). But I also end up getting a sort of reverse of it, where I'm told I should think that way.
Specifically, whenever I ask how to go about being politically active — "think globally, act locally," "be the change you want to see…" and all that — as a monarchist in modern America, and on multiple occasions, I've had people respond that the only way to be an active monarchist is to try to personally become king, and if you're not a would-be king, you should do nothing at all. (This, for one, ignores that no man* has ever won a crown for himself purely through his personal actions alone; every such has had plenty of loyal supporters essential to the effort.)
I’m sympathetic to monarchism (I mean I live in a monarchy, and I don’t think it would be a worse place if the king had much more power). I do think it’s a failure state to be aware of, though.
Sure.
But then, how do you suppose an American monarchist like me might go about becoming more politically active locally, particularly while keeping in mind and avoiding said failure state?
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By this do you mean it wouldn't be negative for the country as a whole going forward if the king had more power, or that it would be unlikely to impact your life negatively for as long as you live there?
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Old soc.history.what-if newsgroup had a rather notorious poster who believed that we should reinstate feudalism and was also perfectly OK with the idea that under feudalism he'd be an equivalent of a peasant.
Or so he claimed when there was no chance of it happening.
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I keep telling people that my ideal regime — or any near it — would have me executed for being a useless parasite. And yet…
I wouldn't take input on the way society should be organized from someone who's suicidally depressed for the same reason I wouldn't take any from those who place themselves at the apex of the proposed pyramid - clear conflict of interests with not only myself but the majority.
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Actual historical monarchies had tons of useless parasites supported by the state, either directly or through corruption.
Given how much of the population was involved in agriculture pre-Industrial Revolution and how little economic surplus above subsistence their was to redistribute, I'd question that. And there's definitely a difference between an "idle courtier" and your average modern welfare recipient.
Idle courtiers- and military reserves who in practice just steal the budget- took up a much larger fraction of a state’s resources in 1700 than the welfare class does today, unless you’re counting pensioners. And, of course, today’s monarchies spend gobs on welfare compared to their normal dictatorship neighbors, or to democracies.
Only until there's an actual conflict.
I'm reminded of this 2020 Los Angeles Times piece: "California once had mobile hospitals and a ventilator stockpile. But it dismantled them"
Better to have and not need, than need and not have, after all.
And as for idle courtiers, they may have been individually of little use, but they generally came from accomplished families; thus, if nothing else, they represented a reserve of quality genes, in a way a modern welfare bum most certainly does not.
Which monarchies are you thinking of here? Are you counting the monarchies-in-name-only that are democracies plus a powerless figurehead? Or are you talking about Middle East petro-states distributing shares of oil revenues to the citizenry, much as we do here in Alaska via the Permanent Fund Dividend?
Neither Bhutan nor Eswatini seem to be particularly generous welfare states — and is there anyone in Monaco poor enough to need one?
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I would hope that my ideal regime would help to make me (and you) not a useless parasite. But perhaps that just means you have more self-awareness than me!
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This line of argument goes at least as far back as Gibbon's claim that Christianity fatally weakened the Roman Empire and the modern online form includes a heavy dose of Nietzschean master-slave morality in the way they contrast supposedly Pagan and Christian ethics. In a sense they are correct, in that if one is committed to permanent racial separatism and inequality then any universalist and egalitarian ideology, be it Christianity, Communism, etc. represents a beachhead from which future moral attacks may be launched on your position. What they don't have is any sort of workable replacement, retreating instead into memes and BAP-type shitposting rather than doing the hard work of building a philosophy to replace the one they continue to hack away at even as it holds up the ground beneath their feet.
It goes back to Celsus:
And it won, because there are always going to be more of the ignorant, servile, and downtrodden. See the French Revolution. Guys who are "we want to go back to the days when the likes of us were rightfully the nobles and rulers" should remember the rattle of the tumbrils taking the lords and nobles to execution before the jeering crowds as entertainment.
It is impossible for Christianity to have “won” by only being attractive to the poor and the servants. For one, they have no rights or military training, so it would be impossible for them to ever exert influence on the middle or upper classes, who controlled everything and made up the military leadership. But it’s also impossible given the wealth of early Christian writings we have — it’s expensive to have dedicated theologians who copy and write thousands of pages. There’s also no reason that a pagan mystery cult couldn’t have defeated Christianity, if the only thing of importance was the promise of an afterlife (there were lots, including Mithras for the soldiers!). And if the poorest members were being converted on the promise of an afterlife, they would pose zero political threat and the powerful Pagans would be happy about this as it would reduce the problem of slave rebellions. (Is Christianity the opium of the people, or is Christianity its own “slave revolt” against the powerful? It cannot be both, so please make up your mind, 19th century.) Lastly, we know as early as the Apostles that they had issues with how to treat wealthy Christians, and they were writing rules on how to subsidize poor widows — things that wouldn’t be worth writing about if it was just a religion of the poor.
Julian wanted to bring back the gracious days of yore before the Christians turned it all to shit, and was frustrated that those shitty Christians managed to appeal to the people who should be following the lead of their betters:
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Monotheism, certainly Abrahamic religion, seems uniquely good at supplanting paganism. Christian missionaries in West Africa and Southeast Asia - even under full colonial rule - often barely even attempted to convert Muslims whom the Arabs had already converted, for example, because they always rejected Christianity and it caused social tensions and civil conflict when they killed or expelled the white missionaries. Pagans almost always embraced it. Muhammad very quickly replaced polytheism in Arabia. Even where it took longer there were major inroads in the Indian subcontinent, in East Asia and so on. In the Americas it happened quite quickly.
It took just a few centuries for the Egyptians to abandon paganism (there were a couple of remote sanctuaries that made it to 500, but most Egyptians had converted within 150 years of Christianity being introduced). By contrast, it took 800-1000 years for the Arabs to convert the majority of Egyptians from Christianity to Islam, often using much harsher methods. To some extent it's almost a historical quirk that some of the Asian civilizations retained aspects of their earlier religious traditions; without the Portuguese and British an Islamic conquest of the Hindus was probably inevitable, and in the case of the Chinese the Taiping rebellion which involved a twisted form of quasi-Christian belief was only defeated with the help of the British and French. By the time Christians conquered Japan in 1945 they didn't really care to convert defeated populations anymore.
Pagans can arguably be easily converted because the Abrahamic God can initially live 'alongside' their other gods, and then supplant them/become dominant, and then the others can be abandoned or forgotten. This is, of course, what happened to the Jews themselves in their ancient history.
Early attempts by the Jesuits to convert Nippon led to a freakout over national security and the expulsion of the Spanish, though not the Portuguese, and there was also the extreme suppression of any lingering Christian belief. The inciting incident was supposedly a Spanish captain boasting that Christian missionaries were but a prelude to Iberian conquest. Japan successfully maintained its near-isolation for the next few centuries.
But the Abrahamic religions are downright viral.
Well, there was also the Shimabara rebellion, which seriously cranked up enforcement of the ban, and of sakoku more generally.
Right, been a while since I read this stuff.
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This is begging the question a bit. There is no reason that Mithraism or Sol Invictus or some other monolatric religion couldn’t have transitioned into monotheistic. Even the transition from a Pagan pantheon to a monarch presiding over angels could have easily taken place (as it did in early Judaism), with Zeus presiding as sovereign. This also doesn’t explain why trinitarian Christianity defeated Arianism, as the latter is more “clearly” or primitively monotheistic. Monotheism was also tried once in ancient Egypt with a “son of God” figure too, but it never took off there (Atenism).
Maybe monotheism plays a part, but it’s more likely that Christianity and Islam have unique characteristics that cause their popularity. Islam, after all, was influenced by Nestorian Christianity. So it makes just as much sense that the actual beliefs, rituals, etc lead to popularity, rather than that they have only one god.
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Everyone remembers that, but forgets the centuries where the lords and nobles had peasants executed for any offense or no offense. It's bad to be on top come the revolution, but good every other time.
Did they spend a lot of time executing peasants for no reason? From everything I've read the complaints focussed on taxes, tithes and feudal dues. Louis XVI was barely even using letters de chachet to lock people up when the revolution happened, much less summary executions afaik.
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They're saying that ideas latent in Christianity, deeper currents that Christianity just represents an early emanation of - caring more for the downtrodden, poor, and weak than the strong, caring more about peace and salvation than greatness and power - are to blame for 'cucking Whites'. And that returning to Christianity won't solve that core problem. So this doesn't rebut their argument at all.
No they are saying Christianity leads to being a cuck. There is a direct line from Christianity to what we have today. A clear cause and effect. But of course we know that's not true given things like the savagery of the Christianity of the Franks or the Spanish Inquisitions. And despite the fact that they could have mass imported nonwhites, they clearly didn't or see it as desirable. They were much more racially conscious than we are now. Many also claim that Christianity was created by Jews to control Whites. They consider it a cucked foreign religion imposed on them by Jews to supplant the true Pagan religions of Europeans.
How would that even work? The Jews (who back then would not have been under any genetic pressure to be cleverer than similar societies) develop Psychohistory a la Asimov around 100-30 BCE, see that they will eventually annoy their eventual Roman occupiers enough that they will destroy the Second Temple, and while they can not prevent that (e.g. by trying to rebel less against Roman rule) because reasons (???), they can at least sow the seeds of their revenge. They create Christianity as a memetic superweapon and task their Agent Jesus with spreading it. For three centuries Christianity survives in the underground before finally Constantine converts (exactly as planned!), leading (as per a straw-Gibbon) to the inevitable decline and fall. (Ok, East Rome managed to hang on a bit longer despite being 'handicapped' by Christianity. And the slave mindset of Christianity did not prevent Europe to colonize most of the world. Details, details.)
Of course, in this silly fantasy history the target of the memetic weapon would still be the Roman Empire, not the descendants of various Mediterranean and barbarian states who would eventually self-identify as Whites. To get to that point one would have to go totally batshit crazy with the plot. Like "Evil reptiloid aliens give the Jews time travel technology" or something.
I can see it as a vibe.
Jesus was Jewish, or of Jewish heritage. His goal was to spread a better cultural way to the gentiles, and also his own people.
This is 'control' in the sense that culture is the opposite of maximal chaos. Normally we make a distinction between benevolent consensual forms of control and malicious manipulative forms of control. But if you squint- there are similarities. Both are ways in which social reality is forged. Both are methods of implanting your 'way' into other people.
And if you feel that Christianity has harmed you- You might recast Christianity's origins in that light. ... And I can see how post hoc ahistorical arguments might be born from that vibe too. Does anyone know of an argument of this sort that seems well historically reasoned going back as far as Jesus? I will be pleasantly surprised.
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I haven't looked too much into it because it's clearly not true and can be dismissed, but one of the guys Richard Spencer has been promoting is Adam Green who in my opinion is insane. I've also seen him promote this book: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Hoax-Pauls-Fooled-Thousand/dp/B0CHX1XV68
Honestly... If Jesus only existed in the hearts and minds of the apostles, unkillable in the way that an Idea is.
I'm sure a lot of people would be very upset.
But personally I would not find that to be any less divine.
You can’t silence the truth, you can’t kill us in a way that matters.
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I invite these people to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations.
I got banned from one of their substacks for pointing this out. There is a guy who Richard Spencer and other DR people have endorsed name Adam Green who pushes this line of thinking and is pretty popular.
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You are not "steelmanning" the anti-Christian reactionary argument, which would be something like, "Christianity's inherently egalitarian and destructive elements were held in check by the natural ethnocentrism and aristocratic spirit of Europeans, but eventually the poisonous seed flowered, and resulted in democracy, socialism, egalitarianism, etc." The question to ask would not be "were Christian Europeans Based™?" but "Were Christian Europeans more or less Based™" than they would have been in a counterfactual where Europe was never Christianized.
Their argument makes no sense though. We have 1,700 years of Christianity in Europe where they were "based" and about 60 years of being "cucked". Clearly something else happened. The sexual revolution, racism being unacceptable, mass immigration all happened at the same time. Are we to believe that Christianity caused this and it was all leading up to this? Or did other things change? This is a time of secularization (especially in the youth) and also coincides with the rise of new age religions. So as Christianity falls, what they would call degeneracy rises? It's simply a just so story. It's unfalsifiable. But you can come up with just as compelling of theories (and I would argue more) that say the opposite.
How can you be pro-White if you are anti-Christian not only in the present but in the past? That is part of the history of almost all white people. Almost all of the great European men they admire were Christian or influenced by it greatly. But that's the thing. They actually don't like white people. If you listen to their podcasts or read their writing, they actually have nothing for disdain from them. To them white people aren't really people but an idea. If they actually had to spend some time around actual normal whites, they would and do hate it. That one guy that used to be a mod is right about the fact that they are much more similar to white progressives than they are to Red Tribe whites in America or working class whites in Europe. The whites they imagine only exist in their head.
Wasn't that the original idea behind Scott's tribal classification? All of these DR people are Blue Tribe, of course they don't like or get along with actual Red Tribers.
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There was a good thread around here about this a few weeks ago. A white nationalist moves to the Midwest and lives among only all-American whites. He despises them of course.
You'd think Midwesern whites were cattle in the form of men the way he describes it.
At this point I hope he moved back to his sunbelt home and found a good Mexican woman to marry. He certainly doesn't like (non-hispanic) white women.
He was one of the people I was thinking of when I wrote that. I actually listened to a podcast with him and Richard Spencer and this is when I realized that to be true. The funniest part is they hate people like Jared Taylor who actually advocates for white interests on a practical level instead aspirational Nietzsche white super men stuff that will never happen.
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Im going to have to quote this post for my review of The Turner Diaries. "American whites are just mindless cattle, barely more human than blacks, and only the best of them are fit for redemption through revolutionary purging" is a literal quote from the heroes.
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So very much this. IMO, it's one of their worst traits.
Sure, I might complain from time to time about the views of older "normie conservatives" — like my parents — but only in much the same way that I complain about my dad's tendency to reckless driving, or my mom's need to call me at random times to double-check her (basic) math. They're still my people, flaws and all. And yes, I'll take a Clarence Thomas, a Larry Elder, or a Ben Carson over a Richard Spencer any day.
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Obviously something else happened! Industry, newspaper, modernity, computer. And yet. Is it so implausible that the prophet that spoke to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden with love has something to do with progressivism? And is a break with "savagery"?
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Again, I don't think I or @To_Mandalay are defending this viewpoint, but I've seen this perspective argued many times online. The argument is that for most of European modernity ancient philosophy, Greek and Roman texts, language, culture, architecture, aesthetics, poetry, theater and so on were core parts of the way young men of wealth and power were educated.
These texts obviously largely predated early modern Christian Europe, although the way they were interpreted did not. Even in the 19th century British imperial administrators learnt Latin and Greek (Classics), studied Classical Civilization, went on Grand Tours to see the remnants of Roman civilization and so on. They could quote Virgil and recite Greek aphorisms, and saw themselves in the tradition of their civilizations.
Therefore, as Mandalay says, the argument goes that even though they were (mostly) Christians, they retained some aspect of the pre-Christian or extra-Christian European identity, which held Christianity's egalitarian / slave morality aspects in check. As this faded by the mid 20th century, Christianity and its implications paradoxically or unexpectedly became more central to the way that elite culture imagined itself even though religious observance itself began to fade from the early 1960s.
Elite Christian culture adopted the Classical heritage before the Roman Empire even fell in the West, so the thing where British imperial administrators learned Latin and Greek and the Classics is just the same Christian tradition that sent them to listen to the softly spoken magic spell every Sunday.
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Exactly. See Nietzsche's concept of slave morality as the basis for Christianity. The weak and oppressed are defined as good, simply because they are weak and oppressed. This is expressed by the symbol of Christ dying a martyr because he was oppressed by the Roman overlords.
I personally believe we are living in times times that are still incredibly Christian. The modern left is all about acceptance of even the most (previously) repulsing ideas. Whatever was not allowed before, is allowed now, simply because it was not allowed - meaning it was being oppressed. Another important Christian mantra is benevolence. One is supposed to be tolerant against other people, a word that is incidentally used a lot by the left today. Compassion and goodwill can be observed in the stance that the left has about Palestine: they are good simply because they are the oppressed (which is then underlayed by more empirical arguments of course, but this belief is the root of the idea).
While I know that saying "the left" is very unspecific, and there definitely are many counter points, I believe these convictions unite the left in its core and it is not a coincidence they are also present in Christianity.
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Of course there was no mass immigration in 1500. Mass immigration didn't happen because there was a "do mass immigration" button just sitting there that nobody bothered to press until 1960, it happened because A) travel became unprecedentedly easy in the 19th - 20th centuries B) for a variety of reasons the politics of the west in the 20th century made western states fairly accepting of that influx.
The nuanced view is that Christianity ultimately is at the root of post-enlightenment left and liberal politics, which I think is pretty unambiguously true (and that's a good thing, thank you Christianity).
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I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.
Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.
This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.
I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.
Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.
I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.
Is that so? Medieval Europe at least did not have slavery in any great amount. That is actually fairly unique for the time period and for the kind of societies they had. The Roman Empire had chattel slavery of pretty much the same kind that would later be re-introduced to the European colonies in the Americas. It seems to have been an old pan-Mediterranean institution, that died out in Christian Europe and was reintroduced basically by cribbing from the Arabs, who had kept it.
I would argue that being a serf was better than being a slave, but only marginally. Yes, you could not be sold away from the land, or be fed to the dogs without any pretense of justice, but mostly your lord captured all of the surplus and you survived on his whim.
So I would argue that your lord being your brother in Christ did gain you something as compared to your lord being a a warrior god who taught might makes right.
I concede that the Roman Empire was probably more unequal, though. For northern Europe, being a slave to some Germanic tribe was shittier than being a serf in the medieval age. But I would argue that the former societies were not very rich to begin with, so the from a Gini coefficient point of view the middle ages were probably worse.
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It's actually quite interesting that Christianity, to the limits of sources, never liked slavery very much, even in time periods when slavery was normal and uncontroversial, and that some of the first Christian-religiously-influenced laws ever passed were protecting slave welfare.
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I recall once reading online one Hindu arguing that there is no such process — that it is impossible for mleccha non-Indians to become Hindu — the best they can hope for is to be born Hindu in their next life.
I think views on conversion in Hinduism vary widely by religious flavor since there are so many different kinds of Hindu belief. For example the Hare Krishnas, despite their new-age-cult reputation, are situated within Hinduism proper and obviously accept, embrace and proselytize to converts. Historically caste was based on profession and there were limited ways in which people could change caste (for example some Brahmins historically changed to the warrior/leader caste iirc). Today the system is more ossified. Converts to Hinduism who have no Hindu background almost always do so for marriage and so would become part of the caste they are marrying into; I know of some cross-caste marriages in India, I'm not sure which caste the children become. Hypothetically if some larger group converted to Hinduism they could be assigned a caste, although there has been a debate about whether the government might issue a "no caste" certificate.
Most Hindus have no problem with foreign converts to Hinduism and the Hare Krishna founder who brought it to the West is often quite respected by at least some religious Hindus, but perhaps it would be best to ask one of our Indian regulars like @self_made_human.
There's no universal consensus on the matter, but like you say, the overwhelming majority of Hindus are overjoyed when someone converts, even to the kooky cults like the HKs.
Half of the BJPs regional shtick is the "Ghar wapasi" (Bring 'em home and back into the fold) movement, where Muslims are 'encouraged' to return to their ancestral Hinduism.
A foreign convert? That's a cherry on top. But I'm not aware of any formal way to assign caste, since well, Hinduism for most of its existence wasn't proselytizing, so there was not much need for it. The funny part is when people convert to Islam or Christianity to escape their lower caste status, only to find that those buggers still stick to it, de facto.
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Blaming progressivism, including European progressives and fellow travelers and influence of certain non Europeans and their activist movements (such as black activist movements and Jewish activist movements and the first included plenty of the later) for "cucking" Europeans is correct but it was influenced by versions of Christianity. Even though atheistic ideology has been even more influential. I do think Judaism, as in religious Judaism gets too little blame, not only for the direct influence of Jews, but also in the way Christianity is said to resemble such far left movements, well that applies even more for Judaism. Of course it applies especially to the Jews with their religion and their understanding that says they never didn't do nothing wrong, were oppressed by the evil other, but they will have their revenge and rule as they deserve. Add into that some unviersalism about how they are in the mission to heal the world and acting for universal justice.
The influence of this kind of perspective in progressive identity grievance movements in general, both of ethnic groups, and of groups like women, LGBT, etc, is of course notable. There is of course progressive Judaism, and the sizable influence of actual Jews, but the actual Jewish grievance perspective is influential even where no Jews can be found, but people who have absorbed this ideology. Exactly in the way people claim non Christians ideologically share elements with Christianity. Indeed, progressive Christianity in the 20th century has obviously been influenced by progressive Judaism.
And just like there has been a far left Jewish tradition, we even had a direct history of Christian radicals going even before 20th century, even if they weren't the dominant strain in Christianity. Their influence in the USA did play its role. There is a difference of course with the Jewish perspective which isn't pathologically altruist, and the European Christian progressive perspective which is against its own demographic, but I do think Black Christianity is much closer to the Jewish perspective where it is a grievance movement that admits no wrong for its own, and seeks more for its group under the framing of universal justice. Although progressive Judaism which is very influential and Black Christianity might be willing to make some intersectional compromises for similar groups, but not for the common outgroup.
So, yes the secular left, including secular leftists who are pro markets have been very influential, but there have been religious influences there. What is called secular, often carries plenty of religious dna. There is also a significant anti-Christian and anticlerical tradition.
Since official Christianity through modernity includes the progressive version though, you can't really pretend that version of Christianity isn't pro subservient/self hating Europeans. It isn't all modern Christianity, but it does exist. Of course, if one examines atheists, they tend to share more the progressive and pathologically altruist vision, so I wouldn't focus on all Christians as the demographic to blame. Especially since anti-Christianity has been an aspect of progressive movements as well. Simultaneously, part of the progressive agenda, has been to corrupt Christianity and have progressivism wear it as a skinsuit.
My view is that progressive Christianity does not derive as the natural telos of Christianity, however Christianity is more universalist than certain other religions, but the end can be something more moderate, like historical Christianity was.
Since, I don't think being maximally self-centered as a group is good, nor pathologically altruist is good, usually civilizations more in the sweet spot were more Christian than today. But it does matter what kind of Christianity you got. If your goal is to follow the goal I mentioned, pathologically altruist Christianity is worse for a civilization than a more secular approach that isn't pathologically altruist. So, I don't think the terminal goal should be "Christianity only", but there ought to be tolerance between those Christians and not Christians who aren't for the agenda to destroy european civilization and its people.
The two have different telos.
The goal of progressivism, in its maximalist form, is the creation of utopia on earth by human hands. It posits that not only is this possible, but that the 'long arc of history' is driven towards such ends. In its minimalist form, it attempts to improve the lot of all human beings.
Christianity emphasizes the immortal soul and considers this corrupted earth to be on a downward slide towards depravity and godlessness. Paradise is not possible outside the spiritual domain and the material world is considered transitory. In its minimalist form, it encourages the actions of its followers to mimic Christ in preparation for the next world.
This isn't really true. Christianity expects the rejuvenation and perfection of the physical world after the Second Coming and the Resurrection. Progressivism is a secularized millennarianism. It's very Christian. What you're describing is more Gnostic.
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You need to consider demand for relocation as well as supply in the analysis. The expected gain in 1500 AD from moving from e.g. West Africa to Europe, given the risks and the relative differences in quality of life, were pretty small compared to the expected gain from moving in 2024. It wasn't like Europeans were fighting off hoards of African immigrants. And in 1900, what would the average African villager going to do in places where they don't speak the language, don't have much marketable skills, don't have immunity to local diseases, and don't have a welfare state to use?
In the Imperialist period, the transfer was the other way: hordes of European economic migrants swarming to the Americas and Africa.
In the UK, a lot of the black immigration was driven by things like African nurses coming over for work after 1945, during a period of labour shortages in the UK.
I would say that the key factors were (a) the Great Divergence in economic prosperity between the West and the Rest, due to the rise liberal capitalism in the former; (b) differences in population growth, and (c) better information transfer, so that even poor Africans could know that the poor in the West enjoyed a better standard of living.
Restrictions on immigration, with a few exceptions (like the White Australia policy) were less important than the above factors, I think.
That is part of it but there is another part that they wouldn't have been accepted. In the 16th century, some blacks made their way to London because of the war with Spain and the reaction was extremely negative with the Queen moving to expel all black people from the realm. So the first recorded instance of blacks goes all the way to the Queen wanting to kick them out of the country. You wouldn't want to be a black person in Europe because the people wouldn't like you and would consider you inferior and possibly not human.
True to some extent, but people will tolerate terrible treatment if the price is right. Just look at migrant workers in the Gulf States.
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I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.
And industrialisation.
Whether you were a peasant in India in 1750 or a peasant in Britain in 1750 didn't matter all that much as far as living standards go. Whether you're a peasant in India in 1980 or even have a minimum wage job in Britain in 1980 however, matters a great deal.
England and the Netherlands were the wealthiest societies in the world starting at their recover from the black death, and retained that title until their colonies dethroned them. Now the difference between $600/yr and $1,000/yr is probably not night and day, but Britain by the period of colonialism had a much higher standard of living compared to India, Africa, etc.
That might be true in some average statistical sense. But would that really help you if you were a typical Indian peasant in 1750? First it would be incredibly expensive to get to England. Then once you got there you'd have to learn English, learn English customs, and learn about how the capitalist economy works. It would be incredibly difficult for them to fit in and get a job, even a low-paying one. There's a high chance they'd just end up worse than they were in India.
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I think you'd have to go back to the 1300s at least for British peasants to be as bad off as Indian ones.
If the rough estimates Wikipedia collected are reasonable then you're a surprisingly good guesser.
That econ history minor paying off just as well as my advisor said it would lol
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Yes, to the point where "British citizen" (as distinguished from "British subject", which included anyone in the Empire/Dominions) is a fairly recent concept. Americans of a certain age (80+) will sometimes use "British subject" to mean "British citizen", maybe because the latter was not actually a thing when they were young.
The reasons Americans use it is that during the heyday of American civic nationalism that saw a resurgence of interest in the War of Independence around the bicentenary in 1976 one of the big things that was supposed to be different about America was that Americans were 'citizens' (ie. members) of a country rather than 'subjects' of (ie. submissive to) the Crown. I don't think it was really about the empire (at least post-18th century) or British identity per se.
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I assume Mongols, Magyars, Turks, and so on don't count?
Anyway, the New Testament does speak against racial divisions.
Not that it matters, but their blood lies, spilt, in the dirt of the Pannonian Plain, not in any modern Europeans in appreciable quantities.
I figured for the first two, but I would have expected Ottoman ancestry in the Balkans. Huh. Yeah, I don't think it matters too much, hence why I figured they didn't count.
"Ottoman" isn't genetic, Turkic tribes assimilated tribes they conquered, so any genetic effect is minimal, Turks in Turkiye have somewhat little genetic ancestry besides what was already there before Turkic conquest and effect on the Europe is even less.
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There is some in the Balkans, but you have to remember that after WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were massive population transfers between Turkey and the Balkans. Ataturk, father of the Turks, is almost certainly just a Turkicized Albanian, what with his bright blue eyes.
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I am not so sure about this, except in very abstract and non-practical senses. Would you care to say more?
It pushes Christianity as a multi-ethnic and cross-ethnic community. This can be seen from the speaking in tongues in Acts 2, to the salvation of the gentiles, to some more specific quotes speaking against divisions for being Jew or Greek, barbarian or Scythian. (And, as it was pointed out, male or female, which should indicate that there's a limit to this: it's not like distinctions should be ignored, just that they shouldn't divide, I think) Do I think that means anything like modern leftism? Certainly not. But I do think that it means that our primary unit of identity should not be with our ethnic group, and that there should be cross-group community, at the very least in religious settings.
This would at least make me reluctant to adopt any explicitly or intentionally racist policies.
The trouble is that 'racist' is such an overloaded operator that it's perhaps worse than useless at this point.
Of course, hence the reference to "intentionally or explicitly racist."
Hence, things like Jim Crow or Apartheid, where laws are being passed for the explicit purpose of maintaining racial division and hierarchy isn't great.
I don't really care about disparate impact, unless that's the intent.
I'm often a bit confused by people's understanding of segregation.
Suppose you have two populations living in the same area. Population A is clean, efficient, industrious, honest, largely non-aggressive, respectful, intelligent, and so on. Population B is the opposite of all of those things. But, both populations are Christians.
Pop A notices that when they let people from Pop B roam around their neighborhoods, things get damaged, things go missing, people get attacked, garbage is left everywhere, people get creeped out by weird and threatening behavior, etc.
Over time instead of living near each other they start to live side-by-side. In places where Pop B shows up in any significant numbers, everything falls apart very quickly. Schools become dangerous and dysfunctional because Pop B kids hit puberty sooner, are much more violent, much less intelligent, and generally vastly more disruptive. So Pop A families have to pull their kids out of school. Ugly and inconvenient security measures are suddenly installed in stores where Pop B types tend to shop. Suddenly none of the bathrooms have mirrors in them any more (because they get broken) and graffiti is everywhere. Litter is everywhere. Stores start shutting down. Rates of violent crime skyrocket. Home invasions, once nearly unheard of, become all too commonplace. Little boys are beaten to death for fun. Little girls are raped, sometimes to death. Elderly women tortured to death for sport inside their own homes in once-safe neighborhoods. Social safety nets become overburdened and then collapse because it turns out that, on average, Pop B people extract vastly more resources from the system than they ever put in, such that it takes several Pop A people's excess wealth to support them. Pop B people destroy the housing Pop A gave them out of generosity. They begin to strip and dismantle the local infrastructure to sell off for money for status symbols and cheap thrills. Pretty soon the only choice Pop A people have for the sake of their very lives and the futures of their children and community is to pack up and leave and try to settle somewhere new without as many Pop B people around. This is maybe okay for the wealthy, since they can afford to. The poor are now stuck in a dystopian hellscape which was once a beautiful, thriving, cohesive community, and rapidly find themselves outnumbered. I could go on in this vein for quite some time; there is much we have not touched upon.
Or.
Or Pop A can look at Pop B, say "We love you and we're happy to worship together, but our kinds are not configured to live together. We'll still help when we can -- but at a distance." (In this scenario, both are Christian, remember, and even act like it inasmuch as any of us can.)
The key thing here is that segregation was not set up to maintain racial hierarchy; it was set up in recognition of existing and immutable racial hierarchy.
Pop A could step in and manage Pop B's reproduction, of course, so as to bring them up to approximate parity within a few generations. But this would mean preventing the overwhelming majority of them from reproducing, which is going to entail all kinds of hideous particulars which I hardly think will be more popular than the clean, simple, humane solution of just living apart.
Look at what integration did to integrated communities and cities. Look at the good things that were lost. Look at the lives and livelihoods destroyed. Look at the collapse of politics into a racial spoils system. Look at what happened.
So, three options:
Segregation -- tried and true, works pretty well, allows Pop A to thrive and Pop B to benefit from their largesse to a degree unimaginable in Pop B's homeland without Pop A intervention. Pop B is healthier, better-educated, better-fed, and safer than they ever could have managed on their own.
Get rid of Pop B by deportation or forced selective breeding. Sucks for almost all of Pop B but at least some of them will go on to join society as equals.
Watch as the entire system goes to pieces, there are fewer and fewer places for Pop A to run, integration ruins everything insidiously through innumerable subtle channels until Pop A's forgotten that things ever even used to be any better. Welcome to South Africa, and more and more Western countries all the time.
None of these options is good. But option 1 stands out to me as a clear winner. I can sympathize with people who prefer option 2 even if I'd rather do it more softly and gradually through market forces. I have zero respect for those who champion option 3 and treat anyone who disagrees with them as irredeemably evil or somehow non-Christian. As though anything else were unthinkable.
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It's not Christianity in general. The key people are New England Puritans. Their followers and institutions (eg Harvard, Yale) became dominant in the US, then after WW2 became highly influential in Europe.
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Doesn't Pope Francis routinely attack racism and call for more tolerance for refugees? 4/9 American refugee settlement NGOs are Christian, albeit heavily govt-supported: https://cis.org/Rush/Private-Refugee-Resettlement-Agencies-Mostly-Funded-Government#uscri
Most Christian leaders describe racism as sinful. In the past things were different, yet it looks like Christianity as a whole is committed to antiracism and multiculturalism in the present-day.
I'm more interested in who actually follows or cares about what Richard 'riding with Biden' Spencer says? In 2024?
I also think there needs to be a more nuanced understanding of what people mean when they talk about historic Christian racism. For example, not only were almost all abolitionists devout Christians (and indeed believed that Christianity required an end to slavery) but even many slavers, for example, acknowledged that the practice seemed un-Christian and struggled with it; Washington owned slaves his whole life, but considered it “wicked, cruel and unnatural”.
Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races, including Washington, but even in the 18th century it was not unheard of to believe in the actual equality of man along modern blank slate lines; particularly in England as slave narratives became popular literature, many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable, some hoped to settle free black people from Africa (as citizens!) in the Caribbean colonies where they would own land and farm etc. There was a strong and widespread belief that Africans could be taught to fully adopt English civilization that persisted through the 19th century, although it increasingly conflicted with Darwinian racialism that emerged later in the Victorian era.
So there were in fact devout Christians who considered that the implication of Christianity was the equality of races even centuries ago, it was just that temporal political interests were stronger.
It’s true that Christianity is hostile to slavery and racially egalitarian in a way that Islam and judaism and Hinduism and the like mostly aren’t. But it’s also true that Christianity has sometimes been a motivator for race laws, as in Spain’s ‘old Christian’ laws, or ideas about the curse of Cham.
Christian marriage laws(women have to consent, can’t be too young, a marriage is a marriage even over parental opposition, and you can’t marry your cousin) tend to break down clans over a long enough timescale, but I’m not sure how much connection clans have to racism. Certainly Christianity tends to believe it has a civilizing mission as a missionary religion, but so does Islam.
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These aren't necessarily contradictions in terms. There was widespread belief in a much more nuanced and fine-grained set of racial distinctions, the idea of a "white" race as opposed to a German/English/French race, or a white race as opposed to a "race of labourers" and a race of aristocrats, is developing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many at different times have said that the black and white races contain, in due proportion, the capable and the incapable. Or one could believe that blacks are dumber than the English and less organized than the Germans, but smarter than the Irish and more moral than the Jews.
Gross white racial superiority is largely a modern innovation.
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There was a large wing of the abolitionist movement that aimed to repatriate freed slaves to Africa. It’s how we got Liberia in the 1820s.
They organized themselves as the American Colonization Society.
For sure, but it’s also ahistorical to say “none of them believed blacks and whites were actually equal”. Some, many even, did. There was a wide spectrum of positions on the subject.
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'Christianity' declined in America when elite institutions started getting filled up with Catholics and jews. This happened in the 1940's and by the 1960's the new 'elite' was throwing their weight around. The old WASP ideals were pushed aside. That's all there is to the story of modern America. 1,2
To highlight why this is the case and not the other way around: America was still very 'Christian' in the 1960's. The places that stopped being 'Christian' were the big 4. Academia, media, the courts and government. It just happens to be the case that 'being Christian' doesn't count for anything when you don't control these and you now have a newspaper, radio and TV in your living room streaming the latest in jewish psychological warfare into your home.
Religion and ethnocentrism go hand in hand since both are dogmatic and confident. Christians lose since they are no longer dogmatic and confident. You can weave whatever historical narrative you want in favor of Christendom and why its the best but it all funnels down to the same modern pit we now live in.
On the whole, the closest you get to confident dogmatism in Christians is when you find racist Christians like with 'Christian Identity'. The rest exists in various stages of failure. Be that bargaining with sinners or interpreting the word of god through a rainbow colored lens.
Christianity did three things very well: Formalize a calendar year with holidays, sanctify courtship for the lower classes and emphasize reading. The rest... not so great.(there might be more, lets be honest)
As an aside, I've always considered the typical universalist anglo sentiment to be a strain of death for the western world. Listening to any moral philosophy with a UK accent fills me with dread. It's like you're always one tear away from not having borders.
The Modernism versus Traditionalism split in the Presbyterian Church pre-dates the 1940's. The split between what were essentially modern professional class atheists and fundamentalist Christians who still insisted on the Westminster confession dates from then, at the latest, not from the 1960's.
The growth of socialism, progressivism, modernism, and secularism in the 19th and early 20th century elite is something you can't ignore when telling a story about American social history. The guys in the scenes at Harvard from the 1930's in The Good Shepherd were quintessential WASPs but they certainly weren't Puritans.
And, of course, the most resounding condemnation of this from the 20th century, God and Man at Yale, was written by a Catholic conservative...
There was a left-right divide in the US prior to the aforementioned introduction of jews and Catholics. What is being highlighted is that the introduction of Catholics and jews into the elite changed the split from what it was to a skewed one.
This effect is also clearly present when we look only at jewish elites. As the jewish elites skew leftward at a rate higher than the traditional elite does. By the same token there is little nativist sentiment to go around since the ingroup bias of right leaning jews leads them straight to Jerusalem, not West-Virgina.
Just to make it clear so that people don't get tangled in irrelevant argumentation; no one is saying every single catholic and every single jew is a lefty. We are talking about broad population groups and how their general elite composition skews the native elite composition when mixed together.
And yet the conservative elites are mostly Catholic with a few Jews and almost no mainline protestants.
???
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I would be intereted in a rebuttal to this article from users here who disagree with its thesis. As a rule, I'm suspicious of any article that just lists of a bunch of Jews from various fields and concludes there is some interconnected conspiracy. It's also only focused on America when we saw the same phenomenons in Europe post WWII without any Jewish influence.
Another point to consider - for all the talk of Flowerman and his ilk, where is the proof that he was the reason for the outcome? All we have is that Flowerman was explicit about wanting to propagandize ordinary Americans and that Americans today generally display far less in-group bias/ethnocentrism. The article sets out against the notion that Jews aren't a fifth column, but it doesn't make any convincing case that they are.
Jews have the notion of "never again", but they're not the only ones who have bones to pick with American bigotry. You don't need a Jewish conspiracy to eliminate in-group biases in the dominant culture when that culture did harm to others, but it seems quite a few people really want the Jews to be consciously involved in these attacks against the dominant culture.
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America and the Soviet Union ruled Europe post war.
To this day mainstream American media holds hegemony in Europe. As was artfully demonstrated by a map of BLM protests worldwide.
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Actually, Christian observance in America reached a new high in the postwar era. The height of weekly church attendance in America was in the 1950s. America was less religiously observant in 1920 than in 1950, hard as that may be to believe.
Meanwhile, the height of Protestantism in the US was probably the 1840s as a percentage of the total population. It’s just that American Christianity was never staunchly ethnonationalist, it existed alongside ethnic nationalism but it wasn’t of it. The same is true in the Islamic world today, you can have tribes with a strong sense of ethnic identity, but it’s not because of Islam, it just exists alongside it.
No atheists in foxholes indeed.
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I said nothing that contradicts that. I instead explain why this stopped being the case due to the demographic change in elites.
I don't understand what this means. Ethnonationalism is just an expression of ingroup bias. Any group based belief or ideology relies on ingroup bias. When you don't have ingroup bias you end up with contemporary 'Christianity' which is just a hedonistic gay progressive with AIDS calling themselves a bishop. You start worshipping the outsider and humiliating yourself for their validation and acceptance. Which is what the broad modern Christian movement is at this point.
This is a small minority of denominations and they are typically doing very poorly.
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As best I can tell the trends that resurged in 1960 began in the early 1900s but we're interrupted and delayed substantially by the great depression and world war 2.
That shifts my priors to the root of the problem isn't something that happened in the 1960s it happened in the 1890s to 1920s or perhaps before that (if the panic of 1907/Civil War just delayed an older trend)
If anything, it has a lot to do with urbanization and industrialization in general.
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Guy, men, lads, fellas, I don't even know where to begin with all this. I am intrigued that Catholics Not Christians, though 😀 So the Horrid Popish Plot met the Global Zionist Conspiracy and we made beautiful music together?
It's a hard pill to swallow but the Catholics that came and the influence they brought did little good for the trajectory of American culture as they decidedly helped move the elite 'leftward'.
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I'm starting a GoFundMe to commission a klezmer rendition of "On Eagle's Wings". Then, and only then, will the inferior WASP culture be washed away from sea to shining sea.
/SaturdayCartoonVillain
I'm not sure if the version we sang as secondary school kids at Mass in the late 70s/early 80s is the one you mean, but the very name makes me shudder.
I will gladly donate to this worthy ecumenical project!
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I'd donate for that. Give me some time and proper motivation and I could probably write it.
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I’ve always been taught that anti-Catholic sentiment in America went hand-in-hand with nativism. The Catholics were from strange lands with strange customs like Ireland, Italy, and Poland. It wasn’t Catholicism per se that drove anti Catholic feelings in the country, but it was a common thread among the foreigners arriving from countries that weren’t well represented at the founding.
I guess the Pope coming out against Freemasonry didn’t help relations between American elites and Catholicism, either.
Strange customs like the Irish? Three 19th century American Presidents were Irish, but they were Protestant Irish.
The main issue was that Catholics were seen as having a supra-nationalist loyalty to the Pope. Even in the 1960 election, Protestant figures like Billy Graham argued that JFK would take orders from the Pope. (The Pope couldn't even restrain JFK's sex life, let alone his policies.) There was also fear of Catholic schools and other sectarian institutiins, which even sought funding from Protestant taxpayers. The Catholic Church was also seen as too anti-black in the North (due to its silence on slavery) and too pro-black in the South (especially by the KKK).
That's not really 'Irish,' though. Scots-English Yeomanry from Ulster vs Celtic peasantry from County Cork.
They were in the eyes of Americans at the time, specifically Scotch-Irish. Also, Scots are Celts, though views about that at the time were sometimes complex.
Aside from their Catholicism, there was little to distinguish a typical Irishman from a typical Protestant Highlander. (Their languages would have been slightly different, but equally alien to an English American in 1850.)
Highlanders, yes. Lowland Scots are Anglos with a funny accent and some Celtic wives.
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The elements of Christianity which would lead one to believe that antiracism is important to the faith were historically counterbalanced with deeper readings of the text and studies in ancient history and philosophy. The ones steering politics were exclusively men who were well-educated in these texts. The decline of Christian literacy coincides with the decline in the emphasis on ancient classics with its brutal realism (“the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must”), and the extolling of false political science (no racial differences as a matter of assumption), and the dominance of a largely non-Christian media influenced disproportionately by non-Christians. Everyone believed in unique racial characteristics before the 19th century, but science came in during the 20th century and told everyone this has been debunked actually.
Islam has a much stronger emphasis on anti racism than Christianity, see here
it’s simply that only highly educated men decided things in Islamic nations. Even today, if only men decided politics, it would be difficult for democrats to win an election. If only men trained in theology and the philosophy / history of the classics decided things, who knows what things would look like? I suppose you could say that, like Adam, the West’s original sin was a combination of pride + being persuaded by womankind, which changed who decided things and then led to all sorts of issues downstream.
"Here there is not Jew and Greek, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all."
I don't think Christianity has anything to say about racial differences, but it definitely does seem like it has something to say about racial barriers.
Galatians 3,
Yeah, I have a hard time reading that as a statement about how there are actually no differences between these groups when it includes 'male and female' and the author (Paul) has no trouble delineating different roles and expectations for each of those based upon their intrinsic qualities and distinct purposes.
Yeah, I agree that it isn't saying that there are no differences. But I do think that it is against setting up social divisions, at least, within the Christian community. We're
Lord have mercy, they told me the rapture wasn't real!
I'm still around, not sure what happened there.
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And who educates those men at an early age and influences them afterwards?
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Islam is a substantially anti-racist religion, and even the vast majority of Khaleeji (and therefore to some extent ‘founding stock’) Islamic scholars have essentially the exact same blank slatist view of race as a woke American college professor. Racial prejudice exists throughout the Islamic world, but it’s the petty prejudice of local peoples, it broadly isn’t religiously endorsed. Even in the West, while largely lay Muslim communities are grouped by country of origin, hardcore Islamist groups and mosques are often remarkably multiethnic and some groups arrested for planning attacks feature variably Arab, black, Desi, Chechen and white converts. And Muslim countries like Turkey with Syrians and Jordan with the PLO have been very tolerant (arguably much moreso even than modern Europe when you look at the percentage of the total population taken in) of refugees until, in the latter case, they literally tried to militarily overthrow the government. Sure, many Gulf Arabs are still racist against Africans, but that’s nothing you won’t hear from many Southern Italians about their recent arrivals. ISIS obviously had Muslims from every corner of the earth fighting alongside each other; the Arabs who led it were happy to hand over captured non-Muslim Arab girls as bribes and spoils of war to non-Arab Muslim fighters, which again shows the primacy of religion over race among devout Islamists. In Malaysia there were big campaigns about the global ummah and billboards about racial tolerance lol. I work with a lot of Muslims around the world, including conservative ones, and their views on race are - in the case of the devout - indistinguishable from white leftists, even if they disagree on everything else.
I agree that Christianity is less explicitly anti-racist. Still, I think anti-Christian reactionaries would say that its more generally less martial affect, pacifist origins, emphasis on turning the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth and so on are ultimately more conducive to DEI ideas than not. Also, we tend to see historical Western figures (say early Americans, or slave traders, or imperialists) as uniformly devout Christians. Almost all would have believed in God and considered themselves Christian, but actual levels of religious devotion varied considerably, in many historically Christian communities the majority of people have never attended Church every Sunday for example, not in 1750 and not today.
Malaysian calls for racial tolerance in any form is fundamentally wrong from first principles: Malaysia explicitly is the only country that constitutionally enshrines special privileges for the muslim majority race and makes continual efforts to further grind other races into the political dirt.
Malaysian calls for racial muslim equality are founded in an intense Arab-worshipping complex in the country, where being increasingly Arabic is conflated with being a good muslim. Small things include the replacement of the word for headscarf from Malay (tudung) to Arabic (hijab). Other examples of linguistic shift include replacing other muslim-practice related terms with Arabic, like iftar instead of buka puasa.
For the most obvious example of Muslim racism, globally but especially visible in Malaysia, look at how they treat the imported Bangladeshi workers. Extreme racial discrimination and forced mosque segregation, with the charity organisations dedicated to foreign worker welfare being run by Chinese and white expatriate women. The ummah is united only as long as the other inferior muslims don't pollute my sacred soil with their backward ways.
Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.
As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.
True, the racial discrimination in the mosques is ultimately a self segregating exercise instead of an actively ordained one. The mosque leaders being active community members volunteering to be part of the administration instead of job appointees does make the difference between racial vs religious based discrimination in the mosques difficult to parse.
One minor observation though is the schismatic fissures in Malaysian, and probably larger muslim world. While internally Islam is a race neutral religion in the whole, the cleaving of Islam into its various sects has mapped somewhat closely to differing ethnic groups as well. Shafi is the school of thought for the overwhelming majority of Southeast Asia, with explicit bans on Shia and Ahmadi in Malaysia.Yet there exist strong informal deobandi influence from Indian preachers, while I've seen discrimination against the bangladeshis justified as them being hanafi. Islam may be a racially neutral religion, but it still has been used as justification for racism.
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I think this is glossing over a substantial amount of Islamic history - in particular, the Umayyads were moderately Arab-supremacist, and Islam made a much stronger universalist turn with the victory of the Abbasids, who were non-Arab and therefore strongly inclined to an interpretation of Islam in which ethnic or tribal identity is irrelevant.
In the case of Christianity, I think it's going to be important here to clarify 'anti-racist', since the term admits to so many interpretations today. I think one could fairly assert that at least from Paul (the historical Jesus being less clearly accessible), Christianity is a *non-*racist religion, in the sense that race or ethnic identity is simply irrelevant. The big early leap is going from Christianity as internal to Jews to Christianity for all people, but once that leap was made - and it appears to have been made extremely early - it was set. Thus in the New Testament we see conversions of everyone from Ethiopians to Macedonians, divine revelations to indicate a universal call (Acts 10), preaching to all people (Acts 17, all of Paul's career), and a theology in which "there is no longer Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian". We even find this universalist language put into the mouth of Jesus (e.g. John 10:16), whether you think that's historical or not.
However, none of that is the same thing as 'anti-racism' in the dogmatic modern sense. The traditional Christian position going back as far as the New Testament is that race/ethnicity/cultural-identity/ancestry is irrelevant, and what matters is personal faith, such that one who believes is the true descendant of the patriarchs (cf. Matthew 3:9, Galatians 3:6-7), even taking priority over the flesh (Philippians 3:2-7). This is obviously quite different to anti-racism in the modern sense, which remains deeply interested in race as a moral and ethical category.
We have to be careful not to misinterpret a spiritual ruling for a worldly ruling. “No longer barbarian or Scythian” also includes the line “no longer slave or free”; a different verse with the same intention specifies “no male or female in Christ”. Now, we know that early Christians comprised both slave and free men, and we know there was no call to free these Christian slaves. And we also know that there were strict rules regarding how women ought to behave, always submitted to either the husband or the male church leader. So we can’t take “no barbarian or Scythian” to mean the eradication of cultural units or allegiances, because there were binding cultural rules for women and allegiances of slaves to masters. IMO these verses are “simply” saying that within the spirit of Christ our worldly identities are enveloped toward spiritual ends (heavenly rewards and judgments). Christ has primacy, and is the whole spiritual “bloodline” if you will, but its relevant category is spirit and not world. So I may be a worldly slave, yet freed in Christ, or free in the world yet a slave to Christ (too lazy google this passage). I may be wealthy in the world, but it would be a mistake for the church to give me extra attention and place me in the front because of worldly wealth.
Paul sort of demonstrates this nuance in Romans. His gentile Christian congregants are his brothers, yet he doesn’t deny that “I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin”, and he especially desired that his worldly brothers would join the spiritual brotherhood. I think this is the morally correct nuance to take regarding world concerns and religion concerns. Genetic differences in race are a world concern that concern the political aspect of a person (rules on emigration, whatever). The absolute irrelevance of genetics for spiritual life and spiritual ends is a religious truth that concerns the spiritual aspect of a person. They are different. The spiritual has supremacy but also has little bearing on the political (“give unto Caesar…”).
Sure, but the issue is that if you truly believe African and Filipino Catholics (for example) are your brothers in Christ and that it is your duty to help them as coreligionists it’s easy to see that developing into an ideology supportive of mass immigration even if Christianity does not require it to per se.
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Well, yes, Paul isn't denying that people are still Jewish or Greek or barbarian or Scythian in a literal sense.
He's denying that Jewishness or Greekness or barbarianness or Scythianness are relevant to one's identity in Christ. Those things do not matter, which is why Christianity thus tends to resist politics that are premised on asserting their importance, and why attempts to reconcile Christianity with overtly racialist politics can only function by mutilating or perverting Christianity.
You can try to draw a worldly/spiritual distinction, but I think that's perilous in practice and often ends merely in the assertion of a double standard. The worldly or political life of a Christian must be shaped by his or her spiritual life also - neither Jesus nor Paul confine their teachings to an abstract realm of the inward spirit, but rather understand that their spiritual teachings have profound consequences for the way one lives and interacts with others. Thus, for instance, when Peter refrains from joining Gentiles for meals in Galatians 2, Paul rebukes him to his face. The spiritual equality of all people in Christ has obliterated the kind of distinctions that might have justified Peter shunning his Gentile brothers and sisters.
Which is to say that the spiritual does have bearing on the political. How could it ever not?
But he is not saying “they don’t matter” socially or politically, because then he would advocate for freeing slaves and treating women like men. But nobody was advocating for these things. So whatever Paul is saying here, it can’t have anything to do with actions related to the polis (the social, the political). The “in Christ” isn’t some stand-in for “now that Christ has come, we treat everyone the same”, because we know from the text and from history that they had rules regarding women and rules regarding slaves. It makes the most sense to understand “in Christ” in its spiritual dimension. Consider:
[a few sentences above our passage] If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
[a few sentences down from our passage] Wives, submit to your husbands. Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters.
Paul could very well have advocated that women be treated like men and the slaves be freed by their masters. It’s all on the same page of the letter. But given Paul didn’t even sense the possibility of a contradiction, I find it most reasonable to conclude that we are talking about things “not on Earth”.
I'd argue that Paul actually does significantly advocate for treating women and men the same way. The same standard applies to both. It's very striking if you compare, for instance, Paul's writing on sexuality and relationships compared to anything contemporaries were saying. Consider 1 Cor 7, for instance - every time Paul presents a piece for advice for one sex, he then immediately presents an identical piece of advice for the opposite sex. Thus:
You notice how he says something about one partner and then immediately says it about the other, including the at-the-time surprising statement that the wife has authority over the husband's body, in a way exactly equivalent to the way the husband has authority over the wife's body. When he talks about the regulation of the couple's sexual life, he emphasises mutual agreement - he could have described only a unilateral decision by the husband, but his emphasis is always harmony between the two.
Likewise:
You get the idea. Paul's approach to marriage and gender relations appears to be very much "that which is good for the goose is good for the gander". It is even more striking if you have any sense of the cultural background - the Law, the ascetic/celibate practices of the Essenes, the Greco-Roman household.
Now, sure, in a few places this is moderated a bit. I'm not going to discuss 1 Timothy on the grounds that it's likely pseudonymous, and not a good view on what Paul specifically thought, but there is whatever the heck is going in 1 Corinthians 11, and of course there's Ephesians 5:21-33. In Ephesians we get a bit more of a concession to propriety - you can see the same basically mutualist ethic from 1 Cor 7, but he applies it metaphorically to Christ and the church and therefore adds an image of hierarchy. Even so, I think it's still noticeably a very different ethic to that of the surrounding pagan or even Jewish world (parallel Eph 5:28 and 1 Cor 7:4), and emphasises a kind of devotion and mutual service.
I'm not saying that Paul thinks men and women are literally one hundred percent identical (though there is an interesting trend; much as the eschaton is "already but not yet", for Paul gendered divisions are beginning to dissolve, even as outward expressions of the same remain normative, as in 1 Cor 11), but rather that he does see them as possessing a spiritual equality ("there is no longer male nor female") which has consequences for the ordering of the family and of sexual life ("the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does"). The gender binary in a sense remains, but it remains so as to be transfigured by holiness into a sign of Christ's relationship with the church (cf. Eph 5).
As such I continue to firmly reject the idea that the spiritual equality of believers, along both lines of sex and by analogy lines of race, does not have consequences for the ordering of society. Of course it does. Christians will behave differently to pagans because of who they know themselves to be spiritually.
We see Paul outlining this specifically! He devotes large portions of this letters to both the relations between the sexes (as in 1 Cor) and the relations between different ethnic groups (as in Romans and Galatians), and in both cases the trend is to assert a new spiritual equality in Christ which changes and transfigures communal behaviour. Male and female believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. Jewish and Gentile believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. As far as slavery goes, Paul never really talks about it because for Paul it is genuinely irrelevant. Political status in the world is meaningless to Paul - or if there's any kind of priority, if anything, it is the poor who have the highest priority (cf. his discussions of his own poverty or his status as a prisoner). He assumes that there will continue to be slaves and masters, and judging from history he was quite correct there, but his point, as with outward expressions of gender propriety, is that this distinction no longer matters. Thus his advice in Philemon 15-16 is that Philemon will receive this runaway slave "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother". Paul isn't so much pro-slavery or anti-slavery as he is a-slavery. It just does not matter, because the master-slave distinction is dissolved and overwhelmed by the new identity that Philemon and Onesimus possess in Christ.
He was very much aware of such issues and addressed them, in a way that is frankly quite powerful both in his own day and I would argue today. You should not just read Paul and shrug and go, "Oh, well, nothing there about how society is to be ordered." As Paul himself might say, may it not be so!
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I don’t disagree with the nuance you discuss, but it’s also true that people don’t necessarily fully think through the implications of the political and ideological positions they advocate. This is a big point of Moldbug’s: by our standards many of the key thinkers of the enlightenment were deeply conservative/reactionary, they didn’t seek to dismantle a lot of the things that subsequent liberal thinkers did, but they nevertheless established forms of ideological enquiry that through processes like the Hegelian dialectic created modern progressivism in a continuous process.
It can both be true that 1776 leads inexorably to 2024 and that none of the founding fathers would be remotely happy with the current ruling ideology of the United States. Similarly, it can be true that the early Christians established a religion that had a tendency towards universalism and universal equality even though the early Christians still believed in the vast majority of social institutions (slavery, patriarchy, tribalism) of their age.
I don’t think you can ascribe Belief A causation to Outcome C when there’s a huge expanse of Phenomena B between them. In the case of 2024’s progressive politics, there are clearer phenomena that caused it, and we can imagine 1776-like norms which inspire a different sort of progress than the one we ostensibly have now. For universalism, it explains more if you look to the French Revolution, which was no more influenced by Christianity than the counter-revolutionaries (who were arguably more influenced by Christianity, or at least Christian heritage). If Christianity can equally inspire both Divine Right nobilities and universalism, it’s more clear to ignore it altogether and look for more direct and salient causes.
I mean, would we ever say that Confucius inspired Mao’s revolution? No, there was an interjecting element in between. Did the Talmud inspire the Soviet Union? No, elements in between. The distances are way too large to clearly ascribe causal attributes, and other causes make more sense.
I suppose we can say, that Christianity causes universalism in the same way Christopher Columbus caused millions of Indians to die from disease. It’s simply that exploring a new thing comes with completely “random”, unknowable, unforeseen problems down the road. But we can imagine a discovery of America that does not accidentally induce a smallpox epidemic, so it’s not like there’s any wisdom in connecting discovery to smallpox in our minds.
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Let me take an aspect of this: Regardless of what any other internet rando says, Christianity is the organizing principle of western civ. It is also indisputably a slave religion of slave morality for the sort of people who aspire to slavery. As such I find it practically, morally and metaphysically ridiculous.
I also think that the shift in the sixties was the beginning of a new version of the old religion adopting the skin of academia in an end run around the establishment of a state religion.
"Wokeness" is just the latest christian heresy, with state backing. Nor will it be the last.
How does Christianity map to wokeness? Outside of the
cheems mindsetslave morality.It’s not the monotheism, or anything resembling belief in an almighty God. No equivalent to the Trinity. No miracles, no message of salvation.
If wokeness has none of the cosmology, mythology, or eschatology, what’s left?
The exaltation of the pathetic. The moral superiority of whoever is the biggest victim.
Which gets thrown into the Christians' faces whenever said Christians complain about the actions of people more pathetic than themselves. And the Christians capitulate.
Just as Jesus would.
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I don't know; from where I sit, there's not a huge difference between "the arc of history" and "Divine Providence." Plus, the way some talk about being "on the right side of history" sounds rather like being "right with Jesus."
There's also the whole "paladin" instinct to moral crusading I discussed here as a "Puritan" trait.
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...I think this might be using 'slave' in an idiosyncratic way, fully detached from any concept of slavery in the traditional sense, i.e. the owning of human beings.
I know this is just a riff on Nietzsche, but it bears noting that Nietzsche's master-slave morality is itself idiosyncratic to him and I'd argue a very implausible way of understanding the history of Western civilisation.
Not at all. Straightforwardly, the religion preaches slavery (to Christ). Politically, it accepts actual slavery and counsels christian slaves to uphold the institution. Early christianity was big among the slaves of Rome. And at the metaphysical level, it counsels submission to greater powers, both spiritually to god, and secularly to Rome. Top to bottom, at every level of analysis and description, Christianity is for slaves and those who aspire to slavery.
The wild Teutone women who hanged their children from their wagons and slew their defeated husbands fleeing the battlefield before committing mass suicide were not Christians. They at least preferred death at the personal and cultural level to slavery and assimilation. This is why there are no non-slave major religions.
What?
Let's take even just the first claim you made - that Christianity preaches slavery to Christ. Quick sanity check here.
John 15:15 - "I do not call you servants [douloi] any longer, because the servant [doulos]does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father."
Galatians 4:7 - "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God."
(See also the entire allegory of Hagar and Sarah to follow, in which Christians are identified with the children of the free woman, not of the slave.)
Galatians 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
1 Peter 2:16 - "As servants [douloi] of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil."
2 Peter 2:19-20 - "They [the ungodly] promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first."
It seems pretty clear to me. I've recently had the pleasure of re-reading The Screwtape Letters, and its demon narrator's apt description of the natures of Hell and Heaven is, "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."
I'm not sure how much more clear it could have been - the goal of Christianity is not subjection to God as a miserable slave, but rather adoption as co-heirs with Christ, sharing in the glory of Christ's own status (cf. Romans 8:29, Christians are "to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family"). This is explicitly contrasted with the image of slavery in the Bible. Thus St. Athanasius summarises (ch. 54), "He was made man that we might be made God". This isn't some hidden secret.
Where images of slavery or servanthood appear in a positive context (e.g. Galatians 5:13), it is reconfigured in a deliberately surprising way - "through love become slaves to one another". The image of a voluntary mutual 'slavery' where each person genuinely seeks the other's good is striking and noticeably not the same thing as the domination of a master over chattel.
Let's go on:
Does Christianity counsel slaves to uphold the institution of slavery? I can only assume you are referring to 1 Corinthians 7:21-24. But this does not at all tell slaves to uphold slavery, or to recommend slavery as a practice. Rather, it is the position I just described - that slavery is irrelevant. He doesn't even tell slaves not to become free, if they get the chance. Paul's counsel is that worldly status just doesn't matter. This is supported by, as I noted in that previous message, what we see in Philemon - Paul isn't an outright abolitionist (as indeed would be pretty impossible in the first century), but his advice to the Christian master is to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother".
It seems worth adding to this, well, the subsequent two thousand years in which Christianity and Christians seem to have been quite well-positioned as regards the abolition of slavery. Sometimes this was in the form of large organised movements, as in Britain, but other times it has been slower. Privately I find something inspiring in the history of slavery in the Byzantine Empire - there was no society-wide war against it, no great battle. Rather, they just... slowly... stopped. Laws were passed against abuse of slaves, and then reducing slaveholders' power, and eventually it just faded away. The tempering aspect of Christianity here seems evident. By contrast the Teutonic pagans you describe were much more enthusiastic slavers.
What's next? Does Christianity counsel submission to greater powers? Well, define 'power'. It certainly counsels obedience and love to God, who is naturally the greatest power, and from there it recommends peaceful coexistence with earthly authorities to the extent that it is possible without disobeying God. But when that is not possible, it recommends protest. I hate to invoke the stereotype here, but you are saying that the tradition that encouraged people to peacefully yet defiantly become martyrs, steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the compulsion of the Roman state even to the point of being torn apart by lions, is a tradition that "counsels submission... to Rome". Does that not seem even the slightest bit off, to you?
If you argue that Christianity counsels obedience to God, certainly. No one's going to dispute that. But this is hardly unusual. If you want to make the Teutonic comparison again, it is not at all clear that a Teutonic tribesman's submission to the chieftain is qualitatively different to that of a Roman citizen's submission to the emperor - not least because, in Christian Rome in particular, the emperor's authority was contingent upon being accepted by the citizen body. That was why there could be so many revolutions in Constantinople, for, while the emperor's power was at least partly theocratic, it was also something held from the republic and there could be revoked, should the emperor be a tyrant. You can see this kind of legacy also in English-speaking Christian traditions - in Britain, where parliament claimed the power to overthrow and replace the king if necessary, and even more radically in America. The evolution of Christian views towards autocratic authority is definitely complex. I'm not going to say that there are no Christian bootlickers, whether historically (de Maistre etc.) or today (the caesarism of someone like Stephen Wolfe, say); but I am saying that a view of Christianity as uniquely servile in its understanding of politics is absurdly mistaken.
And... that's it. Those are all the specific points you make.
You're just, well, wrong.
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I think it’s a reasonable framework for ideological thinking. A “slave” ideology would be one that places value on passively accepting fate, on not being assertive or demanding of other groups. A master ideology would do the opposite and be demanding and assertive and less concerned with helping others.
That’s different than Nietzsche's use of the term. “Slave morality” lionizes the underdog, but it doesn’t have to be passive at all.
Beyond Good and Evil, III.46
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I wouldn’t say that Christianity guarantees slave morality, Christians had after all conquered and subjugated the majority of the world a century ago. I just think it lacks any safeguards against slave morality the way that Judaism (with its inherent ethnonationalism and more vigorously harsh Old Testament) and Islam (with Muhammad the conqueror cemented as ultimate example for mankind) have. If your civilization has a brief slave morality cult or phase, there’s nothing in Christianity or Christian-descended secular society to say ‘stop’.
Nietzsche specifically calls out Judaism as slave morality. Or, uh…
“Slave morality” describes a set of values, not a methodology. So Christianity and Judaism are both perfectly capable of dominating their surroundings. They just do so by convincing people that suffering is moral. This is an incredible competitive advantage against “master” moralities, which lack leverage on the have-nots.
Islam is a good example of how this gets weaponized. The general concept of jihad—struggle—fits slave morality. Fighting the good fight is supposed to be hard. More specifically, martyrdom for eternal rather than temporal reward is textbook slave morality. I’d argue that Western coverage of Islam in the GWoT era actually centers on eroding that moral high ground, mocking its abstract rewards to make them seem base and worldly. 72 virgins, huh?
But I digress. Nietzsche observes that slave morality wins, citing Judaism as well as Christianity. They won using their inverted morals, not in spite of them.
Slave morality can be exploited by non-slaves
There is no non-slave morality
Then why use the term at all?
Look, I don’t think Nietzsche had a very realistic model of history, either. But if you’re going to ignore everything else about his “slave revolt in morals,” maybe you should pick a different term.
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It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. From those who have much, much is expected (and the corollary, from those who have nothing, nothing is expected, explains Grant's Pass). Blessed are the poor. Etc. It's a slave morality.
You're passing a progressive or nietzschean interpretation of those elements as their true, indisputable meaning. Consider the possibility those teach self-discipline ("bearing the cross") rather than as statements bashing those high in status.
The beatitudes describe various hardships as the blessings of God. "Blessed are the X" is not to say the status of poverty/mourning/persecution intrinsically grants righteous status — that is, "poor people are good" — but that poverty/mourning/persecution are blessings from heaven to mortify the evil in you. In this reading, being rich, happy, and safe carries the dangers of you becoming self-satisfied and thus not seeking God. To the contrary, in another context of Jesus's ministry, the poor person who receives only one talent is cast into hell for sitting on his laurels. The two richer servants are praised and the master grants them greater dominion in his service (AKA puts them above the lesser servants).
The lesson here is that the rich man does not value God higher than his own material status. When challenged on the point, he prefers money; his mouth says "I want God" but his mind says "I want earthly passions" — this lesson holds for the beggar with his bottle just as much as Scrooge McDuck with his gold swimming pool. At other parts of scripture, Jesus meets well-to-do people and does not demand they pauper themselves for God's kingdom.
To be clear, it's very questionable that Bezos can be saved, because he is chasing money and status above all else. But is not at all clear that Jesus categorically condemns money any more than he condemns enjoying marital sex, food, or earthly luxuries such as come to you in your service to God.
You're sanewashing a two thousand year old Judean mystic/revolutionary. Consider the possibility that Jesus meant what he said, and Paul meant what he said, and the whole religion is straightforward.
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To be even more clear, the Catholic and Orthodox interpretation of that passage has always been that the rich young man sought monasticism and was dissuaded by the requirement of poverty.
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This sort of interpretation tends to strip Jesus' preaching of anything particularly novel or interesting. "Well when he said turn the other cheek he didn't mean you should let your enemies kill you, he just meant, you know, don't go off half-cocked, control your anger," "Well when he said 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye...' he didn't mean it's bad to be rich, he just meant don't love money too much." This is all stuff any Greek Pagan would have happily nodded along with. What was so hard or so shocking about the path Jesus offered?
I think Jesus' message probably was radically ascetic and self-denying. The story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is also interesting in this regard. It's from a different author than Matthew's gospel, so it's not necessarily going to agree on everything, but in the story, the rich man never actually appears to do anything wrong. You could kind of argue his sin was not being more charitable to Lazarus, but the text never actually says this. And when the rich man is being tormented in Hades and asks Abraham for a cup of water, Abraham tells him no, because "remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony." That's it. In other words, the rich man went to Hell just for being rich. It had little to do with his or Lazarus' deeds in life, but with a cosmic imbalance that had to be corrected. The story is kind of a didactic one even if it isn't literally a parable so it doesn't necessarily mean Luke thought every rich person was going to Hell and I'm sure he didn't think every poor person would have a share in the kingdom but the overall view of earthly wealth is very dim.
This is somewhat supported by what is known of the early church, it's self-imposed poverty and the lack of any violent resistance to persecution. People being what they are, this didn't last long and pretty soon theologians and church fathers were spinning all sorts of justification for why you can actually
Absolutely. He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. The novelty of Jesus's teaching is entirely in the nature of Grace, not specific ethical teachings.
I was of this opinion once, from most of my childhood as a protestant and most of my adulthood as an atheist, but I've changed my mind — the text of scripture does seem to have fruit beyond the autistic literal definition of the words. A lot of protestants (or atheists who were protestants) are lead astray by things like "Sheathe thy sword, for all who take the sword shall perish with the sword" and don't step back to think: Wait a second, why do twelve disciples have swords three years into Jesus's ministry if Jesus actually teaches unconditional pacifism like the literal words suggest?
The steelman for your views is in the book of Acts, where the early Christians after Pentecost form what appears to be a commune. (There is also an incident right after this where a wealthy couple hold back some of their wealth, lie about it, and the Holy Spirit executes them on the spot.) I would encourage anyone to read these early chapters of Acts, because ostensibly the early Christians invested supernaturally with the Holy Spirit would be authorities on what Jesus actually meant. But again I would say there is a deeper meaning that goes beyond sanewashing cope.
If that's the case, he wasted a lot of time delivering ethical teaching. I tend to think Jesus believed 'works' were a lot more essential to salvation than most Protestants (even most Catholics) would like.
They didn't. Jesus told them to go buy some swords earlier that same week, explicitly so that he could fulfill the prophecy that he would be 'counted among the transgressors,' and then forbids them from using the swords when he's arrested. There's not a single place in the New Testament where violence against one's enemies is encouraged or even sanctioned. Divine violence on the other hand is all over the NT, you might even say it's the whole point, but that's a very different matter.*
*I would say the pacifism of the early Christians is inexplicable without the apparently ubiquitous belief that Jesus was going to come back very soon to establish the kingdom and destroy Rome and the nations; in other words, earthly Christians didn't need to do any killing because God was about to do it for them. When this didn't pan out naturally doctrine had to evolve.
Grace leads to good works because grace remakes men morally. "Grace without good works" is incoherent; if you are not doing good works, you have not accepted grace. The dispute between protestants and catholics lies in the catholic church's offer of a bargain by which a favor from God could be purchased: that you could do a good work to "buy" grace.
As told in Luke, they already had two on hand.
There is no occurrence where violence would be appropriate, save for crucifixion, which was Christ's intention to suffer. A centurion approaches Jesus in Matthew and Jesus praises him and says that he will enter God's kingdom with no stipulation that he give up his army gig.
What is forbidden by Christ is retribution or vengeance. That a Christian cannot take up a sword in hatred or for his own personal ends is beyond question.
It depends on what you mean. The actions of the apostles recorded in scripture are strong evidence for any Christian that believes in biblical inerrancy — which I believe is all of them. They certainly acted as if they could not use violence to defend their own persons against persecution. However, this does not track 1:1 with the question of whether a Christian can be a soldier, police officer, defend their family against a rapist, etc: that is, commit violence not on one's own behalf. The apostles did not address that question or find themselves in that situation.
(EDIT: I see Romans 13 gets cited a lot in defense of Christian police officers, despite the main focus being Christians obeying the police. Looks cut and dry on that one.)
As for the behavior of Christians in the 2nd century, one is perfectly entitled to think individuals from that time period might be wrong about doctrine, same as one might think for the 6th century, 11th century, 15th century, or (now) 21st century.
His ethical teaching falls into the camps "you think you're doing enough, but you're nowhere near adequate by God's standards" or "you're hewing to the letter of the law rather than reaching the spirit of the law, which is what you know is right". Both those points are to a purpose. He avoids giving straightforward list of instructions, and he teaches in questions and riddles, because being a moral person does not mean lawyering your way around a contract of clear-cut rules as the Jews had been trying for several hundred years.
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Those concepts are all largely true about Islam and Judaism too. For hardcore Nietzscheans who consider all Abrahamism slave morality that tracks, but I’d say for those specifically down on Christianity alone, it’s more that the New Testament lacks a certain martial character that is found in both Jewish and Muslim history, in the latter case especially in the life and conquests of Muhammad.
Not a Nietzschean, but his basic description of mass religion tracks just fine. Not just abrahamic, I would argue every large religion is a religion of submission, of slavery. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism etc. all count. All are functionally about convincing the ruled to keep to their place.
Non-slave religions cannot spread beyond a tiny martial minority, nor survive social progress or the achievement of wealth and comfort. The slaves outnumber the free a thousand to one. Religion must take its adherents where they are.
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It's worth remembering that in Nietzsche's discussion of master/slave morality in the Genealogy, he initially introduces slave morality as a structural phenomenon - it's defined by its relationship with other systems of morality, not by its inherent content, which therefore at least in principle opens up the possibility of a type of Christianity that is not founded on slave morality (or indeed, the possibility that those who appear to be masters are actually slaves):
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I think you’re referencing a few different trends.
The distaste for Christianity on parts of the dissident right is substantially Nietzschean, it precedes mass immigration. That perspective would say that the West is still post-Christian and still deeply embraces slave morality in policy areas like homelessness, justice, welfare, immigration, foreign policy and so on. Nietzsche is a very popular figure on the intellectual hard right. The argument in this case isn’t that Europeans aren’t capable of being tough under Christianity, clearly they are (and of course all of the greatest ages of Northern European civilization occurred in the Christian era) but that Christianity has an inexorable tendency toward worshipping victimhood and guilt that eventually led to cultural modernity, which these people broadly dislike.
The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism. This did not bother earlier generations of Christian antisemites, but…
Residual Christian antisemitism largely ended after WW2, certainly as a matter of policy. The Pope officially renounced it along with the entirety of mainstream Catholicism, and so did most large Protestant denominations. Over time, some, like American Evangelical Christianity, even embraced a quasi-philosemitic and certainly staunchly pro-Israel worldview. Even denominations that saw less ideological evolution like Orthodox Christianity significantly reduced their hostility to Jews. If you were an antisemite in 1900 it was quite easy to find a Church that agreed with you. In 2020, certainly in the United States, you would be hard pressed and would have to rely on a few small splinter groups that are very far from mainstream Christianity and not well-distributed around the country. This both led to a dislike among antisemitic dissident rightists for Christianity in general and a desire for some kind of certainly-not-Jewish alternative, which eg. Scandinavian paganism obviously is.
As secularism increased and religious observance decreased in the West, the ingrained ideological hostility to paganism as savage or backwards (and certainly as ‘wrong’) declined with it. Young men aren’t afraid of going to hell if they become pagans, so the ‘ward’ against ‘deconversion’ is lessened. That said, pagan or quasi-pagan cults have had a long history in esoteric European intellectual circles, certainly back to the 19th century if not before. The popularity and then decline of New Age religions starting in the 1940s and 1950s may also be related to this.
We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.
I think the lack of a religious alternative makes the idea of trying to remove Christianity from western culture more or less a nonstarter. Until there’s a robust religion that comes out of Pagan thinking in a real pagan way, with an unapologetic pagan way of think (that is, a religious and philosophical movement in authentic paganism that doesn’t have its origins in either Christianity or as a reaction to Christianity), then you can really build outward from it. Judaism is its own thing and always has been, and it’s not really a LARP of a dead religion that exists only in distinction from Christianity and Islam. Jews have their own thing. My experience of paganism is that it’s a LARP that no one takes seriously, and certainly don’t behave as though they believe in Odín, Thor, Zeus, or Athena. They don’t have a sense of reverence for their deities, the sense of them as having wants that you might not like. No sense that you can’t just pick and choose.
And I think that matters because like it or not, the best innovation the Abrahamics have is that their texts are canon and inspired and thus it gives a bulwark against it being twisted into whatever form the elites want. The Torah, the Bible and the Quran are explicit in what they say, and thus cannot be easily interpreted to not mean what the text says it means. Islam can never allow pork. It’s in the book, and the book is from God and not changing for the whims of the rest of the world.
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Well, it wasn't just a single Pope who completed that process after WW2! ;)
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I would have said most of them are, to be honest. There are a bunch of... well, the language I use here will be controversial, but I would say racialist, anti-semitic, alt-right or neo-Nazi type posters and it is entirely unsurprising to me that those people hate Christianity. It is in their interests to try to roll Christianity together with other movements, in order to promote rejection of Christianity.
I find it morbidly absurd sometimes. The woke hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is patriarchal, homophobic, deeply linked to white supremacy, and so on. They only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of those supposedly far-right-supporting elements. On the other end of the spectrum, the far-right also hate Christianity, and argue that Christianity is weak, universalist, over-compassionate, the source of the cultural rot and hatred of strength and vitality that is enervating the West, and so on. They in turn can only see good in Christianity if it is consciously reformed and purged of these supposedly far-left slave-morality elements.
It's strange to be hated by the far-left for being rightist, and hated by the far-right for being leftist. Judith Butler writes a whole chapter of Gender Trouble condemning the pope and attacking that retrograde Christianity, and then you pop over here and it's all about how Christianity is destroying the West because it doesn't hate Jews and/or black people enough. Quite a surreal experience.
Once again I'm reminded of a bit from Chesterton, from chapter VI of Orthodoxy:
(I have omitted Chesterton's specific examples - he has half a dozen or so - for reasons of space, but you can easily check them.)
It's as if the same pattern plays out again. Christianity is both too racist and not racist enough, too Western and not Western enough, too Jewish and yet also too anti-semitic, and so on, in every category, both far-left and far-right beat it with the same stick.
Or maybe it's the only sane thing in the room.
It's less strange if you consider that far-left and far-right are not polar opposites, but instead something approximating Stalinists and Trotskyites: members of a coherent ideological tribe, sharing basic values in common, driven to mutual hatred by surface details.
I'd tend to agree with this, yes. It's been cited far too many times before, but the old woke versus racist skit still rings true. In some cases the overlap is even stronger.
I recently found myself reading Yasmin Nair on Palestine, and was struck by this line:
I'm sure I don't even need to say what it resembles. The portrayal of liberalism as weak and self-defeating, the obsession with a putative Jewish conspiracy controlling the nation, the call for violent revolution - ultimately it reminds me of many of the Motte's own far-right posters. Even on the psychological level, when we find themes like the validation of anger, praise of strength and aggression, the sense of the whole culture as a kind of malicious conspiracy against one, the felt sense of solidarity with an almost-wholly-imagined public, even an online culture that's saturated with memes, affected irony, and deliberate overstatement to either signal in-group loyalty or trigger propriety-obsessed centrists...
The mirror is there. The far-left and far-right share basic values, even if they're sitting in different camps.
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It is an incredible irony that Christianity was the root of antisemitism for so long, but in America the Evangelicals are extremely strong Zionists.
The center is always attacked by the extremes, which doesn’t indicate correctness.
Christianity is a large set of possible beliefs and so it’s very easy to choose one’s own adventure. As a former believer, there’s a lot of good and bad in there.
Frankly, I wish the GOP would prefer a more WASPy Christian candidate than Trump, but MAGA is low class Christianity and a bit too forgiving.
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Or simply that Christianity is not one thing. Some versions of Christianity can be too blood-thirsty and some versions too meek, some too triumphalist, some too obsessed with slave morality. And to the extent that every Christian is different, we can change Lewis's example a little. It is not just many men speaking of one man, it is many men speaking of many other men.
Catholicism and Orthodoxy are different, and each have their own different sects and churches and local differences. If you ask me to describe Christianity I am likely to talk about it in the context of the Christian conflict in my home nation. That is going to be very different than a Greek orthodox in Crete, or a Baptist in Alabama. Not just because the viewer is different, but so too is the thing being viewed.
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