Weird niche connection- in C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," Lewis uses the demon Screwtape to address what he regards as a misunderstanding or misuse of a principle of democracy: The false belief or demand that people are literally equal rather than having equality in a legal or moral sense.
I'm just gonna repost a comment I made a few days ago on a Signal group talking about the elimination of gifted & talented programs from Seattle's schools because they underrepresent minorities. It involves Plato, of course.
> It's probably a category error to say they [the woke] have a coherent view that smart is bad, more like they don't care about that vs superficial fairness stuff
I think they do believe smart is bad. Not because they have anything against smartness in particular, but because their worldview is based on a Platonist metaphysics in which all people are the same in every way.
Social Justice morality goes hand-in-hand with Marxist economic policy. Both demand that everyone has the same abilities, the same gender, the same needs, and the same desires. Every item on their agenda will fail if people aren't fundamentally identical. It's necessary for people to be identical if their rationalist-Modernist (in the "Seeing Like a State" sense) approach to managing society is to work.
Maybe I'm weird but I have always interpreted 'equal' in this context as only meaning 'deserving equal moral consideration'. It literally never occured to me that this should imply we are the same or even very similar. More like an affirmation that we should count the same _despite_ our many differences...
I think that was the intent. My recollection is that it's adapted from an expression about all being equal *in the eyes of God*, with the idea that God does not discriminate based on birth and will admit souls to heaven regardless of wealth, family, or any other earthly considerations beyond your theologically relevant acts and beliefs.
To actually go beyond equality we need some subtle thinking that distinguishes everyone's innate value as a human being -- "equal before god" etc -- vs their actual capacities and capabilities in a given context (maybe not so equal if we are talking about playing NBA basketball or designing a rocket ship).
The reason we get so het-up about equality is that differences in capabilities have ended up (partially) correlating with power and resources.
Differences in preference may be more-important than differences in ability. Both the Woke and the Nazis always attribute to "race" things determined by culture.
For example, the much-talked-about "racial difference" in IQ and test scores might correspond better to the cultural differences in emphasis on studying for tests. Group inner-city high-crime whites and blacks together, suburban upper-middle-class blacks and whites together, and pull out all the identifiable kids with tiger-moms or tiger-dads into a third group (which would have lots of Asians, Jews, and upper-class whites). Does anyone think the ethnic test score differences within these groups would be as large as the (culture-driven) differences between them?
Encouraging diversity should mean letting different cultures co-exist, which means not demanding that all cultures attach the same status to the same things, any more than you'd make them all eat the same food or listen to the same music.
Can you explain what you take "All people are created equal" to mean? It doesn't seem like a well-defined term to me, I have no idea what it actually implies. I've always taken it to just mean that legally the government applies laws to all people in the same way.
The Woke aren't asking for "equality" (equal opportunity, equality before the law). They're asking for "equity" (equality of outcomes). Start to notice how much of the Woke agenda is just to replace or redefine words, like replacing "sex" with "gender", "cultural borrowing" with "cultural appropriation", "free market" with "late capitalism", "prosperity" with "consumerism". It's verbal jujitsu, a shell game played with dictionaries, trying to change people's minds by swapping the words around while they get the rubes to look elsewhere.
I think the recent craze for Rene Girard is due entirely to the way it takes this Marxist/Woke claim that everyone has the same preferences to the next level. Girard says that no one has /any/ preferences; we just imitate what we perceive as the preferences of other people. This bullshit paves the way for attributing absolutely everything to social construction.
AI reading
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/the-lie-that-made-the-west-by-eneasz
Just realized I didn't thank you personally!
Thank you :)
Weird niche connection- in C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," Lewis uses the demon Screwtape to address what he regards as a misunderstanding or misuse of a principle of democracy: The false belief or demand that people are literally equal rather than having equality in a legal or moral sense.
I'm just gonna repost a comment I made a few days ago on a Signal group talking about the elimination of gifted & talented programs from Seattle's schools because they underrepresent minorities. It involves Plato, of course.
> It's probably a category error to say they [the woke] have a coherent view that smart is bad, more like they don't care about that vs superficial fairness stuff
I think they do believe smart is bad. Not because they have anything against smartness in particular, but because their worldview is based on a Platonist metaphysics in which all people are the same in every way.
Social Justice morality goes hand-in-hand with Marxist economic policy. Both demand that everyone has the same abilities, the same gender, the same needs, and the same desires. Every item on their agenda will fail if people aren't fundamentally identical. It's necessary for people to be identical if their rationalist-Modernist (in the "Seeing Like a State" sense) approach to managing society is to work.
Maybe I'm weird but I have always interpreted 'equal' in this context as only meaning 'deserving equal moral consideration'. It literally never occured to me that this should imply we are the same or even very similar. More like an affirmation that we should count the same _despite_ our many differences...
I think that was the intent. My recollection is that it's adapted from an expression about all being equal *in the eyes of God*, with the idea that God does not discriminate based on birth and will admit souls to heaven regardless of wealth, family, or any other earthly considerations beyond your theologically relevant acts and beliefs.
I think you're normal tbh, and I'm the weird one.
You may like https://lifeitself.org/blog/2019/12/01/blind-spot-3-the-equality-complex
To actually go beyond equality we need some subtle thinking that distinguishes everyone's innate value as a human being -- "equal before god" etc -- vs their actual capacities and capabilities in a given context (maybe not so equal if we are talking about playing NBA basketball or designing a rocket ship).
The reason we get so het-up about equality is that differences in capabilities have ended up (partially) correlating with power and resources.
Differences in preference may be more-important than differences in ability. Both the Woke and the Nazis always attribute to "race" things determined by culture.
For example, the much-talked-about "racial difference" in IQ and test scores might correspond better to the cultural differences in emphasis on studying for tests. Group inner-city high-crime whites and blacks together, suburban upper-middle-class blacks and whites together, and pull out all the identifiable kids with tiger-moms or tiger-dads into a third group (which would have lots of Asians, Jews, and upper-class whites). Does anyone think the ethnic test score differences within these groups would be as large as the (culture-driven) differences between them?
Encouraging diversity should mean letting different cultures co-exist, which means not demanding that all cultures attach the same status to the same things, any more than you'd make them all eat the same food or listen to the same music.
Can you explain what you take "All people are created equal" to mean? It doesn't seem like a well-defined term to me, I have no idea what it actually implies. I've always taken it to just mean that legally the government applies laws to all people in the same way.
The Woke aren't asking for "equality" (equal opportunity, equality before the law). They're asking for "equity" (equality of outcomes). Start to notice how much of the Woke agenda is just to replace or redefine words, like replacing "sex" with "gender", "cultural borrowing" with "cultural appropriation", "free market" with "late capitalism", "prosperity" with "consumerism". It's verbal jujitsu, a shell game played with dictionaries, trying to change people's minds by swapping the words around while they get the rubes to look elsewhere.
I think the recent craze for Rene Girard is due entirely to the way it takes this Marxist/Woke claim that everyone has the same preferences to the next level. Girard says that no one has /any/ preferences; we just imitate what we perceive as the preferences of other people. This bullshit paves the way for attributing absolutely everything to social construction.