OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
That generally makes sense as an explanation - I would take it as related to the collapse of mainline Protestantism, and more generally the end of the WASP class. Historically the supreme court is almost entirely what we would call 'mainline Protestant', but in the last few decades mainline Protestantism has firstly almost entirely collapsed and secondly gone quite liberal in terms of politics. Religious conservatives, bar a small handful of impressively stubborn confessional types, are almost entirely either evangelicals or Catholics. Evangelical Christianity in the US began as a movement against an intellectual establishment that they perceived as having succumbed to heresy. There may be many good things about evangelicalism, but it has inherited a certain anti-intellectual streak, and it has never managed to reconcile with cultural elites. It was and remains low-class.
So as you say, that leaves Catholics. The Republicans have made heavy use of them.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I agree there's an important distinction to make there. Noticing and talking about Jewish overrepresentation is certainly not hateful or problematic in itself. It's an interesting observation, and one that may have positive and negative effects, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. I believe there are actually some meditations on the theme by Jews themselves.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Haven't you noticed by now?
Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.
It really is quite tiresome.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I guess part of my point is that it seems to be that the traits we assign to each group are heavily influenced by the location wer'e starting from and the particular questions we want answered. The top-level comment here is interested in black-white relations, so the dynamic he zeroes in on is mature/neotenous, with wild/domesticated as a secondary factor. Lu Jiamin is interested in Chinese/European relations, so he focuses on a different dynamic - wild/tame, or steppe/agrarian, or something else entirely. It's also, I think, very noticeable which qualities of different groups he thinks are revealing. Diet appears to be important to Lu, but I don't notice any of the Western HBD types mentioning diet. Presumably diet comes into it because his binary is to do with agrarians (eating grains, weaving clothes from plant fibers, etc.) with nomads, hunters, and pastoralists (eating meat and dairy, wearing clothes made from fur and wool, etc.), but it also seems like for him diet is one facet of a broader lifestyle that also involves political and cultural practices (e.g. women's rights, parliamentary democracy), and for that matter economics. He thinks that a free market and a competition of equals is paradigmatic of the Wolf peoples, whereas Chinese communism, implicitly, is another form of the 'Dragon King' to which the Chinese people bow. The stereotypically Chinese/Dragon way is to have a tremendously powerful central authority that coordinates all economic and social activity, on a strict hierarchical lines, and to which the people meekly submit - the CCP is structurally the same as the emperor.
This seems especially interesting to me because Lu doesn't try to reduce it to a single factor, like genetics or descent. I notice in the top-level comment here (and in the usual comments of our local racialists) a very reductive approach, trying to find the one controlling factor. For Lu, it seems to be a complex - genetics play a role, but so does culture, education, political structure, economic structure, and so on. Thus Lu maintains some hope that it might be possible to teach the Chinese to understand or respect wolves (indeed one of the central themes of the novel is a lament for the dying grassland), to teach them to preserve the grasslands they are destroying, to discover the secret of the West, and form a kind of hybrid. There is a kind of fusion. By the end of the story, the wolf cub that Chen Zhen has raised dies, and they skin the wolf's pelt and tie it to a pole, like a flag:
A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet.
Chen’s vacant gaze followed the impish, lifelike figure of the cub’s pelt as it danced in the wind; it was the undying outer shell the cub had left behind, but the beautiful and commanding figure seemed to still contain his free and unyielding spirit. Suddenly, the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated.
At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.
By the end, the wolf has become a dragon, soaring through the air towards heaven, and Chen, one of the dragon people, has found his own wolf's soul.
(And then the grasslands are destroyed, because the Chinese government is terrible, and both the wild wolves of the region and the last nomadic herders die out. Boo!)
So there's something more to it than just under-resourced speculations about population genetics. (Indeed, the genetic part is one of the weakest parts of Wolf Totem, and can feel like a self-hating Chinese person's recapitulation of some kind of Aryan thesis.) There's more than one factor here - there are chances to learn.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
This is an area where I think it's also useful to start reading thoughts from other perspectives entirely?
Have you ever read Wolf Totem? It's a novel by a Chinese author, Lu Jiamin, who spent some time in Inner Mongolia, and he has a theory that Han Chinese people are 'domesticated' - he calls them Dragon Totem people - and as a result have been outcompeted and brutalised by wild steppe people and their descendants, which he calls Wolf Totem people. Notably he sees Europeans as Wolf people, and as the descendants of the steppe.
Here are a few passages to give you the impression:
“In world history,” Chen continued the thought, “nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each.”
[...]
Chen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. “There’s a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history. I’m reminded of something Lu Xun once wrote. He said that Westerners are brutish, while we Chinese are domesticated.”
Chen pointed to the cub. “There’s your brute.” Then he pointed to the pups. “And there’s your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.”
Chen rubbed the cub’s head and continued. “Temperament not only determines the fate of a man but also determines the fate of an entire race. Farming people are domesticated, and faintheartedness has sealed their fate. The world’s four great civilizations were agrarian nations, and three of them died out. The fourth, China, escaped that fate only because two of the greatest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze—run through her territory. She also boasts the world’s largest population, making it hard for other nations to nibble away at her or absorb her, but maybe also because of the contributions of the nomadic peoples of the grassland... I haven’t satisfactorily thought out this relationship, but the more time I spend on the grassland—and it’s already been two years—the more complex I think it is.”
[...]
Chen sighed. “The way I see it, the most advanced people today are descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors. Not only did they inherit their courage, their militancy, their tenacity, and their need to forge ahead from their nomadic forebears, but they continue to improve on those characteristics. People say you can tell what a person will grow up to be at the age of three and what he’ll look like in old age at seven. The same holds true for a race of people. In the West, primitive nomadic life was their childhood, and if we look at primitive nomads now, we are given access to Westerners at three and at seven, their childhood, and if we take this further, we get a clear understanding of why they occupy a high position. Learning their progressive skills isn’t hard. China launched its own satellite, didn’t it? What’s hard to learn are the militancy and aggressiveness, the courage and willingness to take risks that flow in nomadic veins.”
“Since I’ve been herding horses,” Zhang said, “I’ve felt the differences in temperament between the Chinese and the Mongols. Back in school I was at the top in just about everything, but out here I’m weak as a kitten. I did everything I could think of to make myself strong, and now I find that there’s something lacking in us...”
Chen sighed again. “That’s it exactly!” he said. “China’s small-scale peasant economy cannot tolerate competitive peaceful labor. Our Confucian guiding principle is emperor to minister, father to son, a top-down philosophy, stressing seniority, unconditional obedience, eradicating competition through autocratic power, all in the name of preserving imperial authority and peaceful agriculture. In both an existential and an awareness sense, China’s small-scale peasant economy and Confucian culture have weakened the people’s nature, and even though the Chinese created a brilliant ancient civilization, it came about at the cost of the race’s character and has led to the sacrifice of our ability to develop. When world history moved beyond the rudimentary stage of agrarian civilization, China was fated to fall behind. But we’re lucky, we’ve been given the opportunity to witness the last stages of nomadic existence on the Mongolian grassland, and, who knows, we might even discover the secret that has led to the rise in prominence of Western races.”
Now as a historical theory, there's a lot here that's doubtful - the proposed genetic link seems weak, Han are genetically closer to Mongols than Europeans are, at times he can't seem to decide on the racial associations (are the Romans weak decadents sacked by the Wolf people, or were the Romans Wolf people themselves?), and some reckoning with the fact that the Chinese have spent centuries kicking steppe peoples around seems necessary - but I think it's at least interesting as a window into how this sort of thing looks from another angle.
That is, here we have people immediately concluding that whites and Asians are both in the 'domesticated', Dragon category, but here's a Chinese voice utterly convinced that whites in the wild barbarian Wolf category.
I think it's also worth looking at theories in this in the context of trying to answer particular questions. Lu is writing in the context of the long Chinese tradition of wondering how the West outpaced them and how the Century of Humiliation happened. As late as the 18th century, there was still a case to be made that China was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, and then in barely a century the Europeans comprehensively embarrassed, defeated, and exploited them, and even today the Chinese still struggle to understand how that happened and what to do about it. Lu's Dragon/Wolf, Farmer/Nomad distinction is an attempt to explain what's different about Europe and China on the macrohistorical level (and consequently places like Africa just don't rate a mention at all).
By contrast, when Westerners come up with theories about race and domestication and so on, they are trying to answer different questions. They perceive a different problem in front of them, which requires explanation. What's the mystery that is supposed to be solved?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?
You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?
I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up.
Isn't this premised on the idea that the people who were involved in CHAZ would have, had they not been involved in CHAZ, become real security threats?
Is that plausible?
At least two alternative possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, the kind of people who engage in street circus nonsense like CHAZ are not in fact the same sort of people who are likely to become real threats, like the early Bolsheviks. They're both radicals, in a sense, but they have very different strategies and interests. If these groups are different, then CHAZ might actually decrease overall security by making governments and security agencies devote time to CHAZ, rather than serious threats. Secondly, it's also perfectly possible that the kind of people who engage in CHAZ would go on to become serious threats - CHAZ itself is a clown show, but the experience of engaging in radical action, even the ineffective sort, might prepare people for more effective action later.
In fact both those possibilities might be the case. If I were a genuine radical - if I were part of a modern Weather Underground or something - I might look closely at CHAZ, identify the most competent or most radical people involved in it, and then aim to recruit them. Even if only the top 5% of CHAZ participants have real revolutionary potential, that's not nothing. A real radical might benefit from the existence of a large number of shallow, ineffective protests in order to skim off the top level of participants. For any organisation whose primary business is illegal, recruiting is a real challenge. Test beds like these protests seem useful.
Is that theory true? Is that what's actually happening?
No idea!
My point is that being able to imagine a situation in which X event benefits Y people does not constitute evidence that Y did X. It's not that easy to transmute theory into fact.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
This doesn't pass any kind of parsimony, does it?
Do you need to posit a benevolent(?) conspiracy to explain hyper-polarisation in American life? Surely not.
And surely where we would expect to see evidence of any such covert action, we don't. A deliberate act of social engineering on the scale of the entire US would require large numbers of people and large, coordinated programmes that we don't see. Meanwhile, if we do look for causes of progressive attitudes to race, it seems to me like we see large efforts put forth by non-state actors, for reasons that are plausible on their own independent of any 'defense-in-depth' plan.
I think it's plausible that American polarisation over unimportant or superficial issues might function to obstruct deeper polarisation, and that through this process real or successful revolt becomes less likely. But if so, it seems more likely that this is a happy accident, rather than something planned for an implemented by an agency.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
What's more American than inventing a bizarre new identity for yourself, especially a sexual identity, and proclaiming that to the world? I would have thought America's at the forefront of that.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?
I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I don't have a graph over time or anything, but we do have, what, four prominent Neo-Nazis? Three? That's a pretty high number by internet standards, and plenty of people around them who are sympathetic in a soft way to them. We don't seem to have many actual left-wingers, though.
I'm not tarring everyone here - I'm here, after all. But I feel like we have more capital-R Racists here than we do lefties.
It's true, I think, that the Motte is mostly blue tribe. Even the racists and Neo-Nazis here are in fact blue tribe. (Per the original formulation, there are Republican-voting right-wing blue-tribers, and Democrat-voting left-wing red-tribers. The tribes aren't just voting groups.) Indeed, I suspect that their position is actually more appealing for a young, clever, right-wing-attracted blue triber. Being a Neo-Nazi is special - being a (pseudo?) intellectual far-righter obsessed with genetics and population IQ and ethnostates makes you just as anathema to the left as being a MAGA barstool type, but it at least makes you different to the MAGA type. You can still position yourself separately from the poorly-educated populist blue-collar beer-and-guns-and-Jesus type of right-wing, because I really doubt anyone in the far-right wants to be confused with them.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
In an attempt to broaden access to the program, Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) have held trainings to help other faith groups improve their grant applications, including hosting a joint webinar with the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). JFNA and the Orthodox Union joined with the USCMO, the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations, and several Christian denominations to call for increased funding to the program. The joint lobbying effort resulted in Congress appropriating twice the previous year's funding for 2021.[17]
This seems like an odd thing to do if the whole thing is a Jewish scam.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Synagogues in Australia do this - I believe the guards are mostly volunteers who are trained on the synagogue's own payroll.
In the past I found it a bit odd, since noticeably mosques and gurdwaras don't do this, despite Muslims and Sikhs also being religious groups that are widely hated, and which are actually more publicly identifiable than Jews due to their headscarves and turbans, but since October 7 I have re-evaluated a little and am more understanding of Jews feeling a need for special security.
I suspect socio-economic factors also play a role - Australian Jews are on average wealthier than Muslims or Sikhs, and thus more able to pay for security. It's also possible that the fact that Jews are indistinguishable in everyday life makes synagogues more vulnerable to random attacks, not less. If I want to attack a Muslim or Sikh, it's relatively easy to identify one on the street and then attack them when they're most vulnerable. (To be fair, most attacks on Sikhs are a result of people mistaking them for Muslims - actual anti-Sikh sentiment is quite rare.) However, if I want to attack a Jew, I need to go to a bit more effort to identify who's Jewish, and observing people going to synagogue is a good way to do that.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I think you make a number of implausible assertions here?
You equate “unlimited immigration” with “the effective destruction of ethnic Europeans”. It is not at all clear that this is the case. Declining birthrates might lead to a numerical decline or even collapse of ethnic Europeans, but the presence of absence of immigrants doesn’t change that. You might argue that if the demographic balance of a European country changed so that there were very large numbers of ancestrally non-European people in it, that might effectively destroy what that nation once was – but again, that’s not the same thing as the destruction of ethnic Europeans. I think you need to be more precise here.
Likewise you just assert “the only legitimate purpose of the state is to guarantee the posterity of the people that constitute that state”. You don’t offer any argument for this – you seem to think it’s self-evident. That does not seem obvious to me. For instance, one might argue (and I am tempted to) that the creation of posterity is the proper responsibility of individual families and communities; the role of the state is in this process is to facilitate the conditions in which it is possible for families and communities to raise children. But the state itself is not the thing that guarantees posterity. We might reflect on the fact that communities have been successfully reproducing themselves since long before the state existed. Rather, the role of the state is not to guarantee certain activities that more properly belong to the private sphere, but rather to mediate interpersonal and inter-communal disagreements that would otherwise turn destructive. You can get most of this out of Hobbes. The state’s job isn’t to make sure you have kids. That’s up to you. The state’s job is to prevent a war of all against all.
Overall I think you just make a number of expansive claims that run past the available evidence. You say “replacing ethnic European majorities in order to mitigate identitarianism has been the stated policy of Western governments for 60 years now”, and that you have quotes or documents to prove it. I doubt you have those, particularly given the bolded part. It will be very easy to find quotes and documents arguing for more migration, but the purposive part of the statement is the controversial part. It’s, well, my theory of conspiracy theories – bundling the obviously true (lots of Western governments have been pro-immigration) with the obviously untrue (the purpose of this is “to mitigate identitarianism” or that this is a plot to destroy ethnic Europeans). The existence of alternative, more plausible motivations (such as just wanting more workers for obvious economic reasons) doesn’t get a look-in.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
This reads like just reposting a news or summary article.
Do you have an original comment or thought, or question to ask?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
I wonder if it might be worth nuancing 'pro-Intifada', 'pro-Hamas', and so on?
It seems to me that many of these protests are, yes, genuinely opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, and supportive of 'decolonisation' interpreted to mean 'Israel should not exist and all Israeli Jews should leave and find homes in other countries, and if they refuse, they are legitimately the targets of lethal violence'. But the rhetoric and justification given for this is so radically different to the rhetoric and justification of either Hamas or any on-the-ground Palestinian resistance movements that I think the gulf is worthy of recognition. For the American campus protester, what Hamas or Palestinians actually want is close to irrelevant - their politics are not so much pro-Intifada or pro-Hamas they are anti-coloniser. Israel is a 'coloniser', which makes them the bad guys, which makes the opposite of Israel the good guys.
If nothing else, the campus protest ideology is not the ideology of the Hamas charter, or even the revised one. I don't think the protesters are reading that charter and unironically agreeing with it. (Though I grant that the revised, 2017 version seems calculated to appeal more to liberal Westerners.) Almost none of them are Muslims, for a start. It's something different, and must have its own origins and influences.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Congratulations - that earned a real laugh from me.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.
I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.
As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.
Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.
Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?
What?
Let's take even just the first claim you made - that Christianity preaches slavery to Christ. Quick sanity check here.
John 15:15 - "I do not call you servants [douloi] any longer, because the servant [doulos]does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father."
Galatians 4:7 - "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God."
(See also the entire allegory of Hagar and Sarah to follow, in which Christians are identified with the children of the free woman, not of the slave.)
Galatians 5:1 - "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
1 Peter 2:16 - "As servants [douloi] of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil."
2 Peter 2:19-20 - "They [the ungodly] promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first."
It seems pretty clear to me. I've recently had the pleasure of re-reading The Screwtape Letters, and its demon narrator's apt description of the natures of Hell and Heaven is, "We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."
I'm not sure how much more clear it could have been - the goal of Christianity is not subjection to God as a miserable slave, but rather adoption as co-heirs with Christ, sharing in the glory of Christ's own status (cf. Romans 8:29, Christians are "to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family"). This is explicitly contrasted with the image of slavery in the Bible. Thus St. Athanasius summarises (ch. 54), "He was made man that we might be made God". This isn't some hidden secret.
Where images of slavery or servanthood appear in a positive context (e.g. Galatians 5:13), it is reconfigured in a deliberately surprising way - "through love become slaves to one another". The image of a voluntary mutual 'slavery' where each person genuinely seeks the other's good is striking and noticeably not the same thing as the domination of a master over chattel.
Let's go on:
Does Christianity counsel slaves to uphold the institution of slavery? I can only assume you are referring to 1 Corinthians 7:21-24. But this does not at all tell slaves to uphold slavery, or to recommend slavery as a practice. Rather, it is the position I just described - that slavery is irrelevant. He doesn't even tell slaves not to become free, if they get the chance. Paul's counsel is that worldly status just doesn't matter. This is supported by, as I noted in that previous message, what we see in Philemon - Paul isn't an outright abolitionist (as indeed would be pretty impossible in the first century), but his advice to the Christian master is to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother".
It seems worth adding to this, well, the subsequent two thousand years in which Christianity and Christians seem to have been quite well-positioned as regards the abolition of slavery. Sometimes this was in the form of large organised movements, as in Britain, but other times it has been slower. Privately I find something inspiring in the history of slavery in the Byzantine Empire - there was no society-wide war against it, no great battle. Rather, they just... slowly... stopped. Laws were passed against abuse of slaves, and then reducing slaveholders' power, and eventually it just faded away. The tempering aspect of Christianity here seems evident. By contrast the Teutonic pagans you describe were much more enthusiastic slavers.
What's next? Does Christianity counsel submission to greater powers? Well, define 'power'. It certainly counsels obedience and love to God, who is naturally the greatest power, and from there it recommends peaceful coexistence with earthly authorities to the extent that it is possible without disobeying God. But when that is not possible, it recommends protest. I hate to invoke the stereotype here, but you are saying that the tradition that encouraged people to peacefully yet defiantly become martyrs, steadfastly refusing to cooperate with the compulsion of the Roman state even to the point of being torn apart by lions, is a tradition that "counsels submission... to Rome". Does that not seem even the slightest bit off, to you?
If you argue that Christianity counsels obedience to God, certainly. No one's going to dispute that. But this is hardly unusual. If you want to make the Teutonic comparison again, it is not at all clear that a Teutonic tribesman's submission to the chieftain is qualitatively different to that of a Roman citizen's submission to the emperor - not least because, in Christian Rome in particular, the emperor's authority was contingent upon being accepted by the citizen body. That was why there could be so many revolutions in Constantinople, for, while the emperor's power was at least partly theocratic, it was also something held from the republic and there could be revoked, should the emperor be a tyrant. You can see this kind of legacy also in English-speaking Christian traditions - in Britain, where parliament claimed the power to overthrow and replace the king if necessary, and even more radically in America. The evolution of Christian views towards autocratic authority is definitely complex. I'm not going to say that there are no Christian bootlickers, whether historically (de Maistre etc.) or today (the caesarism of someone like Stephen Wolfe, say); but I am saying that a view of Christianity as uniquely servile in its understanding of politics is absurdly mistaken.
And... that's it. Those are all the specific points you make.
You're just, well, wrong.
I'd argue that Paul actually does significantly advocate for treating women and men the same way. The same standard applies to both. It's very striking if you compare, for instance, Paul's writing on sexuality and relationships compared to anything contemporaries were saying. Consider 1 Cor 7, for instance - every time Paul presents a piece for advice for one sex, he then immediately presents an identical piece of advice for the opposite sex. Thus:
But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
You notice how he says something about one partner and then immediately says it about the other, including the at-the-time surprising statement that the wife has authority over the husband's body, in a way exactly equivalent to the way the husband has authority over the wife's body. When he talks about the regulation of the couple's sexual life, he emphasises mutual agreement - he could have described only a unilateral decision by the husband, but his emphasis is always harmony between the two.
Likewise:
To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
[...]
To the rest I say—I and not the Lord—that if any believer has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. And if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
[...]
Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband. Husband, for all you know, you might save your wife.
[...]
The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband.
You get the idea. Paul's approach to marriage and gender relations appears to be very much "that which is good for the goose is good for the gander". It is even more striking if you have any sense of the cultural background - the Law, the ascetic/celibate practices of the Essenes, the Greco-Roman household.
Now, sure, in a few places this is moderated a bit. I'm not going to discuss 1 Timothy on the grounds that it's likely pseudonymous, and not a good view on what Paul specifically thought, but there is whatever the heck is going in 1 Corinthians 11, and of course there's Ephesians 5:21-33. In Ephesians we get a bit more of a concession to propriety - you can see the same basically mutualist ethic from 1 Cor 7, but he applies it metaphorically to Christ and the church and therefore adds an image of hierarchy. Even so, I think it's still noticeably a very different ethic to that of the surrounding pagan or even Jewish world (parallel Eph 5:28 and 1 Cor 7:4), and emphasises a kind of devotion and mutual service.
I'm not saying that Paul thinks men and women are literally one hundred percent identical (though there is an interesting trend; much as the eschaton is "already but not yet", for Paul gendered divisions are beginning to dissolve, even as outward expressions of the same remain normative, as in 1 Cor 11), but rather that he does see them as possessing a spiritual equality ("there is no longer male nor female") which has consequences for the ordering of the family and of sexual life ("the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does"). The gender binary in a sense remains, but it remains so as to be transfigured by holiness into a sign of Christ's relationship with the church (cf. Eph 5).
As such I continue to firmly reject the idea that the spiritual equality of believers, along both lines of sex and by analogy lines of race, does not have consequences for the ordering of society. Of course it does. Christians will behave differently to pagans because of who they know themselves to be spiritually.
We see Paul outlining this specifically! He devotes large portions of this letters to both the relations between the sexes (as in 1 Cor) and the relations between different ethnic groups (as in Romans and Galatians), and in both cases the trend is to assert a new spiritual equality in Christ which changes and transfigures communal behaviour. Male and female believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. Jewish and Gentile believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. As far as slavery goes, Paul never really talks about it because for Paul it is genuinely irrelevant. Political status in the world is meaningless to Paul - or if there's any kind of priority, if anything, it is the poor who have the highest priority (cf. his discussions of his own poverty or his status as a prisoner). He assumes that there will continue to be slaves and masters, and judging from history he was quite correct there, but his point, as with outward expressions of gender propriety, is that this distinction no longer matters. Thus his advice in Philemon 15-16 is that Philemon will receive this runaway slave "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother". Paul isn't so much pro-slavery or anti-slavery as he is a-slavery. It just does not matter, because the master-slave distinction is dissolved and overwhelmed by the new identity that Philemon and Onesimus possess in Christ.
He was very much aware of such issues and addressed them, in a way that is frankly quite powerful both in his own day and I would argue today. You should not just read Paul and shrug and go, "Oh, well, nothing there about how society is to be ordered." As Paul himself might say, may it not be so!
I usually try to avoid blocking - in particular, in a case like this, the result would be that the front page would consistently have these large, highly-active threads, with dozens of responses to something I can't see. Realistically I suspect I'd just want to read the blocked content anyway, just to see what's going on!
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