This might be the best Sunday West yet! I'm always awake at like 4 AM USA time every Sunday morning for reasons I don't quite understand myself so it's always nice when one drops and gives me something to do.
A lot of people (Yarvin is one of them; he calls it "the religion of New England") assert that wokeness isn't just similar to Christianity, but actually *is* Christianity, or rather the next stage of its evolution as it sheds its theological aspects and becomes a secular creed, like Confucianism or something. Like Geoff Shullenberger calls it in this thread "a deeply American sort of hyper-Protestantism": https://twitter.com/g_shullenberger/status/1484986997370359808
I think of Social Justice as a combination of Protestant morality and Marxist epistemology, more or less the grandchild of both, and the next phase for each belief system, morphing to fit the needs of deracinated postnational post-rational 21st century America, and designed to co-opt our 2 true gods: Mammon and the Self and its need for recognition.
How anyone can think we are not on the cusp of an Orwellian totalitarian state when news such as the bias incident report is reported is beyond me. So many people I know seem incapable of the simplest dot connection. Love your work Ed, it reminds me I'm not completely barmy :-)
Brand describes a direction of travel that’s broadly accurate, even if the details are often wrong. The WEF is clearly a very bad thing. It allows vested interests and the super rich to directly access and influence governments, without scrutiny and in opposition to state based democracy. It tends to create group think about important issues, has totalitarian impulses, and is the sort of technocratic, supra national body that tends to homogenise organic, national culture. Covid was real but its risks (in relation to the non elderly) were grossly exaggerated in order to manufacture consent. The suppression of information during the pandemic was astonishing, only outdone by the pivot, including by health practitioners, to supporting the riots (ostensibly) related to the death of George Floyd, because racism was a more important “pandemic” than the one that had, just a couple of months earlier, justified shutting down the world.
I think the only vaguely conspiracy theory I believe around covid is Sailer’s suggestion that the vaccine announcement was postponed until after the US election.
I'm not sure if this refutes your statement, but I tend to see the covid response and much of what we discuss here as fundamentally connected with precedent and common sense being replaced by a sort of elite, technocratic knowing to which it is expected we should submit without discussion, because any alternative view is immoral. To take a most neutral example, it was obvious, beyond reasonable doubt, that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab, yet we spent 18 months pretending it was more likely to be the wet market down the road.
I went through a childhood phase of fascination with Roman culture, and one that resurrects every now and then (off to revisit Pompeii and Herculaneum this June, along with the Greek temples of Sicily, and will be trying to see the great Roman mosaics in central Sicily that features scantily clad women exercising). As someone who grew up with clubby, congenial, non-dogmatic Christianity, what would I have been like in AD 400? Probably aghast at the attacks on the clubby, congenial, non-dogmatic temples and gods and cults. Perhaps. Who knows. It must be pointed out that the ancient empires and ancient faiths were not kindly. Christianity did substantially improve the notion of individual well-being and right of existence (which you have written about several times, Ed!). Is it better than paganism, warts and all? Worth debating.
Speaking of the collapsing western WEIRDism, have you read or followed Matthew Crawford?
I’ve read his articles but not his book. I saw him being interviewed by NS Lyons the other day.
I imagine I’d have not been keen on this new dangled Christianity either but it did make our world kinder and more gentle. The big question is would you rather be at the bottom of society in second century Rome or 12th century Latin Christendom? The former was more magnificent but you’d have been treated better in the latter overall.
I love Gun restoration videos on YouTube. Generally find them relaxing and fascinating. You think about the factories and the gun smiths who made the guns. The people who carried them- were they conscripts - like Satre's lot. So I can understand that
Re with Starmer - Same with Sunak neither are objectional but politics is an art. The lack of instinct I think is a problem.Why not just have an a.i after all
If we continue the analogy between wokery and the early Church, we find that the principles of Christianity seem to have remarkably little impact on the new political elite, that is, the converted Germanic tribal rulers of Europe. They retained their fondness for their traditional culture especially in the form of the brutal slaughter of friend, foe and family alike, along with polygamy, slavery, debauchery and all the other modest barbarian pleasures.
So unsuccessful were those who actually believed all that Sermon on the Mount stuff, that by the 10th century they had resorted to the Pax Dei which essentially said: please kill each other as much as you like but try not to murder priests, rape nuns and burn and pillage churches quite so much. If that's ok with you Mr Alaric, sir. Happily, in the following century, their Holinesses hit on the wheeze of sending the more thuggish elements off to distant lands to kill infidels, with promises of forgiveness and the likelihood of an early demise.
All of which suggests that neither Christianity or wokery make much difference to either human nature or political practise.
Mr Monbiot would do well to admit that he is an ideologue too.
You have to be an ideologue to be an activist.
Lots of good links, in a, "We're doomed," way.
This might be the best Sunday West yet! I'm always awake at like 4 AM USA time every Sunday morning for reasons I don't quite understand myself so it's always nice when one drops and gives me something to do.
A lot of people (Yarvin is one of them; he calls it "the religion of New England") assert that wokeness isn't just similar to Christianity, but actually *is* Christianity, or rather the next stage of its evolution as it sheds its theological aspects and becomes a secular creed, like Confucianism or something. Like Geoff Shullenberger calls it in this thread "a deeply American sort of hyper-Protestantism": https://twitter.com/g_shullenberger/status/1484986997370359808
I think of Social Justice as a combination of Protestant morality and Marxist epistemology, more or less the grandchild of both, and the next phase for each belief system, morphing to fit the needs of deracinated postnational post-rational 21st century America, and designed to co-opt our 2 true gods: Mammon and the Self and its need for recognition.
How anyone can think we are not on the cusp of an Orwellian totalitarian state when news such as the bias incident report is reported is beyond me. So many people I know seem incapable of the simplest dot connection. Love your work Ed, it reminds me I'm not completely barmy :-)
Thank you!
Brand describes a direction of travel that’s broadly accurate, even if the details are often wrong. The WEF is clearly a very bad thing. It allows vested interests and the super rich to directly access and influence governments, without scrutiny and in opposition to state based democracy. It tends to create group think about important issues, has totalitarian impulses, and is the sort of technocratic, supra national body that tends to homogenise organic, national culture. Covid was real but its risks (in relation to the non elderly) were grossly exaggerated in order to manufacture consent. The suppression of information during the pandemic was astonishing, only outdone by the pivot, including by health practitioners, to supporting the riots (ostensibly) related to the death of George Floyd, because racism was a more important “pandemic” than the one that had, just a couple of months earlier, justified shutting down the world.
I think the only vaguely conspiracy theory I believe around covid is Sailer’s suggestion that the vaccine announcement was postponed until after the US election.
I'm not sure if this refutes your statement, but I tend to see the covid response and much of what we discuss here as fundamentally connected with precedent and common sense being replaced by a sort of elite, technocratic knowing to which it is expected we should submit without discussion, because any alternative view is immoral. To take a most neutral example, it was obvious, beyond reasonable doubt, that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab, yet we spent 18 months pretending it was more likely to be the wet market down the road.
I went through a childhood phase of fascination with Roman culture, and one that resurrects every now and then (off to revisit Pompeii and Herculaneum this June, along with the Greek temples of Sicily, and will be trying to see the great Roman mosaics in central Sicily that features scantily clad women exercising). As someone who grew up with clubby, congenial, non-dogmatic Christianity, what would I have been like in AD 400? Probably aghast at the attacks on the clubby, congenial, non-dogmatic temples and gods and cults. Perhaps. Who knows. It must be pointed out that the ancient empires and ancient faiths were not kindly. Christianity did substantially improve the notion of individual well-being and right of existence (which you have written about several times, Ed!). Is it better than paganism, warts and all? Worth debating.
Speaking of the collapsing western WEIRDism, have you read or followed Matthew Crawford?
I’ve read his articles but not his book. I saw him being interviewed by NS Lyons the other day.
I imagine I’d have not been keen on this new dangled Christianity either but it did make our world kinder and more gentle. The big question is would you rather be at the bottom of society in second century Rome or 12th century Latin Christendom? The former was more magnificent but you’d have been treated better in the latter overall.
Compare pagan Scandinavia with Christian Scandinavia.
As a token of appreciation for Ed's fantastic site, and as a reflection of my carbon footprint on it, I've just upgraded to founder subscription.
Ah thank you so much 👍❤️
I love Gun restoration videos on YouTube. Generally find them relaxing and fascinating. You think about the factories and the gun smiths who made the guns. The people who carried them- were they conscripts - like Satre's lot. So I can understand that
Re with Starmer - Same with Sunak neither are objectional but politics is an art. The lack of instinct I think is a problem.Why not just have an a.i after all
If we continue the analogy between wokery and the early Church, we find that the principles of Christianity seem to have remarkably little impact on the new political elite, that is, the converted Germanic tribal rulers of Europe. They retained their fondness for their traditional culture especially in the form of the brutal slaughter of friend, foe and family alike, along with polygamy, slavery, debauchery and all the other modest barbarian pleasures.
So unsuccessful were those who actually believed all that Sermon on the Mount stuff, that by the 10th century they had resorted to the Pax Dei which essentially said: please kill each other as much as you like but try not to murder priests, rape nuns and burn and pillage churches quite so much. If that's ok with you Mr Alaric, sir. Happily, in the following century, their Holinesses hit on the wheeze of sending the more thuggish elements off to distant lands to kill infidels, with promises of forgiveness and the likelihood of an early demise.
All of which suggests that neither Christianity or wokery make much difference to either human nature or political practise.