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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.
Ah, I didn’t catch the play on words, my apologies. Theoretically, I didn’t have a choice. Here’s a link to a Calvin and Hobbes comic relating to the practical absurdity of it all (though there are important differences between a lack of free will and the concept of ‘fate’): https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/06/07#:~:text=All%20events%20are%20preordained%20and,not%20my%20fault%2C%20it's%20fate.&text=Calvin%3A%20That%20wasn't%20fate!
I agree that believing we have no free will doesn’t ‘work’-I do not agree that it not ‘working’ is sufficient for making a belief ‘probably wrong’ when it is the only logically consistent conclusion in light of what we ‘know’. I certainly hope you are right, however.
Doesn’t quantum mechanics imply that randomness is stewed into the Universe? If so, how can our actions be determined? Don’t be so quick to give up agency, your ability to improve your life and the lives of the people you love through your own actions. “The gods willed it,” “white supremacy,” and “free will is an illusion” are all little more than excuses for failing to act.
Random is not the same thing as free will, and given the infinite complexity of the theoretical human ‘if-then machine,’ it would be practically indistinguishable from a determined human condition.
Also, like I implied, I don’t ‘choose’ to operate on the assumption that free will doesn’t exist, because that is self-defeating and doesn’t ‘work’; my point was simply that something not ‘working’ in that sense is not a sufficient rational basis to believe it to be false, that is a faith-based standard….the adoption of which can, paradoxically, be perfectly rational, on much the same logic as Pascal’s wager.
Does randomness really exist? I’ve been told that it is extraordinarily difficult to generate random numbers and that even then the numbers prove to be not truly ‘random’.
I once had a conversation with a guy who was an atheist/agnostic (I don’t remember which word he used) and who had degrees in both
mathphysics and philosophy. He said that there is a completely random component in whether an electron gives off a photon or changes shell level, and that in his view since the electron can’t ‘decide’ which to do, something has to ‘decide’ which happens, and this “proves the existence of god”. And this goes to the fundamental preconceptions by which reality is comprehended, ‘scientifically’ and otherwise, and to the existence of God or not.Randomness can’t be proven, it is a theoretical construct that tries to explain an experience that we can’t logically explain but we know does take place. But if it exists in the smaller particles that compose one’s brain, how can one say that randomness does not exist in the whole? This argument contradicts the argument against free will.
This reminds me of a story I posted some time ago. It was told by a friend about taking his orals for a PhD in Electrical Engineering. He was ushered into a classroom filled with professors. One professor asked him a question – “Why is the sky blue?” My friend filled a chalkboard with equations. When he finished, another professor asked, “Why?”
He filled another chalkboard with equations. Again, he was asked, “Why?” Again, he filled a chalkboard. When he was asked “why” a third time, he threw up his hands and replied, “God exists.”
The professors thanked him and asked him to leave the room. Three hours later, they filed out. My friend grabbed his advisor’s arm and asked, “Well?”
Professor: “Well, what?”
PhD Candidate: “What do you mean, ‘Well, what?’ Did I pass?”
Professor: “Well, yeah, of course.”
PhD Candidate: “What do you mean, ‘Of course,’ you were in there for three hours!”
Professor: “Oh, that. You brought up an interesting point and we were discussing it. Why were you worried?”
PhD Candidate: “I couldn’t answer that last question.”
Professor: “Listen, some people can fill one chalkboard, some five. But we all reach that point where the only answer is, ‘God exists.’”