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It’s an old idea at this point that “woke” is a new religion, but my pet expansion of this is that “the weight of history” has replaced the concepts of judgment day and the afterlife.
I was just discussing this the other day with someone actually. I wished at the time that we had a better education of unsuccessful progressive movements as well as successful. The operative question ought to be “how could you tell at the time” but to even countenance that it could have been confusing is unacceptable.
That’s what we face though, living through history. It’s been stunning to see how many are willing to abdicate thinking it through in favor of listening to prophets claiming to know how they’ll be judged long after they’re dead.
My question for people is how they would have known to be for civil rights but against lobotomies.
I think sometimes the learned behavior of trying to make arguments that make outgroup look dumb overrides your attempts to actually understand the world around you. This is one of those cases. Historically religious people actually believe in their religions, as physical facts about reality, as much as they do anything else. People have mental breakdowns about heaven and hell! Whereas being on the 'right side of history' is, in its entirety, a rhetorical device to refer to social pressures or empathy for oppressed people who exist today. Nobody who says that is actually imagining dozens of people looking back on them from a century after and being disappointed. They are not at all comparable.
If you want to disagree that’s fine, but I’ve spent considerable time as a religious person and surrounded by the type of people I’m describing, and I think the weight of judgment day is comparable to the weight of “right side of history.” It’s not a boo outgroup statement by any stretch; I think it ties into the thesis that we tore down religion with little to replace it, so people are cribbing together ways to meet their needs.
Hmmm I spend time around both, more around wokes / progressives and I really don't see it.
When I think about the thoughts that motivate someone who leans progressive, I think things like George Floyd, the idea of someone not being able to pay off medical debt and foregoing care as a result, black kids who can't get good jobs because of racism, imagining a kid who died in a school shooting because we don't have gun control, someone who's mocked for being gay, etc. And also the strong social taboos, and internally confusing the social taboo with justifiably taking offense at words that harm people. I'm having trouble of thinking of an interaction where it felt like people were really, genuinely, afraid that history would judge them. They feel much more afraid that their current social group will judge them.
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In all truth, I don't think anyone can. I think we (collectively) try lots of different things and eventually the truth falls out of it.
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