Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
What do you think you failed to communicate in that thread?
Let me try to give my own gloss on what I think you were getting at. I often find myself on the side of defending... - subjectivity? I'm not sure what the best word for it is - against those who would argue for a purely rationalist technocratic worldview. I think consciousness is a real phenomenon that can't be explained away as an illusion, I think the arts and humanities are important and STEM supremacists get on my nerves, I think that individual choices matter and people aren't just reducible to their structural roles in the social system.
If you have an affinity for those positions, then perhaps we're not as far apart as you might think. Even if I might disagree with some specific formulations you put forth.
Well, I'm certainly no utilitarian and never have been.
I'm in complete agreement.
I think I understand the difference in perspective you're trying to articulate here. But, as usual, I simply disagree that it divides the space of political ideologies cleanly in two.
The nature of "we know how to solve all our problems", mainly. I am in fact convinced that it is a uniquely Enlightenment concept, but if your first counter-example is traditional Christianity advocating unity with God as the end purpose of human existence, I've clearly failed to communicate the insight, and need to reconsider my approach. I have pretty limited time to do that these days, sadly; I think I started writing replies two or three times, but never got them finished.
We could take your example:
and compare it to, say, a passage from Walt Bismark's description of why he is no longer a white nationalist:
...and then compare them to the A and B passages, and ask which matches to which. To me, it's obvious that the passage you linked is much more like the style of A, making a precise, well-bounded claim with clear foundations and clear limits, and the passage above is much more like B, claiming systematized knowledge of uninterrogated validity. The former is inside looking out, the latter is pretending to be outside looking in. Unfortunately, that distinction didn't seem to communicate either, so who knows.
The same for the discussion of Freud a while back. I have zero doubt that you've read much more Freud than I have, and if you believe that Freud's thought can be described as "conservative" in some sense, I'll buy that there's an insight there. On the other hand, I don't think I'm wrong about Freud's impact on the culture as a whole, and regardless of how much his views could be described as "conservative", his impact on society was pretty clearly revolutionary, and also pretty clearly based entirely on lies. He said things that were false, people believed these false things, and as a direct result of believing these false things embraced radical, untested social changes from top to bottom; his disciples and their disciples in turn repeated this process, and we are just now beginning to crawl out from under the resulting rubble. My argument isn't about what Freud believed, but about what he did; and the same for the rest of the Enlightenment's giants.
Likely not, but again, time and effort cost a lot more than they used to, which is why my posting frequency has dropped so precipitously. Putting together cogent arguments gets much harder when a little one decides their new favorite game is shutting daddy's laptop on his fingers. Increasingly often, I'm forced to let my opposite have the last word, and hope to address it next time the topic comes around.
It'll come around again.
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