Found the article very interesting and will have to think more on parallels and dissimilarities with the left woke and elements on the right. I want to take issue with the idea common today that the woke left naturally follows from Christian ideals - I think it only follows from a certain bastardisation of Christian ideals.
Whilst Christianity does say blessed are the meek, it also says blessed are the merciful. It is difficult to be merciful without having some power or ability to do so! But the woke left chooses only to idolise the downtrodden. In Christianity, one recovers by moral self improvement - you are not then justified to do anything.
So whilst the Nietzsche take that Christianity undermines itself in respect for the meek is partly relevant, it only holds water in a lefty-selective reading on Christian teaching.
Great post Regan. I wanted to highlight a couple passages that I thought deserved further analysis:
----------
"Without the supernatural elements of a creator and an afterlife, where all earthly wrongs will be righted, the Christian exhortation to turn the other cheek becomes seen as an instruction to enable evil: silence is compliance (if not violence!). While the supernatural elements and demand for pacifism are dropped, the moral superiority of the oppressed is maintained.
These values, within the secular context, imply a need to protect the weak and oppressed NOW in the earthly realm, using whatever means necessary (including violence, which is how some convince themselves that 10/7 can be categorized as an “act of resistance” rather than an act of terror). Rather than believing the "meek shall inherit the earth" and reap that inheritance in heaven, they must inherit the earth in the here and now. With no promise of another world, we must create our own utopia."
----------
What's interesting is just how little purchase the Christian concepts of grace and mercy have often had with the people who ought to embrace them most, based on the lip-service they give to their alleged Christian faith. And perhaps your analysis here indicates why, because if this is only based on a belief that wrongs will be righted in heaven, that the offender's ultimate comeuppance is assured without them having to lift a finger, then maybe this is indicative of an underlying authoritarian mindset. And when one's engagement with their faith is on the shallow side (which, lets be honest, is usually the case), the distinction between allowing for God's judgement in the next life vs being a vessel of it in this one is easily elided.
You're right that somebody who would "turn the other cheek" only to walk away grumbling about how sorry the slap-happy sinner is going to be when they stand before the pearly gates on judgement day would, deprived of a belief in an afterlife, obviously be inclined to dole out rewards and punishments in the here and now. Which probably does explain a good bit of left-wing authoritarianism – despite the fact that, ironically, much of the left's anti-Israel fervor, even if rooted in sympathy for oppressed people, is bolstered by pro-Hamas propaganda rooted in a fanatical disregard for this life by fundamentalist Islamists.
Which is why I think it's important to emphasize the secular aspects of these Christian values. I grew up in a culture of American Catholicism. Some time in my teenage years, I realized that I no longer believed in God. And one of the most common, and disappointing, questions I got was about what my incentive was to not descend into utter immorality. The implication being, of course, that without the threat of divine punishment, there could be no concept of right and wrong.
The irony, of course, was that the very fact that people would ask me that question with such obvious concern demonstrates that they themselves clearly see value in moral principles independent of the alleged relief they supply from supernatural consequences – to them, said consequences are clearly a necessary means to a desired end, not the underlying justification for such an end. So it should be unsurprising to them that I desire such an end as much as they do, even though I must seek other means to ensure it.
And those other means are to leverage the human capacity for empathy and the expectations of reciprocity that really underly our moral values. Turning the other cheek not because one is looking to the hereafter, but due to a belief that this actually helps sow the seeds of a better life here on earth, for us and everyone else, and that perhaps the offending person is a human whose heart is in need of healing rather than one in need of a good beating, might seem naive at times. But more often than we appreciate, it produces better outcomes for everyone than the retributive and remunerative model of morality – one look at America's incarceration and recidivism rates ought to convince someone of that.
Progressives have lost the plot because they've forgotten that human morality fundamentally derives not from religion, or a belief in some sort of ethereal karmic force, or even the natural desire to "get even", but from an innate understanding of "the golden rule" – treat others as you *would have them* treat you (unfortunately many people sometimes forget the *would have them* part). Most of us understand religion as an invention of humanity designed to *enforce* order, but many of us obviously fail to grasp the fallacy behind how it has become an imperfect intellectual basis for the idea of right and wrong - one which ultimately defeats its purpose as an abstract value by reducing it to another purely selfish, pragmatic concern.
Good stuff. Postmodern framing provides ideological backing for old fashion tribalism. People are fundamentally tribal, not ideological, therefore the left and then the right the play into comfortable human social behaviors. Until recently unions bridges a social and ideological position, but with increasing abundance the tribes aligning less on economics and pragmatic alliances.
Liberal ideology (classical and social) are naturally fragile and must align with a cultural tribe to be politically viable.
In defense of "turning the other cheek": if you step into the unjust punishment, you are not subservient to the power. If you respond in fear you can be controlled by that fear. If you respond with residence, are are overwhelmed and lose agency. The only way to retain agency is to step into the suffering: "you can hurt me, but I you do not control me". This makes sense if you see yourself as serving a higher power (ideal or supernatural), but doesn't require ultimate justice (afterlife). If you think serving the higher good even to death is better than serving an unjust power, the choice is rational even in the extreme (I'd also argue it's socially effective).
“…at some point it ends up being the fault of the Jews.”
Given that anti-Semitism has resulted in pogroms and genocide, is it a reasonable assumption that the Jews have joined together in various organizations to take proactive measures to ensure their safety in hostile gentile countries? If so, what are some examples?
A large part of the right has definitely gone woke and not since now, but for a while. Just think about Libertarians reduced to parroting all new left talking points about foreign policy, or when they labeled basically every great European thinker as a leftist among fascist dictators (funny they inserted Nietzsche and not Marx among the leftist, it speaks it loud) https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/o7gqg5/know_thine_enemy_a_history_of_the_left_volume_1/
Even when they indulge in their deranged antisemitism you cannot doing without noticing most of their anti-jews talking points are literally copy-paste woke talking points (MUH... da jooz invented slave trade, MUH... da jooz were behind the CSA) and so on...
The central claim in this piece is correct, but I wouldn't call the right "woke."
Many of the issues you highlight: the focus on identity, selectively dismissing testimony, cancel culture, narratives about abstract forces like globalism and systemic racism, and utopian solutions—are widespread and have been the norm throughout history.
Wokeness is a distinct phenomenon – whether you take the cultural socialism line ala Kaufmann or an ground it as an extension of Liberalism.
> which explained how certain choices could be seen as sensible without the need to invoke any conspiracy
But that’s exactly how conspiracies operate. That’s almost the very definition of a conspiracy: when you hide your schemes by alternative explanations that seem sensible on their own. Just like them saying “the evidence is corrupt” doesn’t lend itself to any conclusions, you saying “but the evidence is all we have” doesn’t magically make the evidence legitimate. The fact is we’re all adrift in a sea of uncertainty, and the reason the problem is so pernicious is because our tools for fighting uncertainty have been corrupted. If you know your map has already lead you astray, you can’t trust it to lead you to the map store for an accurate map.
I’m afraid I don’t have any better answers. My advice comes down to “trust your gut, while continuing to be your gut’s harshest critic”.
It's not about all-or-nothing certain or uncertain, but "more or less likely." Yes, everything up the chain could be in doubt (maybe you live in a simulation and nothing you empirically observe is true), but it is not the most likely explanation. I call this the possibilist vs probabilist trap
That’s kind of what I was getting at by “being your gut’s harshest critic.” In the end we’re all going to believe what we think is the most likely explanation - that’s almost tautologically true. The best we can do is attack our intuition from every angle we can think of while being aware of our inherent biases.
I tend to think the phrase “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” is a fraud pushed by smart malicious people.
"All cats are female"? Really? Kinda sexist, doncha think ... 😉🙂
Though, en passant, thanks for the recommendation of "Bespoke Coordinates" -- subscribed. 🙂
But a good question entirely consistent with, as you said, your earlier post on horseshoes. Sadly the nature of the beast, pots and kettles -- both black as the ace of spades -- as far as the eye can see. Too many on virtually all sides have far too many unexamined assumptions that they take as articles of faith -- and damned be those who challenge them in any way.
Reminds me of the late and entirely unlamented Atheism Plus -- probably before your time ... 😉🙂 -- but they exhibited pretty much the same failings as the religious they were railing against.:
You may have run across a tweet by a UK News commentator, Andrew Doyle, who had something of a neat description of "The Woke", although, when push comes to shove, he's more or less guilty of the same failings:
AD: "The JK Rowling controversy has exposed one of the most chilling aspects of the woke ideology: the sheer certainty of its adherents.
It never occurs to these people that they might be wrong. That’s why they refuse to debate.
More particularly, when I pointed out that he's just as guilty of that for peddling the quite unscientific idea that "sex is immutable 🙄" (it ain't), I got blocked and defenestrated for my troubles:
Steersman: "Seems to be an article of faith with you that the defining and essential traits for the sexes are just genitalia. Which is most certainly not what the standard biological definitions actually say.
But you remind me of an old tweet of yours that I've often quoted or touted, though I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of having done so"
Saying that liberals have done too little to stop the "woke" leads one to believe that you would have similar views about the relationship between traditional Anerican conservatives extreme right. Yet repeatedly you make reference to the idea that right-wing extremism is necessary to counter the excesses of the left.
Which is funny, because that is *exactly* what many people on the illiberal left say about the right. People like me have been trying to tell them not to counter extremism with more extremism, but the human tendency to "fight fire with fire" is sadly too ingrained in us for this message to gain the necessary traction. As you yourself have unwittingly demonstrated by arguing that we need right-wing postmodernism, and that these woke liberals need to have the right ideas "literally beaten into them", if nesessary. Because that usually works.
In actuality, of course, this will lead left-wing illiberals to believe even more fervently that their brand of illiberalism is necessary to counter right wing illiberalism. Do you really not see how the two things feed upon and enhance each other? What reason is there to believe that one will effectively eliminate the other, and then once this comes to pass, will gracefully recede into the background, abdicating the power it acquired through force, fueled by frothing hatred and hysteria?
You may have noticed that the time when wokeism was at is apex in terms of purchase with mainstream America was during Donald Trump's presidency. It has begun to recede now, but get ready for a new wave of it if Trump gets re-elected. This outward spiraling cycle of extremism has no end, and will proceed unabated while talking heads like us sit here and argue over "who started it". Every person's perspective is limited to near history; conservatives today act as if there was no such thing as right-wing illiberalism before "wokeism" arose.
And yet we all know that isn't true. Something most conservatives acknowledge, while insistently maintaining that once the overt racism of legal segregation was eliminated, black Americans should have just been able to neatly slide into the American middle class, despite lingering prejudices and the effects of white flight to the suburbs (and I am an enthusiastic fan of suburban life) taking their money and political influence with them, leaving blacks to fend for themselves while our cities fell into decay and disrepair. And ultimately, rendering many blacks vulnerable to being preyed upon by the false promises of white Communists, having been abandoned by the so called "classical liberals".
So we can sit here and continue this Hatfields vs. McCoys (or extremist Jews vs extremist Muslims if you like) blood feud, each trying to one-up the other, or we can each choose to disarm the other side's extremists by reponding with moderation and reasonable, sensible solutions. This is what the Democrats did by nominating Biden over Bernie Sanders, and yet the right won't let go of Donald Trump, insisting on obsessing over every bone he throws to the left while he consistently champions legislation and policies that benefit the white working class and workers unions, in states that have a 0% chance of voting for him, in counter to the fraudulent, cultural "populism" of Donald Trump. Not to mention supporting the police and Israel, defying the activist left while avoiding the kneejerk authoritarian overreaction commonly exhibited on the right.
And in the background is Donald Trump, verbally vomiting an unsettling stream of casual, textbook fascism with distrurbing regularity while most of America remains blissfully ignorant (we hope) and the polls are tied.
Donald Trump is a reaction to woke-ism, not a cause.
Trump Derangement Syndrome caused liberals to side with the woke, which is the fault of liberals, not Trump. They could have gotten over their immaturity and aesthetic hang ups to make substantive choices, but they didn’t. They would rather plung society into darkness then be associated with orange man. You are fully commited to voting for woke in the next election and of supporting woke for four more years if he wins just to spite Trump, pathetic.
I don’t see woke “receding”. Is Biden less woke then Obama? Have you gotten a look at Joe Biden? Have you seen what his White House has done? Do you remember everything that has happened since 2020?
What happened with blacks is simple. They have average IQs of 85 and it’s genetic. They were never going to achieve equality of outcome, but equality of outcome is suppose to flow from equality under the law if IQs were the same.
Nobody wants to accept this, so ever more elaborate solutions and blame games are concocted to solve the unsolvable.
Somehow when blacks engage in mass crime and elect incompetent black leaders to loot cities it’s white people’s fault for leaving. Or when they move back to the city it’s their fault for gentrifying it. They got you whether your coming or going.
You want a right wing answer to what to do, go pick up the bell curve. Or just see how the sun belt and the suburbs are better governed.
Now, as to Trump, apparently you, like Mr Arcto, failed to grasp my point about how absurd it is to talk about "who started it". Trump and the MAGA right are a mutually reinforcing influence on the woke left. I could sit here and write a long essay on all of the problems on the right of which Trump is the culmination, but suffice it to say that the right-wing talking point of Trump being a response to "wokeness" is a lazy excuse by the right to avoid a good hard look in the mirror. Instead of confronting their own issues and how they contributed to the problems with their fringe, like I and many others are doing on the left, and more respectable conservatives are doing on the right, most Republicans would rather blame Trump on the liberals so that they can go back to nasty, anything-better-than-a-Democrat politics as usual, because they just can't give it up.
Now, to your accusation of me "voting woke to spite Trump", you couldn't be more off the mark. Firstly, I am not "voting woke", as the majority of the Democratic coalition is not beholden to the "woke", despite what Republican propagandists want you to believe. In contrast, the Republican Party is practically a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc. His flunkies now control the RNC, and his lies and conspiracy theories are now largely accepted as fact among Republicans.
Secondly, to say that I am trying to "spite" Trump implies that I am going against some overwhelming interest of mine in voting against him – like what these elite college dimwits and misguided Palestinian Americans are threatening to do to Biden, in the process electing Trump. Hardly. I vote against Trump because he was a terrible President in virtually every way imaginable, and the fact that he sticks his thumb in the eye of some annoying, obnoxious leftists is about the most foolish reason I can think of to vote for someone for President when every other aspect of his character, his intellect, and his general competence makes him wholly unfit for office.
You ask me if I've been paying attention to the White House – yeah I have. Were you during the Trump years? If you had you'd know about the utter chaos that was the Trump Presidency. How he was constantly having to be told by his staff that he couldn't do this or that because it was illegal. How they were always working around his capricious and impulsive decision making, spending much of their time doing cleanup and making excuses for his ill-tempered outbursts, ignorant blunders, and casual disregard for the law or norms of ethical behavior. He was easily manipulated by foreign autocrats, buying into internet conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda – sometimes straight from the horse's mouth – rather than listening to his own intelligence services. Nothing that came out of his mouth could be trusted, so legit news had to rely mostly on confidential sources on the inside and other hard-nosed investigative reporting. His handling of COVID was not only incompetent but morally depraved. And then came the aftermath of the 2020 election. I could go on for much, much longer here.
Have I paid attention to what's been going on since 2020? You bet I have. I see a world beset by challenges Trump would have drowned in, and which Biden has mostly handled quite competently. I've also observed with dismay how many Americans are too ignorant to tell the difference between problems a President caused and problems he's had to respond to. It shouldn't be hard – the inflation that beset the U.S. happened worldwide, and the U.S. has recovered better than most. Donald Trump was handed a stellar economy and mismanaged it, hiding the damage in the form of a massive bloating of our national debt – even before COVID. Joe Biden was handed a terrible economy that had a built in time bomb in the form of COVID savings that were about to be unleashed in a worldwide inflation-inducing spending spree, and he's guided it back to health. The same thing goes for all of the world's foreign crises. Trump didn't prevent these things from happening when he was president; in fact he enabled them by showing the world's fascist authoritarians how wonderful the world could be with a weakened America and a feckless, easily manipulated President. Now they're all itching to have him back in office.
The immigration problem is a result of our asylum laws – the same laws Trump struggled with when he asked Congress to change them, before COVID bailed him out by allowing him to invoke emergency powers. Now he lies to you and tells you there's no need for new laws; meanwhile, he commanded his spineless minions in Congress to kill the Republican wet-dream immigration bill, because he didn't want Biden to get the tools he needed to fix the problem while Trump was running on it. Plus, Trump didn't have to deal with loathsome, partisan governors like Greg Abbot busing immigrants to other cities just to help create a narrative to hurt him politically (at least, when he's not drowning them with chicken wire in the Rio Grande).
Again, I could go on forever here. Suffice it to say that I don't support Trump because he's a corrupt crook who tried to overturn our constitutional order, stole government secret documents and lied about it while covertly trying to hide them, and is now running for President to evade jail, regularly rambling on about how he's going to pardon the J6 criminals, weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies, and hobble the Civil Service so the government can be run by the corrupt political spoils system again.
So while I'm sorry to sound rude, kindly spare me this "orange man bad" bullshit. Trump *is* bad, and I can literally give you a hundred reasons why without referencing his mean tweets or his casual "X-ism" (or his laughable spray-tan for that matter). He cares only for himself, has no regard for national unity or security, ethical norms, or the rule of law, and has demonstrated it repeatedly. The people who support him with clear eyes are cynical, irresponsible nihilists who believe the whole system needs to be "blown up", even though they have no idea what that would mean. The rest, I can only hope, are too doped out on right wing propaganda to actually know any better.
Obviously I disagree with all that and think voting for Trump is the right call, but I will leave that debate aside. I want to focus on this idea of "Trump causes the woke left, and we have to get rid of Trump to get rid of the woke."
Let's say you did think Trump was the best person to vote for, but your one hang up is that "he provokes the woke left, so we have to get rid of him."
I find that notion misguided and cowardly. There is a certain kind of "center leftist" that is too afraid to stand up to the woke. I mean really stand up, not complain on substack. If the risk is being associate with Trump or caving to woke, they will cave. This kind of leftist hopes that by not offering significant resistance to woke, maybe people will get bored and move on, and then the tough job of risking ones reputation and comfort in an internal faction squabble will recede on its own.
I don't buy it. Partly on the aesthetic grounds of it being a disgusting way of living. But also it's not going to get rid of the woke. The left is institutionalizing woke. It's at base in the Biden administration. It's not going away, and Biden being elected would be a referendum in favor of woke. Woke will end when people on the left that oppose it say "you will stop this or we will bail on the left." Trump I see as an excuse for such center left people to avoid coming to the point on that, and its a bad excuse.
Ok, firstly, let me address your claims about blacks and IQ, because I realize where your information is coming from, and it isn't any more definitive now than it was then. In fact, you're even overstating what Charles Murray said, which itself enjoys no consensus among social scientists.
But even Murray never went so far as to say "it's genetic". He claims it is *partially* genetic, and provides little empirical basis for this claim; it's an assumption he draws from the heritability of IQ (which is not the same thing as being genetic). In doing so he makes the absurd claim that there is little which can be done to modify IQ through environmental factors, despite the existence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
According to the most current information we have, which admittedly could be updated, the average IQ of blacks is around 90, not 85. And that gap has been shrinking. In fact, researcher James Flynn showed that between 1948 and 2002, if grading according to a common scale (IQ scores for a given test and age range are relative, and normalized so that 100 is the average and 15 is a standard deviation), the average IQ has risen 18 points. In other words, the average black today has an IQ 8 points higher than an average American in 1948. Furthermore, children being adopted out of poor families into better off ones is associated with a 12-18 point gain in IQ, and heritability of traits is significantly lessened for children from poorer families.
In other words, the evidence is overwhelming that differences in IQ are largely if not entirely due to social factors, and there is no question that overall IQ has improved and the black white gap has narrowed as economic conditions have improved for blacks. We know that children raised in poverty, especially in single parent households, on average do worse on virtually every adult measure of success, from IQ to income to wealth to chances of committing violent crimes to chances of being victimized by violent crimes. It all begins with economic disadvantage at birth, and it's what's called the generational cycle of poverty. Poor whites experience it too, and many of them are stuck in it just like blacks.
This is what people on the right have failed to accept. Equality of IQ and all of those other things flows from equality of economic opportunity. When blacks were given better opportunities for jobs and schooling through affirmative action and other such efforts, it may have lowered standards, but it gave their children better starting points and has helped partly lift blacks from their economic plight. That doesn't mean there aren't better options, that at some point the lowered standards don't do more to hurt than help, and that people on the woke left aren't deluded about what the problems are – in fact, many of them seem utterly oblivious to the economic roots of racial disparity, insistent on claiming some sort of ambient quality that they can somehow attach the word racism to. They don't want to deal with a reality that requires prosaic solutions – they want something that they can get angry about and demonize their opponents over.
I have more, but I'll respond to the rest in another reply.
Debating Race and IQ is like debating the age of the earth with a young earth creationist. You know that the belief is driven by social/emotional/psychological reasons and there isn't any piece of evidence that can address those factors.
So I give you two very brief thoughts.
1) Everyone knows about the Flynn Effect. Five seconds of common sense thought would lead you to ask the question "were my grandparents clinically retarded." The answer is no, which on its own is enough to divorce the Flynn Effect from "intelligence". If you wanted to do more digging you could find Flynn himself talking about it, and how IQ tests have many subtests and how some have increased over time and some are stagnant, and how the stagnant ones are more akin to raw intelligence (arithmetic) then the ones that have increased (which seem to be the result of a people learning to give test takers the sorts of answers they want to hear without any change in intelligence). You can do your own research if you wish.
2) The income objection could be answered in about five seconds on google.
Whites from families in crippling poverty get the same SAT scores as blacks from families making more than $200,000 a year. The B/W gap persists at a roughly equal level at every income cohort. If you slide in Hispanics and Asians its the story the bell curve would tell too.
Or take a more extreme example. Most Asians grew up in extreme poverty until very recently (and in some cases still do). Not "America" style poverty, like real I don't have enough rice to eat poverty. They also grew up in war torn countries and communism. And yet they score better on IQ tests than both whites and blacks living in comfortable American conditions. Poverty didn't hold those people back.
As Ronald Reagan once famously quipped, "There you go again".
Liberals, "fired the first shot", eh? Before that, the left and right existed in wonderful equilibrium with one another, I guess, balancing the scales and effectively policing the extremes of both sides. And then those darned uppity liberals had to go upsetting the apple cart by undoing some perfectly reasonable right-wing strictures.
I'm curious, which of the Warren Court's uncontroversially just decisions sticks in your craw? Ending legal segregation? Upholding miranda rights? Striking down prohibitions on interracial marriage? The one that actually *improves* "democratic decision making" by requiring roughly equal sizes for Federal Congressional Districts?
You do understand, don't you, that the whole concept of "rights" involves having them *not* subject to "democratic decision making", yes? I mean, sure, there's something to be said for letting things play out and resolve themselves at the local cultural level, so as not to invite backlash and all that. But then again, what need would we have for the concept of "rights" if we only applied it to things which were under no threat from democratic majorities?
I don't know how it is you don't see the Warren Court's decisions as positive responses to what had been extremist right-wing ideas, rather than the opening salvo of some authoritarian leftist takeover of society. At first it seemed to me like you were somehow stuck in a blinkered, presentist view of history, where everything began at the point you decided that it all went wrong.
Is it possible though, that you can't see the mutuality of things because you yourself are a right-wing extremist?
Found the article very interesting and will have to think more on parallels and dissimilarities with the left woke and elements on the right. I want to take issue with the idea common today that the woke left naturally follows from Christian ideals - I think it only follows from a certain bastardisation of Christian ideals.
Whilst Christianity does say blessed are the meek, it also says blessed are the merciful. It is difficult to be merciful without having some power or ability to do so! But the woke left chooses only to idolise the downtrodden. In Christianity, one recovers by moral self improvement - you are not then justified to do anything.
So whilst the Nietzsche take that Christianity undermines itself in respect for the meek is partly relevant, it only holds water in a lefty-selective reading on Christian teaching.
Great post Regan. I wanted to highlight a couple passages that I thought deserved further analysis:
----------
"Without the supernatural elements of a creator and an afterlife, where all earthly wrongs will be righted, the Christian exhortation to turn the other cheek becomes seen as an instruction to enable evil: silence is compliance (if not violence!). While the supernatural elements and demand for pacifism are dropped, the moral superiority of the oppressed is maintained.
These values, within the secular context, imply a need to protect the weak and oppressed NOW in the earthly realm, using whatever means necessary (including violence, which is how some convince themselves that 10/7 can be categorized as an “act of resistance” rather than an act of terror). Rather than believing the "meek shall inherit the earth" and reap that inheritance in heaven, they must inherit the earth in the here and now. With no promise of another world, we must create our own utopia."
----------
What's interesting is just how little purchase the Christian concepts of grace and mercy have often had with the people who ought to embrace them most, based on the lip-service they give to their alleged Christian faith. And perhaps your analysis here indicates why, because if this is only based on a belief that wrongs will be righted in heaven, that the offender's ultimate comeuppance is assured without them having to lift a finger, then maybe this is indicative of an underlying authoritarian mindset. And when one's engagement with their faith is on the shallow side (which, lets be honest, is usually the case), the distinction between allowing for God's judgement in the next life vs being a vessel of it in this one is easily elided.
You're right that somebody who would "turn the other cheek" only to walk away grumbling about how sorry the slap-happy sinner is going to be when they stand before the pearly gates on judgement day would, deprived of a belief in an afterlife, obviously be inclined to dole out rewards and punishments in the here and now. Which probably does explain a good bit of left-wing authoritarianism – despite the fact that, ironically, much of the left's anti-Israel fervor, even if rooted in sympathy for oppressed people, is bolstered by pro-Hamas propaganda rooted in a fanatical disregard for this life by fundamentalist Islamists.
Which is why I think it's important to emphasize the secular aspects of these Christian values. I grew up in a culture of American Catholicism. Some time in my teenage years, I realized that I no longer believed in God. And one of the most common, and disappointing, questions I got was about what my incentive was to not descend into utter immorality. The implication being, of course, that without the threat of divine punishment, there could be no concept of right and wrong.
The irony, of course, was that the very fact that people would ask me that question with such obvious concern demonstrates that they themselves clearly see value in moral principles independent of the alleged relief they supply from supernatural consequences – to them, said consequences are clearly a necessary means to a desired end, not the underlying justification for such an end. So it should be unsurprising to them that I desire such an end as much as they do, even though I must seek other means to ensure it.
And those other means are to leverage the human capacity for empathy and the expectations of reciprocity that really underly our moral values. Turning the other cheek not because one is looking to the hereafter, but due to a belief that this actually helps sow the seeds of a better life here on earth, for us and everyone else, and that perhaps the offending person is a human whose heart is in need of healing rather than one in need of a good beating, might seem naive at times. But more often than we appreciate, it produces better outcomes for everyone than the retributive and remunerative model of morality – one look at America's incarceration and recidivism rates ought to convince someone of that.
Progressives have lost the plot because they've forgotten that human morality fundamentally derives not from religion, or a belief in some sort of ethereal karmic force, or even the natural desire to "get even", but from an innate understanding of "the golden rule" – treat others as you *would have them* treat you (unfortunately many people sometimes forget the *would have them* part). Most of us understand religion as an invention of humanity designed to *enforce* order, but many of us obviously fail to grasp the fallacy behind how it has become an imperfect intellectual basis for the idea of right and wrong - one which ultimately defeats its purpose as an abstract value by reducing it to another purely selfish, pragmatic concern.
Good stuff. Postmodern framing provides ideological backing for old fashion tribalism. People are fundamentally tribal, not ideological, therefore the left and then the right the play into comfortable human social behaviors. Until recently unions bridges a social and ideological position, but with increasing abundance the tribes aligning less on economics and pragmatic alliances.
Liberal ideology (classical and social) are naturally fragile and must align with a cultural tribe to be politically viable.
In defense of "turning the other cheek": if you step into the unjust punishment, you are not subservient to the power. If you respond in fear you can be controlled by that fear. If you respond with residence, are are overwhelmed and lose agency. The only way to retain agency is to step into the suffering: "you can hurt me, but I you do not control me". This makes sense if you see yourself as serving a higher power (ideal or supernatural), but doesn't require ultimate justice (afterlife). If you think serving the higher good even to death is better than serving an unjust power, the choice is rational even in the extreme (I'd also argue it's socially effective).
“…at some point it ends up being the fault of the Jews.”
Given that anti-Semitism has resulted in pogroms and genocide, is it a reasonable assumption that the Jews have joined together in various organizations to take proactive measures to ensure their safety in hostile gentile countries? If so, what are some examples?
Yeah I agree. Postmodern right is a less confusing term.
A large part of the right has definitely gone woke and not since now, but for a while. Just think about Libertarians reduced to parroting all new left talking points about foreign policy, or when they labeled basically every great European thinker as a leftist among fascist dictators (funny they inserted Nietzsche and not Marx among the leftist, it speaks it loud) https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/o7gqg5/know_thine_enemy_a_history_of_the_left_volume_1/
Even when they indulge in their deranged antisemitism you cannot doing without noticing most of their anti-jews talking points are literally copy-paste woke talking points (MUH... da jooz invented slave trade, MUH... da jooz were behind the CSA) and so on...
The central claim in this piece is correct, but I wouldn't call the right "woke."
Many of the issues you highlight: the focus on identity, selectively dismissing testimony, cancel culture, narratives about abstract forces like globalism and systemic racism, and utopian solutions—are widespread and have been the norm throughout history.
Wokeness is a distinct phenomenon – whether you take the cultural socialism line ala Kaufmann or an ground it as an extension of Liberalism.
Wokeism is the grand grand son of Christianity.
Yes, that influence should not be overlooked.
Nice distinction. The evidence insensitive
> which explained how certain choices could be seen as sensible without the need to invoke any conspiracy
But that’s exactly how conspiracies operate. That’s almost the very definition of a conspiracy: when you hide your schemes by alternative explanations that seem sensible on their own. Just like them saying “the evidence is corrupt” doesn’t lend itself to any conclusions, you saying “but the evidence is all we have” doesn’t magically make the evidence legitimate. The fact is we’re all adrift in a sea of uncertainty, and the reason the problem is so pernicious is because our tools for fighting uncertainty have been corrupted. If you know your map has already lead you astray, you can’t trust it to lead you to the map store for an accurate map.
I’m afraid I don’t have any better answers. My advice comes down to “trust your gut, while continuing to be your gut’s harshest critic”.
It's not about all-or-nothing certain or uncertain, but "more or less likely." Yes, everything up the chain could be in doubt (maybe you live in a simulation and nothing you empirically observe is true), but it is not the most likely explanation. I call this the possibilist vs probabilist trap
That’s kind of what I was getting at by “being your gut’s harshest critic.” In the end we’re all going to believe what we think is the most likely explanation - that’s almost tautologically true. The best we can do is attack our intuition from every angle we can think of while being aware of our inherent biases.
I tend to think the phrase “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” is a fraud pushed by smart malicious people.
"All cats are female"? Really? Kinda sexist, doncha think ... 😉🙂
Though, en passant, thanks for the recommendation of "Bespoke Coordinates" -- subscribed. 🙂
But a good question entirely consistent with, as you said, your earlier post on horseshoes. Sadly the nature of the beast, pots and kettles -- both black as the ace of spades -- as far as the eye can see. Too many on virtually all sides have far too many unexamined assumptions that they take as articles of faith -- and damned be those who challenge them in any way.
Reminds me of the late and entirely unlamented Atheism Plus -- probably before your time ... 😉🙂 -- but they exhibited pretty much the same failings as the religious they were railing against.:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130525005812/http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2105
https://web.archive.org/web/20160507082148/http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2632
Both sides reminding me of Pascal's aphorism:
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/blaise_pascal_133606
You may have run across a tweet by a UK News commentator, Andrew Doyle, who had something of a neat description of "The Woke", although, when push comes to shove, he's more or less guilty of the same failings:
AD: "The JK Rowling controversy has exposed one of the most chilling aspects of the woke ideology: the sheer certainty of its adherents.
It never occurs to these people that they might be wrong. That’s why they refuse to debate.
This is zealotry; it needs to be resisted."
https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com/status/1208423606977515520
More particularly, when I pointed out that he's just as guilty of that for peddling the quite unscientific idea that "sex is immutable 🙄" (it ain't), I got blocked and defenestrated for my troubles:
Steersman: "Seems to be an article of faith with you that the defining and essential traits for the sexes are just genitalia. Which is most certainly not what the standard biological definitions actually say.
But you remind me of an old tweet of yours that I've often quoted or touted, though I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of having done so"
https://andrewdoyle.substack.com/p/what-has-gender-identity-got-to-do/comment/55371934
Canons (sic) to the left of us, canons (sic) to the right ... 🙂
Saying that liberals have done too little to stop the "woke" leads one to believe that you would have similar views about the relationship between traditional Anerican conservatives extreme right. Yet repeatedly you make reference to the idea that right-wing extremism is necessary to counter the excesses of the left.
Which is funny, because that is *exactly* what many people on the illiberal left say about the right. People like me have been trying to tell them not to counter extremism with more extremism, but the human tendency to "fight fire with fire" is sadly too ingrained in us for this message to gain the necessary traction. As you yourself have unwittingly demonstrated by arguing that we need right-wing postmodernism, and that these woke liberals need to have the right ideas "literally beaten into them", if nesessary. Because that usually works.
In actuality, of course, this will lead left-wing illiberals to believe even more fervently that their brand of illiberalism is necessary to counter right wing illiberalism. Do you really not see how the two things feed upon and enhance each other? What reason is there to believe that one will effectively eliminate the other, and then once this comes to pass, will gracefully recede into the background, abdicating the power it acquired through force, fueled by frothing hatred and hysteria?
You may have noticed that the time when wokeism was at is apex in terms of purchase with mainstream America was during Donald Trump's presidency. It has begun to recede now, but get ready for a new wave of it if Trump gets re-elected. This outward spiraling cycle of extremism has no end, and will proceed unabated while talking heads like us sit here and argue over "who started it". Every person's perspective is limited to near history; conservatives today act as if there was no such thing as right-wing illiberalism before "wokeism" arose.
And yet we all know that isn't true. Something most conservatives acknowledge, while insistently maintaining that once the overt racism of legal segregation was eliminated, black Americans should have just been able to neatly slide into the American middle class, despite lingering prejudices and the effects of white flight to the suburbs (and I am an enthusiastic fan of suburban life) taking their money and political influence with them, leaving blacks to fend for themselves while our cities fell into decay and disrepair. And ultimately, rendering many blacks vulnerable to being preyed upon by the false promises of white Communists, having been abandoned by the so called "classical liberals".
So we can sit here and continue this Hatfields vs. McCoys (or extremist Jews vs extremist Muslims if you like) blood feud, each trying to one-up the other, or we can each choose to disarm the other side's extremists by reponding with moderation and reasonable, sensible solutions. This is what the Democrats did by nominating Biden over Bernie Sanders, and yet the right won't let go of Donald Trump, insisting on obsessing over every bone he throws to the left while he consistently champions legislation and policies that benefit the white working class and workers unions, in states that have a 0% chance of voting for him, in counter to the fraudulent, cultural "populism" of Donald Trump. Not to mention supporting the police and Israel, defying the activist left while avoiding the kneejerk authoritarian overreaction commonly exhibited on the right.
And in the background is Donald Trump, verbally vomiting an unsettling stream of casual, textbook fascism with distrurbing regularity while most of America remains blissfully ignorant (we hope) and the polls are tied.
Your move.
Donald Trump is a reaction to woke-ism, not a cause.
Trump Derangement Syndrome caused liberals to side with the woke, which is the fault of liberals, not Trump. They could have gotten over their immaturity and aesthetic hang ups to make substantive choices, but they didn’t. They would rather plung society into darkness then be associated with orange man. You are fully commited to voting for woke in the next election and of supporting woke for four more years if he wins just to spite Trump, pathetic.
I don’t see woke “receding”. Is Biden less woke then Obama? Have you gotten a look at Joe Biden? Have you seen what his White House has done? Do you remember everything that has happened since 2020?
What happened with blacks is simple. They have average IQs of 85 and it’s genetic. They were never going to achieve equality of outcome, but equality of outcome is suppose to flow from equality under the law if IQs were the same.
Nobody wants to accept this, so ever more elaborate solutions and blame games are concocted to solve the unsolvable.
Somehow when blacks engage in mass crime and elect incompetent black leaders to loot cities it’s white people’s fault for leaving. Or when they move back to the city it’s their fault for gentrifying it. They got you whether your coming or going.
You want a right wing answer to what to do, go pick up the bell curve. Or just see how the sun belt and the suburbs are better governed.
Now, as to Trump, apparently you, like Mr Arcto, failed to grasp my point about how absurd it is to talk about "who started it". Trump and the MAGA right are a mutually reinforcing influence on the woke left. I could sit here and write a long essay on all of the problems on the right of which Trump is the culmination, but suffice it to say that the right-wing talking point of Trump being a response to "wokeness" is a lazy excuse by the right to avoid a good hard look in the mirror. Instead of confronting their own issues and how they contributed to the problems with their fringe, like I and many others are doing on the left, and more respectable conservatives are doing on the right, most Republicans would rather blame Trump on the liberals so that they can go back to nasty, anything-better-than-a-Democrat politics as usual, because they just can't give it up.
Now, to your accusation of me "voting woke to spite Trump", you couldn't be more off the mark. Firstly, I am not "voting woke", as the majority of the Democratic coalition is not beholden to the "woke", despite what Republican propagandists want you to believe. In contrast, the Republican Party is practically a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc. His flunkies now control the RNC, and his lies and conspiracy theories are now largely accepted as fact among Republicans.
Secondly, to say that I am trying to "spite" Trump implies that I am going against some overwhelming interest of mine in voting against him – like what these elite college dimwits and misguided Palestinian Americans are threatening to do to Biden, in the process electing Trump. Hardly. I vote against Trump because he was a terrible President in virtually every way imaginable, and the fact that he sticks his thumb in the eye of some annoying, obnoxious leftists is about the most foolish reason I can think of to vote for someone for President when every other aspect of his character, his intellect, and his general competence makes him wholly unfit for office.
You ask me if I've been paying attention to the White House – yeah I have. Were you during the Trump years? If you had you'd know about the utter chaos that was the Trump Presidency. How he was constantly having to be told by his staff that he couldn't do this or that because it was illegal. How they were always working around his capricious and impulsive decision making, spending much of their time doing cleanup and making excuses for his ill-tempered outbursts, ignorant blunders, and casual disregard for the law or norms of ethical behavior. He was easily manipulated by foreign autocrats, buying into internet conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda – sometimes straight from the horse's mouth – rather than listening to his own intelligence services. Nothing that came out of his mouth could be trusted, so legit news had to rely mostly on confidential sources on the inside and other hard-nosed investigative reporting. His handling of COVID was not only incompetent but morally depraved. And then came the aftermath of the 2020 election. I could go on for much, much longer here.
Have I paid attention to what's been going on since 2020? You bet I have. I see a world beset by challenges Trump would have drowned in, and which Biden has mostly handled quite competently. I've also observed with dismay how many Americans are too ignorant to tell the difference between problems a President caused and problems he's had to respond to. It shouldn't be hard – the inflation that beset the U.S. happened worldwide, and the U.S. has recovered better than most. Donald Trump was handed a stellar economy and mismanaged it, hiding the damage in the form of a massive bloating of our national debt – even before COVID. Joe Biden was handed a terrible economy that had a built in time bomb in the form of COVID savings that were about to be unleashed in a worldwide inflation-inducing spending spree, and he's guided it back to health. The same thing goes for all of the world's foreign crises. Trump didn't prevent these things from happening when he was president; in fact he enabled them by showing the world's fascist authoritarians how wonderful the world could be with a weakened America and a feckless, easily manipulated President. Now they're all itching to have him back in office.
The immigration problem is a result of our asylum laws – the same laws Trump struggled with when he asked Congress to change them, before COVID bailed him out by allowing him to invoke emergency powers. Now he lies to you and tells you there's no need for new laws; meanwhile, he commanded his spineless minions in Congress to kill the Republican wet-dream immigration bill, because he didn't want Biden to get the tools he needed to fix the problem while Trump was running on it. Plus, Trump didn't have to deal with loathsome, partisan governors like Greg Abbot busing immigrants to other cities just to help create a narrative to hurt him politically (at least, when he's not drowning them with chicken wire in the Rio Grande).
Again, I could go on forever here. Suffice it to say that I don't support Trump because he's a corrupt crook who tried to overturn our constitutional order, stole government secret documents and lied about it while covertly trying to hide them, and is now running for President to evade jail, regularly rambling on about how he's going to pardon the J6 criminals, weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies, and hobble the Civil Service so the government can be run by the corrupt political spoils system again.
So while I'm sorry to sound rude, kindly spare me this "orange man bad" bullshit. Trump *is* bad, and I can literally give you a hundred reasons why without referencing his mean tweets or his casual "X-ism" (or his laughable spray-tan for that matter). He cares only for himself, has no regard for national unity or security, ethical norms, or the rule of law, and has demonstrated it repeatedly. The people who support him with clear eyes are cynical, irresponsible nihilists who believe the whole system needs to be "blown up", even though they have no idea what that would mean. The rest, I can only hope, are too doped out on right wing propaganda to actually know any better.
Obviously I disagree with all that and think voting for Trump is the right call, but I will leave that debate aside. I want to focus on this idea of "Trump causes the woke left, and we have to get rid of Trump to get rid of the woke."
Let's say you did think Trump was the best person to vote for, but your one hang up is that "he provokes the woke left, so we have to get rid of him."
I find that notion misguided and cowardly. There is a certain kind of "center leftist" that is too afraid to stand up to the woke. I mean really stand up, not complain on substack. If the risk is being associate with Trump or caving to woke, they will cave. This kind of leftist hopes that by not offering significant resistance to woke, maybe people will get bored and move on, and then the tough job of risking ones reputation and comfort in an internal faction squabble will recede on its own.
I don't buy it. Partly on the aesthetic grounds of it being a disgusting way of living. But also it's not going to get rid of the woke. The left is institutionalizing woke. It's at base in the Biden administration. It's not going away, and Biden being elected would be a referendum in favor of woke. Woke will end when people on the left that oppose it say "you will stop this or we will bail on the left." Trump I see as an excuse for such center left people to avoid coming to the point on that, and its a bad excuse.
Ok, firstly, let me address your claims about blacks and IQ, because I realize where your information is coming from, and it isn't any more definitive now than it was then. In fact, you're even overstating what Charles Murray said, which itself enjoys no consensus among social scientists.
But even Murray never went so far as to say "it's genetic". He claims it is *partially* genetic, and provides little empirical basis for this claim; it's an assumption he draws from the heritability of IQ (which is not the same thing as being genetic). In doing so he makes the absurd claim that there is little which can be done to modify IQ through environmental factors, despite the existence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
According to the most current information we have, which admittedly could be updated, the average IQ of blacks is around 90, not 85. And that gap has been shrinking. In fact, researcher James Flynn showed that between 1948 and 2002, if grading according to a common scale (IQ scores for a given test and age range are relative, and normalized so that 100 is the average and 15 is a standard deviation), the average IQ has risen 18 points. In other words, the average black today has an IQ 8 points higher than an average American in 1948. Furthermore, children being adopted out of poor families into better off ones is associated with a 12-18 point gain in IQ, and heritability of traits is significantly lessened for children from poorer families.
In other words, the evidence is overwhelming that differences in IQ are largely if not entirely due to social factors, and there is no question that overall IQ has improved and the black white gap has narrowed as economic conditions have improved for blacks. We know that children raised in poverty, especially in single parent households, on average do worse on virtually every adult measure of success, from IQ to income to wealth to chances of committing violent crimes to chances of being victimized by violent crimes. It all begins with economic disadvantage at birth, and it's what's called the generational cycle of poverty. Poor whites experience it too, and many of them are stuck in it just like blacks.
This is what people on the right have failed to accept. Equality of IQ and all of those other things flows from equality of economic opportunity. When blacks were given better opportunities for jobs and schooling through affirmative action and other such efforts, it may have lowered standards, but it gave their children better starting points and has helped partly lift blacks from their economic plight. That doesn't mean there aren't better options, that at some point the lowered standards don't do more to hurt than help, and that people on the woke left aren't deluded about what the problems are – in fact, many of them seem utterly oblivious to the economic roots of racial disparity, insistent on claiming some sort of ambient quality that they can somehow attach the word racism to. They don't want to deal with a reality that requires prosaic solutions – they want something that they can get angry about and demonize their opponents over.
I have more, but I'll respond to the rest in another reply.
Debating Race and IQ is like debating the age of the earth with a young earth creationist. You know that the belief is driven by social/emotional/psychological reasons and there isn't any piece of evidence that can address those factors.
So I give you two very brief thoughts.
1) Everyone knows about the Flynn Effect. Five seconds of common sense thought would lead you to ask the question "were my grandparents clinically retarded." The answer is no, which on its own is enough to divorce the Flynn Effect from "intelligence". If you wanted to do more digging you could find Flynn himself talking about it, and how IQ tests have many subtests and how some have increased over time and some are stagnant, and how the stagnant ones are more akin to raw intelligence (arithmetic) then the ones that have increased (which seem to be the result of a people learning to give test takers the sorts of answers they want to hear without any change in intelligence). You can do your own research if you wish.
2) The income objection could be answered in about five seconds on google.
Whites from families in crippling poverty get the same SAT scores as blacks from families making more than $200,000 a year. The B/W gap persists at a roughly equal level at every income cohort. If you slide in Hispanics and Asians its the story the bell curve would tell too.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0a13ef7807eaa3ff3f45ba41c575ee0a-pjlq
Or take a more extreme example. Most Asians grew up in extreme poverty until very recently (and in some cases still do). Not "America" style poverty, like real I don't have enough rice to eat poverty. They also grew up in war torn countries and communism. And yet they score better on IQ tests than both whites and blacks living in comfortable American conditions. Poverty didn't hold those people back.
As Ronald Reagan once famously quipped, "There you go again".
Liberals, "fired the first shot", eh? Before that, the left and right existed in wonderful equilibrium with one another, I guess, balancing the scales and effectively policing the extremes of both sides. And then those darned uppity liberals had to go upsetting the apple cart by undoing some perfectly reasonable right-wing strictures.
I'm curious, which of the Warren Court's uncontroversially just decisions sticks in your craw? Ending legal segregation? Upholding miranda rights? Striking down prohibitions on interracial marriage? The one that actually *improves* "democratic decision making" by requiring roughly equal sizes for Federal Congressional Districts?
You do understand, don't you, that the whole concept of "rights" involves having them *not* subject to "democratic decision making", yes? I mean, sure, there's something to be said for letting things play out and resolve themselves at the local cultural level, so as not to invite backlash and all that. But then again, what need would we have for the concept of "rights" if we only applied it to things which were under no threat from democratic majorities?
I don't know how it is you don't see the Warren Court's decisions as positive responses to what had been extremist right-wing ideas, rather than the opening salvo of some authoritarian leftist takeover of society. At first it seemed to me like you were somehow stuck in a blinkered, presentist view of history, where everything began at the point you decided that it all went wrong.
Is it possible though, that you can't see the mutuality of things because you yourself are a right-wing extremist?