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
I think both are important (and actually complements).
Agreed. Even Abraham argued with the revealed word of God, interpreting it in the light of reason [Genesis 18]. But when God's command was clear, nothing mattered more [Genesis 22].
After some thought I wrote down a clearer explication of what I meant by "Enlightenment epistemology", and what I see as the problem with it. Here goes...
The motto of the Enlightenment, as famously put by Kant, is Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! (Have the courage to use your own understanding) [Kant (1784): What is enlightenment]. To elaborate a bit, this means
- Exclusively honoring of the rules of evidence used in the physical sciences -- as opposed to other modes of persuasion including intuition, pathos, authority, and tradition, especially religious tradition.
- For Kant, and for contemporary thinkers like Steven Pinker, this is not a balancing act, but wholesale abolition of the alternatives to make way for what they call "Reason". Kant writes that "Laziness and cowardice" are the only reasons men do not free themselves from the yoke of authority and tradition [ibid]. Pinker lists intuition, tradition, authority, and sacred texts as "Ways of going wrong" [source]. According to this view, which I call Enlightenmentism, there is no rightful place for any other mode of rhetoric, besides that used in the sciences, in the discussion of public policy and moral norms.
What's not to like?
- The problem is not that scientific knowledge and scientific evidence are "bad". On the contrary, the body of knowledge we have acquired by those methods are a blessing to humanity, and I think we could not have acquired it any other way. Moreover, the rules of evidence in the physical sciences, before wokeness started taking academia by the throat at least, were what I think they ought to be. When scientific evidence decidedly favors one answer to a question of fact, that evidence should be what settles the question.
- The problem is that this sort of reasoning, by itself, doesn't get you very far outside the subject matter of the academic sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, psychology, etc.). In particular, by itself, it gets you nowhere in ethics or policymaking. People who believe that it does, or even that it ought to, are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains.
- Contrary to the claims of thinkers such as Jeremy Benthem, John Stuart Mill, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris, humanism (viz., the position that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings, perhaps along with other sentient creatures) does not close the "is-ought" gap in any useful way. Again, people who believe it does are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains, and why their conclusions differ from those of other people. (I have argued this at some length in another post).
- The problem with subverting the actual source of our moral norms and replacing it with a feeble rationalization is this: each generation naturally (and rightly) pushes back against their inherited traditions, and pokes to see what is underneath them. If the actual source of those traditions has been forgotten, and they are presented instead as being founded on hollow arguments, then the pushback will blow the house down. Sons will live out the virtues of their fathers less with each passing generation, progressively supplanting those virtues with the unrestrained will of their own flesh. That is what we are seeing in our culture today -- and the "Enlightenment" views of thinkers like Kant, Mill, Pinker, and Harris only pour fuel on the fire.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
I agree that "Honesty" is closer than "truth" as a translation, though I don't think it catches the whole thing. Someone can be honest even when they forget something important, or forget everything (as the dead do, in Virgil's Aeneid, when they drink from the river Lethe). Aletheia connotes being able to give a clear picture of the subject you are talking about, and then actually giving it.
Note that truth is a property of sentences while honesty is a property of a person or his conduct on a given occasion -- whose presence is a virtue and whose absence is a sin. So the Greek concept of aletheia is more like "honesty" in that it is more ethically weighted, and carries that ethical weight into more contexts, than the English conception of truth. But it is stronger than honesty because it also suggests knowing what you are talking about.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).
I can't tell what you are trying to say, or how it relates to what you are responding to. Can you elaborate and/or clarify?
I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying [struck through: Science] truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love;
My position is not that we should deny truth, but that the Enlightenment overreaches on the exclusive sanctity of factual truth and objective methods for determining it. In particular, this leaves no honored way of adjudicating questions of morality or beauty, or of promulgating values and visions (that is, visions in the sense of Sowell's A Conflict of Visions).
From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?
Let me say more succinctly what I think is wrong with Enlightenment worldview: It asserts that there are right ways to reason about propositions of fact (viz., generally speaking, the methods used in science and mathematics), but also holds that this "way" is the only honored method of assessing merit of any kind. On the other hand, it yields no actual basis for actually adjudicating between different worldviews (or, what Thomas Sowell called visions), and, in particular, between different value systems. The latter is a controversial assertion, but I believe it firmly and I think the attempts to argue against it (e.g., Harris's The Moral Landscape and Pinker's Enlightenment Now) are terribly weak, as I argued in this post.
This particular aspect of Enlightenment worldview -- and the aesthetic and moral nihilism that it actually entails (even when its adherents claim otherwise) -- had its seeds in the period we call the Enlightenment, but has grown to dominate Western thought only in the second half of the twentieth century, accelerating (in my opinion) when the right abdicated conservatism and embraced Fusionism. This aspect of "Enlightenment" yields tendencies toward radical progressivism and moral and aesthetic relativism, which are antithetical to the Anglo-Christian tradition and indeed to all viable traditions. The part of the Enlightenment that applied scientific materialism and objective reason to science was an improvement consistent with, and emergent from, the Western Christian tradition. On the other hand, the aesthetic and moral nihilism that come from applying that view "outside of its lane" are a dragon eating at the roots of the tree of our civilization. Yes, they have always been around in some form, but they were poison to our ancestors, and they are poison now. By analogy, if my grandfather was an alcoholic, I can carry on the tradition of his identity values without embracing that particular tradition which was always detrimental to the whole.
What I am citing isn't an etymology (that is, word history); it is the literal meaning of the word in Greek, that long existed, and continues to exist, contemporaneously with the meanings of its constituents (a-lethia: non-forgetting, non-concealment). It is translated as "truth" only because there is not a better English word to translate it into, but a lot of important content and connotation is lost in that translation. A word can become an idiom (that is, cease to have its literal meaning) over time, especially if the constituents become obsolete, but this was not the case with aletheia in Classical Greece, and I doubt it is even the case in Modern Greek. The root lethes, is still a word in Greek to this day, meaning "forgetting" or "oblivion" (not "materially false"). The English word "True" has no root in English, of which it is the opposite, but its opposite is "false".
In its earliest and most influential uses (Homer, for example), aletheia is used differently from the modern English word "true". Here is a brief discussion of how word aletheia is used in Homer. After Homer, the biggest influence on Classical Greek use of the word is probably the poem Aletheia by Parmenides, in which it has a broad and mystical meaning -- even farther from the modern notion of truth as material factuality -- perhaps akin to the Stoical notion of logos.
I also think that even if the word becomes idiomatic over time, it loses its literal meaning only by a matter of degree, and that these things affect us more than most people think.
I withdraw the claim about Pinker generally; he writes like a scientist because he is a scientist -- though the percentage in his popular books is still no more than half (and Better Angels of our Nature is probably a data-heavy outlier), which leaves 50% sermonizing.
For The Moral Landscape, I submit that the paragraph you chose is cherry-picked from the 1%. Here is a link to the full text of The Moral Landscape. What do you think the percentage is there?
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.
I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:
- The denotation of "truth", most strongly suggested by the use of the word, is material factuality.
- "Truth", whatever it is, is irreducibly sacred, if not the fountainhead of sanctity itself (as when Jesus said "I am the truth, the way and the life).
In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.
In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.
By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).
Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes
- "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
- A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
- Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
- this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
- Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
- Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
- William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.
Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that
- Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
- All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
- As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
- -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
- Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
- The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.
I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:
- Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
- People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
- None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
- We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
- The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
- Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.
It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology... Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.
In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.
On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
I cannot castigate cowards for preferring to bend when they cannot tolerate breaking.
How about we don't castigate anyone or label them as cowards when they are doing what most people do, but we recognize and promulgate what we seem to agree on: you are a better man if you tell the truth at that table and endure the discomfort than if you keep silent out of fear. I think there would be a lot more Riley Gaines's and Harrison Butkers (I pick them because they are not professional talking heads) if more people gave them a call and said, "Hey, I think what you are doing is heroic and I appreciate it".
crack a taboo shibboleth in a group conversation and you'll see the light of recognition in the eyes of kindreds
Most people, of course, are not famous and wouldn't get the platform Riley Gaines or Harrison Butker has. In this situation ("cracking the shibboleth") I think it's important to important to share the norm amongst ourselves that one of those "kindreds" is being courageous when he speaks up, and if we spoke up for each other when this happens and we are at the same table (even though it is uncomfortable) it would happen a lot more often. Not everyone has to be brave about this, but we should recognize those who are; and if we are not among them, we should recognize that they are better than us in that respect.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
I thought #2 was self-evident. Perhaps I was mistaken. Do you believe it is false?
I think we can extend some charity to the normie prog
Extend charity by loving our enemies, yes, challenging as that is. Extend charity by not calling a spade a spade, I don't think so.
Most people just want friends
I think this oversimplifies something crucial, to the point of obfuscation. Every normal person wants friends, and every normal person wants to be truthful and benevolent. When someone wants friends far more than they want to be truthful and benevolent, to the degree that they recklessly, knowingly, or willfully spread falsehood and harm, what should we do about that? Should we regard them as subhuman and delight in their suffering? no. Should we speak frankly about the fact that they are doing that, even if the conversation is uncomfortable? yes. There are times when such frank condemnation is justified as I argue here, and indeed I think it is a duty.
My outgroup does not care about what they claim to care about is pretty much always incorrect.
Pretty much. But
- every group is someone's outgroup, and
- there exist group differences in intellectual honesty between ideological groups. Therefore,
- somewhere in the world there is a group G whose outgroup G' has a median level of intellectual dishonesty that is significantly above the median for the general population. But,
- everyone is tempted to think that they are group G and their ideological opponents are G', and so
- we should be very careful in reaching the conclusion that we are G and our ideological opponents are G'. On the other hand
- sometimes, by #3, when someone reaches that conclusion, they are right.
I think the argument in this case are strong enough to meet the burden of proof.
The average person simply does not invest much time in investigating causes beyond what their immediate social circle is doing.
That's right. Hence, what goes viral in a community depends on it being interesting enough to share with an average of at least 1.001 other people in your immediate social circle. What goes viral in a community tells you what really matters to people in that community. SJW's know about "Hands up don't shoot". They know about January 6. They know about Russian collusion. They know about the hockey stick graph of climate change -- but what they don't know about is the hockey stick graph of murder of blacks -- because, even if it comes to the attention of a random SJW in some dark corner of the internet, that is not important enough to share with at least 1 other SJW on average. Look at what they do have bandwidth for, and look at what they don't, and it tells you what they care about.
It is true that the average SJW doesn't know the facts of the matter we are discussing. It is also true that the reason he does not know those facts is that it is a group characteristic of his community not to care about those particular facts. The ones to who are not hypocritical on this issue are the ones who would be amplifying the issue if they knew about it, and of course there are some of those, but they must be a small minority (or else it would actually be getting amplified). You know what happens to those people? They grow up to be Michael Shellenberger, Thomas Sowell, and Amala Ekpunobi.
The average white progressive doesn't know many, if any people in black urban communities. So they are reliant on what movements like BLM say.
They would know better if they cared more. In fact, they would know better if they cared much at all. This isn't something that a person has to figure out for themselves; you just have to know somebody who knows somebody that heard about it on a podcast (or read it on a message board), and all three of you (you, the person you know, and the person they know) care about it enough to pass it on. And the podcasters and pundits themselves, whose job it is to know this and inform their audience, certainly cannot plead innocent ignorance.
This is an important theorem. It is the convergence theorem for so-called geometric series, and, to a first approximation, it describes how interesting information items spread in a community. Basically, if everyone who hears about the thing, on average, shares it with r other people, and r > 1, then it will spread until the community is saturated and r effectively becomes less than one (because a high proportion of people in the community have already heard it). That geometric growth to saturation is colloquially known as "going viral". The r-value for a certain piece of information, or video, or whatever has in a given community depends on how well that item resonates with the interests of the community. Long story short, what goes viral is what people find interesting. (Thanks for the tip. right?)
If black lives really mattered in woke culture, the discussion about the epidemic of black homicide would go viral faster than "Hands up don't shoot" -- and if they really didn't want to be patriarchal white saviors, so would the fact that white Democrats are the only group that wants to defund the police.
TLDR Progressives are not just black life utility maximizing machines, so when they don't do the exact things you think they should do, it doesn't mean they don't care, it means they have a whole stack of other moral precepts and beliefs to balance. J
Some underlying variable took off in 2015, which, as I noted, has caused more excess black deaths than the Vietnam war, the Korean War, and World War II combined, in a shorter amount of total time. This is not a nuance thing that could get lost at the bottom of the stack; it has literally had the effect of a war on black lives. You don't need to be a "utility maximizing machine" to notice that, amplify the issue, and look for an explanation. It would suffice to care, at all, about what they loudly claim to care about.
"If you really thought that abortion was murder and hundreds of thousands of innocent babies were tortured and killed each year you would do much more about it".
It's not just that they aren't doing enough (as might be said of pro-life activists); It's not even that they aren't lifting a finger; au contraire, it's that so many of them take to the streets to shout for a policy (defund the police) that predictably harms our community, harms blacks disproportionately, and that is not supported by most blacks -- and practically none of them are complaining about the others doing that.
One is clearly not obligated to be a "utility maximizing machine". One is obligated to exercise due diligence to be intellectually honest and not to do obvious net harm, all things considered. Qualitatively, you could make the same argument about anything, but whether that argument has merit depends on (1) the severity of the harm, (2) the severity of the hypocrisy in ignoring it, and (3) the clarity with which both of these can be discerned by a reasonable observer. In this case I submit that the harm is catastrophic, the hypocrisy outlandish, and the clarity crystal. Here I argue that there must exist cases like that, whether this is one of them or not.
@SSCReader if you want to give a convicting argument, I suggest you point out some of those cases and compare the woke movement to them. For example, you could say "Yes the Nazis were significantly more hypocritical than average (in 1935, before taking power), and yes the Bolsheviks were, too (in 1900, before taking power), but the woke are not -- by quantitative comparison with, say, evangelicals." I won't ask you for evidence; I'd just like to know your opinion of where some ideological groups stand on that continuum. Or do you believe we're all just human and no groups is any more or less hypocritical than any other?
They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives.
I can't tell whether you are saying that (A) this is what's going through their woke minds, or (B) this response has objective merit, so I will respond to both.
Regarding (A):
Telling blacks what what their problems are and how to solve them is the modus operandi of white radical progressives. "When a basic definition of each policy was provided [to 1300 blacks polled], 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment." [source], but Democrats oppose school choice, and oppose it more the more woke they are, saying that they hurt black students [for example here]. Thomas Sowell's book Charter Schools and their Enemies establishes this pattern on charter schools beyond reasonable doubt IMO. I submit this is representative of the bigger picture of white progressives shoving problems and solutions down the throats of the black population. Progs claim that climate change disproportionately impacts disaffected minorities and push for "climate justice"; disaffected minorities want cheaper power bills and don't give an ass rats about climate change. This phenomenon also extends to the issue at hand. "Among those polled, 47% [of black Democrats] say federal budget spending should be “increased a lot” to deal with crime, compared to just 17% of white Democrats" source. It's disproportionately white woke liberals who call to defund the police on behalf of blacks, not blacks who want it.
Regarding (B):
The truth? There is no "black community". There is a shared community in which murder rates are skyrocketing, and skyrocketing disproportionately for our black neighbors -- and sitting on your hands about it because it is "their problem" and not "our problem" is depraved.
Aside from a few outspoken radicals, most blacks want more funding for the police, and almost half of them want "a lot more" (see above). So how, again, are white college girls holding up signs to "defund the police" because "black lives matter" not telling blacks how to solve their problems?
Why are yours so different? A quick search for Black mortality causes clearly shows homicide
I have the same search results as you. They surprise me a little (insofar as Google hasn't algorithmically downranked the #1 result) but they don't change my picture of what the conversation looks like. If you hear of the fact that the rate of death by homicide rate for blacks started to climb sharply in 2015, and climbed by 50% by 2020 with most of the increase coming before COVID, you probably heard that from a conservative outlet. I have never heard it from a progressive outlet and I don't expect to. If your mileage varies on that I would like to know.
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.
When an animal gets rabies, it seems to decide to stop drinking water. That is why it is called "hydrophobia". This causes excess viruses to build up in the animal's mouth instead of being washed down, which would happen if it were drinking normally. The little spit that is left in the mouth is thick with rabies virus, so he is said to "foam at the mouth". Then the animal seems to decide to get mad at the world -- so mad that a skunk will attack a German Shepherd, and a German shepherd will attack its owner. To himself the rabid animal is probably thinking the equivalent, "You called my momma a name and I heard it". But what is really happening is that a rabid animal is not in control of itself; it is carrying out the plan of some other agent that has infected it, and the goal of that plan has evolved to spread the virus that carries it.
The locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; [Proverbs 30:27, ESV]
Rabbi Raphael Hirsch wrote,
Mankind, estranged from G-d, longs in vain for happiness and peace, longs for the garden of Eden, but they have chosen a way on which they will never find them! Cherubim and the flames of the sword of suffering "preserve" for mankind the road to Eden. Their message: Men cannot win Eden through his own strength; this road is saturated with blood; he will find Gan-Eden again if he is willing to be led and commanded by G-d. [Rabbi Raphael Hirsch: Commentary on the Torah]
I think Hirsh is right in that the story of Eden captures something that people, or something inside people, longs deeply for; and there are two paths that appear to lead toward it. One path respects our position as servants of a Higher Power, the position of our fellow man as being made in His image, and the constraints of the moral and causal laws of nature and human nature. The other does not -- and was aptly called the unconstrained vision by Thomas Sowell. Both are essentially spiritual in their composition. What does Marx's utopian vision look like? No divisions by class or country, no courts or cops, no private possessions, and plenty for all. Sound familiar? If you want to understand Marxists, you should think of Marx, not as a political philosopher, but as a self-anointed prophet. When Bertrand Russell met with Lenin, he unexpectedly found that Lenin regarded Marx that way:
If he [Lenin] wanted to prove a point, he thought it enough to quote a text of Marx. No fundamentalist was ever more addicted to scripture than he was to Marx. [Bertrand Russell, describing his meeting with Lenin in a 1962 interview with David Susskind]
Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. [Russell, Bertrand (1920): "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism".]
when asked what they envision they're usually cagey on details,
I think Crosby, Stills, and Nash crystalized their motivating impetus pretty well:
Song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1sH0uR2u7Hs
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Crosby-stills-nash-and-young-woodstock-lyrics
Which makes me think of the line from This is Spinal Tap: There's such a fine line between clever and... stupid.
I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such.
I think if they cared about what they say they care about, they would be discussing, not just "too much gun crime", but the sudden spike starting in 2015 and what might be behind it, and whether the Ferguson contributed to it. They would be the ones starting that conversation if they cared about the lives of black people. They would be discussing that more than they discuss alleged police racism, or at least in the ballpark of as much.
I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? [emphasis added by me, @NR].
Their behavior is indeed baffling if you assume that they are trying to implement a rational plan to achieve the goals they claim to have. But I don't think that is what is going on. If you ignore what they say and watch what they do, what objective does it point to?
As an aside, I think it's a bit cold blooded to say that the offender "had it coming". I suspect that if you or I had been his shoes, and walked in his shoes a while, we might have acted the same way he did -- or at least understood and empathized with his motives. I think it's more accurate to say that the shooting was justified.
Great post. It's refreshing to read something with some thumos [Greek: spirit] on The Motte. I agree with the critical mass of this, but I am going to focus on the things I don't agree with:
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