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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I don't doubt there are parts of academic "wokeism" that are relativist, but to the extent that those ideas have trickled down to the Tumblr and Twitter masses, I think they lose a lot of of their relativist character. Ask the average Twitter user with pronouns in their bio what Foucault thought, and you'll get a blank stare. Ask them what "stand-point epistemology" is, and it's probably the same. But you could probably get them to go on a thousand mini-rants about "micro-aggressions", and what media is "problematic", and who from history was good and bad in absolute terms.

I don't disagree at all. I would be curious to see where the current balance lies if we actually just asked them, "Is there an objective morality?" We might be so far along that we'll get blank stares to that, too.

To the extent woke people purport to disagree with objective morality, I think it's a combination of two things:

  1. They interpret the phrase "objective morality" to mean western/Christian morality.

  2. They interpret "objective morality" as supporting the idea that the powerful should be able to impose their morality on the oppressed.

So even though they do believe in "an" objective morality, they associate the phrase "objective morality" with views they disagree with and therefore claim to not believe in it.

If I'm being flippant, I'd say that my observations of the internet wars were that both sides had major problems, but probably the biggest area that atheists felt like they were constantly getting crushed on was the argument from morality. They tried lots of things to try to fix this. Ultimately, I think they were so unsuccessful that they just did everything they could to bury the topic and ridicule anyone who even thought about morality as a thing.

...directly leading to exactly the phenomenon that you describe.

This is like reading a dispatch from a completely different timeline. Are you talking about atheists like Sam Harris, who literally wrote an entire book, The Moral Landscape, explicating a sophisticated defense of his non-theistic conception of morality? You can say, as I’m sure you would, that this book was a colossal failure and that its arguments are bad, but it is just verifiably false that atheists attempted to “bury questions of morality”. It’s also especially incoherent to then try and link the New Atheists to “the woke” - whom you fail to identify” - when the vast majority of “woke” people I knew during the height of the atheism wars either hated the New Atheists, or, far more often, had no interest in atheism whatsoever and formed their worldview in a way that was totally orthogonal to questions about the existence of God(s).

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