In a lengthy essay that is worth your time, James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna write,
Sacred beliefs are ones that have been for moral reasons removed from the realm of skepticism and doubt because they’re viewed as too important to be subjected to these corrosive influences. Instead, sacred beliefs are effectively set aside from rational inquiry, which results in an expectation for them to be understood mythologically rather than literally, technically, or scientifically. The presence of sacred beliefs that cannot be questioned, challenged, or doubted—including their corollaries, even in minuscule ways—is a strong positive sign that a moral community is, in fact, a moral tribe.
Every community needs the enforcement of social norms. But I read the authors as saying that a moral tribe carries things further by requiring members to subscribe to a set of sacred beliefs. Traditional religions are examples of moral tribes, but a main point of the article is that we can have a moral tribe that shares only some but not all characteristics of traditional religions.
The conclusion of the article is that we ought to place the sort of constraints on the moral tribe of Social Justice that we place on religious groups. In particular, we should resist institutionalizing Social Justice.
That conclusion resonates with me. I have no desire to persecute the advocates of Social Justice. But I insist on having the right to question some of their beliefs.
I have no desire to persecute Christians, but I appreciate living in a society where any widespread movement by colleges or corporations to demonstrate “commitment to Christianity” or to mandate “Jesus training” would be vomited out of the system. That’s what I think should happen to “commitment to inclusion” and “diversity training.”
I will put some more excerpts below the fold, but I urge you to read the whole essay. Also, Handle’s comment on a different post might fit well here.
We don’t often think about it, but language conveys a powerful signal of group membership, which may, in fact, be one of our most deeply hardwired social traits. Religious or woke speech is no exception.
Hence, what I call the three languages of politics. The major political tribes talk past one another in part because they are using language to separate friend from foe.
moral tribes are conventionalist and often strictly punitive (which Altemeyer might have identified as a kind of “authoritarian aggression”) where it comes to policing their tribes’ moral norms and expectations—that is, they’re inherently bent toward the totalitarian. Specifically, we call the resistance to the intertwining of religious institutions and state institutions secularism
Social Justice seeks societal institutionalization at the broadest scales, but it started out by bending our universities to its agenda. Because universities are the houses of higher education in our society, thus the pinnacle institutions for creating, legitimizing, and passing on knowledge, this has been a frightfully worrying takeover. . .Religions in secular sociopolitical environments are forced to treat their beliefs as beliefs. Social Justice has arranged things such that it can treat its beliefs as knowledge.
Social Justice accepts as articles of faith that group-based identity is real, meaningful, and a site of oppression (or dominance), and the way to understand this problem is through the postmodern doctrines of social construction (largely through language) of power. This idea was bolstered considerably in 1989 by the introduction by Peggy McIntosh of the doctrine of “privilege.” This concept is tantamount to the doctrine of Original Sin for Social Justice
In the postmodern cosmology, it isn’t a righteous God who created the world and ordered it to His designs and to His glory but the self-righteous powerful and privileged who did it such that their power and privilege eternally seek to sustain themselves, their designs, and their glory.
Because power and privilege are everywhere and relational, and because they are deemed to intrinsically operate to justify and perpetuate themselves, Hate is everywhere and eternal. Humankind is therefore Fallen because the dominance of dominant groups is an eternal corruption, and our sinful nature—privilege—expresses itself in bigotries that are, ultimately, the very attempt of our privileges to maintain and justify themselves. This belief is theologically identical to the Calvinist notion of Total Depravity
These aren’t protests. These are prayer rallies.
That’s what I think should happen to “commitment to inclusion” and “diversity training.”
1) I wish people remember a lot of companies have significant global customers and companies are signaling to them to.
2) Most corporate ‘diversity training’ is decreasing.
3) For completely condensing ‘diversity training’ is, I recommend to everybody to main ponts to remmeber:
3a) Company assets are at risk. We can complain about how poorly James Damore was treated for his memo, but it was written strong enough to Exhibit A at any sex discrimation lawsuit.
3b) Remember the best way success in any corporate organization is make sure co-workers and customers like working with you. And people like hearing stereotypes about them.
I have no desire to persecute Christians, but I appreciate living in a society where any widespread movement by colleges or corporations to demonstrate “commitment to Christianity” or to mandate “Jesus training” would be vomited out of the system. That’s what I think should happen to “commitment to inclusion” and “diversity training.”
I think you are conflating two very different concepts here.
The idea of having a “commitment to inclusion” simply means that the university is to be a place where no one is socially excluded, particularly based on race or gender, but not exclusively limited to those things. It is specifically a statement about NOT having any mandated ideological beliefs, other than an openness to people and ideas. Demanding someone have a “commitment to Christianity” is a demand for a commitment to one specific belief system.
I find it hard to understand why the simple idea of socially including people of all races and backgrounds would provoke hostility. Of course the university should be a place where racial prejudice isn’t tolerated, and everyone is welcome to participate in intellectual dialogue. This should go without saying.
Now, I GET the fact that the Social Justice set doesn’t actually live up to that standard, because in practice they are actually quite socially exclusionary to people who don’t adhere to a long list of other, detailed, specific, ideological commitments. So I’ll grant that here “social inclusion” is really not a literal statement, but sort of a symbol of a bunch of other ideas which that is supposed to represent. But taken by itself, the literal concept of “social inclusion” is not objectionable. One could respond to this not by rejecting “social inclusion” but by embracing it in it’s literal reality and pointing out how the social justice movement fails to live up to it’s own standards.
Yes, one could indeed do that. Similarly, one could have criticized “separate but equal” on the grounds that it wasn’t really equal, and the people who run it simply have to do better on the equality part. But, of course, the people who ran it didn’t want it to be equal. They wanted it to be just, and they sincerely believed that justice required black people to be subordinate to whites.
Similarly, many people who enforce “commitment to inclusion” or run “diversity training” believe in justice, which requires everyone to accept their view of society and their moral judgments.
Right. No need to take euphemistic and pretextual marketing slogans at face value when it’s so easy to see behind the curtain. That’s confusing being charitable with being gullible and naive, i.e., a sucker and a chump.
Also, it’s good to keep in mind the fact that despite the fact that the Supreme Court keeps trying to insist that there are no “talismanic incantations” in the law, in practice, they have made certain codewords operate as such, as an absurd but effective way for organizations to navigate areas where Constitutional jurisprudence has become incoherent, e.g., with regards to Affirmative Action.
The magic codewords are thus effectively mandatory, regardless of how different the policies and goals are really meant or intended to be denoted by them, though not accurately described by them.
This, for example, is the ‘deliberate obfuscation’ and ‘hiding the ball’ language from Justice Souter’s dissent in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)
When progressive Supreme Court Justices in favor of the policies are telling us its a ridiculous shame that those results have to be accomplished via sham, then I really don’t see why we’re supposed to assume it’s not a sham and take the marketing slogans at face value.
I think what you are saying is that “commitment to inclusion” = “support for racial quotas” but I don’t think that is what is meant by it at all.
I take “commitment to inclusion” to mean maintaining an intellectual culture on campus which is welcoming (i.e. inclusive) towards students who are already there regardless of race. I.e. trying to include minority students in the campus community – not socially excluding them.
It’s kind of a subtle concept. Not talking about how many black students should be admitted, but creating a classroom atmosphere where black students feel comfortable speaking up in class.
This is the same kind of motte and bailey dynamic that corrupts political conversation in so many other areas and makes productive discourse all but impossible without “rectification of names” and describing how people actually use the term in practice. No one is arguing against treating people with respect and courtesy and making them feel welcome and safe (“the bait”), but that’s not how ‘inclusion’ is implemented in practice, which is racially conscious preferences, quotas, speech restrictions, and excommunication for heresy (“the switch”).
In the government, it’s completely clear that “inclusion” is just the latest in the line of euphemisms which have fashion-like high turnover, because of a social trickle-down adoption cycle expiration date, as soon as everyone starts using the term to have exactly the negative connotation of the previous term it was once meant to cover up with some seemingly unobjectionable signifier, which of course it will inevitably acquire again, because nothing in reality actually changed but a name. Which doesn’t fool anybody but fools, and doesn’t even do that for long. Once we had affirmative action, then diversity (and/or equity), now inclusion.
But the offices are doing exactly the same things, which is not switching focus to making everyone feel like they belong and are valued as part of the team, but producing racial and gender statistics reports and goals, allocating money, contracts, charters, and jobs preferentially to members of particular identity groups, and reminding leaders and managers at all levels, both within the government and for “private” companies regulated by or doing business with the government, that they had better not fall too far behind, or else, and also cynically reminding them of the codewords they can use to justify deviation from fair meritocracy if they need to put a thumb on the scale sometimes to meet mission.
For example: https://www.occ.gov/about/who-we-are/occ-for-you/diversity-and-inclusion-programs/omwi/index-omwi.html
Or it could be that some people use the word one way, and other people use it a different way, and those two groups of people aren’t the same people, and it’s entirely possible to embrace the term in the first sense while simultaneously objecting to in the implication that it has to entail all the other stuff people would like to pile onto it, and that by choosing the path of hostility, you actually cede territory to the people who want to define it in the more onerous sense. Like the way the right ceded “Liberal” to the left by using it as a term of abuse.
In other words, instead of defining yourself by opposition to “inclusion” you could define a positive vision of what “inclusion” means to you that other people could compare and contrast with the vision offered by progressives.
Hazel, I wish I could see it the same way you do. But for many, many people, it means:
White people have created a system of privilege so pervasive and so powerful that it creates an unjustly uneven playing field. To create a just, even playing field, we must discriminate against whites.
Similarly for males.
Similarly for straights.
And while whites/males/straights shouldn’t be excluded, they should feel guilty and in some sense unwelcome unless they “check their privilege”, i.e., agree with us and allow themselves to be disfavored.
Hazel, so you’re saying that “commitment to inclusion” is kind of like “anti-fascist” in the 1930s. It’s a good idea, and should be supported even if the most vocal supporters are communists. And even if your support seems to help the communists, who are turning into fascists themselves, e.g., Stalin, the Spanish Civil War.
Prior paragraph bought on by recently reading The God That Failed. A lot of nice people wound up supporting very unnice things.
The essay comes off like a hit piece on norms the author doesn’t like. I can easily imagine an equivalent piece Jacobin about how Capitalism and Freedom are like a religion etc etc. I don’t think it was particularly charitable at all to the SJ movement
You two did
visit the same countryread the same essay, didn’t you?First of all, who says that capitalism and freedom don’t operate like unquestioned and quasi-sacred religious tenets for many people, or even most of their ‘adherents’? Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t be justified by empirical evidence and logical argument given some underlying set of goals and values, however, those values, ultimately, are necessarily metaphysical in nature and cannot be justified on a similar epistemological basis or made tractable to skeptical inquiry, and so have to to be accepted on ‘faith’, as it were.
But in practical terms it means that the values associated with those concepts are embedded in most of their adherents as psychological reflexive attitudes and received prejudices, adopted by cultural osmosis as crude and shorthand versions of social conventions irrespective of the internalization of any doctrine or reasoning typically the exclusive provide of elite experts, and which they could not articulate if they had to. This is not only the typical condition of every civilization, it is indispensable in practical terms as the only way for the overall population to carry on with normal life in stable, pleasant, and functional society, with notions to guide decision-making that are sufficiently cognitively-accessible to most people. What holds for ideological law holds equally true for state-based law, and all societies are quasi-theocracies in the above sense.
Thus, ‘religion’ in these general terms – which the authors of the essay went to great lengths to research, describe, and define with care – isn’t the problem. The problem is the lack of self-awareness of having a religious-like value system and believing one has the one true objective answer to important moral questions while simultaneously espousing containment of all the other religions purportedly in the name of pluralist tolerance and individual liberty. That contradiction will inevitably resolve in favor of a state religion, monocultural theocracy enforced by state power, to the punitive exclusion of diverse moral perspective on important questions as effectively heresy.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing either, though we’ve all been acculturated and trained to think of it that way, for reasons of a particular historical pathway which won’t hold forever or even much longer. One can argue it’s a good and necessary thing given predictable human Social Failure Modes and runaway processes which must be contained one way or another. And at that point the question becomes one of choosing better over worse in terms of just how badly the metaphysics rubs against the parts of reality which are necessary to enable the system’s stated goals and purposes. If your goal is “human welfare” and your system is “Venezuelan Socialism”, well, they rub against each other really, really hard.
Lindsay and Nayna do trip over the same mistake that is extremely common to critics of progressivism, which is that they are out of date by at least a generation with regards to the now-faded importance of what became a frankly embarrassing postmodernism – an idea that has declined significantly in prestige – and an increasingly well-defined ‘binding metanarrative’ they claim is lacking. It was only a matter of time until postmodernist rhetorical style would be dropped as the ideology achieved increasing power and social entrenchment, and they got it half right with Crenshaw and McIntosh’s Intersectionality / Privilege Realism shift, just not the continuation of the trend of that shift since then.
“Social Construct” talk is still a mixed bag, deployed selectively and strategically when ideologically convenient, for example when innate differences cause various forms of unequal outcomes and other stereotypically disparate inclinations. This contradicts the ideology’s mythological core of absolutist egalitarianism, and so must always be interpreted in the light of the “Matrix of Domination” Oppression Conspiracy Theory, in which these bad things can only occur because bad people are causing them to happen.
“The problem is the lack of self-awareness of having a religious-like value system and believing one has the one true objective answer to important moral questions while simultaneously espousing containment of all the other religions purportedly in the name of pluralist tolerance and individual liberty.”
The authors of the piece espouse the containment of Social Justice in the name of “secularism”, which itself is an unsupported set of assumptions and ideological commitments. I’m not even making the case anything is right or wrong, just noting the irony here
It seems the authors are targeting fideistic modes of belief (not without warrant), but functionally asserting that all sacred belief is fideistic, which is not only inaccurate, but an inaccuracy so gross that it could only be arrived out by a nearly comprehensive ignorance of both history and religion.
Picking just Christianity, I find it hard to believe that anyone could pick up Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, St Augustine’s City of God, or St Thomas’ Summa Theologiae and honestly come to the conclusion that they have “effectively set aside… rational inquiry,” even if one disagreed with every one of their conclusions.
It’s very easy to build towers of reason on foundations of nonsense. Feng shui, astrology, and World of Warcraft theory come to mind. And it’s been 150 years since Darwin published; a lot of premises about humanity and nature that seemed perfectly reasonable 200 years ago are no longer viable in light of current evidence.
I was educated at a Calvinist middle school (to the extent that “education” is the appropriate word), and I grew up in the Bible Belt. I’ve had long discussions about religion with quite a few believers, but I’ve never been able to find any coherent objection to my own igtheism. Eventually I learned to shut up; the conversations weren’t teaching me anything and were annoying the believers. There may be people whose religion isn’t based on fideism when you look a little below the surface, but my own sample (n>10) suggests they’re rather uncommon.
We are talking a bit past each other, as your argument is roughly of the sort that, “For many (even the vast majority) of people in this particular time and location, sacred belief is of a fideistic sort, and that results in…”
But the authors seem to be making a very different claim about sacred belief as such.
It is a rhetorical slight of hand, because if I point to Aquinas (for one example out of thousands) they can either dismiss it as not relevant, “His isn’t really sacred belief because it doesn’t set aside all rational inquiry and as we have already noted, sacred beliefs do that…” or they can declare that no matter how rational the inquiry appears on the surface, it must not really be rational inquiry at all, because it concludes in some sort of sacred belief, and as we already know (see above), sacred beliefs don’t have any commerce with reason.
It has a kind of wily genius to it, in that they are entirely immune from criticism from the sacred belief camp (current or historical), since they have a priori declared that anything that might be said on that score is either irrational, irrelevant, or both *by definition*.
Wiles aside, the flaw in their attempt is that is demonstrably false.
As a separate line, I do not really have much more sympathy for igtheism than I do for St Anselm’s ontological argument (much as I respect his writing, and his other treatises).
The two strike me as the sides of one coin, or perhaps better, as a mirror image: igthesim is just the ontological argument flopped right-for-left. Both go about as an argument for the existence (or non-existence) of God based on our ability to arrive at a suitable definition. The only wrinkle being that “existence” is not a property, and the question of existence is certainly not contingent on how easy it is to arrive at a unanimous and unambiguous definition.
I am much more inclined to the Thomistic conclusion that we can know and say some things about God, but His singleness and transcendence necessitates quite a bit will have to be expressed apophatically and analogically.
I use the word “igtheism” to avoid either the false certainty of atheism or the faked ignorance of agnosticism. Many people use the word “God” in many ways. Some of those ways may be true but have yet to be proven, others are obviously stupid. If you tell me what you mean by “God”, I’ll tell you whether I’m an agnostic or an atheist.
If religion was ultimately based on reason, there would be no need for revelation. Many cultures would have developed very similar religions on their own, the way they developed math, spears, and agriculture (to various extents). The fact that that didn’t happen tells me there’s another key ingredient.
I would agree with that last sentence wholeheartedly.
Religion is notoriously hard to define in itself, but I think it is fair to say that it does include both rational inquiry and revelation… or to use the much more famous terminology: faith and reason.
Pure “natural theology” gets you so far, but only so far. It can achieve an understanding of God in the “First Mover” sense, or by any of the other famous “Five Ways”. But that falls short of what almost anyone means when they say religion, or in the original authors’ words, ‘sacred belief’.
Revelation is a “key ingredient” that goes the next step and says (for example) that God is a Trinity or that He is incarnate as Jesus Christ.
Whether those statements are true (as I believe) or not, neither of them are contrary to reason (much ink has been spilled explaining the point) or immune from inquiry; but neither could they have simply been worked out if someone sat down and thought long and hard enough about it.
My complaint with the authors is not that they alluded to revelation as being part of religion, but that they seem to be arguing that ‘sacred belief” is nothing but blind faith, and that anything known by faith cannot be thought about rationally.
I still object to that as not only mistaken, but horribly off the mark. It is a kind of straw man definition that suited to making their point at the cost of leaving reality behind.
Re: ThomasL – I would say that things known by faith can be thought of rationally, but it doesn’t help. Deductive reason is about truth-preservation; if you’re reasoning from true premises and you’re doing it right, you should get true conclusions. If you’re reasoning from faith-based premises, your conclusions will be unpersuasive to anyone who doesn’t believe your premises. In the modern world, that’s most people.
Re: ThomasL – To understand where I’m coming from, think of Islamic jurisprudence. They have hundreds of books of tightly-reasoned commentary on the Koran and the Hadith that have developed over the past ~1500 years into distinct schools of legal thought. Ayatollah Khomeni’s career-making fatwa that chess is not necessarily sinful is very impressive in a way, but I expect that you would agree when I say that it’s also utterly pointless.
Though I admit I now have a desire to read that fatwa just for kicks, I think it begs the question to equate a question like whether chess is necessarily sinful with questions like these from the opening of the Prima Pars of the Summa:
1. Is the proposition “God exists” self-evident?
2. Is it demonstrable?
3. Does God exist?
Why the use of reason should be excluded from such questions on principle not only eludes me, it eludes the roots of the entire Christian tradition.
Re: ThomasL – Those are in fact worthy questions, and for funsies in college I took a 400-level philosophy course that spent most of its time on them. Sadly, we have yet to come to any conclusions that are generally considered persuasive by those who weren’t already inclined to believe them.
Re: ThomasL – On the other hand, you’re kind of demonstrating my point. The question of what is and isn’t haram is paramount within an Islamic paradigm, even though it seems pointless to us. Similarly, the proof or disproof of God is paramount as it relates to a bunch of assumptions from the Christian paradigm (mind/body dualism, a judging God, eternal reward/punishment). Since I don’t share those assumptions, I find myself not much caring whether there is a First Cause.
Freedom of religion and the separation of church and state were critical ideas almost certainly necessary (though not sufficient) for the modern miracle of our current living standards and quality of life.
Progressivism has created a new secular religion which is specifically working around these two insights. Starting in universities, and quickly expanding out into the institutions of government, corporations, education and the media, we have seen the emergence of a new secular religion which is actively opposing all other beliefs and is actively seeking out purity displays to ensure conformism.
For modernity to continue, we will need to rein in this new-fangled type of religious extremism. The first step is, as the author has done, to label it as a religion. The second step is to concertedly stand up for our rights to question and reject this new religion, and to enforce that it does not get ingrained in our public institutions.
This is a very serious threat to modernity.
John Milton: “When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?”
Richard Overton: “I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may write myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man’s right—to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety—as it were writ in the table of every man’s heart, never to be obliterated—even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free.”
Their religion made them anti-censorship and anti-authoritarian. Likewise William Walwyn’s religion. Richard Rumbold’s religion. Edmund Bohun’s religion. John Lilburne’s religion.
Thomas Helwys: “Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
John Locke: “Immediate revelation being a much easier way for men to establish their opinions and regulate their conduct than the tedious and not always successful labour of strict reasoning, it is no wonder that some have been very apt to pretend to revelation, and to persuade themselves that they are under the peculiar guidance of heaven in their actions and opinions, especially in those of them which they cannot account for by the ordinary methods of knowledge and principles of reason.” It needed arguing in the 17th century and it still needs to be argued now.
I think it’s a mistake to see Social Justice as religion-adjacent, even though it seems to be.
It’s more about process than principles. It’s a constant, desperate attempt to impose and fight for position in zero sum status hierarchies, and about dominance and submission within them. Diversity loyalty oaths are promises that you accept that.
The facts don’t matter to them because the facts don’t matter to your position – only your will to fight, or to show that you are resigned to your position, matters. They’re are concerned with gender and ethnicity because those characteristics are easy to see and therefor easy to monitor.
They have constant moral panics because they provide new opportunities for sorting and to enforce norms.
This is a pessimistic and snarky comment with a chilling amount of cold-blooded accuracy to it. Well done!
It fits well with Kevin Williamson’s “Watch what you say” essay, in which he notes that 20-something twitter heads who have never accomplished much can band together to destroy the career of someone who is well-established and at the height of his (usually his, not her) powers.
Religion and political struggle are hardly incompatible. Mohamed was a conqueror; so were a few of the popes. And in any serious struggle, results and loyalty count at least as much as piety.
Well, I criticize Christians all the time. But I notice that google spell checker treats them with respect. As for universities, i suggest they figure stuff out, their main task.
I can’t get any bells rung out of the topic, anyplace one takes the topic leads to denialism.
FWIW, the great Brazilian super group, The Tribalistas had an interesting song entitled Tribalistas (nice youtube video) on their first album back in 2004 (not one of their better but still plenty good) and the lyrics, roughly translated into english, seem to anticipate and dispense with the tribalism fixation of the current moment:
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/tribalists-tribalists.html
The tribalists no longer want to be right.
Do not want to be sure
They do not want to have judgment or religion
Tribalists no longer come into question
Do not enter into doctrine, gossip or discussion
Tribalism has arrived in the building pillar
Foot in God and Faith in Taba
Foot in God and Faith in Taba
One day I was a chimp
Now I walk with my foot
Two men and a woman
Arnaldo, Carlinhos and Zé
The nostalgic tribalists of the future
Abuse of eye drops and sunglasses
They are tourists just like you and your neighbor
Inside the placenta of the blue planet
Foot in God and Faith in Taba
Foot in God and Faith in Taba
One day I was a chimp
Now I walk with my foot
Two men and a woman
Arnaldo, Carlinhos and Zé
Two men and a woman
Arnaldo, Carlinhos and Zé
One day I was a chimp
Now I walk with my foot
Foot in God and Faith in Taba
Foot in God and Faith in Taba
Tribalism is an anti-movement
That will disintegrate in the next moment
Tribalism can be and should be what you want.
You do not have to do anything just be what you are
Tribalism arrived, hand on the ceiling and ground on the foot