@kenny-evitt reblogged:

I can’t escape the nagging suspicion that “capitalism” is really just a placeholder for ‘human nature’ or something. What alternative system or ‘ideology’ would work differently? And if there isn’t one, why do you keep criticizing 'capitalism’ specifically?

For one, any student of history can tell you that “human nature” is way way more flexible than you can imagine. Different societies in different ages have done such different things it always boggles my mind. Do you not read the endless tumblr posts about some weirdass and fascinating lost culture?

Western First World fatalism about “human nature” is just an arbitrary collection of cynicisms. 

Certainly, many systems of exchange have existed outside markets. As much as everyone likes to mock authoritarianism, many people participate in centrally-directed structures like a military, or within a large corporation. Command and control has problems, but it exists, and it’s not always terrible. So do genuinely tribal economies, where people share on the basis of what the people they care about need (and if gets complicated, it gets into gift economies.)

There have been a lot of systems of exchange beyond capitalism!

***

But, dismiss all that. Let’s say nothing works as well as free market capitalism, at least in terms of avoiding starvation and overly powerful central governments. Let’s call it, to borrow from Churchill “the worst economic system except for all the others.”

So?

Say you had a father who came home drunk and beat you every other day. Your only other options were running away and starving, or fighting him and getting beat every day. It might very well be that accepting this violent abuse is the best possible option you have.

You still have a right to criticize it. You should not worship this father. And, having robbed him of legitimacy, your outlook is different. By knowing he is bad, you do not blame yourself for his punishments. (And you do not blame your little sister when she is the target of the physical rage.) Even with no other options available, criticizing him is all important so that you keep touch with reality. And the real truth of it is, is that he’s a shitty father, you do not deserve to be beaten, and all of that remains even if there’s nowhere else to go.

Capitalism starves people, and then it lies to us that they deserved starvation. Even if no other option were any better (which I do not believe), it is important to always remember that. 

Incidents lately:

An Asian, progressive professor at Yale was doxxed when students discovered her very nasty pseudonymous Yelp reviews.

June Chu, dean of Pierson College at Yale University, apologized last Saturday for her Yelp comments which included calling people “white trash,” “sketchy” and “low-class folks,” the Yale Daily News reported.  Chu was placed on leave this week and will not take part in Commencement activities, according to an email sent to students by Head of College Stephen Davis, Yale Daily News reported.

Plus a Breitbart reporter is suing a reporter at conservative anti-Trump magazine Fusion, for saying she is racist for making the OK symbol in a picture.

In the complaint, shared with BuzzFeed News, lawyers for Cassandra Fairbanks allege that Emma Roller, the Fusion journalist, defamed their client when she tweeted an image of Fairbanks at the White House making what Roller claimed in a caption is a “white power hand gesture.”

Fairbanks is represented by Robert Barnes, a Malibu attorney best known for high-profile clients such as Wesley Snipes and Ralph Nader. In the suit, Barnes pits “independent, outsider writers, scribes, advocates, and journalists… a new media” against an “increasingly distrusted elite-backed press.” Mainstream media organizations “view the First Amendment as a wholly owned property of elite-backed journalists to smear and slime their adversaries at will,” the complaint reads. “The First Amendment is meant to protect the Cassandra Fairbanks’ of the journalism world: independent, alternative voices of truth in a sea of fake news.”

Yeah, the lawyer is declaring the importance of the First Amendment as he sues a reporter for saying something he doesn’t like.

(The actual issue seems to be that the alt-right is having fun appropriating “normie” symbols - like Pepe, Taylor Swift, milk, and now the OK hand sign - knowing that social justice opponents will treat this as credible, and throw another totem of mundane culture overboard because it had been infected by racists. Alt-right-adjacent like Fairbanks types help this along, and then are shocked when their opponents read them as participating in racist signalling. It’s dumb all around.)

Anyway, I’m not going to do the “no one is talking about this” whine because I have no idea what all the discourse is. But I haven’t seen many references to either of these on rationalist tumblr myself at least.

And it’s an important reminder that in any battle over “free speech”, a large portion of those defenders are completely opportunistic partisans who will abandon this principle when they are offended. (Or who will use the defense that they are “only highlighting the hypocrisy of their opponents”… by being massively hypocritical themselves.)

This does not mean that no one values Free Speech qua itself. There are clearly some principled defenders. But it’s really not very many. It’s certainly not as many as those who are shouting Free Speech as a defense in any particular controversy.

@isaacsapphire in another thread:

Around 1999 or 2000, I spent a while talking with my mother’s mother about her experience of Pearl Harbour and World War 2. She had been a child in Los Angeles, California, on the West Coast of the continental United States, the bit geographically and psychologically closest to Hawaii, in part because of the Navy bases in both places having a significant amount of movement between them. So people in LA often personally knew sailors who were currently posted to the Pearl Harbour base.

And she knew Japanese people, went to some flower arranging classes taught by Japanese diplomats’ wives.

And my grandmother still defends the Japanese Internment. I listened to her, how it seemed like a good idea at the time.

A few years later, 9/11 happened. I lived at the edge of the NYC commuter area, and you could see the smoke from the shore. People from my town died, although no one I knew personally.

People proposed locking up all the Muslims, and I felt fear and that didn’t seem like a bad idea in those days. And I remembered my grandmother’s words, and I found courage to overcome my fear and not endorse a repeat of a mistake we have already made. But I feel empathy now, for the Californians of the era of the Japanese Internment. I understand why they did what they did.

Even when the old people have viewpoints you find abhorrent, you can gain from listening to them. It gives a broader perspective, that you will need when you face once in a generation problems.

@isaacsapphire , @discoursedrome, and @ranma-official are discussing “Why is the Left anti-atheist” in a few other threads. This deserves some response, though most of the discussion is just-so story-making about reasons the Left dislikes Atheists.

For one, no, atheists are not the outgroup for even the most cliche social justice progressives. Social justice ideology is still a coalition of many different groups, beliefs, and experiences and there are definitely many atheists among them. It’s not like if you met an avowed feminist, and it came up she was atheist, any of us would really be shocked. 

There are not purity squads going around testing whether people believe in god and pouncing on any sign of atheism, the way they are for libertarians, or HBD, or ever having voted Republican. (Well there may be some, the world is wide and surprising, but they’re certainly less conspicuous than the other varieties.)

Atheism is not the official belief of progressive ideology these days, and in some ways it may be less cool than Suffi Islam or extremely non-specific spirituality, but it’s still a real part of the coalition.

So what’s going on here?

Well to some degree the answer is “cool liberalism doesn’t hate atheism, it just hates Richard Dawkins”, which is pretty self-explanatory. But I do think there is something more generalizable at issue.

@oligopsonoia was talking about Moral Therapeutic Deism as an important advance in philosophical/cultural technology. And indeed, it was great at getting people to stop killing each other over god.

MTD is the theology of cosmopolitan liberal ideology. Or it’s atheist version “Jesus may not have been the son of God, but I think he was a great moral teacher.” It’s very soft-hearted respect for all this “religion stuff” without fully buying into it. That way, our “Coalition of the Ascendent”, including both academic Leftists and Muslim immigrants, can all get along.

As passionate atheist writers and Christian philosophers both say, if God exists that is the most important fact ever. To them, everything you believe about the world should be derived from the existence of, or absence of God. This is a committed ethical stance.

Not only is that awkward for the coalition, that committed ethical stance is entirely antithetical to how ideology works. A mature ideology does not want people who take their philosophical commitments more seriously than anything else! Those people are inconvenient, annoying, and not easily moved.

Ideology wants reasonable people. It wants people who are part of the “broad movement” overall, much more than passionate commitment to one ideal. Social justice ideology wants investment in anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-imperialism, anti-bad-corporations, anti-traditional religion, and a lot of other things while never answering which of those is the most important if they ever come in conflict. It uses a great deal of social pressure to convince people to never ask that question.

Atheism as a cause might be able to make peace with all the other religious minorities, but it will never be in harmony with MTD. It takes God seriously, and taking something truly seriously, putting the intellectual foundation from first principles above any social necessity, is the predator to ideologies.

It’s not cool. It’s not harmonious. You can have your atheism, just don’t take it too seriously, and you better be more on board making fun of Ivanka Trump’s fashion than trying to debate the source of morality in a God-less world, when you’re part of the ideological culture. (Dear lord, do not question “what is the source of our moral certainty.” That must always be assumed to be shared by everyone without any need for explanation or justification.)

To the same degree, committed economic class warriors, committed civil libertarians, and Effective Altruists have found themselves unwelcome in the movement if they take their pet cause too seriously over the buffet table of all the other causes. Modern liberalism is a social stance, not a philosophical one.

Continuing last week’s post, it can seem like the rules of social etiquette for how to appear polite and high class are complicated and ever-changing. In fact, for people trying the low-variance goal of “just get by” most of these rules can be boiled down pretty simply:

• Don’t draw attention to yourself.
  
• Don’t draw attention to the existence of your body.
  

The first is an injunction not to be loud or needy, since after all those show desperation and that what you offer is abundant (and therefore low value.)

The second guideline explains a lot of rules that appear to have independent justification.

• Don’t burp, yawn, cough, or make other bodily sounds.
  
• Don’t smell. (Social rules about bad hygiene are usually more about “reminding people your body exists” than actual ill-health.)
• Don’t eat in public.
• Cover yourself up and some skin unintentionally showing is embarrassing.
• Slut-shaming focuses on the display of breasts and legs.
• Don’t talk about illnesses or bodily functions.
• Don’t scratch an itch.
• Have less body (be thin) rather than more (fat.)
• Although hair is complicated and highly subject to fashionable changes, on average: more hair -> lower class.

Each of them independently usually get some sort of Miss Manners explanation for why that is considered rude or low-status, but altogether they speak of a deeper fear of the human body. Its very presence is obscene and uncomfortable. The strongest, visceral drives behind both class and ideology are this underlying fear of disease, filth, and corruption. Anything bad is somehow dirty, and anything dirty is somehow bad.

Instead, the upper class ideal is to appear as detached from the worldly body as much as possible. Yoda describes this fantasy in Star Wars: “Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.”

The positive direction is luminous. The negative direction is crude matter.

Patriarchal ideology sure used this body-based class-shaming as part of its enforcement against women. Promiscuous women are not just denigrated as immoral, but specifically as low-class. They are sluts and whores. Description of them feature lasciviously displayed breasts. They use garish amounts of makeup. And the threat they bring is of icky diseases around your genitals. It’s all designed to trigger our disgust reactions.

When we can identify this vector, we can oppose it. We should be less credible towards body-based-shaming, and understand it as part of defining the class ladder, with people described in bodily terms as “obviously lower down.” It is a fantasy, and even as we understand it better we can also dismiss it.

(As mentioned in “Class is Normative Power”, this sort of fantasy is enormously complicated because by performance it becomes partially true. People with wealth who are concerned about status will then pay a lot of their greater resources to conform with the desired appearance, and they will select other people who also conform to this, so that now upper-class people really do smell different. Though importantly, this is just a trend, and there are always individual exceptions.)

People who denigrate women for how much skin they have showing, or how much hair and where they have it, or whether they follow manners like how to eat and how to dress, we understand are both performing sexism and classism. They are intertwined, and you can’t really take down one boss without the other.

***

This is what’s behind the complaint that so much of current social justice ideology is classist. It’s not just about using a few wrong words about people with less money or education, or even the privilege that most social justice activists seem to not know what life is like for people who didn’t go to four-year selective colleges.

The complaint of classism is about the logic of their ideological judgment. Instead of saying “we will no longer use class and body-shaming to humiliate our out-group” it’s “class is an excellent tool, so long as used against the right groups.”

So we see the same emphasis on the body-presence when describing men. Mockery focuses on their beards, and their odors, and their whole physical existence.

@prudencepaccard described the campaign against “man-spreading” as Kafkaesque. The criticism is that men “take up too much space.” And you can easily imagine that accusation some Russian existential novel “Your crime is taking up space.” Which is not to say it’s meaningless, it’s actually something that once you are aware of, you feel incredibly guilty about. Is your volume or your smell or your skin an affront to someone, has it made you an exile from society?

There is of course polite behavior, regarding making room for other people on your seat or most of the above-class criticisms, but intense focus on your body will lead to paranoia well beyond the polite requirements of society. Drilling into them is a rich vein of power, but it’s exactly the power we must forswear.