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Am I Smart Enough For the Gospel of Intersectionality?
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” — Matthew 22:36-40
While I believe that the power of Judeo-Christian morality is that its axioms come from the Divine, it is also empowered by its simplicity. While I have enormous respect for our Jewish friends and neighbors and I owe a great deal to my Catholic forebears, I think they make day-to-day righteousness more complicated than necessary. Being a good neighbor is hard enough by simply doing unto others as I would have done unto me.
However, as detailed and convoluted daily righteousness can be for the Orthodox Jew or faithful Catholic, keeping up with righteousness by way of intersectionality is absolutely baffling.
Most of us are in the fat part of the bell-curve when it comes to intelligence. The Average Joe can comprehend “treat others as you would want others to treat you” without regard to intelligence. It resonates. We Christians call that resonance “common grace.” Most of our offenses can be understood in the simple context “would you want someone to do that to you?” If the answer is “no,” it is an easy thing to recognize the need to repent and change our behavior. (Though not all that easy to actually do it!)
The sins detailed by Intersectionality are myriad and incomprehensible to the common man. While I kind of understand the concept of “microaggression,” I am doing well to manage my macroaggressions. I will never be able to engage in a soul-cleanse that demands an order of magnitude more detail.
Put another way, if your desire for a world free of “weaponized white fragility” as explained by a diagram and a 45-minute talk … well … good luck getting a trucker to repent of his “white fragility” and embrace the gospel of voluntarily renouncing his privilege. It’s not that the trucker is a bad person. It’s just that above a certain level of complexity, anything can start to sound like nonsense, and intersectionality is very complex (and it is also nonsense).
We have a very robust moral framework within Western Civilization. We already have the guidance in order to be kind to one another. I think we need to work within it rather than replace the Golden Rule with a vast PowerPoint deck curated by directors of diversity.
That you for the diagram.
But above and beyond the diagram, thank you for bringing real moral stature to the discussion. There is nothing in the world more apparent to me about how to determine my moral compass than The Golden Rule.
I too would love to be able to work on my micro level of spirituality, but the macro level I am needing to work on first doesn’t give me much time for that.
I confess I have no idea of what BIPOC happens to be.
Yesterday I happened to listen to and watch Jordan Peterson’s lecture and it can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfH8IG7Awk0&t=3625s
Jordan does a major riff on intersectionality, at or after the 40 minute point. A summary would be this:
“We differ from one another due to gender, health, wealth,
geographical location, family structure, time era we live in, education, athleticism, attractiveness and then race and ethnicity.” He mentions that of all those characteristics that frame our most essential being, race and ethnicity might be the least important.
Then he discusses the patchwork construction of a hierarchy inside intersectionality, that for a black person to achieve a higher more desirable place inside that construct, they would first of all need to be a woman, and then have some other victimizing trait like poverty. But then if that black impoverished woman encounters a black impoverished woman who is gay, she is bumped down a notch, right?
Finally he goes on to say, “The logical result of intersectionality is individuality. The intersectionalists will get there, if intersectionality doesn’t kill us all before then.”
So Peterson would very much agree with you that the entire philosophy of intersectionality is complex, and that also, it is nonsense. (Unless the person has evolved and realizes that a true understanding of intersectionality forces oneself to accept that individuality is the supreme quality and supreme virtue.)
It is nonsense. It’s a justification for giving them absolute power. It is also blatantly racist against white people.
I believe I read somewhere that it stands for Black, Indigenouis, Person of Color.
Even the most simple of teachings can be twisted by the left to make them too complex to understand, thus the need for a ruling elite . . . .
Update: I vaguely remember a similar definition for socialism or communism:
“A system of government simple enough for the masses to understand, but complex enough to require a group of elites to run it.”
I think this is how churches (and other organizations) become corrupt in general. Simplicity and elegance.
Thank you posting this. I, too, believe it is the essence of the Christian message. A lot of the rest is just noise to me.
I actually look at these kids in Seattle and feel sorry for them. For all their bluster about creating a new world order, they just seem pitiful, small, and lost. When you think your life is so meaningless that you have to act out like that, it makes me wonder whether you had anyone in your life to teach you right from wrong. And it makes me very thankful for my own parents and grandparents. Maybe, especially, my mom, who when I complained about having to go to church, would say, “I don’t ask much from you. You’re coming with us to church. Try to listen.”
The challenge I have with intersectionality is the rapidity with which the actions it calls for change. What was prohibited yesterday is mandatory today. What was acceptable or even encouraged yesterday is today considered offensive and thus must now be prohibited. Which I guess is to be expected for an incoherent philosophy.
William Tyndale sure found that out the hard way after he translated a Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English for mass consumption.
Arguable.
This only makes sense if there is no real privilege, and its opposite, based on any of these (or other) characteristics in the society we live in.
I do think if we lived in a society where we all loved our neighbour as ourselves there would not be – taking a generous definition of neighbour.
Till then…??
From Vox:
Accurate?
Intersectionality denies our individuality. The words of Jesus emphasizes our individuality.
When people have been hurtful to my kids and they’ve had trouble getting over it, I’ve told them, “The good news is that I am not responsible for what anyone else does. When I meet G-d, he will not be asking me about what others did to me. I’ll have to account only for what I did.”
Like I always say sometimes: I prefer religions that reserve the concepts of Hell and eternal punishment for the afterlife.
Only partially. The left, not conservatives, elevated “intersectionality” from a mere descriptive phrase to an entire orienting philosophy intentionally to destroy existing society, attaching to the term competing and mutually incompatible hierarchies of grievance. Maybe if the left had continued to use the term in its descriptive sense, and not turned it into a sledgehammer to destroy, we would be having a less fraught discussion today.
In alternate reality land, yes that portrayal of intersectionality as exposed by VOX would be accurate – if there had been :
1 no John F Kennedy
2 no Martin Luther King Jr
3 no Civil Rights movement
4 no Civil Rights Act
Right now, in real California, if a white man goes to an interview at a large corporation, or government agency, and he possesses the same education, same job experience, same credit rating, same ability to interview, as a black woman, she still has a 400% greater chance of landing the job.
It’s not incoherent if the goal is to keep your erstwhile citizens constantly in turmoil.
Read # 14 before reading this: So after the white guy is excluded from getting the job he desires, he finds himself needing to apply for benefits. Then he will find, as he stands in front of the social worker at Health and Human services, that he needs a birth certificate, a driver’s license, his soc security card, two years of back bank statement, names of all employers going back five or six years, and the same with addresses.
Meanwhile he overhears the interview the hispanic couple are participating in one table and chair over. They are being given immediate “emergency” benefits as they stated they are broke, and that they lost their ID while coming to the country. These bennies include free medical health insurance, housing voucher, AFDC payments and food stamps. In Calif, this couple now are also both eligible for free tuition for any public college or university in the state.
If he had been given free tuition for his higher education, he would not be worried about his credit rating tanking. He has been out of school for six months. The student loan people are now calling 24/7. Without a good credit rating, his chances of getting decent job are now worse than those of people who are not as qualified.
It is totally true that the overall consequences of “Diversity hiring,” Affirmative Action and liberal attitudes toward immigration have been disastrous for white people. The fact that Fed agencies skew hiring practices toward hiring the least qualified is also a huge worry for the public overall.
Tyndale is one of my heroes!
Not only are the goalposts constantly in motion, they are invisible.
Intersectionality yields a caste system based on claims of collective guilt and nobility and on demands for retribution. It will produce endless cycles of injustice, resentment, and violence.
It’s because we demand pure victims. Nobody’s allowed to be just human.
We demand that the oppressors be pure, too. One drop of privilege tarnishes the whole works, and means they must be eliminated in order to achieve justice.
Whiniest ideology ever.
I’m getting a real Ricochet SSM Wars vibe from discussions of this here.
Ah, the good old days.
Somehow I seem to have missed out on the Trump Wars and usually not even known they were going on.
Ignorance is bliss.
Ignorance is like a delicate tropical fruit.