I have a theory that with the decline of religion in the West, people replaced what they got from religious ideology with political ideology. The sense of belonging and community. The sense of certainty in basic tenets. The confidence of being able to reliably recite their 'scriptures'. (Which 'scriptures' all having been laid down by their prophets.) And they are all guided by faith, not necessarily data. They have become quasi-religious organizations, and I'm sure in the future, will probably crystalize into something fairly overtly similar to what we would call religions today.
I guess the point is that you can see some of the same behaviors of religious types being evoked in adherents to the various political ideologies. To the point of not really even being willing to listen to math, or data, or science. There is a very real perception among them that the scriptures allow a better understanding of nature and the universe than the systems nature and the universe provide to aid our understanding. Even more worryingly, as the article points out, they will often put forth ideologically pure 'domain experts' who can be relied on to give explanations grounded more in doctrinal alignment than scientific veracity. So we've already reached a point where explanations that are in accordance with 'scripture' have become a matter of great doctrinal import to these groups, and are being actively sought out. I guess by that I mean, the poison has leaked over from general society, into the sciences.
I honestly believe that, as these groupings of political ideologues coalesce to replace religion more and more, I'd bet dollars to donuts that extremism in the future will be fueled almost exclusively by these quasi-religious political groupings.
> I have a theory that with the decline of religion in the West, people replaced what they got from religious ideology with political ideology.
I disagree with the premise.
Most of "the West" outside of America didn't replace religion with political ideology. America is also one of the Western countries that are slowest to lose religion, and it seems (from outside, as a European) that the loudest voices, at least on the political right, are also the most religious.
Meanwhile, in my experience, the European countries that have most strongly rejected religion have not at all replaced it with politics. I don't think they've replaced it with anything, really. Some new age stuff, yoga. A few people with politics but only a small minority.
> it seems (from outside, as a European) that the loudest voices, at least on the political right, are also the most religious
It's good that you recognize you're getting an outsider, biased viewpoint... because as an American, I can't square this with my experience at all.
If we were talking about 25+ years ago, then yes, the Republican party had a strong connection to a Christian base of voters and religious influence on policy was significant. Today though, it's an utterly insignificant special interest group. I doubt any religious group would crack the top 100 most influential lobbying groups, unless you count Israel but that feels distinct from religion.
The Democrats are essentially anti-religion, other than a vague desire to be inclusive to diverse religions. The Republicans are able to make a little political hay because of this ("War on Christmas" type stuff) and sometimes various elements of vices (drugs, prostitution, gambling, porn) or other ethical concerns (death penalty, abortion, assisted-suicide, ending life support) are influenced by religious beliefs.
Look at the fact that Donald Trump just won the popular vote and a decisive victory across broad demographics. His connection to Christianity is about as strong as any politician's connection to whatever regional food dish they eat for a photo-op one night on the campaign trail before moving on to appeal to the next city by doing their local cultural thing.
I think that is part true, but there are multiple other factors. I think one is that the main religion in the west is anti-wealth ("eye of a needle", "root of all evil", "give all you have to the poor" etc.) and that fits uncomfortably with a wealthy society.
> There is a very real perception among them that the scriptures allow a better understanding of nature and the universe than the systems nature and the universe provide to aid our understanding.
That is mostly true in the west of a new variant of Christianity - American evangelical Christianity. It only really really took off in the 18th century ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism#History ) and has gained a lot of ground in recent decades. TO some extent I think it is a product of the same culture as political ideologies: polarisation and blind loyalty. Like those ideologies it originated in the US.
> I'd bet dollars to donuts that extremism in the future will be fueled almost exclusively by these quasi-religious political groupings.
It is already the case. If you look at the 20th century the most extreme violence was fuelled by fascism (secular, wanted to replace existing religions, some leaders like Mussolini were atheists) and communism (almost always anti-religious and persecuted religions).
I think maybe these ideologies opposed religions were because religions are rivals for capturing people's values and loyalties.
Fascism didn't oppose religions.
Communism opposed religions in general.
The leader of the Italian fascists was personally an atheist.
The Nazis opposed particular religions including Christianity - they made multiple attempts to supplant Christianity as the major religion of Europe with neo-paganism and Positive Christianity. They were not keen on a religion founded by a non-violent Jew.
Fascist Italy supported the Catholic Church and made it their state religion. Same thing for francoist Spain.
A better example would be the chinese cultural revolution and their campaign against the Four Olds.
but the leader of fascist Italy was an atheist, which suggests the endorsement of the Catholic Church was not entirely sincere. Its possible that Mussolini was not entirely honest in his public behaviour.
This is correct and it's all Hegel's fault.
The only ideology that should be unquestioned is human rights.
The one that really pulls my nerve are the hardcore libertarians, because they often pretend to be backed by data when there is no data or contrary data around. Although I mostly lean on libertarianism, hardcore libertarians are usually impossible to argue with.
There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ rights)? Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are they? Are liberties more fundamental than rights that require taxpayer expenditure? Is paid holiday really a human right (UDHR art. 30)? Does the expansion of the concept of human rights weaken fundamental human rights?
> The only ideology that should be unquestioned is human rights.
Why should an ideology that’s obviously derivative of Christianity be treated as beyond question and not Nietzscheanism or Wahhabism?
This is my belief (heh) as well, in no small part from the staggering number of Bay Area “woke” types that turn to Islam, which holds quite the set of conflicting views on the progressive-conservative axis.
So I'm not muslim but I am a leftist in a conservative religious tradition.
The thing you might be missing is that sincerely religious people, including converts, don't necessarily "shop around" for a religion that aligns with their other beliefs. If you, somehow, come to believe that god is the one true god and muhammad was his last prophet, then you are going to become muslim. You don't have any other authentic choice.
For some beliefs you have options, eg if you believe jesus died for our sins but are flexible about the rest there are a lot of churches you can sincerely participate in. But if you believe in for example apostolic succession culminating with the bishop of rome well then you're going to be catholic.
I don't want to get into an evaluation here of who does and doesn't convert sincerely, or what are the valid sources of these beliefs or whatever. Pretty much every religious person has personal beliefs that are in conflict with the teachings of the religion. There are a lot of different ways to handle that contradiction but it's a fundamental part of the experience of belief.
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This is emphatically not what HN is for. We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421265 (Dec 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246939 (Nov 2024)
I feel like the author has fallen into the trap he describes himself.
It seems to me as though the phenomenon of "wokeness" is not well characterised through out the piece and instead it is used in a "we all know what wokeness is" fashion that actually clashes with the way the concept is viewed within the circles he himself is criticising.
I think within sociology and political theory there's actually a lot of discussion around the concept of "wokeness". What does it mean, how does it affect progressive views of the world when it comes to diversity and inclusion. It's definitely not a monolith and I think treating it as such is disrespectful to other people and bad for the public discourse.
In the same vein there seems to be a tacit agreement that everything involving Marxism is wrong. There's comments like "in the recent years all the sociologist departments have turned Marxist" as if that by itself was a condemnation. Although personally there's a lot of ideas in Marxism I disagree with, Ive really come to appreciate the critical analysis that's done of the capitalist mode of production through the Marxist lens.
Inequality in our world is definitely tearing society apart, and these concerns can be examined very thoroughly through Marxism. It's a framework of analysis that can be used.
So, ultimately, although I agree with the notion of cliques (or priesthoods, as he calls them). I think a big part of the analysis comes from a very biased perspective that fails at trying to comprehend the other's perspective and that's precisely something the author points at those he is criticising.
I've been frustrated by his writing in the past few years. He asks big questions, but is surprisingly small-minded with the answers.
Feels like he found a formula for churning out thinkpieces:
- find an interesting topic
- make a simplified model of the issue
- solve the simplified model
- discover reality conflicts with the model (optional)
- ignore reality
- declare victory
I think he just grew up, frankly. I've never had a blog, but I'm fairly similar intellectually and dispositionally to Scott and have followed him a long time and I've seen the same thing happen to me. When I was younger and in school, I'd go deep into rabbit holes and investigate them very thoroughly, mostly dispassionately, trying to have as little bias as possible, maybe come to conclusions, maybe not. But having a full-time job I'm reasonably senior in, a family, and needing to stick to some regular exercise routine to stay functional and healthy as middle age otherwise ravishes me, there is simply not the time or mental energy to do those things any more.
My reponse has been different, though. I just don't care any more. I have had no personal interaction with any person or institution that seemed woke in nearly a decade and I have no opinion about it, probably because I'm not in school and stay off the Internet except for Hacker News every few days. I haven't voted in two decades and avoid culture war nonsense.
But Scott is a terminally online person, has built a brand, and is being paid lots of money by Substack to keep churning out these think pieces. So he has to keep doing it, but he's also a middle-aged man running a private psychiatry practice with a wife and two young kids. There is no way he has the time or mental energy to devote to this stuff that he had 15 years ago. He has accumulated knowledge and wisdom and is still a hell of a writer with a very good understanding of how to present statistics to a lay audience, but he's probably also forever going to be mentally stuck in 2007 when Ron Paul seemed to every professional-managerial class 25 year-old man in America to be the most intellectual honest, exciting thing we'd ever get. He's becoming the poor man's version of Andrew Sullivan or Megan McArdle for the kind of people who only listen to bands that aren't popular.
Suffering from success, DJ Khaled-style! Better to die a hero...
I suggest you could simplify that to:
- find an interesting topic
- ignore reality
- declare victory
Or possibly to:
- ignore reality
- declare victory
There is a certain style of libertarian writing, and I include the author as well as the mercatus center posse as often using this syle, that I find quite off putting. It often feels like the primary purpose of most of their writing is to show how they are smarter than everyone else. This manifests in a writing style that is extremely confident and declarative which is an effective mask for the hollowness and one sidedness of their ideas.
I'll cherry pick just one example from this article. The author in one sentence dismisses the entire field of psychoanalysis. Yet I can't help but notice that his entire blog sure looks like he is unconsciously carrying out his own psychoanalysis in public. You can also see it in the grievances against the medical profession where he has to use his blog to guard against feelings of inadequacy because he didn't get into a top medical school or residency. But he gets to play it both ways because the fact that he writes these outrageously long, fluff filled pieces, that draw a large following he can then use as proof that he is actually in fact smarter than the people who previously rejected him.
I have some similar chips on my shoulder so I quickly recognize these patterns of behaviors in others. And perhaps I am misinterpreting him, but every single time I read one of his posts I am left with the main takeaway being that I am supposed to be impressed by his intelligence.
Other red flags in this piece include the references to the stupidity of the average person (again in implicit contrast to his penetrating intellect) as well as the lazy generalizations and vacuous statements about amorphous concepts such as wokeness along with the bizarre suggestion that wokeness somehow conquered most priesthoods even though the counterexamples are far, far too long to list. I'll leave it with one though: actual priests in the US can hardly be said to be woke even though their own sacred texts are far more aligned with progressive economics than consumer capitalism.
> I'll cherry pick just one example from this article. The author in one sentence dismisses the entire field of psychoanalysis.
Properly. The issues with psychoanalysis are extensive, well known, and he has discussed them in the past, like the dodo bird verdict. If you are somehow still a fan of psychoanalysis after everything, then you are not going to be convinced by two sentences of criticism, or even three, and there is no point in trying when that is not the primary topic; dismissing it in 1 sentence is correct. (And this is your slamdunk criticism you lead with?)
You're not merely supposed to be impressed by his intelligence but in his virtue as a purely rational, unbiased mind absolutely free from any corrupting ideology.
He's an insecure like you said and a coward. Too afraid to say what he actually believes (or maybe too spiritually weak to actually commit to any), he hides his goals and motivations behind this pseudo-academic prose style.
> Too afraid to say what he actually believes
I think this would sound very unlikely to any regular reader of SSC/ACX. Many articles, including this one, are explanations of what he believes and why.
(Is it possible that you just find his explanations difficult to believe?)
> (Is it possible that you just find his explanations difficult to believe?)
Correct, I don't believe he's honest about his beliefs, their sources, and his motivation.
> He's an insecure like you said and a coward
Aren't we all, to some degree?
Sure but it is the degree that's notable here.
> "wokeness" is not well characterised through out the piece and instead it is used in a "we all know what wokeness is" fashion
In comments, Scott explains: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods/comment/8506...
On their face a lot of these might be bad things, but my criticism is precisely that this "brand" of wokeness that he describes is an oversimplification on a lot of issues.
For example, let's take the claim that COVID vaccines were being prioritized by race instead of age. This is a big claim, in Australia for example I remember people from ethnic groups were considered priority; I don't recall them being prioritized over old people however so it's definitely an argument that I think needs to be treated with seriousness. Where was this, what were the reasons given for it, etc. I do recall certain races being more likely to have more serious reactions to the virus than others; there's socio-economic factors to consider as well (for example, black people tend to live in poorer neighborhoods, we could look at number of people per household, etc.).
So, although I appreciate the effort of actually giving some examples, my main point stands. We ought to contextualize and give a fair reading as to why these decisions are being made, provided that these examples are a fair representation of the modern scenario to begin with. Instead of simply labeling them as "woke".
I think there's a big reaction against diversity that fails to account the reasons, logical, philosophical, ethical that are behind it and why these people think we should have more of it.
I feel like if you want to have these kind of discussions it's more helpful for everyone to actually give proper respect to the opponent's arguments and strong-man their arguments when you take them down. As other posters have pointed out, it seems as though he is making a strawman and then writing a whole essay about it.
> It's definitely not a monolith and I think treating it as such is disrespectful to other people and bad for the public discourse.
It definitely is and the priests deterministicly produce this. The only one who could ever teach me..
"Inequality in our world is definitely tearing society apart..."
This is a false narrative that is not supported by the data or by economic realities. Allow me to get on my soap box for a moment...
Inequality is a concept that is economically (not psychologically, unfortunately) inconsequential to a world that has seen a dramatic DECREASE in poverty in the past 50 years. We live in the best of times.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
The ratio of one person's "wealth" to another's (inequality) has little or no bearing on anyone's wellbeing unless the person of less wealth chooses to make it so.
In other words, Elon Musk (for example) is not keeping anyone from being able to afford things just because he has great wealth. That wealth was created out of enterprise value--it was not stolen from anyone.
There is no great "source of wealth" that only certain people have or can control access to. Wealth is created, not hoarded. This forum is ostensibly about this very topic: commercialization of technologies and value creation.
In a free society and economy, individuals are capable of building ventures that have enterprise values that are "invented" out of thin air through economic contracts.
LeBron James, for example, is very wealthy because he has a contract to get paid for his talent. That contract was valued through economic negotiations. He grew up in poverty, and now he is wealthy.
This is where wealth comes from: the creation and monetization of something of value. It happens in the stock market every minute of every trading day.
I stopped reading the news a long time ago. After reading this, I haven’t really put much thought into what would make me return to having a regular habit again. Or what would even signal to me that I suddenly have something to gain from it?
I there’s something to be said about keeping one foot in the public sphere while also having a degree of skepticism. The difference between Gary Numan and David Bowie.
This article appears to be a defense of priesthoods and the traditional media:
> But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true - in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers.
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Is the author perhaps overcomplicating the explanation on how 'wokeness' captured so many priesthoods, by invoking complex memetic virality? E.g. Marxism was very effective at capturing priesthoods in China and Russia (e.g. Lysenkoism) because it was politically powerful, as well as morally - it was considered immoral, even treasonous, to not be communist.
In the same way, modern Western morality is based on anti-racism, and wokeness is merely its next logical step.
Can we apply Ising models used to explain ferromagnetism to how opinions get formed in crowds?
The point was that there are too many people like you out in society in quasi-religious political groupings that adhere less to natural reason and more to ideological 'scriptures'. 'Scriptures' like woke-ness, or anti-woke-ness. You're clearly the anti-woke-ness jihadi type, but the idea is the same.
You have effectively gone out immediately after reading the article and proven the article's larger point. It makes responding to you awkward, since you appear to be unaware of how your comment validates so many of the article's larger implications in a way that you clearly did not intend. So most of the people interacting with this thread are just downvoting you in the hopes that your comment will disappear. They'd just as soon not have that uncomfortable conversation with you where they point out that your anti-woke-ness is as cringe as the woke-ness you're decrying.
> You have effectively gone out immediately after reading the article and proven the article's larger point.
You must misunderstand my position, because I don't really disagree with the article overall - it seems plausible to me. Just that it uses an over-complicated explanation for one of its points.
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https://www.perlentaucher.de/essay/die-folgen-der-rushdie-af...
At the root lies a fundamental anti democratic event that overruled a democratic society : the Fatwa.
How about you get off your 17th century witch doctor house and admit you're a human following practices that broadly work which have been refined and tested by a large group of humans using a scientific like model over many years. Done...
And please try to do some actual outreach with children. It helps refine what you're talking about into short simple statements vs rambling comparisons between Maoist china and the clergy.
Comparing yourself to a priest in a tower turns away many and encourages anti-thesim type conversations to start which I think is what you're ironically making fun of here. (A lot of very vocal people simply don't/won't see that).
And simply put, no I don't have the free time to finish reading all of that...