Because we’re taking pleasure in the pain of complete strangers—all we know is that they belong to the opposite faction, so they must be awful people—it’s much harder for us to slam the brakes and recognize that we’re starting to bask in sadism.
. . .There is a reason our greatest traditions, both religious and secular, tell us to love our enemies. That imperative is particularly important in the face of rising social and political polarization. The people opposite us in our big debates are our fellow citizens, and they deserve respect. Only by affirming that truth can we successfully tackle something as daunting as a global pandemic and build the social and civic bonds we need to maintain our grand experiment in pluralistic democracy.
You are unlikely to be a moral exemplar when you define yourself by the groups you hate.
Well I used to be disgusted.
Now I try to be amused.
So respectful acceptance of the forces behind The Great Immiseration. Sounds like suicide.
Alex Joffe sums up the situation nicely:
“A haphazard re-engineering of America is taking place at breakneck speed. The apparent goal is a low-cohesion, low-trust (as well as low-growth and low-innovation) European-style social democracy with a large dependent class, presided over by a permanent government overseen by an expert class of technocrats and ideologues devising top-down solutions to problems both real and invented. That this is the antithesis of representative democracy and the utter undoing of American tradition could not be more apparent. Nor is the fact that this process is managed by a technocratic left-wing oligarchy that has a near total grip on the country’s institutions, including government, media, education, and corporations.
The right-wing reaction, a predictable byproduct of rapid marginalization of groups and values, seen in the outrageous January 2021 Washington riots (falsely deemed an ”insurrection”) and even more shocking outbreaks of interpersonal violence, is welcomed by the ruling class as confirmation of the immoral and irredeemable nature of the “deplorables.” ”
https://besacenter.org/the-europeanized-usa/
General strikes and boycotts of woke companies will be a more efficacious response than the tired old appeals to civility that have been so ineffective in the past. I understand that Mollie Hemingway is not marketing her new book through Amazon. Now there is an example to follow.
“You are unlikely to be a moral exemplar when you define yourself by the groups you hate.”
This is a good candidate for a Klassic Klingism
–“Only by affirming that truth can we successfully tackle something as daunting as a global pandemic and build the social and civic bonds we need to maintain our grand experiment in pluralistic democracy.”–
Call me a massive skeptic on this one. The grand experiment seems doomed to failure. I can’t imagine anyone believing that this society is capable of building durable social and civic bonds: it’s currently going the other way. Trust in institutions is probably lower than it has ever been, and we’re currently in the process of politicizing otherwise neutral activities like national pastimes and entertainment.
After the cold war ended, we lost a sense of purpose.
Since the late 90s – we’ve been running without any operating software, so to speak.
Ideology as a kind of operating software.
When there isn’t much purpose in our lives, it becomes far easier to define ourselves by who we are not rather than who we are.
There are a lot more doubting Thomases (skeptics who refuse to believe without direct personal experience), partly because we’ve traded direct personal experiences for virtual, ethereal ones.
There’s a good reason that the commands on love are ‘love the Lord your God,’ ‘love your enemy,’ ‘love your neighbor,’ and ‘love your wife.’
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds. – Kevin Phillips.
Lovely quote! Something to add to my second installment of “Politics is Evil.”
The left preaches hate as a means to divide us and retain control in a closely split electorate. That all men are created equal is a statement based on love, and should be the basis for conservatives to ally with the Black Church to address the dysfunction in the underclass caused by the destruction of the family. Vouchers instead of DOE, trade schools/community college/STEM instead of 4-year liberal arts degrees, military focus on Guard/Reserves, term limited government employment, etc. would create a framework to support the underclass.
America is an aspirational country, and we have an obligation to provide access to the American Dream to all Americans.
They may be our greatest traditions, but they are highly unnatural. The Abrahamic faiths are a significant departure from our ancestral social organization. Over the grand sweep of human history, “big man” governance, enforcement of a strict social hierarchy through taboo, and group-managed trade with limited individual freedom or group-internal market transactions have by far dominated the political organization of all our societies.
The institutions built to subvert these human tendencies took millennia to build. They are being torn down by attacks from both the left and right, with the general public cheering these on with the thought “anything else must be better.” But the reality simply is that our ancestral political organization led to violent, unstable societies. Tear down institutions and you return to “big man” rule, not socialist utopia.
What institutions are the right trying to tear down? As far as I can tell they’re trying to restore institutions back to their original purpose. If that’s not achievable, they may want them eliminated, but there’s a snowball’s chance of that ever happening.
It feels as though many of these social media companies have created an online gladiator arena, where users get to cheer or jeer on virtual combatants. It is somewhat frightening to watch how many people revel in winning, which means someone has to suffer, as this seems like a zero-sum game.
The only way to stop it seems to be to never enter those digital gates by creating an account.
But it is too interesting and too enticing as an experiment.
The average person from both the left and right has clearly never taken a critical thinking course. The debate quickly devolves into personal insults and no one seems to notice how lackluster this is from a quality perspective. And then, everyone just piles on from there with all of the likes, lackluster comments and what not.
In my experience, the quality on Twitter is > than that from FB, but not by much.
“You are unlikely to be a moral exemplar when you define yourself by the groups you hate.”
Until “moral” is redefined to mandate the hating of certain groups.