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I think your criticism regarding the rules and my failure to ‘even try to meet the standards” was below the belt, given that I have answered hundreds of your questions in good faith in the course of our long-running discussions . However, as a mistake theorist I am an inveterate optimist and a glutton for punishment, so here’s the next batch.
Both sides can be evil, or neutral. The rest of the section is mostly wordgames. You throw moral condemnation around all the time, it’s only when I use good and evil that I have to start the definition from scratch.
The situation is this: I give a gun to a slave/jew, and when the sheriff/SS catch us, a fight breaks out, leaving law enforcement dead. Yeah I think that’s morally fine. People are allowed to defend their freedom with lethal force. I hold the policemen responsible for enforcing immoral laws/doing evil, they are not an inert instrument of the democratic will.
The laws are irrelevant whether they serve good or serve evil. The laws are just the cliff’s notes version of morality, for those who need a shortcut. If legality and morality conflict, morality should win every time (whether it’s your morality or mine).
‘Gentleman’s duel’ was ironic, I do not care for southern honor culture, or duels. A gunfight breaking out between a slave and a slaver is a “just war” for the slave, not a ‘doubly just’ duel.
Because you’re never supposed to resolve a mistake by killing the other side.
No, you can fail morally, repeatedly, without being evil. But at a certain threshold of moral failure, you become evil, and that essentially means that ‘the good’ can treat you as an enemy, and no longer give you the benefit of morality. That’s why lying to a nazi policeman is okay.
But of course if one withdraws the benefit of morality willy-nilly, one quickly finds oneself in a war against the whole world. For example, I do not consider you, or most of my political opponents (even nazis), or most westerners, to be evil and vogelfrei. Unlike unconvicted murderers, Lee-rommel and nazi bakers. A key difference is that they have done evil.
No. If tomorrow, your side and the woke declared a civil war in my country, and most people picked a side, I’d want nothing to do with it, and leave. Like a duel between two acquaintances, I’d be disgusted by both sides.
Yes, still evil. The mob’s will is not absolute, and I am not bound by democratic rules to commit genocide. The contradiction in your position is that you appear ready to jettison democracy and discourse, start slitting throats , declare war on your evil enemies, now, for a level of oppression that is objectively far below that of the jews under nazism or the blacks under the confederacy (who apparently are not justified in their rebellion).
I thought having views attributed to me that are not my own was likewise below the belt, given that it is one of the actions explicitly banned by the rules here, and for good reason. I made my comment in good faith, but will not chide you on the rules in the future. It would be nice if you would refrain from attempting to describe my beliefs to third-parties in the future, as you do not understand them.
I ask you questions because I cannot predict the answers. In our last exchange, I had 3/4ths of a reply written and saved to a text file when I was interrupted, and it contained a bunch of attempts to predict what your response would be to various questions; this conversation has shown that almost all of the predictions are wrong. I do not understand how you think, though I think I'm getting close.
I'll try to have replies to the rest of the above done tonight. Would you prefer more questions, or just statements?
...As a peace offering, an answer to a specific question from last time:
I am not an absolute monarchist, a theocrat, or an anti-enlightenment reactionary. I'm a Christian. Beyond Christianity, I suppose you could say I'm a humanist, or perhaps a better term might be a Machiavellian. I see the basic ethical question as split between "What is right", and "what is expedient". The former is useful for determining what I should be doing in an absolute sense, and the latter is useful for figuring out what I should be doing provided it does not contradict with the former, and otherwise is useful for predicting what other people will do, irrespective of the former.
I believe this split is absolutely necessary for a proper understanding of the world, but I suspect it is also the source of much of our disagreement. My best guess is that you don't recognize such a split, or your split operates very differently from mine, which makes our assessments diverge wildly.
The Enlightened, Absolute Monarchists, theocrats, and presumably anti-enlightenment reactionaries, it seems to me, all believe that humans are a simple mechanism amenable to control through the construction of legible systems of rules. It seems exceedingly obvious to me that this model of humanity is dead wrong. Humans cannot be controlled by rules or systems of rules. No legible system can ever contain them indefinitely, because one of the things humans consistently do is break things that get in their way. Everything made by the human hand and mind can be unmade by those same tools. As I sing to my child each night, "time is filled with swift transition, naught of earth unmoved can stand". I criticize these ideologies when they confuse temporary Schelling points and ad-hoc coordination mechanisms for immutable laws of the universe. Meanwhile, I point to the fact that Human Nature does not change, that it is the same today as it was when the epic of Gilgamesh was written, and that ideologies that claim otherwise are headed, sooner or later, for a bad end.
I could tolerate living under any of the systems you named. I recognize that none of those systems can ever possibly fix all of our problems, and eventually the problems they can't fix will bring them down. All of them will crumble within a few generations, most within less. I aim to understand what makes them crumble, so the crumbling can be either hastened or temporarily forestalled, whichever seems preferable given the situation.
I do not believe that there has ever been a "Good" society. All humans are some variety of evil, and so all human societies are some variety of evil. Evil can be temporarily minimized, but at some point in the relative short-term, human nature expresses itself and the evil seeps back in. Evil can be concentrated and amplified, but doing so tends to crash the system, likewise on a relatively short-term. The base state is moderate levels of evil, and we always return to that base state sooner or later. The goal should be to minimize evil as much as possible and for as long as possible; that's the best we can do, and we will never succeed at it sufficiently to be "good", because society is made of humans, and all humans reliably choose evil at least some of the time.
People frequently try to evade this reality by redefining good and evil, such that the evil they're particularly prone to becomes good, and the good that they're particularly bad at becomes evil. This process is generally labeled "moral progress" of late. My read of the historical record is that it never works, and often results in periods of concentrated evil.
Does this answer the question sufficiently? If you have more questions I'll try to answer them, and otherwise will try to get replies to the above done tonight.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
I usually ping you when I do. I still think you and the others defend the carrying out of immoral orders, even though you don’t think they’re immoral. The strawman accusation comes across as an attempt at controlling and censoring my interpretation of your beliefs. You can always refute and dispute (like I flatly stated to you recently : “I didn’t say that”). Half of all discussions are just two people trying to reconcile their interpretation of the other’s position. Don’t ask me to blindly accept your perspective on your beliefs, like a sacred garden you have dominion over.
That’s up to you, it’s all good, at your service.
Looks like you’re claiming the unassailable rock of the skeptic-pessimist so you can easily criticize without ever having to defend.
I like machiavelli, I like the split, I don’t buy that he was ironic and it was meant as an indictment of the prince. Taking one variable away is always a useful way of looking at the world.
But it seems to me the kind of people lampooned in the OP have taken his thought experiment too seriously, and consider themselves free to always act expediently, and relegate the question of what is right to their inner conscience. Sola fide, if you will.
I was thinking of jumping in, when you originally asked FC the question. I refrained, because I was curious how much we are on the same page, and didn't want to prime him, but now that I see we agree quite a lot on this, I think I can confidently say, you're missing the point.
The phenomenon you're describing is real, and it's quite common for people to take this sort of defensive position, but it's not what's happening here. The point isn't to say "democracy bad, theocracy good" or the other way around, or even to poke at each of them while remaining safe behind non committal. The point is that it's not about the system, it's about Asabiyyah. Even some Enlightenment Liberals understood that, or at least that's how I understand the quote about everlasting vigilance and freedom.
I don't think democracy, in itself, will help you maintain Asabiyyah any more than theocracy will, or vice versa.
What is asabyiah but ‘group loyalty’? Where the interest of the individual and that of those outside the group disappears for the collective good of for instance, the nation. Where the prole and the industrialist, the jew and the catholic, stick together because they’re italians first, right or wrong. It’s collectivistic and faschistic. I don’t mean it as an insult, but I don’t agree with it. What happens if the group decides individual freedoms are unnecessary, or even that a minority has to die for the good of the nation? So I remain vigilant against asabiyah too. I guess my group loyalty is to ‘the good’, which no doubt comprises many, but not all, italians.
I mean, I don’t know what asabiya means to you, but it seems to be related to the ‘hard men good times’ concept, which I also don’t subscribe to. The highest asabiya societies (tribal, nomadic, clannish) are not places I want to live in, and also, in the modern world, militarily incredibly weak. The bonds between people in primitive societies may appear stronger than in our ‘atomistic societies’, but they are still far more violent with each other. They may have ‘coherent values’ in the sense that they have never asked themselves which philosophy they subscribe to, but they are more than capable of bashing each other’s heads in over the parochial, stupid stuff.
"Group loyalty" will do in a pinch, but I like to use the Arabic word, as it's exotic origin allow it to be somewhat more expansive, as non-Arabs can't parse the word. "A group's animating spirit" is what I'd call it, and yeah I know it's pretty vague for a definition. I disagree it's fascistic, unless you believe committing to any group is inherently fascistic. Liberal democracies need asabiyyah too, and in fact witnessing American asabiyayah in action was a bit of a culture shock moment for me, a cynical post-communist Easterner. It's fair enough if you want no part in it, I'm not here to convert you, and I used to be a hardcore individualist myself, so I can imagine where you're coming from, but hopefully the explanation will help you understand where we're coming from as well (and not paint us as reactionary theocratic monarchists).
And yet, unlike us, they're scheduled to inherit the Earth, by the mere act of showing up.
Is supporting Ukraine asabiyah-yayayay?
But convert me to what? You don't have an ideology, or a plan, besides "shit happens, the wheel of fortune turns, you can't control humans by rules or systems of rules, but hey people should stick together".
Not likely. If prognosticating that far into the future even makes any sense, my money is on some pro-natalist modernist offshoot.
It's what you need asabiyyah for.
Unironically a better plan than anything any ideology I used to follow could come up with. Also when you act this way, I wonder if FC's apology wasn't unwarranted.
Sounds like a good deal to me, since any such offshoot seems more likely to come from people I'm aligned with, than any liberal group.
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Kinda, but for European unity. Not as effectively as it could be, but it's there.
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