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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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As others have stated, I think you must of first had some allegiance to a thing before you can "betray" it. Perhaps it's because I was opposed to them from the start, or perhaps I'm just being uncharitable, but it always seemed pretty clear to me that the most vocal internet atheists were motivated more by a desire to see the religious right in particular and wider "normie culture" in general brought low than by any sincerely held principal.

From where I'm sitting the New Atheists didn't "Betray the West" so much as they were largely anti-Western from the start. Of course, their successors on the dissident right are much better. The problem is that among other things the West was always more of an ideological/cultural project than anything else. The Words "Civis Romanus Sum" were words of power regardless of whether the speaker had been born in Latium or the Levant. This has historically been one of the West's great strengths, one of the reasons (if not THE reason) that Christendom was able to build and maintain a level of civilization that, as @TheDag put it in another thread, make any other belief system look like infants in comparison. Apes together strong.

However, as is often the case, this source of strength is also a source of vulnerability. We live in an age of the stupid, the lazy, and the faithless. Furthermore we live in an age where the frontiers to fuck-off to, or exile ner-do-wells are limited. As such it is both easy to be a free rider, and difficult for the upright to escape from or remove said parasites. The West in general and the anglo-sphere in particular being an ideological project first, is especially vulnerable to Gramscian cultural warfare. You want to fuck over a society? Fuck with its ability to reproduce, both in the abstract via civic education and counter-proselytization and in the particular via gays furries and no-fault divorce. Surround the cooperators with defectors and let game theory do the rest. Or at least so the thinking goes.

But here's the thing, the Lord lays before us blessings and curses and then beckons us to choose. We all choose our company and civilization is a choice.

I think that the New Atheist are "anti-west" in a sense that they have parasitic relationship toward western values that they nominally hate. It is very similar to some other anti-west or anti-Christian ideologies: they heavily rely on subversion of existing values to move forward with their goals. What I mean by that is to take some value that is part of the culture - e.g. "we were all created equal by god" and then just use it to ram through their own redefined version, e.g. that equity is just an upgraded version of whatever you believed before. But these values lack anchoring, as soon as the host you have parasitic relationship with dies, there is no longer any basis whatsoever to move these values forward.

If I don't believe in god or soul or equality as some god-ordained transcendental Truth, then why should I care about this or that disadvantaged group? Indians did develop literal caste system that prevailed for thousands of years, it is not as if equality is the only way we can conduct in this world. Maybe people are created unequal and here are 7 reasons why it is a good thing to keep it that way [hint - they are outgroup].

It is the same whenever somebody tries to poke a little bit into value system Sam Harris has. He uses some big words familiar to people in rationalist spheres such as "promote human flourishing" or "decreasing suffering" in a sense that he wants to move from the "worst possible misery for everyone", a thing very evocative of the image of hell. In the end similarly to rationalists he lacks grounding of his morality. If one takes this supposed "new" morality at face value, one quickly finds himself in realm of maximizing some hypothetical utils of unborn people by bombing datacenters or something, maybe alternatively one sees utils expressed as tons of biomass thus maximizing number of ants in existence or some utter nonsense - at least nonsense as intuitively viewed from somebody still at least partially partaking in western/Christian ethos.

It goes haywire real fast, so I agree that it is insanity to expect anything resembling western values by deconstructing and sawing off not only the branch you are sitting on but basically creating nuke and bombing the whole forest just to see what beautiful things will emerge out of the rubble. It is inherently self-defeating game, Sam Harris will not produce mini Sam Harrises as they will have no desire to study Christianity or religion as Harris did, they will bot be raised by people adhering to same values that formed Harris. And it is not as if it is impossible, but I find it interesting how many people use adding up to normality as some kind of stopgap for obviously intuitively wrong conclusions - like eating babies. Except apparently eating babies was literally seen as normal in some societies, I am not that sure if we are not building one such at this point.

Those are some excellent points.