NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
Past peak woke? Don't count on it
Stuck around St. Petersburg, when I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank, held a general's rank
When the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game
— The Rolling Stones: "Sympathy for the Devil"
This is an essay on the long-term state of the culture war, written as a post for TheMotte.
1. The culture war
In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:
- identity politics: a caste system based on historical class grievances
- censorship of opposing views
- lawlessness
- arbitrary, authoritarian governance
- radical progressivism: extreme disregard for traditional norms and values
America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.
Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.
2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism
It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. [Solzhenitsyn (1973): The Gulag Archipelago]
I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.
Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.
Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.
Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! -- Ronald Reagan: address at the Brandenburg Gate; June 12, 1987
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges; if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. -- Barack Obama: Campaign speech at Roanoke, VA, July 13, 2012.
Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety. And when you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way, and the best way, or the right way to achieve safety. This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities. For too long, the status quo thinking has been that you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong. -- Kamala Harris: radio interview, June 2020.
Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?
Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.
3. The constitution of the people
So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.
In every nation, at all times, the militant, the tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].
Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.
Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?
To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If men then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is on its way.
NelsonRushton
2mo ago
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process. Are Nina Ng and Dr. Mark Perlmutter die-hard anti-Israel extremists? Even if we ignore the bias that would lead one to conclude that every Arab and Muslim working as a doctor is a sympathizer to Hamas (of course, we would never say this about Jews who have associations to Israel), this conclusion doesn’t make sense in light of the testimony from the
I don't know how to explain the Times opinion, so that remains a mystery. But it is way more plausible that the Times got it wrong somehow, than that a military rifle round hit a person in the head and failed to exit. I once shot a 180-pound boar in the throat with a round similar to the one the Israeli military uses, and I found the bullet in the pig's rump; it went all the way through a wild boar from stem to stern.
NelsonRushton
2mo ago
I did a hasty google search and I was just mistaken. It appears that the IDF uses a 5.56x45mm NATO. Still, that round will go in one shoulder of a 200-pound wild boar and out the left shoulder, leaving a golf ball sized exit wound. In Marshall & Sanow's study of terminal ballistics, they give penetration averages for pistol rounds in real world shootings (of humans), but for the 5.56 NATO they simply say "routinely exits the human body".
So while I was mistaken about the caliber of the round, I stand by the claim that it is not plausible for an IDF rifle round to stop inside a human skull.
NelsonRushton
3mo ago
If you shoot someone in the head at close r
Amen. No damn way a 7.62x51 rifle round (what the Israeli's use, comparable to a .308 Winchester) fails to exit a human skull.
NelsonRushton
3mo ago
That is only meaningful if (a) (as jeroboam said) they are telling the truth, and (b) you compare to a control group consisting of the number of children shot in the head or chest in other war zones.
A priori, it is = easier to believe that you could find several doctors to make up this story, than it is to believe that Israeli soldiers are doing it intentionally on a regular basis. So the evidence needs to be pretty solid in my book.
I do not believe that intellectual arguments generally have much impact on Marxists. As a notable case in point, Thomas Sowell (perhaps the most insightful political thinker of the late 20th century) was a Marxist when he began studying for his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. He did his dissertation under George Stigler and studied extensively with Milton Freidman, both of whom were Nobel laureates in economics and vigorous free market advocates. If intellectual arguments, well-formed and directed at a capable, open mind, are the cure for Marxism, Sowell should have been the poster child for the red pill by the time he graduated. In fact, however, Sowell was still a Marxist when he received his doctorate.
After spending years under the rigorous tutelage of some of the world's foremost free marked economists without a dent in his Marxist zeal, Sowell began working as an intern for the US Department of Laor. Within three months he had renounced Marxism -- not as a result of any intellectual argument, but as a result of seeing how the sausage of leftist government is made. Sowell went on to write A Conflict of Visions, which I believe was largely inspired by his own red pill experience. The thesis of the book is that ideological differences are not born of errors in reasoning on one side or the other, but of different ways of seeing the world. These ways of seeing, AKA worldviews (or visions as Sowell calls them) are not the result of conscious deliberation or argumentation. On the contrary, they are the stage on which deliberation and argumentation take place. Sowell holds that people with different worldviews talk past each other because they literally see different worlds and speak different languages, even when they look at the same events and use the same words. I believe he is quite correct.
As a rule, people do not argue themselves into a worldview and they do not get argued out of a worldview. What changes one's worldview, in general as in Sowell's case, is not argument but experience. Fortunately, the experience that shapes one's worldview does not have to be a lived out in the flesh. As Jordan Peterson has recently advocated in his We Who Wrestle With God lecture tour, the virtual experience induced by hearing a story can also shape one's worldview. That is why people of all times and cultures spend so much time telling and listening to stories (and watching screen plays on television, reading novels, etc.). Peterson says, "A story is the lens through which we see the world". I would say that a worldview is the lens through which we see the world, and stories are a crucial device by which worldviews are promulgated and passed down.
In particular, values of a culture are transmitted through stories of heroes and villains who live out the virtues and vices of that culture. This is why the vast majority of material in sacred texts consists of stories. Of the roughly 23,000 verses in the Hebrew Bible, only 613 are commandments and the rest is storytelling. The works of Homer and Hesiod -- the principal religious texts of classical Greece -- were nothing but stories of heroes and villains, and this is not uncommon for sacred texts around the world. I hypothesize that peoples' natural capacities for spiritual experience , for hypnotic trance, and for the appreciation of music, co-evolved as a mechanism for passing down the worldviews of a culture. Language evolved for passing down declarative knowledge, and entranced storytelling evolved as a mechanism for imparting the shared cultural worldviews in which that declarative knowledge is situated. Want to change someone's values? Entrance them and tell them a story. That is how Milton Erickson did it; that's how Gerry Spence does it, and that is how Jesus did it. Great influencers are great hypnotists and great storytellers. This is why religious sermons are given by a well lit speaker against a dark background, begin and end with music, and consist mostly of stories. TV Shows and movies are conducted that way, too. This is why children's bedtime stories are a tradition in every culture: sleepy children are entranced.
I would guess more people have broken free of Marxist brainwashing by reading Orwell's Animal Farm than by reading Hayek's Road to Serfdom or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (I've heard of both anecdotally, but more of the former). But the story that is truly the bane of Marxism is the Holy Bible. Marxists know their enemies, and that is why they make war on that book everywhere, and to whatever extent, they take the stage. We saw that, for example, in the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics. Evangelical Christians lean Republican by two to one [source], while atheists lean Democrat by four to one [source]. Women ages 18-29 lean Democrat by only two to one [source]. About the only salient group that leans left harder than atheists are gays. So unless you think you can turn a gay person straight, the most effective red pill transformation you can make is to convert an atheist into an Evangelical Christian. Turning an atheist into a Christian is a stronger blow against Marxism than turning a young woman into an old man (and who would want to do that anyway?). Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, recently lamented that perhaps by creating atheists he is also creating Marxist zealots. Of course he is, and even new atheist Richard Dawkins now tends to agree with that assessment [source].
Moreover, I believe we think of "taking the red pill" the wrong way. At this point, many if not most people -- even most Democrats -- already know that wokeness is intellectually preposterous and morally toxic, but they are scared to say so publicly. That means that the younger generation only hears one side of the story and the infamous march through the institutions ploughs ahead. What is chiefly needed to fight Marxism is not more arguments, or even more people to agree with us, but greater courage among those who already believe: the willingness to actually fight the culture war. The culture war is not a literal war, but is a literal fight in the sense that if you participate you may well suffer materially for it. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "It is not syllogisms that keep reluctant nerves and muscles at their post in the tenth hour of a bombardment." Whatever it is that keeps them there, that is what we need more of, and it doesn't come from arguments. It doesn't even come from the side of the brain that formulates and evaluates arguments.
So, want to red pill a normie? Don't argue with them; tell them stories heroes who embody the virtues honored by patriots of the West -- especially courage and integrity. Read them George Washington's first inaugural address, or his letter from Valley Forge. Or read them Sam Adam's speech to the Philadelphia State House, or Socrates's Apologia. But if you want to fire-engine-red pill a normie, share the Gospel with them. Christian communists might be a thing, but they aren't really much of a thing.
My 7 year old son asked me this morning, "Do monsters draw people with big sharp teeth?" It's a natural assumption; children (and cartoonists) often draw monsters with either exaggeratedly big sharp teeth, or claws, or horns (or all three) -- presumably because the fangs of an apex predators are primally frightening to people, especially to children. I said, "No, monsters draw people holding Bibles".
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
This has been a goal of the libertarian and classical liberal movements for the last century.
And that approach is failing miserably before our eyes.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
The bigoted opinion most supported by this farce of a fight isn't anything about Khelif's genital arrangement or chromosomes,
A woman, born female in a country where homosexuality and gender transition are illegal, raised as a woman, but born tall and with a face and body that is undeniably a bit masculine
According to NBC among other sources, Khelif has male (XY) chromosomes: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/imane-khelif-boxing-win-olympics-gender-eligibility-rcna164662
In my book that is obviously, by far, the central issue.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
It seems like the recent uptick in crime has a large component of crime committed by homeless addicts, especially on the East coast. If you are naturally left-leaning, you might be interested in Michael Shellenberger's thoughts on this topic. This whole video is good, but I have queued the link up to the part where he discusses the central idea: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5nSBmftZ1qU&t=903
Shellenberger is very compassionate and a natural born leftist, but he understands the facts that (1) addicts living in the street are there because of an ongoing sequence of foolish decisions whose net effect is that they have lost control of themselves, and (2) the interventions necessary to get them back on their feet necessarily involve both carrots and sticks. He has some fairly concrete policy recommendations that he makes in the video. My sense is that he has so much conviction to actually solve the problem that he doesn't let himself be blinded by ideology, and his suggested approach combines the best aspects of the political left and right.
In any case, suppose I have an idea that I believe is better than the status quo. Then what? My philosophy on this has two parts. First, a soldier at war is not responsible for winning the war; he is responsible for doing his duty in the effort to win the war. Similarly, when it comes to public policy, I am not responsible for changing the world; I am responsible for (1) not being part of the problem, and f(2) doing my duty in being part of the solution. My duty is to work intelligently to change hearts and minds. Working intelligently means working in groups and through institutions -- and on this topic I would refer you to Teddy Roosevelt's essay "The Duties of American Citizenship", and to the final segment of Ronald Reagan's farewell speech.
In my opinion, if, over the course of your life, you help five people get closer to truth, you are a superhero.
- The bible talking about killing off entire families as punishments.
- Long lasting family feuds.
- Feudal level countries killing off entire families as punishments.
- Ongoing demands for reparations.
I think the assumption that is built into your thinking is that the only legitimate justification for proactive violence (that is, violence not in defense of self or others) is as punishment for an offense by the person targeted for violence. If we assume that, then it follows that the cases above consist of punishing people for the acts of other people. But not everyone holds that assumption, and I don't hold it myself.
Note: I am not necessarily defending the actions described below, but I am trying to articulate the alleged moral justification in the minds of the killers.
In Case 1, I assume you are referring to the story of Achan in Joshua 7. Notice how often this phrase occurs in the Bible: In this way you shall put evil away from you (some examples can be found here). That means that the execution is justified, not by punishing someone who committed a bad act, but by the desire to rid the tribe of certain genetic predispositions. It isn't bad acts that are being punished, but bad genes that are being extirpated. This also applies to the genocide of other tribes that have too many bad apples (e.g., the Midianites and Amalekites). It's not that the Amalekite infants have done anything wrong; it's that they are likely to infected with something akin to zombie-ism or orc-ism. That doesn't explain the killing of Achan's wife, but it explains the killing of his children.
The killing of the wives and children also has an enhanced deterrent effect. What good does it do to punish someone for crime in the first place? From a utilitarian standpoint, the benefit of punishing crime isn't the pain and loss of the offender as a positive good in itself; it is the deterrent effect. Killing the whole family enhances the deterrent, and thus has the same kind of justification as killing the offender himself, or even flogging him. From a utilitarian standpoint, IMO, it is indefensibly arbitrary to just punish the offender, when punishing people he cares about has a larger deterrent effect -- and when no immediate, intrinsic good comes from punishing anybody in the first place. (But I'm not a utilitarian).
Case 2 is unique in this list. This is the only case where the killing is not a state action. But in warfare, whether between clans or nations, your duty to kill enemy combatants, and perhaps even noncombatants, is not justified by the fact that you are punishing them for some offense they committed. On the contrary, they may be right good fellows through and through. Killing in warfare (or clan warfare) is not punishment at all; it falls under a different heading.
In Case 3, for example in the Glencoe massacre, I presume the real justification was to cement the power of William of Orange, which might otherwise have been on shaky ground. This action was widely condemned, but not universally condemned, and William felt he could get away with it so it must have been plausibly justified in his culture. When I see something like this, I don't ask, "Wow, how could they be so crazy?". I ask, "Wow, what makes that moral convention adaptive for national survival?" What I take away from events like this is how important it was to the survival of feudal nations for the King to have strong moral authority. Without that, national defense would be a tragedy of the commons.
Case 4 is, in my opinion, the one that is truly based on a notion collective punishment. How could people be so crazy? What is adaptive about that? What is adaptive about that is that, if you manage to convince enough people that the targeted class (the bourgeoise, white people, Jews, whatever) is the root of all evil, then, like Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, you and your constituents can self-righteously steal the property of large numbers of people who have done nothing wrong. The push for reparations is nothing but a pretext for banditry -- the same as in Marxism and Nazi antisemitism.
oops. Strike that; reverse it
I am tempted to delete the original post, but that would also delete the record of your pointing out the error. The post is now edited to preserve as much of its essential content as is still relevant, pointing out the history of the post and the correction. Thanks for the correction.
Note: The original version of this post theorized that there was a causal connection from the botched Secret Service protection of Trump to Microsoft's layoff of its DEI team. However, @The_Nybbler then pointed out that the firing happened before the assassination attempt (see below). The post is now about why I think that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) push within the Secret Service was responsible for their poor performance on July 13.
When I was a university faculty member, I noticed pretty quickly that no matter what issue was being debated in a faculty meeting, it was always the same people in two camps opposing each other. I am reminded of Thomas Sowell's well-put description:
One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education, Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. [Sowell (1987): A Conflict of Visions, p. 13]
In the case of disputes among college faculty, it took me a while to figure out the underlying variable that basically split the department into two camps -- but once I noticed it, it was consistent and the data grew over time: the basic ideological split in the department was between people who want a culture of meritocracy, and people who don't. So I learned that not everyone wants meritocracy; some people in fact are strongly opposed to it, and that this variable is a major ideological axis in the culture of a university department, and probably of any organization. The degree of meritocracy in an organization correlates with a large number of other variables and determines which direction it goes on a variety of high stakes decisions.
DEI is an assault on meritocracy in a deceptively direct and damaging way, and so it fundamentally changes the organizations it infects. The result of DEI is not just that you hire and promote the best candidates you can under the constraint of identity-group quotas -- because under a DEI push you can't even have an honest discussion about it in case there are better white male candidates. Fundamentally, DEI isn't about quotas; it is about denying facts about group differences, and corresponding individual differences, that underlie the need for quotas. In this way, DEI requires systematically lying about merits of people's credentials and performance, which entails the erosion of the fundamental variable of meritocracy in the organization. This sends the organization into a sick corner of ideological space that results in a pathological inability to perform its mission -- unless its mission is licking the boots of DEI-loving bureaucrats and politicians, which is, without exaggeration, the primary, or at least a primary, mission of a growing number of organizations.
And that, I think, is how an amateur would-be assassin was able to stalk unopposed onto on a rooftop, with a rifle, 130 yards (short rifle range) from a podium where the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee was speaking, with a clear line of site to the podium (every time I re-read that sentence, I think I am in the Twilight Zone). The more information comes out about this event, the more it seems to be a result of institutional incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and the more egregious the stonewalling is from that agency, and the more baffling the whole situation is -- unless you understand DEI and its consequences.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Not the process I described, but I think it allows for the same mechanism (lack of attention to the WNBA => lack of convergence on opinions about the greats) via this step:
Each voter was presented two randomly selected names and asked to pick which one has had the better career in the 21st century.
So culture war? But then how do I explain Phelps at No 1?
Good question. One possibility is that the list was compiled from the top 100 (or some other number) from several different journalists: you make your list; I'll make mine, he'll make his, and we'll agglomerate them in some way. In that case, each woke writer would feel the need to put a few of WNBA players on the list -- but the WNBA is not an A-list sports league and hasn't been discussed enough to reach convergence on the GOAT's. Some of those journalists may never even have watched a full WNBA game (most feminists haven't). So, there would be less convergence on the various lists, which would show up as lots of WNBA players in the agglomerated top 100. Just a guess off the top of my head.
Phelps at #1 seems like a CYA move: almost 10% of the top athletes are from a single obscure sports league -- but that's our honest opinion, and it can't be sheer wokeness, because look who we put at #1. Also, Phelps has the all-time record in the most salient metric (total Olympic medals in head-to-head worldwide competition), so any other choice would look woke.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Is this consistent with your above statement, "They do"?
@NelsonRushton: Whatever argument that is, it will have to prove that majorities don't decide morality
@anon_: They do. And the majority now has decided that slavery was pretty awful.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Would you also affirm the following?
- race based slavery is immoral regardless [causally]of what a majority of people believe.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
You think there are a lot of lost tribes out there that tried all 3 and never invented writing or something? This whole theory is puzzling. No one had gunpowder, phones, and crocks at the same time either.
In real life these values are on a continuum. My hypothesis (not thesis) is that the closer a society gets to accepting all three at once, the weaker it gets. It's not that they failed to invent writing; it's that they got conquered and absorbed, and their culture was taken out of the meme pool.
I don't know what you mean by "crock". The question here, though, is what is in need of an explanation. It's obvious why no previous society ever had the internet and remote control drones at the same time. It is not obvious why no society ever had (1) sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable, (2) homosexuality is morally acceptable, and (3) male and female sex roles ought to be respected equally. I would expect that if the combination were not toxic, a society would have embraced them. Many societies embraced (1) and (2), and I submit every society ought to embrace (3); so, an explanation is required as to why it never happened.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Let proposition A be that combustion consumes oxygen, as opposed to releasing phlogiston. Do you believe (1) (Proposition A is true because a majority of people in 2023 believe it is true), or (2) (proposition A is true, regardless of what a majority of people believe, because combustion actually consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston)?
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Do you believe in the symmetry of C/D? Or do you believe 300 years ago fire really was phlogiston?
I believe that combustion consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston. I assume you do too. The next question is why this is true. Do you believe that this is true because (1) a majority of people in 2023 believe it is true, or because (2) regardless of what a majority of people believe, combustion actually consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston?
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
Well there you have it. Jesus dude, could you construct a more convoluted argument? Literally throwing darts at a non-existent enemy.
The conjunction of (1), (2), and (3) is not a straw man; it is exactly where Western civilization is headed. Yet it is uncharted ground. My thesis is that that ought to give us pause that no society has ever tried this combination and survived long enough to record the fact.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
What's silly is the idea that my judgment today of has to be based on what people thought in a different century... They [majorities] do [decide morality]. And the majority now has decided that slavery was pretty awful.
Let me see if I understand correctly. Do you affirm the following?
- Proposition A: Slavery was immoral in 1700, because a majority of people in 2023 believe it was, regardless of what a majority of people in 1700 thought.
If so, why is that true but not this:
- Proposition B: Slavery is morally permissible in 2023, because a majority of people in 1700 believed it is, regardless of what a majority of people in 2023 think.
For example, is it because 2023 comes after 1700? Or because we are having the conversation in 2023? Or for some other reason?
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
@NelsonRushton: By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago
@anon_: This is a fairly common, silly argument.
The argument you are calling silly is your previously stated argument on the topic of CSAM (supermajority, etc. etc.).
What I asked for is your argument that the abolition of slavery was a moral improvement. I'm now asking for the second time. Whatever argument that is, it will have to prove that majorities don't decide morality, which will contradict your argument for the prohibition CSAM.
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?
- A large supermajority believes that sexual urges towards 5 year olds is fundamentally morally abhorrent
- No such contingent is even remotely there on (1), (2) or (3). In fact, none of those can even claim a bare majority against them
As I reported before, a supermajority of married women disapproved of premarital sex in the 1960's. Moreover a supermajority of adults in the US (75% of those who expressed an opinion) believed premarital sex was wrong as late as 1969 [source]. By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago; premarital sex was wrong until 60 years ago, and gay marriage was wrong until 10 years ago. I assume you believe, however, that the abolition of slavery (e.g.), which changed the supermajority consensus, was a good thing. If so, then there must be some consideration aside from the majority opinion that informs morality. My question is, in your view, what is it, and how does it apply to CSAM in a way that it does not apply to, say, the normalization of premarital sex in media?
NelsonRushton
6mo ago
I don't know of any society has embraced them together.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Awesome! I'm flattered.
To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which more thorny propositions are hiding. These thorny propositions mostly involve the use of violence (including threats of violence) by the government against its citizens, to induce them to behave in a certain way that you believe to be generally beneficial. We do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial. What I suspect we disagree on is the intrinsic harm in using threats of force against fellow human beings to make them behave in the way we wish they would. For example,
I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights" (what exactly do you propose?), and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the betterment of the general condition of society, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.
On the other hand, I do not have those same presumptions about woke zealots. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic band wagoning.
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