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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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This is an intriguing take, and one which—ironically—brings to mind a certain argument advanced by antisemites of the European paleoconservative ilk, viz. that the Enlightenment techniques of using reason and logic to question longstanding social norms were at least tolerable in the hands of Christian/Christian-heritage thinkers, who held an almost innate (if unconscious) sense of where to draw the line and stop applying the culture of critique, lest they rend Western society apart entirely. Jews, on the other hand, possessing no such intuitive metis, blew past all Christian guardrails in their blind zeal to make everything rational, scientific, legible—whence the horrors of checks notes communism and the Frankfurt School.

Jews have never been in a proper standpoint to understand Christian morality because they're the outgroup. All moral systems have profound flaws when viewed from the outside. I don't care what gentiles have to say about Jewish culture either because there's minimal chance they really get it.

I do think there's something to the argument that Jews are more prone to fall for the more excessive varieties of left-wing bullshit because they're much more culturally predisposed towards notions of collective (familial, racial, class) based consciousness, guilt, virtue, etc. than the wider West.

Except wokeness in practice isn’t really big into collective responsibility/guilt. It’s all about what you’re owed. A lot of it is actually quite individualist.

And what is the basis of this alleged debt?

It is rarely anything the claimant themselves have done, its all "you owe me because somone who looked vaguely like you wronged someone who looked vaguely like me 100 years ago" or "i deserve to have my choices validated because of [insert group membership here]".

The view isn’t too far from that expressed by various reaction-adjacent Jewish people. In any case, as one myself, I’m skeptical that Jews have any particularly great insight into Jewish culture that gentiles don’t (and vice versa).

I agree, Jews don't know where to stop in their criticisms. But that's a universal human trait. The problem is not "Jews like to destroy other moral systems" but rather "two or more distinct moral factions are incompatible with a healthy society and one will always try to trounce the other". To disdain them for refusing to integrate is natural, but on the inside there's an obvious tension of "Should we ever fully integrate, we may get targeted again but with our now weak communal bonds we'll be far more vulnerable." The best criticism you can give is that modern America doesn't seem like the Jew-persecuting type, but this cycle is so ingrained in them that mindless adherence to "They want to kill us!" is slightly justified. But I'm not in the position to fully dissect all that

This is largely Solzhenitsyn’s argument and is implicit in Churchill’s writing on European Jewishness. I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again and if anything the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it. Essentially Jews embraced liberal ideas both more zealously and more literally because of a combination of their own desire (hardly surprising) to move beyond the previous status quo in European Christian-Jewish relations and because of the specific way in which criticism and commentary upon the Talmud was central to Jewish intellectual culture.

I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again

I agree that it's not necessarily antisemitic, though I think Moldbug is not the best example to use here. I've always found his disavowal of extra-Overton-window takes (on HBD, liberal democracy, and antisemitism) to be lukewarm at best and performative at worst. My pet theory is that it's a kind of Kolmogorov complicity by proxy: though he's far from the levers of power himself and (genuinely, as far as I can tell) professes no desire to get closer, he doesn't want guilt by association to tarnish the prospects of any politico who openly touts him as an influence.

the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it

This is news to me; I wasn't aware that the MacDonald school* even knew about this argument, let alone disagreed with it. What's their take?

*Not to be confused with Hamburger University

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