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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33017 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/us/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-new-york-subway-death-charge/index.html

Daniel Penny, a 24-year old Marine, turned himself to police after being charged with 2nd degree manslaughter for the killing of Jordan Neely. It looks like I was initially wrong. I said that drugs may have played a role given that the original NYTs story, which I replied to, from a week ago said that Neely had been choked for only 50 seconds and released and was unresponsive. The updated story is that he was choked out for much longer, as long as 15 minutes, which would have def. been lethal, and the video is pretty bad.

So retract my original argument in which I posit drugs played a role. This is why you should always wait until you have all the information before forming an opinion. I think Penny is not without some guilt here. Keeping someone in a choke for so long is going to end in death. It's likely Neely was not rendered unconscious near-instantly from blood loss to brain, such as from a sleeper hold as I originally assumed from the original story (I assumed Penny put Neely in a hold, and then Neely went limp in 20-30 seconds and did not come back), but far worse, had been suffocated to death, like being held underwater because his windpipe was restricted. That's why he was flailing around. It would have been more humane had Penny just shot him although that would have carried a worse charge.

A second degree manslaughter conviction is not that bad. only max 15 years for killing someone, and with parole Penny may only spend 5 years, which is a pretty lenient sentence for killing a guy, and not even in self defense or accident. By comparison, Ross Ulbricht faces multiple life sentences despite not killing anyone. I cannot say Penny is not without some blame in this matter. But In Penny's defense, the police took too long to come, and despite Marine training he and his accomplices didn't know what else to do.

The tendency that's emerged to view random acts of violence as indicative of 'a mental health emergency that is the result of government shortcomings' is concerning and just weird. The current example is Jordan Neely.

  1. People are getting lost in this speculative 'why' behind these actions and losing sight of the 'what'. in other words, that someone has a mental disorder that may have contributed to their decision to commit a random and violent crime is a very distant second to the fact that they committed a random and violent crime. it seems like many of the perpetrators who receive this sort of public treatment are people who have committed a laundry list of crimes in the past and for whom this sort of behavior was entirely predictable. And it's this 'they have a mental disorder it doesn't count' mentality that seems to be at the root cause of these people not being held accountable and put behind bars so they can't repeat that's behind all of this. Sure, maybe treating mental health disorders will help, but they can receive those services in jail (or we should focus on ensuring they can receive them, if they can't already). And this narrative ignores that the sole purpose of a criminal justice system is not to reform criminals; it's to serve justice and reduce the amount of crime that's happening. And before anyone makes the non-intuitive claim that there is nothing to suggest that arresting people reduces crime, yes there is; and i don't even know why the assumption that arresting people doesn't reduce crime exists in the first place. It seems very obvious and logically sound that if someone has a tendency to commit crime, they cannot do so if they are in jail.

  2. It ignores that there are people with mental disorders who go their entire lives without committing a random act of violence. Looking for a basically exogenous (e.g. outside the realm of the self) source of blame instead of holding individuals accountable is so symptomatic of a form of thought that has begun to plague society. It is always the system's fault, it is always something else's fault. It's a cancerous way of thinking because who the hell is to say what ultimate cause led to someone doing something. It's pure speculation, so to focus on identifying and blaming this vague ultimate cause instead of focusing on holding people accountable falls victim to causal ambiguity and sets yourself up to not be able to remedy the problem

  3. I don't know why there is this view that if the government just dumps more money into this magical mental health pot, that random acts of violence will be solved. We can't even be sure that mental health issues are generally and primarily the cause for this sort of behavior, but even to the extent that we can, I just find it so weird that people think the government can somehow solve it. Like just throwing money at this vague notion of mental health services will somehow solve the problem

One of the counterarguments to this "hard on crime" line of thinking is the problem of mass incarceration. There is a limit to how many people can be imprisoned without compromising the system’s integrity. I learned more about this when I read about the Russian prison system, which developed its own set of rules after the communist revolution in 1917 and following literal imprisonment of whole nations in gulags. A similar phenomenon is happening in US prisons, where powerful gangs impose their own laws and influence both the inmates and the outsiders. Mass incarceration is a problem of the type that stares back if you stare at it intensely enough.

There is also a deeper problem behind this - whether we call it a “mental health crisis”, as some on the left do, or “social fabric being ripped apart”, as some on the right do. It is shocking that over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Even if we are not among them, we cannot ignore the fact that 10% of males will experience the prison system for a period of time. Therefore, I do not think that the solution is to release violent criminals or to be extra tough on crime.

over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime

Wow, I would not have guessed. See source here, including racial breakdown: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf

But, do note that the above is 1997 report using 1991 data. I believe rates are up since then, though, so I don't mean to disagree with your point.

Your data doesn't appear to include local jails, as ireally suggests below. However, rates are not up since 1991, which is at the top or end, depending on the particular stat, of the big crime peak - rates of homicide, property crime, etc have significantly decreased since then, even including the post 2020 spike

In what is my new favorite excuse, ChatGPT told me wrongly, my apologies. Checking Wikipedia (ironically, given how often we were told not to do that at first), per capita peaked in ~2008 (including local jails).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#Growth_and_Subsequent_Decline


year  total         per-100k

1940	0,264,834	201

1950	0,264,620	176

1960	0,346,015	193

1970	0,503,586	161

1980	0,503,586	220

1985	0,744,208	311

1990	1,148,702	457

1995	1,585,586	592

2000	1,937,482	683

2002	2,033,022	703

2004	2,135,335	725

2006	2,258,792	752

2008	2,307,504	755

2010	2,270,142	731

2012	2,228,424	707

2014	2,217,947	693

2016	2,157,800	666

2018	2,102,400	642

2020	1,675,400	505

Wikipedia is almost always a better source - in the sense of usefulness and accuracy of the information - than something like (not implying these are the same) nyt/cnn/nypost/local news, or even worse a popular random website, even if that random website is from "harvard" or something. It's a worse source than a paper / dataset / article in a trade publication / review article in the field, but those are hard to interpret if you're not familiar with them.

It is shocking that over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Even if we are not among them, we cannot ignore the fact that 10% of males will experience the prison system for a period of time.

I always have a hard time believing this. I suspect that this statistic includes -- and is vastly inflated by -- relatively short stints in county jails. If we look at the country's entire population and count everyone who, for example, spent a night in jail for a misdemeanor Fail To Appear warrant for driving on a suspended license and lump them together with the actual criminals in state and federal prisons, then I can see 9-10% being plausible. But actual prison incarceration? Doubt.

Lots of people have been jailed at one point in their life. Few have ever been imprisoned. Jail =/= prison. I think a lack of awareness of this distinction has led to the popularization of this statistic.

I posit it is sort of magical bean type of thinking. Lots of people don't like mass imprisonment/institutionalization. They also happen to not like being assaulted/raped/murdered by smelly people on the subway, or don't like strolling through a park full of feces and needles. Mental health is the magic bullet that lets you mentally square this circle, you don't have to make tradeoffs! This theory also generally fits into the worldview of the modern PMC and other urbanites who value talking and words very highly. In this unrealistic theory of the world the steps go like this:

  1. Get people to talk to social workers and shrinks.

  2. They now are fully functional citizens who can work at whole foods and live in (totally available) housing just like them.

  3. Now the streets are also clean and safe.

With regard to number 3, the exact inverse appears to be the current trend. I wouldn't be surprised if throwing money at "mental health" is actually exacerbating the problem.

This is not stemming from politicians. This is grass roots. There are tons of protests over Neely, for instance. You see this sentiment on the NYC subreddit as well. If you ask a progressive person, and frankly many moderate liberals as well, they echo it as well. On the contrary, politicians are just responding to what their constituents are saying on this one.

‘Tons of protests over Neely’ is not how I would describe literal tens of people in a city of 8 million.

It's not implausible. Assuming minimum values--"tons" being at least two, "tens of people" being at least 20--that works out to 200 lbs. per person.

So I guess then you're of the opinion that the ex-Marine whose actions led to Mr. Neely's untimely demise should be charged to the full extent of the law? After all, Neely was merely ranting, and while it's a common feature of schizophrenics, isn't inherently dangerous. To assume that such behavior was indicative of a violent tendency was unreasonable. Neely did have a violent past, but unless Penny can demonstrate that he had prior knowledge of this violence (and he almost certainly can't), his actions weren't justified any more than if he had perpetrated them upon an arbitrary person.

To assume that such behavior was indicative of a violent tendency was unreasonable

Is it unreasonable? In my experience, I have observed two flavors of schizophrenic ranting: "untargeted" and "targeted". Untargeted being when someone is yelling at the air, or at inanimate objects. "Targeted" when they are getting in specific people's faces.

I don't know which Neely was doing but I actually suspect that P( engaging in targeted ranting | no history of violence ) < 0.05, making it reasonable to assume.

Ex-Marine whose actions led to Mr. Neely's untimely demise should be charged to the full extent of the law?

If the Marine was in Afghanistan and blew up an entire family (ironically targeting a man working for a US-based aid company) including 7 children because he mistook buckets of water in their car for bombs - that's not a problem, nobody gets punished. US generals tried to lie about it until the media moved on, concealing their error.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/13/us-will-not-punish-military-over-afghanistan-drone-killing-of-civilians.html

People broadly recognize that there are errors made in wartime, especially when the US wants to look tough. On the macro scale, that's why the US was there for so long, because it was so embarrassing to admit they had no clue what was going on and no hope of achieving their nebulous, ill-defined goals. On the micro scale, they wanted to minimize the embarassment of getting attacked by ISIS during their ignominious withdrawal, so there would've been a lot of pressure to bomb some ISIS related target.

But our ex-Marine instead kills some useless homeless insane person who's a blight on everyone around him and this is a major problem? This is bizarro world where insane violent criminals get treated with 1000x the dignity of innocent families. If we can accept collateral damage in wasteful wars, we should accept collateral damage in maintaining basic standards of behaviour.

Alternately, some bleeding heart liberal would say 'stop bombing innocent families, don't kill unhoused people on the subway'

But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'

But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'

I can actually defend Neely in the context of your analogy from a right-wing perspective. Bombing Afghan aid workers and not giving a shit but handling Neely with kid gloves is right and proper because he's American and the Afghan aid worker isn't. One of our guys is worth a hundred foreigners, that's the whole point of being a nation with national in-group preference.

And all the people on the subway aren't Americans? What about the 7-year-old girl he tried to abduct? Or the 67 year old woman he punched?

Precisely because he's threatening Americans, he should be a higher priority target than some random Afghans (a country that is almost as far from the US as it is possible to get). A nationalist, in-group focused USA would sort out its problems at home before going out to wreak havoc in the Middle East and North Africa.

That's fair. I don't dispute that Neely should have been in jail already for his previous crimes against Americans.

After all, Neely was merely ranting, and while it's a common feature of schizophrenics, isn't inherently dangerous.

Is it? Have you been polling schizophrenics for their proclivity to rant? I suppose we should assume 90% of the top level posters here are schizophrenics yeah?

From what I've read so far, Neely was walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor. I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that that this is the kind of behavior that is usually reserved for the mentally ill and intoxicated. You can call it ranting, raving, or whatever, but it's certainly not normal and is certainly distinct from going off on tangents in a space specifically dedicated for the purpose. News reports indicated that Neely was schizophrenic and I'm assuming that that influenced his behavior, but I'm no psychiatrist.

He had an open warrant for punching an elderly woman in the face. Also he had 44 prior arrests. Also multiple people have come forward to say he had tried to victimize others in crimes that went unreported. This is unsurprising, most crime is unreported, so anytime a criminal gets caught doing something, it’s safe to assume he has done it multiple times before. This means Neely probably victimized hundreds of people already, through acts of trying to kidnap a teen girl to trying to push people into the tracks (attempted murder). Thus the marine was fully justified in using non lethal means to subdue the threat. The fact he had an anomalous reaction, likely to due to drugs and an unhealthy lifestyle like George Floyd, isn’t the marines fault in the least.

Thus the marine was fully justified in using non lethal means to subdue the threat.

Unless the marine knew about that criminal history (and note btw that a large number of those arrests were for things like turnstile jumping), they are irrelevant to the question of whether he was justified.

I'm not very sympathetic to "The actor couldn't have researched that specific information, therefore their decision couldn't have been affected by those facts."

As a simple example, imagine that the unknowable facts were completely different. In this hypothetical Neely has won the Carnegie Medal for civilian heroism, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is a shoo-in for canonization as a Saint, and did every other good thing you can name. The marine still hasn't done any biographical research. Do you think that that background would be just as irrelevant as the real one?

I don't blame people for being correct even if their reasoning can't withstand strict scrutiny.

Yes, that background would very obviously be completely irrelevant. To quote the California Supreme Court:

the law recognizes the justification of self-defense not because the victim "deserved" what he or she got, but because the defendant acted reasonably under the circumstances. Reasonableness is judged by how the situation appeared to the defendant, not the victim. As the Court of Appeal noted, "Because [j]ustification does not depend upon the existence of actual danger but rather depends upon appearances' (People v. Clark (1982) 130 Cal. App.3d 371, 377 [181 Cal. Rptr. 682]; see also CALJIC No. 5.51), a defendant may be equally justified in killing agood' person who brandishes a toy gun in jest as a `bad' person who brandishes a real gun in anger."

People v. Minifie, 13 Cal. 4th 1055, 1068 (1996). That seems to me to be 100 percent correct, both legally and morally.

I'm more sympathetic to that argument when we have months of factfinding followed by days of debate on the minutiae of the event, like in a criminal trial. We don't usually have that much detail available, so we have to use something to fill in the blanks the rest of the time.

The flow of information from the "unknown" background to the actor isn't magic, it's just not explained in the text. For a more concrete example of how background characteristics can change the events in a way that aren't reflected in a description, consider:

Alice shot Bob after he approached her in the alleyway behind 1st street. She stated that she feared for her life, as he was carrying knives "in an obvious manner". Bob was a 23 year old male who...

The end. Everything else is background that she couldn't have researched (and even the age would've been a guess). Otherwise it might change your opinion that he:

A) ...had a history of mugging, a rap sheet as long as your arm, etc.

B) ...was a culinary student heading home from class.

I think that variant A was likely justified, and variant B likely wasn't. Do you think that both are, or neither?

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Arriving at a correct answer through insufficiently rigorous reasoning is what is called "guessing". We discourage it in students, we discourage it in AIs (at least to the point where they guess so well as to be indistinguishable from reasoning). I damn well want to discourage guessing before you attack someone, too.

He used the appropriate level of force. People forget it wasn’t just him - he had help from two black men who also thought this guy needed restraining. Are they guilty of aiding in murder? Why is no one calling for their arrest? This is a rhetorical question - I know exactly why they aren’t

BLM was calling for the arrest of all of them. Consistent, if wrong.

Didn’t see that, got a source?

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  1. Perhaps, but nevertheless Neely's criminal history is irrelevant.

  2. The others did not cause Neely's death. If anything, they made it less likely that Neely would die, by reducing the need for Penny to use great amounts of force.

On your 2nd point - did they really?

If the marine restraining Neely was in the wrong and jumped the gun, intervening on Neely's behalf would have made it less likely that he dies. Instead, they enabled the marine.

I'm very much on the side of the marine and the men who assisted, but you cannot so neatly excuse the 'extras' from culpability if you see Neely's death as a grave injustice. If you're going to be pissed at the marine, you should be pissed at the others.

Saying "Actually, the other two men could have potentially saved Neely's life by helping restraining him" is a disingenuous redirection from the obvious racial dynamics at play. That may have pull with you, but I'm betting most people who are even aware of the incident don't even know there were others involved.

We could investigate the reasons behind that state of affairs as well, but the answers will also lie in that general direction.

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Actually from a legal perspective you’re wrong - helping restrain someone so that they can be more effectively executed makes you an accomplice. Once again, I ask why no one is calling for these people to also be prosecuted, when Chauvins fellow officers who didn’t even touch Floyd all got heavy sentences?

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walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor.

What, do you think, would have happened next. This seems to be leading up to a certain kind of action, no?

Probably nothing, in my experience. That raises an interesting question: Penny was apparently from Long Island, so he might have been more frightened of Neely than a more worldly person would have been (or perhaps not. Perhaps Penny came to NYC often and had seen his share of homeless people. Or, perhaps Neely was in fact behaving in an unusually frightening manner.

"A more worldly person wouldn't be scared of a raving lunatic and would just know that's the cost of city living"

That misstates the issue. The issue is NOT whether or not it is a cost of city living; it is whether a reasonable person in Penny's position would have believed that Neely posed an imminent danger. There is actually a lot of case law which struggles with this particular issue. Eg: Calif Criminal Jury Instruction 505, on self-defense, says: "When deciding whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, consider all the circumstances as they were known to and appeared to the defendant and consider what a reasonable person in a similar situation with similar knowledge would have believed." Well, does that mean a reasonable New Yorker, or a reasonable tourist, or something else? For example, the California Supreme Court has rejected the idea that a jury must consider what a "reasonable gang member" or a "reasonable battered woman" would believe, People v. Humphrey, 13 Cal. 4th 1073 (1996).* I would personally say that a jury should hear evidence of how conversant Penny was with ranting homeless people and should take into account how someone with that level of familiarity would have responded (that is part of "similar knowledge," IMHO), but then I am partial to criminal defendants.

*Though evidence that a battered woman might actually perceive a danger is admissible. But that is a different question than whether the belief is reasonable; self-defense requires both that the defendant have an actual belief that danger is imminent and that the belief be reasonable (though in CA and elsewhere, having an actual, but unreasonable belief = imperfect self-defense, which is a partial defense).

Well, it seems they joined in after Penny initiated things, which is a different scenario. I might have joined myself, to keep things from escalating, even if I didn't think Neely was an actual threat.

"It's not 'Nam Smokey, there are rules" -- if you're gonna fight with bums and expect not to be arrested, you need to wait for them to very clearly hit you first. This does put one at a disadvantage, but them's the breaks.

Cameras ruining all the fun these days, you can't get away with saying they swung first smh

No cameras showing the start of the incident here. Not that that will help Penny; the general rule of authority is that it started when they saw it.

I think the facts haven’t come out to discern whether he should be charged.

But I’m less talking about whether Neely deserved to be killed, and more talking about the public response to his actions - irrespective of his death. This same outcry happens when there are other random acts of violence that catch the headlines. Michelle Go, for instance.

I think honestly it stems from a much larger error in meta ethics in the sense that it seems that the west has come to the conclusion that people cannot choose their behavior at all, and thus if they do a bad thing, or fail to do a good thing, there must be a systemic explanation because of course he didn’t choose to live that way and didn’t choose to do that thing. And once you’ve moved the locus of control away from the individual, it becomes the fault of society and we must have programs to deal with this sort of thing, and if we have them, they need more money.

The incentive is obvious from an elite government/nonprofit elite POV — the programs created to solve the “systemic problems” are basically elite jobs programs. People like them love programs because people like them work for those new programs and spend that money. They benefit directly.

But I think the bigger issues this approach creates are learned helplessness (self-cultivation is a skill, self-control is a skill, and so is discipline), and an increasing reluctance to say something about bad behavior in ourselves and others. And in a lot of places (go talk to teachers, for example) the rules don’t exist. Teachers complain about this all the time. Kid doesn’t do anything in class but draw dickbutt and act out? He’s getting a C, because we don’t flunk kids anymore. If a kid disrupts class, even if they do so in a threatening way? He goes to the office and nothing happens. Cops tell similar stories — you can arrest them all day and watch them walk out, charges dropped, a day later. What this creates is a lack of accountability and structure. People pretty much know they face few consequences of their actions. So given that most of us won’t so much as say something, and the authorities aren’t allowed to do anything, anyone so inclined will do whatever he wants to.

I agree with your assessment. When I've written about it I've referred to it as this perception that we are in a post-homo sapien world; that we have fully outgrown our primitive nature and have gained the ability to perfectly engineer society and human nature. It ignores that the same basic laws of nature apply; that human systems are complex to the point that they cannot be fully comprehended, so we cannot simply decide to intervene to produce x desired outcome because a. there is no way we can truly understand and respond to the ultimate and specific causal forces and b. there is no way we can truly understand the effects a given intervention can have. I mean it sort of doesn't matter whether people have the ability to choose their behavior. Whether or not the decision to murder someone is the result of genetic predispositions and a traumatic childhood, that person is a murderer; and we should be focused on ensuring they cannot murder.

I think the meta ethical fallacy you point out and the post-homo sapien world i point out observe something that is intellectually muddled and has a selective view of whether free will exists/human nature is a blank slate. This narrative suggests that free will exists to the extent that human nature is something that can be re-engineered by humans, but not to the extent that the individual can be held accountable for their actions.

I find this all especially interesting given that if you look at people who did just heinous shit throughout history, e.g. serial killers or rapists etc., they typically had a rough upbringing and they probably would not have done their heinous acts if not for some traumatic and formative experience. But no one jumps in and says Jeffrey Dahmer shouldn't be held accountable because he had a fucked up childhood. But even if they did, you have to ask, who gives a fuck? He did what he did. You can't go back in time and change his childhood.

I view many progressive prerogatives like this as being this rebellion against the notion that the laws of nature apply to humans and reign supreme (in that they cannot be refuted or changed). It's this notion of the helicopter mom and the administrative state; that we can overcome our environment, pad its walls to eliminate everything bad, and that we are not subject to the imperceptible interdependencies that characterize complex systems. That there are inevitable and organic consequences to actions which serve to deincentivize bad behaviors. Complex human systems function in the same way as a free market; the free market functions the way it does because it is a complex web of organic nodes, just like any system of humans.

Alternatively, I think it may be the result of modern existence becoming very complex --> complexity is uncertainty --> humans fear uncertainty most of all --> humans gravitate to these notions that the environment and the uncertainty it creates can be conquered/that there is a bad guy (e.g. the system, elites, whatever) that can be blamed and defeated. I truly think that in 10 years people are going to be shocked and find absurd notions like these.

I think this rejection of the laws of nature and natural way of things also manifests in the popular view that someone's wage should be a reflection of the standard of living that wage affords them, and not a reflection of their market value/contribution to the company. It's a rejection of the idea that the life someone ends up with is largely a function of the decisions they've made.

I tend to agree, but I wonder if there’s also a sense in which blaming big systems is a dodge against having to do something concrete. If the problem is dangerously mentally ill on the subway, detaining them seems mean. Blame something huge means you don’t have to do the mean thing.

I had just been promoted, and BAU was less prestigious than my own university, so I thought the odds of me actually taking the BAU job if offered were low, but my academic friends and mentors all encouraged me to go along for the experience and to see if I fell in love with the BAU campus or faculty. And who knows, they might offer me so much I couldn't refuse.

This is a great example of how having other options, such as a current job you like, allows you to be more relaxed and treat the interview process as a two-way street to assure mutual fit. You then have greater latitude to do things like smoke-out any woke-scolds and Dolores Umbridges. With no other attractive options, one would have to play it more carefully. Beggars can’t be choosers. And with other attractive options, employers—like women—will often be more interested in you and work harder to compete for you.

the experience soured me considerably on US academia, and made me grateful that my corner of European academia seems to be working pretty well… the wider team gets on brilliantly, we pack out our rooms and the bars afterwards with a wide mix of academic staff, we routinely win huge grants to expand or collaborate, and my boss regularly talks about the importance of ideological diversity

"Best we can do is an icy, suffocating atmosphere where everyone’s a potential cop, talk-attendance is a zero-sum competition, after-hours drinks are a trap, and ‘ideological diversity’ is treated as a dog-whistle for wrong-think.”

my boss regularly talks about the importance of ideological diversity (he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines).

Unless I'm misunderstanding it, this sentence kind of amazes me. As an example of how much your current institution respects ideological diversity, you mention that the institution has deliberately fostered a chilling effect on speech where it's common knowledge that speech perceived as being too woke will be frowned upon by the higher-ups... and where those higher-ups are themselves acting as a result of a chilling effect deliberately created by the government to minimise the presence in academia of an ideology it does not like? And this seems to you like ideological diversity?

I mean, that makes sense if you define 'ideologically diverse' to mean 'friendly to right-wing viewpoints', but not if you have a more reasonable definition of what that should mean.

(i) In the main interview, when I asked why I wanted to work at BAU, I mentioned that it had a great record for academic free speech, including a very respectable FIRE ranking. I could see people looking flustered when I said this, and I was subsequently told that this was a strategic mistake, because 'academic freedom' would code to many faculty members as basically the right to say unpalatable non-progressive things (plus FIRE was not well regarded). I knew it was a risk, but as far as I was concerned, it was a good filter for the kind of people and environment I wanted to work with. Still, I was surprised that it went down so obviously badly. BAU is not Mount Holyoke or Harvard; it is a massive university with lots of blue collar and international students, so it wasn't antecedently clear to me how much progressive identarian authoritarianism would have seeped in.

I mean, you probably should have guessed that, yes. You probably shouldn't lead with "Hire me, I'll be a constant annoyance to you for years to come." The question of whether you can get hired despite viewpoints that might make them look bad, if you otherwise have a stellar resume, is distinct from the question of whether you can get hired with the opening pitch "I'm gonna make you look terrible in the press, k?"

(v) In my current job, I have lots of autonomy, as do people who report to me. For example, if someone says "I want to try to start a collaboration with University X in Argentina", then our default response is "Cool, how can we make that happen?" We also have lofty ambitions, and are constantly trying to find ways to expand or get more money (we have tripled the number of our grad students in the last 3 years, for example). This is despite being a pretty small organization within our university. By contrast, at BAU, when I made some more ambitious proposals for how BAU could foster collaboration or bring in new grants or spin-off new research centres, I was met with uncomprehending stares; the default view was "well that could be interesting I guess, but shouldn't you be focusing on traditional publications to boost your odds of getting tenure?" While that may be a realistic assessment of what would be in my interests working at BAU, again, it put me off working there.

Our offices may be grotty and dilapidated by comparison, but the wider team gets on brilliantly, we pack out our rooms and the bars afterwards with a wide mix of academic staff

I don't have much direct experience with US academia and how it compares to European academia, but this sounds reasonable to me, yes. When I meet Americans older than 50, they are always amazed that I go to the bar with people I work with all the time; they seem surprised that anyone anywhere in the world still does this.

you mention that the institution has deliberately fostered a chilling effect on speech where it's common knowledge that speech perceived as being too woke will be frowned upon by the higher-ups

Not the case at all. We have plenty of people working on projects that might be perceived as woke. The main thing we’re keen to avoid is accusations of cancel culture or right-leaning views being censored — that’s what I mean by bad headlines.

You probably shouldn't lead with "Hire me, I'll be a constant annoyance to you for years to come."

Why should this be a consequence of supporting academic freedom? I want to work in an institution with bold thinkers from across the political spectrum who feel confident exploring big controversial ideas. That used to be very much part of the mission statement in much of the humanities, and that’s why I wouldn’t be interested in working at an institution where academic speech was suppressed.

Not the case at all. We have plenty of people working on projects that might be perceived as woke. The main thing we’re keen to avoid is accusations of cancel culture or right-leaning views being censored — that’s what I mean by bad headlines.

So in particular, if you were interviewing for a position in front of a higher-up in the department and your first words to them indicated that you might be very likely, as a teacher, to say the kind of thing that would generate a "Woke Academia Gone Mad" headline, they might choose not to hire you?

(he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines)

It's working!

Yeah, honestly this is the kind of shit that makes me think that a vague center-right government can be an effective response to wokism; no crazy Trump-style radicals who will energise the left. Instead, practical people who can speak softly and carry a big stick. I say that reluctantly, because on economic issues I'm far closer to the dissident left (e.g. Freddie deBoer), but can't stand the progressive social nonsense.

It can be more than "vague centre-right". America is growing some smart-but-hard right wing doers. DeSantis is the obvious one, but not the only one. Then there's activists like Chris Rufo who can work through whatever politician has power.

I think your BAU and likely the particular department within the BAU is pretty unrepresentative. I'm a faculty member at a different BAU and it's really nothing like this at all.

I will second this comment. Comparing my actual personal experiences in what was supposed to be the most extreme possible environment to what I read on the internet is what made me completely distrust the "wokeness is taking over everything" narrative in the first place.

Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.

My spouse has been a tenured humanities faculty member at a BAU for 20 years, with several different stints across the country the decade before that. Between our own experience and that of dozens of friends in the academy, everything the OP wrote rang true to me, except the timeline at the conclusion (our institution is 5-10 years ahead of the OP's account).

I'd add that faculty social life is stultifying - it's not that you can't ever have real conversations with people about difficult topics, but it takes a long time to break through the suffocating blanket of conformity. Most social encounters start with progressive consensus-building about the issues of the day, and often can't move past that. It's worse if there are unfamiliar people in the group, or administrators.

These phenomena may not universal, but are, at a minimum, widespread. Above all, I'd love to know what your institutions are doing right that you don't see this.

We don't have so many examples, but on second thought maybe this is yet another example of academic experiences being dramatically different depending on which department you're in. Both you and the OP seem to mention experience with humanities departments, though I'm not sure where @Tomato is.

I'm in pure math and I've found that even with new people I can argue almost anything political as long as I tie it back to some common fundamental value and avoid saying certain poisoned words (the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time). A lot of my stated policy preferences are extremely liberal, so maybe this gives me enough trust and legitimacy that people don't think I'm secretly hiding different values when I say something not in the consensus---I can argue that standardized tests are actually good for undergrad admissions and people do think I believe so for the "right" reasons. It helps a lot with the trust issue to point out examples where something exceptional is happening that changes your belief---I'll say I don't like the general GRE but undergrad admissions are different for this and this reason.

Now for some speculation on why there might be a difference between fields, I think it's pretty important that for mathematicians, their research area isn't really expected to give them any special insight into politics. If a liberal mathematician hears about a Trump supporting colleague, there's an easy out: "well, they're my friend so I know their heart is in the right place and I know they treat everyone in the department with equal respect, but they're just confused because of so and so biases. Anyways, none of us are really that good at thinking about politics anyways, remember the last time we talked to our friend in history/philosophy/etc.? Also, remember the Unabomber? That Serge Lang was an AIDS denialist? Trump-guy isn't really messing up so badly". For a humanist who's actually supposed to be an expert in people and culture, the out isn't so easy and the assumption might become that supporting Trump is a true implication of their values which therefore must be evil.

the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time

I somehow missed this response, but two months later, I need to recognize what an excellent line this is.

Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.

Check the poster's username and history. They're a fish not noticing water.

This is not the kind of comment you can throw out without evidence. And if you do point it out with evidence, it should be done as lightly as possible in a non-antagonistic way.

You should know better.

That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.

Out of interest, are you humanities or sciences? I didn't put this in the main post for vague OpSec reasons, but this particular post was a 75/25 split between a humanities department and a science department. I had separate meetings with the people in the science department, and they were lovely; much easier to get along with, not least because half of them were from outside the US (lots of East Asians, South Asians, and Eastern Europeans) and consequently less obsessed with tribal signaling. More generally, they seemed more interested in the content of my ideas than running me through procedure or testing for wrongthink. Sadly, I was told they had minimal influence on who got the job, given they were only paying a quarter of the salary, at best serving as a tiebreaker.

I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.

What is there to unpack? I don’t experience the things he claims to experience. Nobody I know does. Colleagues at my uni and other unis make fun of having to write a diversity statement for Berkeley, and that’s all I’ve ever heard about this stuff irl.

BAU is not Mount Holyoke or Harvard; it is a massive university with lots of blue collar and international students

I think you've misread the social fabric of America. I would have expected "large research university near a nice urban center on the West Coast" to be more progressive than Harvard. Harvard has the constraint of having to project a veneer of respectability. BAU is likely to be filled with exactly the kind of person that sees 50 Stalins-style activism as their ticket into the big leagues. They're also unlikely to experience much student or government pushback, unlike say, Auburn or Arkansas.

I mean, isn't it clear that mediocrity is at the origin of this activism? Havard can't afford to much mediocrity, at some point they have a reputation to hold. BAU, on the other hand...

spoiler: so far I haven't heard back, so I assume I didn't get it anyway

I'm (unfortunately) not surprised that mentioning FIRE probably tanked any chance you had right from the beginning. Yeah, FIRE is basically right-coded nowadays, and frankly I suspect it will suffer from the same sort of institutional capture in reverse that swallowed the ACLU. (That said, it's one of the few charities I still donate to.)

I first noticed "free speech" being treated as basically code for "right winger who wants to call people the n-word" back in the A+ "Freeze Peaches!" days, but it's still been shocking to me how many progressives now literally consider "free speech" or "academic freedom" to be a right-wing talking point.

Anecdotally, I feel like even in the tech industry I am seeing a lower quality of college graduates the last few years, though it's hard to say how much of that is them being put through too many woke hoops and how much was Covid laying waste to academic rigor and accountability.

Anecdotally, I feel like even in the tech industry I am seeing a lower quality of college graduates the last few years, though it's hard to say how much of that is them being put through too many woke hoops and how much was Covid laying waste to academic rigor and accountability.

Have you considered that you might have become more competent yourself, and thus those student look more ignorant in comparison? It could explain the phenomenon at least partly.

I'm (unfortunately) not surprised that mentioning FIRE probably tanked any chance you had right from the beginning. Yeah, FIRE is basically right-coded nowadays, and frankly I suspect it will suffer from the same sort of institutional capture in reverse that swallowed the ACLU. (That said, it's one of the few charities I still donate to.)

I doubt it will end up this way, if anything they seem more likely to swerve left. The impression in the dissident sphere is that they're controlled opposition already.

I doubt it will end up this way, if anything they seem more likely to swerve left. The impression in the dissident sphere is that they're controlled opposition already.

Why, because they still represent leftists being censored by conservatives too? Or do they think FIRE will stop representing right-wingers?

Because they seem focus on the most milquetoast and establishment-friendly dissidents out there.

I had that thought in the back of my head as well, but it's also natural for more spicy dissidents to feel left out, and expect the free speech warriors to unperson them the moment Jesse Signal is no longer considered a bigot.

They are correct to think so and that is not the proper way to prosecute the culture war. When the free speech left was at its height, they were defending literal Nazis.

They also chose to defend Nazis.

Commenting on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Coronation Sermon

Nobody has made a post about the coronation yet. There weren't any major culture war incidents. It went off without a hitch in other words. I'm reaching to find something to talk about. Here is my reaction to the sermon given by the archbishop of Canterbury during the ceremony. The sermon states the ceremonial role of the British monarch in plain terms and tries its best to skirt around the fact that the king has no power. He likens Charles III to Jesus. Here is the full sermon:

https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2023/05/06/archbishop-of-canterburys-coronation-sermon/

We are here to crown a King, and we crown a King to serve.

What is given today is for the gain of all. For Jesus Christ announced a Kingdom in which the poor and oppressed are freed from chains of injustice. The blind see. The bruised and broken-hearted are healed.

That Kingdom sets the aims of all righteous government, all authority. And the Kingdom also sets the means of all government and authority. Jesus doesn’t grasp power or hold onto status.

The King of Kings, Jesus Christ, was anointed not to be served, but to serve. He creates the unchangeable law that with the privilege of power comes the duty to serve.

Service is love in action. We see active love in our care for the most vulnerable, the way we nurture and encourage the young, in the conservation of the natural world. We have seen those priorities in the life of duty lived by our King.

Today we have the honour of being in this Abbey with so many who show such love; you work with charities and organisations, you build community, you serve the nation in Armed Forces, in emergency services, and so many other ways. Next door are 400 extraordinary young people in St Margaret’s, whose lives speak of service. Around the world in the Realms and Commonwealth are so many more. You live your lives for the sake of others.

The unity you show, the example you give, is what binds us together and offers societies that are strong, joyful, happy and glorious. They bear heavy weights for us.

The weight of the task given you today, Your Majesties, is only bearable by the Spirit of God, who gives us the strength to give our lives to others. With the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the King is given freely what no ruler can ever attain through will, or politics, or war, or tyranny: the Holy Spirit draws us to love in action.

This is promised by Jesus who put aside all privilege, because, as the first reading tells us, God will give all things for our sake, even His life.

His throne was a Cross. His crown was made of thorns. His regalia were the wounds that pierced his body.

Each of us is called by God to serve. Whatever that looks like in our own lives, each of us can choose God’s way today.

We can say to the King of Kings, God Himself, as does the King here today, ‘give grace that in thy service I may find perfect freedom’.

In that prayer there is promise beyond measure, joy beyond dreams, hope that endures. By that prayer, for every King, every ruler, and, yes, for all of us, we are opened to the transforming love of God.

The archbishop likens Charles III to Jesus, not by elevating Charles to the level of a god, but by bringing down Jesus to the level of a man. Christians believe that Jesus was both a man and a God. The fact that he was and is an omnipotent deity is essential to Christian theology. But having the limitations of a man is what makes the telling of Jesus' life in the Gospels a compelling story. The archbishop's sermon depicts Jesus as a very talented preacher who relies on the power of persuasion to save souls. This aspect of the Gospel story most closely resembles Charles III's role as archon basileus of a parliamentary democracy. But unlike the British monarch, Jesus had real power to back up his preaching.

The sermon oversells what Charles III can accomplish with mere persuasion. It states with confidence that "showing unity" and "giving a good example" are sufficient to "bind us together", to "offer a society that is strong, joyful, etc." and to "bear heavy weights". By speaking of the ceremonial role of the British monarch as sufficient to accomplish the duties of kingship, the archbishop leaves no consideration for what happens if persuasion fails to produce the advertised results.

I was raised Christian but became an atheist a long time ago. When I think back on Christianity, there are certain concepts that that strike me as peculiar. One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair. My naïve understanding of Christianity when I was a Christian was influenced by growing up in an individualistic culture and a school system organized along individualistic lines. Every person was tested by God individually, I imagined. Sharing notes or copying answers from other test takers was not part of the test. I believed my choices in life would just determine whether or not my soul was saved. But the thought that my choices in life could be the determining factor in making somebody else a good person literally never occurred to me, and if it had, it would have greatly discomforted me. I would have perceived it as an added burden. Again, it would never have occurred to me that other people were sharing the burden of making me a good person. I would have perceived the sharing of responsibility only as an increased burden. I imagine that people raised in collectivist cultures perceive the sharing of burdens as generally resulting in a decreased burden. The concept of a mutually supporting community taking collective responsibility for the salvation of their souls is probably much closer to how people thought about Christianity in the past. It almost gives me warm fuzzy feelings, but I still find the chaotic, random nature of it discomforting.

Service and helping people is the unifying theme of the archbishop's sermon, but there is something lacking in his call to service. I like to help people. I like to be of service. I like giving people presents. I like teaching. I'm pretty good at it. But something I don't try to do is influence friends and family and coworkers to make them better people. I shrink from any situation where somebody is doing something immoral that I could intervene to correct. It's one thing teach somebody practical knowledge, and quite another to stage an intervention.

Christianity used to take the collectivist approach to saving souls. It wasn't enough to lead the horse to water. Responsible people had to dunk the horse's head and make it drink. The king was often the one doing the dunking. Since the time of the Glorious Revolution, the power of the state has grown enormously. But liberal democracies impose artificial limits on how they use their enormous power. Faced with equine dehydration, or any other societal problem, the solution must be more education, free counseling and state-sponsored therapy. It's fitting that the land of the NHS should refer to kingship as a service. The solution is always a service. Yet there remain certain classes of societal problems that are best solved—or that can only be solved—by issuing a command.

When I think back on Christianity, there are certain concepts that that strike me as peculiar. One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair.

For what it's worth (not that I am trying to get you back in the fold or anything), that is not really true as far as I know. The way I was always taught is that God deals with people with their circumstances taken into account. So if you consciously reject Jesus, you will likely be judged unrighteous after death (though in the end only God knows, at best we can just speculate). But if you just wind up never having heard of him during your life, that isn't going to factor in. Instead you would be judged based on how much you tried to do right insofar as you were taught it, and what your conscience nudged you to do.

Obviously Christianity has many different schools of though, so there are probably Christians who really do believe that if someone in an isolated Amazon tribe dies without ever having heard of Jesus, they're going straight to hell. But it definitely isn't what I was taught, at least.

So if you consciously reject Jesus, you will likely be judged unrighteous after death (though in the end only God knows, at best we can just speculate). But if you just wind up never having heard of him during your life, that isn't going to factor in. Instead you would be judged based on how much you tried to do right insofar as you were taught it, and what your conscience nudged you to do.

The reasonable course of action for all sensible Christians who truly believe this is to limit the world's knowledge of Christianity as much as possible and make talking about Jesus absolutely forbidden for every member of the faith, for anyone who tells someone who has never heard of Christ about him risks that person's eternal damnation.

No different to how the reasonable course of action if you're Buddhist is to embark on a crusade to eliminate all life. Can't reincarnate if there is nothing to reincarnate into...

I certainly don't hold to the view that non-Christians can be saved while remaining so, but I don't think that what you said necessarily follows, since if it's easier to be saved through Christianity than through non-Christianity, that would be one reason for the difference. (for example, if living a sufficiently righteously life is hard, but there's forgiveness of sins with Christianity, that would explain why evangelizing could make sense)

But I do think belief in Christianity is necessary for salvation.

This is commonsensical if you assume that (a) God is omnibenevolent and (b) you have an independent standard of what is good/evil, but it goes against several widely held Christian doctrines - Original Sin (we are all born with a mortal sin that requires repentence through Christian belief), the idea that knowing of Jesus is an especially good thing as far as eternal life goes (not a logical implication of John 3:16, but certainly hinted at in context) and the idea that Christianity is a prerequisite for salvation (strongly suggested by "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the father, except through me").

This was one of the main things that made me into an atheist. In particular, it made me think that Christianity seemed an awful lot like a mystical Jewish group that morphed into a gentile religion, rather than the intervention of a God who actually loved all humans. As Jesus Christ Superstar put it, the peoples of the Red Sea had no mass communications... Unfortunately, they also didn't have an all-powerful God (with a record of intervening in human affairs, to the point of drowning > 99% of its population) to help spread their message around the world.

Making them a natural place for a mystical group to develop and talk of miracles, but not a natural group for an all-powerful God to use to spread his message. Of course, you can explain all that in an ad hoc way, but at that point I was finally unwilling to believe more improbable stuff to support my apologetics.

Actually, the belief that they're damned is a pretty normal belief, I'm pretty sure.

Among the Roman Catholics, there's the teaching of Extra eccleasiam nulla salus—outside the church there is no salvation, although I'm not sure what Vatican II did to things. The council of Florence has a statement saying that neither pagans nor Jews nor heretics nor schismatics will be saved. Eastern Orthodoxy I think has at times expressed similar thoughts, although I know that universalism is also kind of popular among them, at least in the present day.

Protestants are more varied, I think, but I think with the emphasis on sola fide, there should be the same belief.

Christianity really is an exclusive religion. As Christ says, "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the father, except through me." John 3:16 is perhaps the most famous verse in the bible: "For God loved the world thus: he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life." Paul writes, "For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe."

If you're wondering, how is this just, well it's not as if Christians think they don't deserve hell. Their own salvation is an enormous gift, and it isn't as if it's owed to everyone else that they come to believe in Christ.

Edit: It looks like I understated the effect of Vatican II, Vatican II seems to have reinterpreted the things I was saying so as that they're probably not representative of current Catholic teaching.

I was taught in catechism class people who were not introduced to Christianity could still be saved if they lived righteous lives. So, unless the people writing the official catechism textbooks were heretics or it’s changed in the last 20 years that’s the official line from the church.

I imagine you're right. Aren't there teachings about the necessity of grace, though, given that the Pelagian controversy was a thing? And wouldn't pretty much everyone have committed a mortal sin at some point (and so they wouldn't be considered to have lived a righteous life, as you put it), as well as there being original sin?

Not disagreeing that is probably the official line, just unsure how some of that works.

The mechanism of theoretical salvation for the righteous non-Christian is still the grace obtained through the sacrifice of Christ, as it is for the innocent unborn, and for youths before their personal age of accountability.

They would have to be someone who, were they not ignorant of or memetically poisoned against the gospel, would repent of and turn from wickedness, and plead Christ’s blood before God’s throne.

So then why do Christians spread the gospel? First, because He told us to. Second, to assure salvation and hope to any who feel lost in this world’s turmoil.

That's a reasonable take, but I don't think it's quite the same as what @Hyperion was saying. You seem to be saying those who would have believed would be saved, while he was saying that those who did the best available to them would be saved, which are not the same.

(I'm not sure that the link you put is arguing what you are saying, since it seems to say that everyone still is guilty at the end—just saying there are differences of degree, if I'm reading it rightly.)

I disagree with both, though.

The scriptural evidence is somewhat interesting. The main thing that comes to mind is some imprecations of Jesus:

Matthew 11:21 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. 22 But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 23 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. 24 But I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.”

It's definitely not saying here that Sodom and Tyre and Sidon will be in paradise. But it seems like they will have a less severe judgment.

I think one thing to be kept in mind is that our salvation is fundamentally not based upon our deservingness, but Christ's. It's not that people are good enough but just in the wrong situtation, never hearing the gospel, etc. No, rather, conversion is rather a work of God in those who are wicked and undeserving.

Yeah, I gave a hot take on the most permissible salvation scenario I can reasonably consider possible. It’s not likely to shake out that way.

It doesn’t really work, but people, and religions, contain multitudes. You see this in all religions where they compromise their previous beliefs for various reasons and that becomes the new orthodoxy only to then compromise them again during the next crisis.

The catholic dogma was interpreted this way at the time of the Council of Florence (see also Dante), but it stopped to be long before Vatican II. For example:

To be in the communion of the Catholic Church and to be a member of the Church are two different things. They are in the communion of profession of her faith and participation of her sacraments, through the ministry and government of her lawful pastors. The members of the Catholic Church are all those who with a sincere heart seek the true religion and are in unfeigned disposition to embrace the truth wherever they find it. It never was our doctrine that salvation can be obtained only by the former.

John Carroll, first bishop of the US.

For the protestant, I don't get it. I was taught that they believe in fate, so that your salvation was decided by God before your birth and your actions don't matter, but I'm no expert.

You can't "reinterpret" defined dogma. That's what defining a dogma means.

"For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding" - Dei Filius, First Vatican Council 1870

As for the dogma itself:

"Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff." - Unam Sanctam, Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302

With regards to John Carroll, of course he's going to be wishy-washy like that. Maryland is surrounded by protestants. If he went around telling people they had to swear allegiance to the pope to be saved, the Establishment Clause might have been under some early pressure.

Well it was also the opinion of vatican II that everyone could be saved on his own merits, if they did not reject jesus. So it seems that you can actually reinterpret dogma, because that's what vatican II did. Just like the catholic church always had a dogma that you could not make money from money, yet there are catholic bankers now.

Let's say that person A asserts both that X, and that no future interpreters may gainsay X.

Then a century later, person B asserts both that not X, and that future interpreters may contradict A.

If both A and B are church leaders, it would be easy to say that B is simply mistaken. However, I think a better way to look at it may be that there are two separate churches, "A-type catholicism" and "B-type catholicism".

(If however B-types then go around asserting that they are and have always been A-types, we may have a problem.)

I think it's a little more complicated that, since Catholics are loath to admit that the dogma has actually changed.

What's actually going on is that they're reinterpreting X so that they don't have to agree with the actual sentiment, so that they can affirm X while denying what X was originally supposed to mean.

As was pointed out elsewhere, that's kind of hard to reconcile with some of the things said in Vatican I about reinterpretation not being okay, but there are sort of ways to get around that, via what seems like it's quite possibly a reinterpretation.

It depends how you define catholicism, but it seems to me that there is in practice only one type of catholicism. They recognize the same pope, they go to the same churches. That is why you can actually reinterpret dogmas, even if you said you couldn't. Because the dogmas are defined by the catholic community, not the other way.

Who exactly are "the catholic community"? There's a lot of variance out there.

And why does that allow reinterpretation? I'm afraid I'm not following.

More comments

Ah, revealed-preference dogma. :)

I agree with you. But that reads to me like it's contradicted by some of the things that Vatican II says about tradition in Dei Verbum, along the lines of Newman.

I think there are ways to get out of some of that—Bellarmine thought that only the canons and other select parts of councils are infallible, I believe, and what you cited first wouldn't fall under that.

But there is the following from Dei Filius, which is an anathema, so everyone would agree that it's infallible:

If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.

Unfortunately, that particular statement is a little ambiguous—the argument could be made (I think it might be unclear, there are features in the text of Dei Filius that could support either interpretation), that that anathema, when it has the word here translated as knowledge (scientia in latin), refers to non-theological sciences like psychology, not to theology.

I would prefer that it were less ambiguous, since I have Catholic friends to argue against who like the idea of development of dogma, but that's how it goes.

(Also, someone else attempting to use the set of texts you pointed out to argue a formerly Catholic friend into more anti-Vatican II beliefs did result in that person leaving Roman Catholicism)

Given the last canon of Dei Filius of Vatican I, it's at least questionable to me whether you should be able reinterpret dogmas like that (although I haven't actually read any Roman Catholic scholars to see how they approach that canon of Vatican I—it probably is a little ambiguous).

Well, I'm not sure how settled it was. Maybe he was trying to do something else, but the following from the Syllabus of Errors from 1864 at least reads as intending to prohibit some of what Carroll was there affirming (although maybe there's some other way to take it):

(15) Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.—Allocution "Maxima quidem," June 9, 1862; Damnatio "Multiplices inter," June 10, 1851.

(16) Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation.—Encyclical "Qui pluribus," Nov. 9, 1846.

(17) Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.—Encyclical "Quanto conficiamur," Aug. 10, 1863, etc.

(18) Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.—Encyclical "Noscitis," Dec. 8, 1849.

(those were condemned by Pius IX)

At this time, not all protestants really have a doctrine of predestination, but they should. Like under Thomas' understanding, you're predestined, but you also are condemned because of your own actions.

I was taught that they believe in fate, so that your salvation was decided by God before your birth and your actions don't matter, but I'm no expert.

In my experience only some Protestants believe that (notably Calvinists). Though, I also like the explanation I've read from Catholics. God exists outside of time, so he sees all of your life in one instant, like a single endless now. Therefore he knows what will happen, but you have free will nonetheless.

I realize that not everyone will jive with that explanation, but I personally rather like that one.

Right, I think that might end up being isomorphic to the Molinist interpretation, depending on how things fit into that. You still have to account for how any of that relates to God. Is it all dependent upon God's will in some way? Is any aspect of it independent? God being eternal doesn't make all the problems go away, since I would image there would still be some doctrine of providence.

I'm pretty sure Luther did not believe in free will, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Bondage_of_the_Will

It seems to me that for the catholics God knows (before your birth) if you will be saved, while for the protestants (at least those who don't believe in free will), God decides it.

Actually, that depends on the Catholic in question. The two predominant ideas on predestination are the Molinistic and the Thomistic views, I believe. Thomas Aquinas would see God as predestining, while Molina sort of would. (Predestinating which choices are instantiated, but not the output of the choices themselves, if I understand it correctly.)

Dominicans vs. Jesuits.

I disagree with the ad hoc social justice theology, because the Kingdom of God is not of our world (John 18:36). One of the most significant problems facing Christianity is the failure to read the plain wording of Jesus’ teachings, that we share between brothers (Christians in the Church) and lay down our lives for our friends (fellowship in the Church). Christians are not golems designed to do good for outsiders continually. They are designed to help Christians and make Christians, which is why so many of the passages on charity speak about brothers and little ones (in Christ). The Apostles did everything for Christians, they formed churches and shared wealth among Christians and did not go around healing atheists. Of the non-Christians, they said not even to share a meal with them! Any charity done to a non-Christian without the purpose of conversion is wasted.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan has been manipulated by false teachers who suppose that, despite every single parable possessing greater meaning in each word chosen, this parable simply means “do good to everyone”. Indeed, instead of Jesus saying “do good to everyone”, he wastes his words contriving his only parable with no greater meaning. A Samaritan, the original Jews / true priestly line of Israel, who are the neighboring faith of the Jews? No reason this is added. A man traveling from Jerusalem, the home of the Jews? No reason added. Encountering a man half-dead, on a path, and doing what was sufficient to save his life? Nope, no reason this part was added. How about when Jesus refuses to heal the Canaanite woman unless she humbled herself, saying “it is not right to throw the bread to the dogs”? He must have just been speaking in tongues, …

So the Archbishop should have elevated the masses to the mysteries of God instead of picturing Jesus as a SJW, IMO. But as for the King humbling himself? I find this beautiful. The only problem with a hereditary monarchy is that they lack the right moral training. Consider also in Philippians 2:

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Consider the end result. Are you making knees bow? Are you making tongues confess?

I'm confused about your reading of the Good Samaritan Parable.

The Samaritans aren't the friendly neighboring faith to Jesus's jewish audience, they're the heretical near outgroup. The Jews had demolished their temple in the previous century and in Jesus's time the Samaritan's profaned the temple mount by scattering bones on it. The parable is given in answer to a questioner asking 'who is my neighbor' that they should love as themselves. Before the heretical Samaritan helps the injured man, a priest and a levite refuse to help him, possibly because they value ritual cleanliness so highly they don't want to touch the man who may be dead. Jesus ends the parable by asking which of these is the injured man's neighbor.

Casting the hated heretic as the merciful unexpected neighbor rather than the high status fellow Jews suggests a broadening of the boundaries of who is a neighbor we are commanded to love, not a limiting of it to co-religionists.

As you mentioned, Jesus was against the religious developments of the Pharisees and was also critical of the Sadducees (who may be “Levites” in this parable). Their focus on purity laws, criticized abundantly in the Gospel, means that they could not touch a corpse without great inconvenience. The man is described as half-dead. Hyrcanus who ordered the Samaritan temple destroyed was aligned with the Pharisees IIRC. As Jesus came for the “lost flock”, and as he’s shown elsewhere friendly to Samaritans, I don’t think he or his followers considered them the out-group. In John 4 it’s mentioned that his apostles were surprised he was talking to a woman, but didn’t ask her what her business was, as they did with others considered the out group. He then stayed with them and apparently converted many of them.

The only criticism against the Samaritans by Jesus, as far as I know, is that the woman had five husbands. An interesting aside, in that passage, what’s translated as “no dealings with Samaritans” could be translated as “no joining up with Samaritans.” Perhaps these five husbands allude to the five books of the Pentateuch which the Samaritans believed to be holy only, and Jesus is coming to her as the one which represents the joining of the five books of the Torah. The husband motif is elsewhere found in the Bible, and this also allows us to make sense of why the woman twice repeats “he told me all that I ever did”.

It's kind of one of Jesus' things to be associating with people who would ordinarily be expected to part of the outgroup (tax collectors, lepers, "sinners" and yes, Samaritans), instead of the religious leaders. What do you mean by "he didn't ask her what her business was"? Are there numerous other examples of him doing that?

I wouldn’t phrase it like that. Jesus helps all manners of sinners because that’s one of the things God is for: a physician who heals the sick. He is not so much “associating with the out-group”, which for him are the Pharisees that he despises and curses, as showing us what God is. His associates are the Apostles, who are not sinners except the foretold Judas. I think we can be sure that this is the point because it’s specified exactly in the passage where he reclines with tax collectors etc:

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance

Yes, Jesus is there for the healing of the (spiritually) sick. But the Pharisees most certainly are sick, they just might resent being told so.

But I suppose that doesn't contradict your overall point about the good Samaritan, so let's address that. I think what Jesus is saying is not "which person shoud be your neighbor: Priests, Levites, or Samaritans." I think the priest and the Levite are set up as supposed to be thought of as exemplary keepers of the law (remember, this is all set up in the context of asking what is the greatest commandment of the law, and then this is something of an exposition of the second greatest), but what Jesus is saying is no, you should have compassion instead, despite being a Samaritan and so being much worse on the keeping-the-law scale, as they would think. Perhaps along the lines of the "I desire mercy and not sacrifice" in the prophets. But the question is not whether we should treat the Samaritan as a neighbor, it's that the Samaritan was treating the Jew as a neighbor. Again, Jews and Samaritans didn't exactly get along, so there's a picture there of transcending the ethnic boundaries.

At least, that's how I read it. Thoughts?

I'm not saying Jesus personally saw Samaritans as his outgroup, I'm saying that the Jewish man he is telling the parable to did because most Jews at that time did. It's unexpected that a Samaritan would help a Jews in the parable just as it is unexpected that a Jew would ask a Samaritan for water in John 4.

While it's true that there is supposed to be especial care for other Christians, it should not be unique to them.

The Samaritans were not at all looked upon favorably. See in John, where there is the woman at the well, and it's unusual that they are talking with one another (and not just because of different sex).

As to the not eating a meal with them, the main quote that I'm seeing this for (and by all means, bring up any others), is 1 Corinthians 5:11: "But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one."

Because it specifies someone who calls himself a Christian, I take this more as saying not to eat with professed Christians who do not live that out, not that it's talking about unbelievers.

For something showing both that there should be more care for Christians, but also that there should be care for everyone, see Galatians 6:10: "So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith."

Of the non-Christians, they said not even to share a meal with them!

Are you referencing 1 Corinthians 5:11?

I always took pretty much the opposite interpretation of that verse.

9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people; 10 I did not at all mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the greedy and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to leave the world. 11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is a sexually immoral person, or a greedy person, or an idolater, or is verbally abusive, or habitually drunk, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a person. 12 For what business of mine is it to judge outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? 13 But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the evil person from among yourselves.

New American Standard Bible

Thank you for correction, my memory was quite off. Although there is also the “don’t be unequally yoked with unbelievers” in 2 Cor 6:14, and then the ‘those who don’t care for their relatives are worse than unbelievers’ in 1 Tim 5:8.

If you associate with immoral outsiders, doesn't that make them into insiders, who you are forbidden from associating with? And doesn't that then make them into outsiders again, so you have to associate, so you then can't associate...?

No, hanging around with a Christian doesn't make you a Christian.

I have always found Christian theology fascinating, despite being an atheist. The scriptures are self-contradictory, and it's thousands of hours of entertainment to watch people tie themselves into knots trying to interpret them coherently. I can imagine Calvinist theologian James White being quite offended at the archbishop's sermon. He takes the position that yes, Christ is king, and that does mean that we exist to serve him. He directly connects the decline in emphasis of the Lordship of Christ to the decline of the temporal power of monarchs. The bible is chock full of references to the kingship of God and "The Kingdom" because that is the analogy that people at the time those books were written would have best understood. In a world with ceremonial kings that don't do anything, is it any surprise that people have invented a ceremonial God that doesn't do anything?

The scriptures are self-contradictory, and it's thousands of hours of entertainment to watch people tie themselves into knots trying to interpret them coherently.

Per my understanding (I'm sure there was some theologian at some point who had a dissenting view), the Mystery of the Trinity is a literal contradiction that must be embraced. If you ask "was Christ fully mortal in every sense, subject to all the limitations of mortality?" then the answer is "yes". If you then ask "was Christ fully divine in every sense, subject to none of the limitations of mortality?" then the answer is again "yes". The contradiction is not to be interpreted away; the contradiction is the whole point.

The contradiction is not to be interpreted away; the contradiction is the whole point.

Saying that X is a Mystery and that X is a contradiction are not the same thing.

I think it's usually understood to be beyond the capacity of human understanding, but not contradictory.

My favorite is Matthew 24:36:

“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."

It uses trinitarian language, but does not have an orthodox conception of the Godhead. People usually say "something something hypostatic union" to get around the Son not knowing, but does the Holy Spirit know the day and the hour? Sure sounds like he doesn't.

One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair. [...] The concept of a mutually supporting community taking collective responsibility for the salvation of their souls is probably much closer to how people thought about Christianity in the past. It almost gives me warm fuzzy feelings, but I still find the chaotic, random nature of it discomforting.

I find this to be one of the more beautiful aspects of Christian thought. Life isn't always fair. Coming to an understanding of the intense burdens that have been placed upon your shoulders simply for existing, burdens that you didn't ask for and had no foreknowledge of, offers a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with rationality without thereby causing a descent into total nihilism. Along similar lines:

"I like Schelling's nice totalitarian view; his idea is that even if you have no choice, you are still fully responsible for it. [...] It was forever decided, determined in the very fate of Judas, that he will betray Christ; he didn't have a choice. It was his destiny. But nonetheless he's fully responsible for it. [...] Schelling's solution of this enigma, which you find already in Kant, is a wonderful one. It's kind of a transcendental a priori act, it sounds idealist but it's not, it's very close to what in psychoanalysis we would have called the choice of the fundamental phantasy. In some kind of atemporal a priori act we are, as Sartre would have put it, responsible for our project; for what we are. Of course in our temporal reality we experience this as our nature, you cannot change it, but fundamentally at an unconscious level we are responsible for it. And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.

I find this to be deeply resonant. Others will find it to be nonsense. There's no accounting for taste.

I find this to be one of the more beautiful aspects of Christian thought. Life isn't always fair. Coming to an understanding of the intense burdens that have been placed upon your shoulders simply for existing, burdens that you didn't ask for and had no foreknowledge of, offers a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with rationality without thereby causing a descent into total nihilism.

If you pair this with the modern tendency to demand that life be fair for others, this sort of thing just results in the believer accepting all the burdens of the world -- not just those placed on themselves, but those placed on others who refuse to bear them -- on their own shoulders. It's asking to be taken advantage of.

sent out a Hindu to read the Epistle

There are Hindus who regard Jesus as an avatar of Vishnu.

these rhythm negros jiving for no reason

What year is this person living in‽

time traveler who thought he was watching Charles II's coronation

Those gospel people were wildly out of place and did feel like they were just there for diversity points.

Not that it stopped the usual suspects on ITV and the BBC bitching about how white everyone was, so as ever, it's a completely wasted effort to try and appease these racists.

I did think Rishi reading "We give thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the son of God and etc. etc." was particularly farcical.

I guess it just feels like an extra notch in the subsumption of British particularism into the soup of globohomo when the Establishment doesn't respect the culture enough to even try to maintain the kayfabe. I mean, sure, I doubt Bojo's a sincere Christian at heart and him reading epistles would be rank hypocrisy, but even purely nominal Christianity is better than official Hinduism. With Rishi, you know it's just his mouth making sounds and the words are not believed. With Bojo, you'd merely strongly suspect it.

Much was made during the Trump years of "Why are you supporting this man who from his actions clearly doesn't give a shit about the white working class", and the answer was often "I can't get positive actions from any of the candidates, so I'll take the one that at least one pretends to care over the others who don't even bother with the pretense". Having a Hindu read homilies during the King's official pledge to protect the Christian spirit of Britain? That has to me the taste of a ceremony that didn't even pretend to care about the ancient mores of the sceptred isle.

neutered the Hinduism of wealthy British Hindus (even of high caste

Minor nitpick on the "even of high caste".

From my personal experience current gen urban/wealthy higher caste Hindus are among the most deracinated groups in India or the diaspora.

You will find more genuine faith or adherence to tradition among the middle caste Hindus or Christians/Muslims of all castes.

It’s one thing I deeply respect about Judaism and Islam. They stay true to the belief and won’t allow people to go beyond the limits.

I don't know. Perhaps if I thought Rishi Sunak actually believed in the roster of multi armed animal gods. But realistically, his Hinduism is just as fake as the fake Christianity of the average UK politician.

Even from the perspective of Christianity, scripture isn't a magic spell and Bibles aren't totems - it shouldn't really matter who reads it.

It doesn't seem like you need to be racist in any sense to find it odd that they chose a non-Christian to read Christian scripture on this occasion. The blatant racism of the person objecting to gospel music only delegitimises any other concerns he might name.

So in that spirit: the presence of Sunak at the coronation isn't inappropriate, nor is it inappropriate for him to take part in some capacity. Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu leaders appeared later in the ceremony to present items to the king. Being a Hindu doesn't disqualify Sunak from taking part in the coronation.

But you'd think that the reading of scripture specifically is something that ought to be done by a Christian, or at least by a person who believes it.

But you'd think that the reading of scripture specifically is something that ought to be done by a Christian, or at least by a person who believes it.

I've been at some catholic weddings where the readers were atheists that were never christened. And there was no political pressure to be inclusive or progressive. So I don't think most people care about that.

Was there a eucharistic sacrifice at these weddings? If there was, I think some rules were broken.

How about that gospel music isn’t a British thing?

I suppose I'd say that seems like a rather arbitrary place to draw the line, and it would make me suspicious of the complainant's motives. I can't recall any requirement that everything at a coronation must meet some standard of Britishness, and neither do I know how you'd define Britishness in this sense anyway. Indeed, it seems that previous coronations have often included elements we would associate with other countries, most famously France.

And it seems as though Charles III and his household should have the right to select the music they wish at their coronation. The gospel music was skilfully performed and appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.

French art or music makes sense in that France and Britain are inextricably connected. See eg 1066.

Gospel music on the other hand seems…quite unrelated. Random even.

It's common in many states in the Commonwealth of Nations, of which Charles is titular head. It's also practiced in some of the Caribbean nations of which Charles is king, and I believe Afro-British in the UK itself also sing gospel music. For that matter it's a popular form of Christian music that even many people of no African heritage sing - I've sung gospel music in church before, even though I have no ancestral connection to Africa.

It doesn't seem unreasonable for Charles' coronation to include elements reflecting the cultures of countries that he rules, and again, if he or his household wish to include that music, is any more justification necessary?

It depends if you see the monarchy as merely the head of numerous states, or the head of a British state and other countries.

That is, including elements of Caribbean culture in with the British culture suggests the monarchy is ecumenically. Some in contrast see this monarchy as particularly British. Hence why some would be upset without being as it was put above racist.

Perhaps not, but he's also the king of the commonwealth, and gospel is pretty popular in Africa and the Caribbean.

Don't get me wrong, I still hated it. It completely jarred with the rest of the service. But a Nigerian Anglican choir could have worked well.

Except most Nigerian Anglican churches are looking to officially break from the Church of England: https://www.wsj.com/articles/conservative-anglicans-call-for-break-with-archbishop-of-canterbury-over-same-sex-blessings-2564937b.

Awesome post, would love to hear more of these deep dives

This is my favorite Mottepost all year. Can you recommend any good books on this history of NOLA and the Cajun triangle? I've got ties to the area and have always been enamored of its unique culture and history.

This is fantastic! I lived in NOLA for 7 years (see my nick/handle), and most of this history is new to me. The names some facts are familiar but not the conceptual fabric tying everything together.

They also legally suppressed the French language across the state. Cajun and Creole children were paddled for speaking it in their public schools well into the twentieth century.

This is technically true, but the dominant factor in Cajuns abandoning the French language was that their bosses were Texans who preferred English speaking workers, and Cajuns who had mostly been paddled for speaking French in school and then continued speaking it anyways stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming. The paddling mostly suppressed the Cajun language in a few holdouts.

The narrative that state pressure, rather than economic factors, was the main reason for the decline of the French language is mostly driven by Cajun academics trying to cast themselves as oppressed by a white anglo hegemony alongside blacks- my grandfather told me "my parents spoke French, but they never wanted to teach me". For the same reason you tend to see occasional books talking about how Cajuns were more likely to intermarry with blacks or whatever- being oppressed is fashionable, and LSU academics who got French department sinecures through nepotism and themselves speak standard, not Cajun French want in on the grift.

Actual working class(the vast majority) Cajuns are more likely to point to anti-Catholic or class biases as reasons for their poverty, and are often not shy about criticizing lazy or dysfunctional friends and relatives, with the implication that those prejudices are much reduced and so there's not a lot of excuse for not succeeding.

stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming.

I don't follow. Why would that make them stop teaching them French instead of starting to teach them English?

TR giving a speech on the topic:

I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.

Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but of the soul and of the spirit. If the American has the right stuff in him, I care not a snap of my fingers whether he is Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant. I care not a snap of my fingers whether his ancestors came over in the Mayflower, or whether he was born, or his parents were born, in Germany, Ireland, France, England, Scandinavia, Russia or Italy or any other country. All I ask of the immigrant is that he shall be physically and intellectually fit, of sound character, and eager in good faith to become an American citizen. If the immigrant is of the right kind I am for him, and if the native American* is of the wrong kind I am against him….

…Now for our own citizens. We represent many different race strains. Our ancestors came from many different Old World nationalities. It will spell ruin to this nation if these nationalities remain separated from one another instead of being assimilated to the new and larger American life.

The children and our children’s children of all of us have to live here in this land together. Our children’s children will intermarry, one another, your children’s children, friends, and mine. Even if they wished, they could not remain citizens of foreign countries….The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens.

Long before Anti-immigration nativist sentiment was based primarily on conversations about the white race, it was based on questions of Christian denomination, on language, on a fear of factionalism within the country. Nativist Americans were hesitant to trust any immigrant who maintained cultural, linguistic, or ethnic distinctiveness.

Once everyone speaks English, what benefit is there to also speaking French? My maternal grandparents spoke cajun French at home growing up. Would my mother have gotten any significant utility out of being raised bilingual?

Coolness only carries so far; You need an active initiative and local culture to really support it. (Which is why cajun-french lasted as long as it did, really.)

A friend of mine can understand both Cajun-french and German(due to his older relatives), but that doesn't mean he can speak it.

Well, beyond the swear words.

Contrasting that, while my grandfather could understand the language of the home country, he couldn't speak it - because his father and mother made a point not to have him speak it, and there was little benefit to knowing a second language when you were supposed to be American.

Still, recent changes in outlook has resulted in a rush to preserve the language, and Louisiana is one of the few places that has local governments having in-place bilingual laws and whatnot. But given how the older generation is slowly dying out... well. We'll see what happens.

(Though is is fun to see French tourists touring around the Acadian parishes.)

Learning Cajun French as an adult is moderately trendy, and there’s a decent enough live music scene and social activities in Cajun that it makes sense as a hobby in southwest Louisiana/southeast Texas. I’m given to understand that enough of the couples who meet this way (are trying to)raise their children bilingual that there’s probably a future of native speakers, even if the current native speakers make the ELCA look demographically healthy.

The misunderstandings between Cajun speakers and standard French speakers are hilarious, though.

The answer is, “It would be cool, and there are maybe some moderate cognitive benefits. We think. Mostly it would be cool.”

The cognitive benefits of knowing 2 languages is probably in the bottom 5% of reasons given to learn a language.

I wonder if the benefits are greater if you learn languages far removed from each other, like simultaneously trying to learn Welsh, Magyar and Navajo.

Hey, it's one of the reasons I'm doing it. (Of course, I'm getting old enough that cognitive benefits start becoming important again...)

Because natal bilingualism was not understood to be completely possible in the 1940's.

I don't believe that. There were bilingual regions in the world way before that.

As a former ESL teacher, I can tell you that well into the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for schools to discourage ESL students from speaking their native language at home, and for immigrant parents to basically not teach their kids to speak it, because it was widely believed that this would inhibit becoming fluent in English.

Now we know that this is the opposite of true, but bilingual education really wasn't well understood, even in places where you could see kids growing up bilingual.

I think I heard this theory in the past, but I heard it exclusively from Americans. That fact makes the "we totally weren't trying to stamp out your culture, guys" theory look a bit suspicious, rather than argue in it's favor.

It was also the norm across a lot of Europe for a long time. My hometown in Europe switched from a local dialect of a minority language to the national language in about one generation, for this reason.

That doesn't mean Cajuns in the 40s knew that. I had an immigrant teacher from Latin America in HS who told me how his parents spoke only English at home to Americanize the children better, so that by the time he was an adult he couldn't speak Spanish.

If you are a peasant under Jim Crow in the rural southern US, you are unlikely to know about them. And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.

And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.

Yes, it's almost as if someone decided to stamp out all competing cultures on the territory, make it look voluntary, but wasn't shy about using the paddle if someone was being stubborn.

Well yeah, obviously there was top down assimilative pressure and obviously there were kids beaten for speaking French. But these weren’t Native American residential schools here- the English only assimilationism failed when it was all stick. Yes, a lot of the carrot was on the basis of false narratives being fed by educated people to subsistence farmers. But it’s important to note that this wasn’t a pack of lies being fed to the backwards peasants to get them to cooperate in their own cultural dissolution or whatever narrative some academics are pushing- aside from French, Cajun culture is doing fine, and the Cajuns themselves wanted their kids to speak English with a normal American accent rather than as a second language while the educated people they turned to for help happened to hold false beliefs about how to do that, but those false beliefs were the expert consensus of their day and applied literally everywhere.

Experts hold false beliefs for non-malicious reasons all the time, eg face masks stop Covid.

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but those false beliefs were the expert consensus of their day and applied literally everywhere.

I honestly doubt that. The idea that bilingualism is somehow bad could be seen in the wild until pretty recently, but in my experience was limited to the Anglos, and might even have been mostly an American thing. Maintaining it requires a huge amount of anti-curiosity, and blindness to other parts of the world.

Experts hold false beliefs for non-malicious reasons all the time, eg face masks stop Covid.

Sure, once an idea gets rolled out from the top, it tends to get repeated in good faith by the lower strata of society. It seems that this is how Anglos have always done it.

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Some of your links are broken, the proper syntax is [text](URL).

Edit: Actually, the problem seems to be that some of them are using ”fancy” quotation marks instead of "normal" straight quotation marks.


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