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Notes -
Alito should have been more skeptical that "civility" and (especially) "inclusivity" are uncontroversial. Any teaching of "civility" is teaching not just that people should act in ways which are civil and not in ways which are uncivil, but teaching WHICH ways are civil and WHICH ways are uncivil, and those things vary sharply across the population. "Inclusivity" is worse, in that it's basically a positive label for progressive values rather than a label for anything uncontroversial at all.
We are at risk, because I am paraphrasing after reading most of the transcript yesterday, making some notes, and editing them into a post today while referencing some stuff. Here is that exchange:
It's more accurate to say Alito doesn't worry too much about determining the goodness of the book. Maybe it is good, maybe it is not not good. The concern is whether someone can make a religious objection to it. He thinks that is a pretty obvious, yes. This is a moral formation rather than information.
I agree "inclusivity" in the context of education has a clear progressive meaning. "Civility" I think we should hang on to or fight for. It is possible to be civil while maintaining moral disagreements. Happens all the time here and that's good. The well is poisoned enough that it's reasonable to want to* detach all the goodness terminology from progressive mantras.
The discussions that fly here civilly wouldn't be seen as such in many spaces, certainly school. Even that term carries baggage.
I'm also not sure it matters. "Diversity" may not have had the progressive meaning until it allowed one to discriminate on diversity grounds and now the term has been used as a license so often that invoking it in certain context just screams progressive thing. "Safety" was also ruined when it became useful.
The liberal thesis was that there was some objective grounding to these concepts that people would naturally gravitate towards.
I think we can safely say at this point that the liberal thesis was wrong. "Consensus" is not a fixed, naturally-occuring attractor fit for anchoring a society. Values can drift without apparent limit, and mutually-incompatible value sets are not only possible but are routinely observed in the real world. Attempting to share power between mutually-exclusive value-sets is a fool's errand. The solution is borders; I pursue my values here, you pursue yours over there, and we do our best to leave each other alone. No level of language games is going to provide a sustainable workaround to this simple reality.
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