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It's difficult to argue that the armies of historical civilizations, with deep traditions - pick any, mongols, romans, etc - were humanized? Peace and kindness and love over war and hierarchy and conquest isn't trad - it's the creed of progressives, albeit often poorly followed.
It's neither. No-one except the most radical ever espoused universal peace and kindness and love. Even Jesus, the lamb, drove the moneychangers out of the temple with scourges, and "came not to bring peace, but a sword." The question where the parties differ is who gets the peace-and-love, and who is consigned to the war-and-death. And as for hierarchy, that's sort of an orthogonal third quality that can come with either peace (as in leveller/quaker/anarchist dreams) or violence (the cossack/cowboy/yeoman tradition)
Huh? This is a universal belief today. It's mocked in the 'duude hippie universal love' sense - but 'fundamentally, we should be kind and good to everyone' is, like, a moral tenet most agree on. If I asked random people around me IRL if that's a good thing, they'd say "yes". The more conservative might add "but that's very difficult, and we can't go too far", and the more leftist might say "except for the NAZIS" (who are, of course, bad for breaking that premise, tolerate intolerance, w/e), but most agree on it in a significant sense. It relates to everything from antiracism to global development aid to christianity to why those hippies thought 'whoa love everyone' when they took acid (indigenous acid-doers have visions of their idiosyncratic practices when they do psychedelics), to one's day-to-day life where the economy, school, welfare, are justified by 'benefitting everyone'.
Peace and love to ISIS? To Putin? To Boko Haram? To "January Sixthers"? To Transphobes? To Pedophiles? To Conversion Therapists?
You don't have to scratch the surface too hard to find people who even baked-out old hippies don't extend "universal peace kindness and love" to. The question is, where do you draw the line?
Universal in an approximate sense, sure, but it's present
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I disagree. Read their writings, their poetry, their histories, examine the events of their time. They understood good and evil, virtue, honor, malice, human weakness. They were often concerned with the good life and how to secure it, and their execution was by no means the worst humans have done.
This is certainly the Progressive claim. And then there's the actual history, where Progressive attempts to implement the purest form of their vision have consistently resulted in some of the most concentrated evil and human misery the world has ever seen. Properly freed from tradition and hierarchy, truly Progressive societies have not demonstrated a solution to war, nor to hierarchy either, and it is not clear to me that attempting to eliminate hierarchy in particular is even possible, much less desirable.
This is not to claim that Marxism or Progressivism are Pure Evil, because they are not. Humans generally are not good producing anything pure. The fact remains that straight tabula-rasa year-zero Progressivism has a considerably worse record than any ideology currently in play, and judged by a balance of outcomes versus remaining influence versus length of influence, it's by far the most extreme outlier I'm aware of.
It is more or less necessary depending on circumstances. Cossacks and cowboys had very little hierarchy. Some versions of yeoman farmers didn't have much more.
Is hierarchy measured by number of layers, or by the influence the layers exert? I would bet most Cowboys and Cassocks who lived and worked together had a "boss", and I'd bet that "boss" had a whole lot of say on how things went. I'd bet, depending on the size of the group, there was even a fair amount of hierarchy below the boss. If your whole life revolves around working together, and that work is done under more or less explicit chain of command, I'd say you have "a lot" of hierarchy even if the hierarchy is only a few or even one level tall.
Yes, but at the same time if "exit" is easy (or at least not significantly harder than non-exit, b/c let's be real cossack life in any circumstance wasn't a picnic), and if the hierarchy is in many respects directly-answerable to the group (e.g., the election and deposition of Cossack "hetmans") or a function of ill-defined "prestige" or respect, then that hierarchy may sit comparatively lightly on one's shoulders.
Of course all this is theoretical, and I'm not a cossack or cowboy so if I'm blowing wind feel free to disregard.
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I'm not conflating good and humanized here. Ancient civilizations both had deep and profound traditions, and also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people for no conceivable progressive reason, for glory and conquest and just mere power. But marxism is less violent, in both ideology and implementation, than - easiest demonstration - the mongols, or some of the wars of ancient china.
Post-WW2 society does seem to have less war than ancient societies (... althouhg that's a weak claim, "post ww2", ww2 was recent!) - which is perhaps related to 'the glory of conquest and war' being a value modern progressives despise, which was not true in the past.
Why must the reasons be "conceivably progressive"? Romans believed that their sociopolitical system was the best, and the more of the world it ruled the better everything would be. Progressive polities likewise believed that their sociopolitical system was the best, and the more of the world it ruled the better everything would be. Sure, the "everything" that "would be better" was based on different values, but why should we concede that International Socialism was a more worthy goal than "Rome Eternal"? The Romans appear to have been self-aware of the Pax Romana; I'm not aware of an equivalent Pax Sovieta or Pax Franca. The Enlightenment did not derive the blessings of peace and prosperity or The Good Life from first principles, and they manifestly sucked at actually securing them.
What justifies this choice of dates? Progressivism's first real play was the French Revolution, which resulted in some of the largest wars the world had ever seen. Progressivism's next real play was the Russian Revolution, which was pure hell on earth and helped sow the seeds of WWII itself. Further plays resulted in multiple genocide-analogues post-WWII. The Soviets were no strangers to Glorious War and Conquest. Neither were the Chinese, or the Vietnamese, nor the Cambodians, nor Che and Castro, nor many others besides.
The first poem from your link:
...To be clear, your argument is that such sentiments have no analog from, say, The Great Patriotic War? Such a claim seems entirely unsupportable, but perhaps you'd like examples?
We're talking past each other tbh, and it's probably my fault - I don't really know how this is a response to my point, or where exactly we disagree. I was arguing you seemed to be claiming progressivism was somehow more violent or brutal in a way 'untethered by tradition', and my response is just that 'both progressivism and traditional societies have been quite violent, and violence = bad seems somewhat progressive'. I'm not saying progressivism is better, or that WWII didn't involve patriotism. And I did note that the 'actually reduced war' claim was a weak one - the stronger claim is the progressive claims 'war is bad and there should be less of it', even if he follows through on it poorly, while many trad societies do not claim that, and indeed had violent wars. This isn't saying that progressives are better ... just that your argument has a bit of progressive in it.
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I believe the perspective FC is coming from is one in which it is understood that the basest level of human interaction is, as nature, red in tooth and claw. "Might makes right" isn't a moral precept, it's a factual description of the most primitive level of homo sapiens social organization. Government began the first time the strongest, quickest guy in the social unit said "Do what I say or I'll fucking kill you."
There's a fantastic scene in Wildbow's current serial Pale, in which a red-tribe-y combat sorcerer finds himself trapped in a realm in which, as a fundamental Law, violence is not permitted.
Violence is always an option. And as an option, it often sucks, even when you win. Much of hierarchy, and tradition and civilization is just scaffolding to reduce how often we actually resort to direct violence to resolve disputes. "Peace, kindness and love" are nice ideals, but they don't actually offer a useful alternative method of dispute resolution. This issue is made stark when we talk about ideologies like Marxism, whose action plan is essentially:
Tear down all existing social order, traditions, civilization and mores.
???? (Something magic happens).
Utopia.
When we tear down all that scaffolding, we don't unleash the World Spirit/Planet Ghost/Friendship is Magic. We actually just revert to the oldest, default paradigm, violence. Will to power. Trial by combat. And so Marxists always end up with Stalins and Pol Pots and Raz Simones (notice how it took him less than 24 hours to reinvent the first human civic tech, Monopoly on Violence?)
To the extent that it's a revolutionary ideology, Woke will have the same problems. To the extent that it's not a revolutionary ideology, but just window dressing on liberalism, progressivism can dodge that same problem.
Marx and his disciples very explicitly embraced violence as their mechanism for ushering in the new world. Genocide-analogs were not a failure mode, but very much an explicit part of Marxism, and a part carefully retained when even supposedly-"core" ideas like the Proletariat were discarded. It's difficult to determine which current leftists are lying to themselves about this fact, and which are merely lying to everyone else; the persistant refusal to simply abandon the old blood-soaked monster leaves me deeply skeptical of the existence of a third variety. Marx offers an excuse for lining people you don't like up against a wall. If that's not what you're interested in, why is he still relevant?
He really is not all that unique in this. Hell, you don't even need a fancy theoretical justification for doing this - people in the 20th century got the ol' blindfold-and-cigarette treatment all the time just for insulting whoever happened to be in power in their country.
Marx offers intellectuals a justification they can accept in place of base human will-to-power (which they think themselves to have transcended). Same reason Christian theologians twisted themselves into knots justifying war against the infidel; they had both a desire (or need, depending on where one stands) to wage war, a desire/need to not believing themselves to be in violation of moral precepts/self-conceptions which would normally deem such acts as evil.
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The ability to do violence is the only truly inalienable right.
It means that violence is intrinsic to the human experience, ineradicable (and thus inalienable). All practical rights rely for enforcement on the assumption that the people can enforce them with violence if necessary. It is this principle that underwrites "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another". The basic rights, of self-defense, of self-determination arise from this ancient right. All others are based on it, at some abstracted distance. A right is a principle that is morally correct to defend with violence. What is "revolution", but an appeal to the most ancient and basic of all rights? The Last Argument of Kings is the last argument of every man.
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It’s inalienable in the sense that you can’t take it away from someone. As long as I have arms, legs, teeth, I can use violence.
It's not about that. The point is, your right to do violence is the only truly inalienable right you have. No one can take it from you except by killing you.
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