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Notes -
Earlier this summer some of my more religious connections circulated a tweet from Burk Parsons:
I have been thinking about the word "moralizing" in connection with this comment. Asking Google for the definition gives me this:
One of the logical consequences of asserting the "equality of persons"--a genuine ideological cornerstone of Western liberalism--is the idea that "no one is better than me." This is like, trivially false on its face, of course: probably many people are better than me at baseball, for example, or at knitting. "Everyone knows" (the consensus-building argument goes) that it's not total equality of skills, resources, etc. which egalitarianism demands, but rather a kind of "political equality" in which no person should be afforded greater rights or privileges than any other person by virtue of their birth or social position.
Most people seem to intuit that being great at baseball or knitting doesn't make you a "better person" than others, in any egalitarian-relevant sense. But there are other things that people seem, for whatever reason, to reflexively associate with individual worth and worthiness. One of those is intelligence. Another, I think, is moral praiseworthiness. Maybe it is because we do recognize some acts as criminal, and treat the status of "criminal" as naturally and permissibly forfeiting one's (political-equality-grounded) rights?
So: criticize someone's immoral-but-not-illegal choices, and a common response will be, "You think you're better than me?"
Of course, one needn't regard oneself as "better" to recognize bad! And I have certainly met my share of outright moralizers, people who derive apparent satisfaction from looking down on others, especially with an "unfounded air of superiority." (Snobbily religious folks, for example, as well as wokists--if that's not just a different word for the same phenomenon.)
My own memory is that as recently as the 1990s, people who drank, smoke, etc. were at least somewhat prone to saying "I know this is a terrible choice, but I'm still going to make it--but I really respect people who don't make this choice." I don't think I've encountered that sentiment in a memorable way since 2014 at the latest. My unfounded guess would be that something like "unconditional self-love" has largely replaced the pursuit of excellence and merit as a central motivator for those aforementioned "snobbily religious" types. And loving oneself unconditionally presumably comes part and parcel with rejecting any culture that asks or invites us to change.
I could make a case for the law not being a respecter of who stands before them. A person should not be seen as different before the laws because they’re really good at something. I wouldn’t want a person to get away with murder because he’s better at some skill than I am.
But I think somehow the idea came to mean that no one is objectively better than anyone else, and therefore nothing that those people choose to do is better or worse than anyone else. So you doing drugs all the time, not holding a job, and stealing is exactly equal in worth to my studying medicine, curing a disease, and giving thousands to humanitarian causes. I view self esteem as an outgrowth of that idea. If everyone is equally good, and all modes of behavior are okay, I can feel good about myself even though I’m doing bad things. Even criticism of other cultures as to whether those cultures promote good behaviors that will let people thrive is seen as evil.
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I have a little bit different take. It is not that western world is against moralizing, it is just that it changed values that people are judged by. The don't be judgmental schtick was there only as a temporary stopgap in order to protect these alternative moralities while they were weak. Now when they reign, instead of traditional moral values and virtues that people were judged by, you can now easily be judged as committing one of the big 4 "new" istophobic sins: racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. You can add various other moral issues such as being a bigot (you are against these values as interpreted by new religious authorities) or some sort of other enemy: anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist and so forth.
What I find interesting is how a lot of the new morality is direct subversion of traditional virtues and promoting related sins instead. Instead of chastity, we promote lust. Instead of humility we literally celebrate pride month. Instead of patience we celebrate righteous wrath of punching Nazis and persecuting bigots. Instead of temperance we literally promote gluttony, celebrate obesity and drug culture. Instead of charity we promote greed by eating the rich and demanding rights without any related responsibilities. Instead of diligence, we excuse sloth ideally enabled by some sort of UBI or by medicalizing it and removing any responsibility for it. Instead of kindness we prefer envy of those who have some kind of privilege and who are in in some mysterious systematic ways responsible for our situation.
I am not the first one to notice, that the new moral regime shapes up to be almost literal subversion of the old system.
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