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Woke America Runs on Ignorance
Woke world is a simple, black-and-white, never-never land of good and evil, oppressors and oppressed. But everything is simple until you know something about it. Binary morality can rarely endure the light of knowledge and understanding.
In a recent column, George Will writes about “our lumpen intelligentsia”:
Published in GeneralAn admirable intelligentsia, inoculated by education against fashions and fads, would make thoughtful distinctions arising from historically informed empathy. It would be society’s ballast against mob mentalities. Instead, much of America’s intelligentsia has become a mob.
Seeking to impose on others the conformity it enforces in its ranks, articulate only in a boilerplate of ritualized cant, today’s lumpen intelligentsia consists of persons for whom a little learning is delightful. They consider themselves educated because they are credentialed, stamped with the approval of institutions of higher education that gave them three things: a smattering of historical information just sufficient to make the past seem depraved; a vocabulary of indignation about the failure of all previous historic actors… to match the virtues of the lumpen intelligentsia; and the belief that America’s grossest injustice is the insufficient obeisance accorded to this intelligentsia.
Today’s cancel culture — erasing history, ending careers — is inflicted by people experiencing an orgy of positive feelings about themselves as they negate others…
The cancellers need just enough learning to know, vaguely, that there was a Lincoln who lived when Americans, sunk in primitivism, thought they were confronted with vexing constitutional constraints and moral ambiguities. The cancel culture depends on not having so much learning that it spoils the statue-toppling fun: Too much learning might immobilize the topplers with doubts about how they would have behaved in the contexts in which the statues’ subjects lived.
First, if a belief doesn’t work, it’s probably wrong. That logic gets me past atheism. So, G-d exists, but is Christianity true? The best evidence I’ve seen for that is the startling change that came over Christ’s disciples after His death. When He was crucified, they were terrified and went into hiding; Peter even denied knowing Him. Yet, shortly after His death, they lost their fear, came out of hiding, and openly preached the Gospel. Some of them died terrible deaths rather than denounce Him. What accounts for the change?
I copied the last one
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
God says I tell you ahead of time what I’m going to do so that when I do it, you don’t say dismissively, My idol did that, or I knew that was going to happen. Christianity is probably the only ‘religion’ founded and proved upon a prophesy made more than 500 years before (and translated into Greek more that 300 years before). This predicts the Anointed One coming and being cut off in the 483rd year (the 69th sabbath — understood as a seven-year period) of the 490 years after the decree by to rebuild Jerusalem. Artaxerxes starts the 490-year (70-week) prophecy in 457 B.C. Even allowing for changes in calendars and there being no zero-year, and so forth, this still puts the 483 years that passed at around in 33 AD, Jesus came, was cut off as the sacrificial Lamb for the sin of the world and the personal propitiation for each person’s sin, and additionally changed the world for the better.
This is pretty much proof to me. This in addition to the phenomenal existence of the Jews — God’s chosen people to this day — through the diaspora and their returning to Jerusalem. And personally to me, the miracles I’ve experienced in my own life.
Church without belief is garbage. Only the certainty of an Absolute Truth with an Absolute Moral Law from a Transcendent Law Giver can convince anyone to be good. It is this has been reduced to nothing over the last fifty years, and is why we are in such terrible conditions today.
I’m going to add in the Apostles who suffered torture and persecution and death for witnessing to the career and resurrection of Christ. Nobody did that for Baal, or Zeus, or Astarte, or Osiris, etcetera. The whole shebang would have collapsed in Jerusalem because everyone would have known it was just a line of guff. Stephen would have to have been deranged. James bin Zebedee is executed as Bishop of Jerusalem and nobody would have followed him in that position. Certainly not James the brother of Jesus, who thought it was all a crock until Jesus rose, and then became Bishop of Jerusalem and was executed for his trouble.
Read Acts. Before it is too late. No man knows the day, nor the hour.
Yeah. The martyrdom of all the inner circle for their faith speaks loudly, doesn’t it. And Paul who rejoiced in prison, because he knew.
Gad Saad makes the exact same points. He said that the reason SJWs go into Economics or Sociology is that they can avoid falsifiability. Economics and sociology can use the some semblance of the scientific method to figure things out but SJWs don’t like that.
According to any kind of scientific/empirical thinking ever, you need capitalism to generate enough wealth to not be poor and two-parent nuclear families are the best families for kids. You can’t prove this through conventional science because you can’t reverse age the same kids that were raised by single mothers and have the single mothers marry the fathers and see how it all happened with all the other variables being the same. But you can compare kids of the same race and the same household income in the same location with each other. In fancy terms, this is called regression analysis.
Since ever study ever (I exaggerate slightly) suggests that kids of any racial or income background do better with two parent families, I conclude that the two parent family is better than the single-mother family. This isn’t exactly the scientific method but it as empirical as you can get.
What leftists do in my experience, is that they find the kid from a single mother who graduated valedictorian and is now a successful business entrepreneur. Notice how lefties are currently focusing on the small number of black-Americans killed by cops rather than anything that kills black-Americans in significant numbers. Sociologists and political scientists feel that this is more important so they write a bunch of papers about systemic racism rather than address the elephant of black homicide and black fatherlessness.
I believe that this is connected to the sin of pride.
Paul who is shipwrecked at least three times. On top of regular whippings and beatings and stonings and whatnot. Paul who repeatedly prevents prisoners from escaping for the sake of the guards who would be executed if they did. He gets them all singing hymns. And turns the Praetorian Guard into his personal crypto-Christian messenger service. This guy could have lived a fine and raucous life except for that one incident on the way to Damascus.
Quite so. I don’t think a Will-approved history curriculum would be an improvement.
Maybe because math – such as statistics, etc – if done correctly, proves that many of their “theories” about race etc, are wrong?
Like, the claim that hundreds or even thousands of “unarmed black teens” are killed by police every year. The actual NUMBER proves them wrong. So, they say “math is a tool of white supremacy.”
As are reason and logic, apparently.
It would only stand to reason.
Logic is a branch of mathematics.
Reason is closely affiliated, at the very least.
I have no idea how my comment will be received but I’ll just post it and see what happens. If only to exchange ideas and get feedback:
I don’t know anyone who talks this way or believes this argument should be normalized, except for people criticizing academia, and I know some very liberal and woke people at all levels of the academic food chain.
(Yes, with the internet you can find some teacher somewhere who said something dumb, I know there was something going on in a college in South Africa some years ago. It just doesn’t characterize any distribution.)
I have read that this kind of stuff crops up in university courses, but whether the articles are just “nut picking” far left outliers, I have no idea. I’m sure it’s not mainstream. Here are a few examples of it:
https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/why-rationalism-is-irrational/
https://theunityprocess.com/the-removal-for-logic-the-formula-of-patriarchy/
https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/85spp.html
I posted this a week ago, but it fits here: This is another excerpt from George Will’s July 2 column on Cancel Culture:
…but here’s what Will wrote on June 1:
November 3 is a binary choice, no matter how much you dislike both sides. So while Will decries the rot on the college campuses and the cancel culture it has enabled, AFAIK, he has not repudiated his June 1 column calling on voters to elect Joe Biden and give the Democrats control of the Senate.
Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.
— Omar N. Bradley
As far as our understanding of science can determine, entropy is the natural state of the universe. Also, humans are organic automatons and free will is an illusion.
As an agnostic, my problem with atheism is therefore that if its true, its a truth that is inherently worthless and self-defeating, so one might as well believe that which brings the greatest utility. The problem, of course, is at least three-fold:
Willful belief is not actually belief at all, and attempts to attain a ‘true’ state of belief is likely a major cause of ideological or religious extremism.
Utility is subjective at both the personal and societal levels
Relative utility will often change with the circumstances (again, at both the personal and societal levels).
What makes you say that?
What makes you say otherwise, aside from faith? Sciences says that human personality and decisions, as well as our sense of self and connections with others, are based on our genetic material interacting with external stimuli on both an immediate and cumulative basis-an infinitely complex if-then machine. It is the theoretical existence of the soul as a source of independent, eternal consciousness that provide a non-determinist* explanation for our perceptions and decisions, a capacity to act and exist beyond the limitations of chemistry and physics.
*or non-random, according to theories I’m not really smart enough to understand, but either way ‘free will’ as we understand it would not exist.
It seems like that might be indistinguishable from “free will” so either way the outcome is the same.
Practically indistinguishable, hence a very convincing illusion, but enough of a distinction to cause personal discomfort*, and likely social problems when widely believed.
*There is a though experiment, predating the movie, where one is given the option of being hooked up to a machine like the Matrix, without subsequent knowledge of having done so, with false perceptions of a perfect life being provided for you, even to the point of whatever emotional and psychological needs would best suit your personal happiness. Would you do it? My answer is no, my left-leaning friend with Marxist sympathies answered yes…..I suspect that would be a general pattern, albeit with exceptions.
Maybe people who answer yes, need to see “Star Trek: Generations.”
Was that the movie where it was said that life had meaning because it ends? I found it about as comforting or inspiring as that famous poem which said, “Don’t worry about what happens after you die, because you become fertilizer which nourishes grass!”
Heh. I’ll get back to the existential angst tomorrow.
No, the point I was making was that they said the illusion of existence within “The Nexus” was pointless because it wasn’t real, nothing mattered, nothing “made a difference.”
Electrons have free will, why can’t sentient biological creatures?
I am with Will.
There is a third way between the Cancel Culture of some of the Dems, and the Reps who lost their cojones in dealing with Trump. (Only two Senators found Trump’s shake-down of Ukraine’s president to be wrong, and only Romney found it cause enough to remove Trump, while Lamar Alexander found that Trump’s behavior while wrong, was not enough to remove Trump. All of the other Senators did not hold their manhood dear [Henry V] and refused to find that Trump’s behavior was less than “perfect.” Those Republican Senators should rightfully be condemned to minority status as condign punishment, until Trumpism is no longer a force in the party or nation.)
Given that there are enough Dem Senators with institutional respect for the filibuster, such as Michael Bennet and Diane Feinstein, that will give Mitch the ability to stop truly bad legislation, or to limit its scope.
Gary agrees with George Will. Is anyone surprised?
My point in asking “what makes you say that?” (emphasis on the “makes”) is that, if you’re correct that we have no free will, then something made you say that we have no free will, you had no choice.
A bigger point is that believing that we have no free will doesn’t “work” – it doesn’t lead to a fulfilling life or allow us to cooperate with others. Letting people suffer the consequences of their actions makes no sense in such a world; their actions were compelled. If a belief makes life miserable and, for all practical purposes, unlivable, then it must be wrong. Or, put another way, if you have to act as if the belief is wrong just to get through the day, then the belief is probably wrong.
Objection! Assuming facts not in evidence!
Gary, you really think DiFi is going to stand up to Chuck Schumer?