Boethius

Learn to doubt your doubts. And as far as atheism, theism, rationalism, etc., maybe it's not so much about being on the right side or wrong side of the truth so much as it's about knowing truth in different ways.

@Epikur That's a very fair point. My own spiritual upbringing was quite fragmented and my mother was basically a new age hippie. When I was 11 we left the Presbyterian church of my childhood and went with neighbors to what I remember as a more conservative evangelical church for over a year. My mom then revealed to our neighbor that my mom was thinking of dating women (after having just divorced my dad, she thought she would given women a try instead of men) and my mom was told that she needed to receive an exorcism to remove the demon of homosexuality as a condition of continuing attendance. Thankfully, we never went back. Though my mom did after that invite the LDS elders to her house to tell her about Mormonism! Then we ended up bouncing around between Spiritualism and Unitarian Universalism until I left for college. Had my only experience of religion been the conservative evangelical church, I would probably have an extremely different view of religion today.

I feel a lot of atheists are like this guy https://www.youtube.com/c/TheraminTrees/videos who has been making anti-religious youtube videos for the past 12 years. So it's like you didn't appreciate your (fundamentalist) religious upbringing, so much so that you declared yourself an atheist and have made it your mission to "debunk" religion altogether, and yet don't you realize how absurd and lacking in self-awareness it is to keep hammering on about it year after year after year? I'm just waiting for the day when TheraminTrees declares that he has started attending an Eastern Orthodox church. Because that does seem to be the path for a lot of the atheists who just can't let religion go.

I ditched a lot of the "conservative" views on things back as a teenager in order to become "counter cultural". I'm thinking about things like (a) don't do drugs (b) don't be promiscuous (c) respect authority I would say it probably is kind of naive and even immature to take those proscriptions at face value, and yet there are natural limitations to going in the opposite direction. What is a fun weekend drinking habit in your 20s, for example, can start to become a problem in your 30s (especially when it becomes your primary way of relieving the inevitable stresses of life). So my interest in Blue has been trying to find the wisdom in their more limited worldview, or at least in their defense of their worldview, while still acknowledging that I'm never putting the genie back in the bottle of thinking something like "my mom told me to not do drugs, so that's how I know that I should never do drugs"!

The Critical Race Theory perspective is that racism = prejudice + power Since white people are seen as having all of the power when it comes to setting racial discourse and institutionalizing racialized policies, it follows that it is impossible to be racist against white people. Whether or not the average person on the street would agree with this conclusion, this is a very standard belief for someone who subscribes to the CRT worldview.

How do we manage to do this without reinforcing racist classification systems in the very first place? I'm thinking here specifically of all of the multiracial folk, whose existence demonstrates that race exists along a continuous spectrum from "total descendant" of European ancestors on the one hand and "total descendant" of African ancestors on the other hand. Do we simply replace notions of race with notions of ancestry as the problem of racism (hopefully) recedes?

Common sense is problematic. By which I mean that the average person on the street has all sorts of implicit biases that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, jingoistic, etc. If the Left's goal were merely to win a bunch of elections then it would probably be more successful in that by coaxing the ego of the average person on the street and by refraining from challenging that person's toxic attitudes. But that's not the only goal of the Left; the Left also wants to shift the culture away from such toxic attitudes in the very first place. So there's a balancing act here between (a) gaining enough political power to meaningfully dismantle the systems of oppression that guide American society while (b) maintaining the moral clarity and witness necessary to challenge such cultural and political systems in the first place. The Left is still in the process of striking the correct balance in pursuing these two goals, but to pretend that the only goal here is (a) is to misunderstand the nature of the contemporary Left.

Christopher Rufo's answer to this question is that West Coast cities are applying a very ideologically Green approach to solving the problem of homelessness (throw money at the problem) that does not address the fundamental root causes of homelessness (mental illness and drug addiction). The refusal to address root problems is borne out of a (misguided) desire to avoid "blaming" the homeless for their problems. And the result of all this is an ever increasing homeless population. I'm not familiar enough with these issues to know how definitive is Rufo's take on the problem, but I do know that a truly compassionate approach to solving homelessness should involve helping people solve their personal problems that led to homelessness in the first place (without blaming/shaming people for these problems, of course).

I can't help but detect a whiff of trans-erasure in this comment of yours. Do you not think there are trans people who strongly identify with the gender role of the gender with which they identify?

We will probably never agee on how we should be discussing gender in the very first place. That is, discussion of normative gender roles is one way of talking about gender, as is discussion of gender as a social construct, and these two ways of talking about gender are really coming at the subject from two different directions. The inability to agree on how to properly discuss gender is probably why these conversations tend to be so polarizing. On the other hand, I think we're coming to a place where we can agree that every person has the (pretty much absolute) right to express and experience their own personal relationship to gender in whatever way feels most comfortable. So how we do or do not discuss gender is really secondary to people simply living their lives as best as they know how. Quite honestly, I think we might all be happiest if we ultimately allow gender to be a bit of mystery

@Carl-Richard I agree, of course, that empathy divides Obama and Trump. I guess what I'm trying to express is that there is (as I understand it) a difference between (a) the personality trait known as narcissism and (b) narcissistic personality disorder I doubt most presidents aside from Trump could be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, even as many of them may well score highly on narcissism as a trait. Personally I don't view it as a problem that the average politician scores highly on the narcissism spectrum relative to the general population since they are representing a country that can be said to be rather "narcissistic" in nature. Or at least, it's not a problem so long as we continue to support the "myth" of American exceptionalism.

I feel one of the most under-examined questions in the world of Social Justice is why anyone would want to engage with the work of social justice in the very first place. I worry that people might even find this line of inquiry itself to be a bit of a provocation, which is not my intent. Instead I suspect that those of us who are interested in Social Justice have a variety of different reasons and motivations for engaging, and that it could be enlightening and useful to lay out some of those reasons and motivations. So why do you care about Social Justice?

There is a reason why psychologists (before the 45th president) were deeply wary of "diagnosing" politicians with various conditions like narcissism. For example, isn't the idea of American exceptionalism in itself rather narcissistic? And so does that mean that a politician who can speak to American exceptionalism in a particularly charismatic way is themself narcissistic? For me the takeaway is that I don't think we should be comparing politicians against members of the general populace but against other politicians. I would argue that Obama compares favorably to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (to say nothing of how he compares to the 45th).

Nationalists pretty much by definition want to maintain a uniform and traditional "sense" of the nation as a whole. So they are deeply sceptical of immigration and not all that interested in "participating within global networks". Overall, I just can't help but read your comment as a Green indictment of Blue, per se. And yes, in the US nationalism gets mixed up with white supremacy. Just for this reason alone, I am deeply wary of nationalism in the US. But I don't know if hostility to nationalism is "helpful" in the larger scheme of things. I mean, if people on the Left decide (as we basically have) that nationalism in the US is simply verboten, then are we not preparing the way for more unhealthy manifestations of the (apparently basic) human yearning for national solidarity? I am thinking, of course, of the 45th president when saying this.

@Preety_India Well, last year it seemed like most of the companies abandoned our 45th president and have taken up the cause of Social Justice in the time since. It's hard for me to know what to make of what some people refer to as "woke capitalism".

@Preety_India Are you at war with Stage Orange?

That's probably true. I guess a lot of people aren't really aware of what capitalism is or how it works, which might explain why people start saying things like "capitalism is evil" once they start to gain an awareness of the limitations of how it operates. On the other hand, I look at something like the "Thank You NHS" social phenomenon and I feel so much cringe. Like, I probably don't want to live in a society where we start applying personalities to our companies. I kind of prefer having companies be "known" entities, even if those entities are fundamentally "selfish" in nature. I find that when people ask me if I want to help out with something, my initial (defensive) reaction is to say "no". But that if I pause and take a moment to think about it -- or even better yet, just jump to saying "yes" -- then I usually feel better about it all afterwards. So to your point, I should probably keep up that practice. I expect that's what we will be doing as we move into the future. I have so little idea, however, of what it could look like that I don't know how I could help support this.

@Forestluv Do you see any sensible way for balancing the interests between competing groups, like Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter for example? I struggle in thinking that an individual like myself simply has to "choose" one group over the other as the object of my sympathy.

@aurum I've found it strange watching companies the past few years become socially conscious. I guess they've been doing it as a way of protecting their bottom line, since customers these days want to spend their money in ways that are socially and environmentally responsible. But I've found the commercials of companies saying that they "put people first" to be kind of bizarre and disingenous. Fundamentally, I believe companies exist to make money and are incapable of having a conscience. This is unlike humans, of course, who do have consciences and who do not exist for the sake of maximizing their own personal financial portfolios -- regardless of how much their behaviors say otherwise Do you have any thoughts on moving from an empathetic sense of care toward concrete action?

@commie Do you feel yourself accountable to some of the things that Social Justice demands of people, even if you don't particularly believe in it?

My most radical view is that I think we are all being held to account, even now, for our ability and willingness to live our lives out of an abundance of love. As Bertrand Russell once said, actions born out of a motive that is ultimately other than love are at best useless, and are more likely harmful at worst.

@Fredodoow I'm aware of the sort of "demonization" of straight white men that you are referring to. In certain social justice spaces I have personally heard the problems of the world laid upon straight white men. But I think what you're missing is your own personal ability to tune the toxic aspects of this out. Yes, you should try to be a non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic, all around good man (maybe even an ally, if you feel so called), but you also don't need to accept the status of society's punching bag. The key is that the way you avoid being someone's punching bag isn't by arguing out about reverse racism and misandry, but in more subtle ways of letting things slide off your shoulders. You can force people to own their projections when they are thrown on you, for example. Let's say a woman says in your vicinity that "men need to get in touch with their feelings". That's a cliche that's been floating around since the 70's, and maybe it's true, maybe it's not. You can always ask yourself "why does she care what men do?" The answer might be that she has dated men who expect her to play the role of therapist or who are dismissive of her own emotions. So in that case it's true that the men in her life have failed her, in a way, by not getting in touch with their own emotions. But if you are not dumping your emotions on her and you are able to have competent emotional conversations with her, then at that point it actually isn't her business, quite simply, how you decide to deal with your own emotions -- maybe you have a therapist, maybe you do kickboxing, maybe you practice Stoicism. My point is that these sorts of cliches that sound like men are being blamed for something usually have some kernel of truth in them and some natural limitations as well. For myself, I found that learning a bit of Stoicism (Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, for example), learning about psychological projection including Karpman's drama triangle, and practicing non-violent communication (as developed by Marshall Rosenberg) helps me avoid the predictable drama of these various conversations when they devolve into simple finger pointing. If you prefer finger pointing then you're gonna get called racist, sexist, homophobic, etc and most people aren't going to defend you. But if you just want to live your life responsibly and in a way that avoids unnecessary drama, then some of what I wrote may be useful to you as well. Good luck!

@Forestluv That's an interesting point about these platforms already participating in the "attention economy". My fear is if legitimate criticism gets de-platformed for reasons of naively short-sighted political gain. Which would be bad from a free speech perspective and also bad for the health of any political party in the long term. I suppose my concern about free speech can be addressed by still allowing critical material to be available but harder for an interested party to find. But the politics of all these restrictions are going to take a couple years at least to work out. I worry what becomes of the anger and resentment of Trump's supporters if they have absolutely NO outlet to express themselves. In particular, I would prefer if the Republicans don't put up a more polished version of Trump in 2024. So I remain sceptical about these restrictions.

Liberals are always ALWAYS the ones who come to suffer under free speech restrictions since they are the ones who make proposals that break conventional ways of understanding or participating in society. So while we probably do need some reasonable restrictions to prevent the spread of hate and disinformation, if left-leaning folks think they're gonna be able to use free speech restrictions for political gain, they will learn (at least eventually) how sorely mistaken they were in that.

Maybe you're right that I should be less sceptical of these conversations, given that they have the capacity to bring healing to ridiculously complicated and painful topics. I do think we're gonna at least stumble our way through quite a bit of our history & politics via these conversations.