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I racked my brain in disagreement at first with her claim (I took a fair amount of ancient literature classes in college and continue to read ancient literature

I racked my brain in disagreement at first with her claim (I took a fair amount of ancient literature classes in college and continue to read ancient literature when I can), only to find I couldn’t come up with many examples that contradict her. In fact I even began to think on the Bible, the one document I’m sure we would all think of as being moralizing, but even it contains passages that don’t assume the good guy/bad guy trope: In the Joshua narrative (a part of the Bible that troubles a lot of people for its wholesale slaughter of ethnic groups) before they sack Jericho Joshua sees an angel and asks which side he is on, and the angel replies, “neither” (Joshua 5). Similarly in Deuteronomy the existence of other deities is presumed in some passsages, but they are meant for “other nations” (Deuteronomy 4). And my favorite example, God tries to kill Moses after he commissions him (Exodus 4:18). Here’s the thing though, when ethnicity and familial ties no longer are the thing binding a society together, the only thing left is ideology. If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology. Universalism is a powerful tool, it can create a society like the US, which has many faults and sins to be sure, but is the only society in history to elect a member of, what was very recently, a slave class to its highest political office. Universal also has its dark side in things like the fascisms of the early 20tj century. It seems like we might be migrating back (or around?) to a non-Universalist sentiment around the world in the current backlash against globalization. The impetus definitely has some nationalism and racism in it, but it feels different to me than a moralizing racism of the past that assumed racial superiority, and now seems to be rooted in a theory of primacy (it’s not that we’re better, but we come first, e.g. “America first”). It makes sense to me that we are migrating away from Universalism. Our collective psyche cannot fathom the indirect violence that we are all wreaking on each other right now (and the immense catastrophes we are all about to suffer).

lsd5you 9y ago
If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology Does this not seem coercive and borderline orwellian to you? We have to embrace narratives sounds an awful lot like 'accept things which are not true'. It is hardly any different to a religion in this sense. Abstract ethics class morality plays itself out in my opinion. It is a platonic ideal that can be used as a model for behaviour but not as some kind of absolute. It deconstructs ways of life and papers over real differences. It promises us a sterile world that noone actually wants to live in. We want progress, but we (in my opinion) manifestly don't want eventual the destination the 'end of history'. As such like the business cycle there may well be a morality cycle that we cannot banish. There is a similarity with technology. What if we as a society demand and enjoy change, but our actual happiness is reduced in the long term (you can imagine modeling this as happiness a function positive in progress - rate of change, but negative in the overal level of enlightenment - or whatever progress accumulates as).
- hacknat 9y ago
  I definitely didn’t mean that in a statist way, as in enforced morality. I just meant that societies that don’t use kinship bonds inevitably use something else to maintain cohesion in society, religion has been used, founding myths (American republicanism, etc), and now it seems there’s a backlash against it all. My only point was that maintaining social cohesion in a pluralist society is no mean feat. As a side note, short of making sure everyone gets a strong foundation in philosophy, I don’t see how you can maintain an agreed upon set of values in a pluralist society without some sort of myth. You call it “accepting things that aren’t true”, but myth goes beyond truth, IMO. Most values are untestable hypotheses, so they don’t really fall into a modern definition of knowledge or truth, at least as I learned them in my undergrad science courses. Humans are wired to think in narrative terms so inevitably the process of transmitting values across generations is going to generate some distracting cruft that is patently absurd, but that doesn’t mean the attempt at transmitting values is absurd.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    Note that you can read the current fight between the more enthusiastic members of right vs. left as a struggle over which sets of foundational myths take precedence. The fight over political correctness (especially in academia) can be seen as the attempt to establish a new sacred narrative that is not allowed to be questioned, at the risk of an individual being cast out from the community. This narrative is a replacement for the earlier understanding of the sacred rooted in Christianity, which no longer holds force with many people today in an age of technology and science.
majormajor 9y ago
I think ethnicity is overrated for these purposes and familiarity is much more important. This is key to the motivation of soldiers and military training - fighting for the person beside you - but we've lost it in day to day life. For how this applies to the rural crowd, we distrust those we don't interact with daily and demographics and history let that easily be turned into racial or religious hatred, but I think the arrow of causality is reversed. To draw a comparison to another area of debate: religion doesn't create terrorists, religion is something that is used by terrorist leaders as a tool to keep their followers focused and in line. Racism isn't more inherent than terrorism, it's taught by those using it as a weapon. One that only works if you don't know a sufficient set of such people well enough to immediately call bullshit. Who we would call evil, but of course might be perfectly nice people in person to the people they know, with internal justifications for the evil they do, and that's where all our arguments and politics currently break down: the point where me shouting "stop listening to your evil racist pastor" isn't going to get through easily to someone who interacts with that pastor weekly, often in charity situations, and sees the good side much more than the evil side. (You could also describe this as "everybody has an evil side" instead of "everybody has a good side." Terry Pratchett talks about this a lot in his novels, in a balanced sense in terms of the capacity for unbounded grace or for unbounded malice, often from the same person. But I lean a bit pessimistic, so I like how he has one of his characters put it: “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”)
- hacknat 9y ago
  I think that’s a fair point, but this is the first society in which the people you are most familiar with aren’t necessarily in your ethnic group (though even in the US it’s not so much the case).
  - majormajor 9y ago
    I haven't done the primary research myself, but my understanding from other readings is that we're less unique there than we think. Before multicultural Western cities there was a fair bit of live-and-let-live multiculturalism in Roman society, depending on where you were, but especially e.g. with Greeks identifying as citizens of Rome and such. But much like today, on the more mono-cultural outskirts, such as Judea, things were much more ethnicity-centered, polarized and prone to violence. But either way, if we're the second or first, you're right that it doesn't seem to do us much good even if that is true, since they didn't find an answer that worked perfectly either... but, having a collapse of civilization is also hardly unique to diverse civilizations, so maybe the connection is just week overall - in which case what we need to focus on is just the reason for the acceptance of violent messages today. The "easy" left-leaning answer is "it's the economy/income inequality/poverty" but I'm only about 75% convinced, myself, that that's the only or primary thing.
tboyd47 9y ago
Agreed. This "good guys" and "bad guys" thing is not religious in origin; all world religions are older than it and have a much richer and more nuanced lesson on morality.
eesmith 9y ago
> Universalism is a powerful tool, it can create a society like the US, which has many faults and sins to be sure, but is the only society in history to elect a member of, what was very recently, a slave class to its highest political office. Universal also has its dark side in things like the fascisms of the early 20tj century. Haiti, the second republic in the Americas, elected people who had been slaves. For example, Faustin Soulouque, born into slavery in Petit-Goâve in 1782, elected President of Haiti in 1847 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faustin_Soulouque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faustin_Soulouque . He then became Emperor of Haiti. What do you mean by "Universalism"? Is it "focused around ... the doctrine that every human soul will ultimately be reconciled to God because of divine love and mercy"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalism Because I struggled and failed to see the connection between the German and Italian fascist movements movements and the American Universalism of the late 1700s. Those fascist groups were driven be nationalism. You can see that in the names. Partito Nazionale Fascista, ("National Fascist Party") was rooted in Italian nationalism. Nationalsozialismus ("National Socialism" or "Nazi") was positioned as alternative to international socialism. In "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer", the "Volk" means ethnic Germans. I think internationalism, expressed for example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale , is closer to what I think you might mean by Universalism than ethnic nationalism.
- hacknat 9y ago
  Sorry I should have defined my terms. When I said Universalism I wasn’t referring to religion, more the modernist concept that there are a universal set of values the objectively exist (i.e. my morality is good and yours is bad). Certainly I think this concept sprang out of religion, but it has certainly taken on a life of its own outside of religion, as most people think of it anyway.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Thank you for the explanation. I'm still having a hard time understanding the timing. How did that modernist concept of moral universalism create or contribute to a society like the US in the late 1700s? I thought you were talking about Christian Universalism because "Christian Universalism originated in the late 18th century with the Universalist Church of America" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Universalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Universalism ) and Christian Universalists consider Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration, as one of their founders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush ).
natecavanaugh 9y ago
> before they sack Jericho Joshua sees an angel and asks which side he is on, and the angel replies, “neither” (Joshua 5). I read this not as a contradiction to the good/evil narrative, because the conversation continues on chapter 6 and the Lord told Joshua he had given Jericho into his hands. So when Joshua asked the commander of the Lord's armies if he was there for them or their adversaries, and he said neither, it reads like he was there as an emissary with a message (or purposefully a dual purpose). I believe Joshua's first question was actually "are you here to kill us or them?", The commanders response seems to make more sense when continuing to chapter 6. As far as the concept of the Universal and our turning from it, theres an interesting theory called the Strauss-Howe generational theory [0]. Basically it divides history into 4 phases that are each around 80 years, and each part of the cycle springs from the previous generation. It's worth looking into :) Also in regards to needing an ideological bind in absence of familial ones, I think it's been common throughout history about placing ideology above all others (for instance, when a man sleeps with his brother's wife, that ideology outweighs family loyalty). I still have to disagree with the author on this one, as the trope she's discussing is an ancient one that's based on dualism, going back to the ancient Chinese. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...

lsd5you 9y ago

If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology Does this not seem coercive and borderline orwellian to you? We have to embrace narratives sounds an awful lot like 'accept things which are not true'. It is hardly any different to a religion in this sense. Abstract ethics class morality plays itself out in my opinion. It is a platonic ideal that can be used as a model for behaviour but not as some kind of absolute. It deconstructs ways of life and papers over real differences. It promises us a sterile world that noone actually wants to live in. We want progress, but we (in my opinion) manifestly don't want eventual the destination the 'end of history'. As such like the business cycle there may well be a morality cycle that we cannot banish. There is a similarity with technology. What if we as a society demand and enjoy change, but our actual happiness is reduced in the long term (you can imagine modeling this as happiness a function positive in progress - rate of change, but negative in the overal level of enlightenment - or whatever progress accumulates as).

hacknat 9y ago
I definitely didn’t mean that in a statist way, as in enforced morality. I just meant that societies that don’t use kinship bonds inevitably use something else to maintain cohesion in society, religion has been used, founding myths (American republicanism, etc), and now it seems there’s a backlash against it all. My only point was that maintaining social cohesion in a pluralist society is no mean feat. As a side note, short of making sure everyone gets a strong foundation in philosophy, I don’t see how you can maintain an agreed upon set of values in a pluralist society without some sort of myth. You call it “accepting things that aren’t true”, but myth goes beyond truth, IMO. Most values are untestable hypotheses, so they don’t really fall into a modern definition of knowledge or truth, at least as I learned them in my undergrad science courses. Humans are wired to think in narrative terms so inevitably the process of transmitting values across generations is going to generate some distracting cruft that is patently absurd, but that doesn’t mean the attempt at transmitting values is absurd.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  Note that you can read the current fight between the more enthusiastic members of right vs. left as a struggle over which sets of foundational myths take precedence. The fight over political correctness (especially in academia) can be seen as the attempt to establish a new sacred narrative that is not allowed to be questioned, at the risk of an individual being cast out from the community. This narrative is a replacement for the earlier understanding of the sacred rooted in Christianity, which no longer holds force with many people today in an age of technology and science.

majormajor 9y ago

I think ethnicity is overrated for these purposes and familiarity is much more important. This is key to the motivation of soldiers and military training - fighting for the person beside you - but we've lost it in day to day life. For how this applies to the rural crowd, we distrust those we don't interact with daily and demographics and history let that easily be turned into racial or religious hatred, but I think the arrow of causality is reversed. To draw a comparison to another area of debate: religion doesn't create terrorists, religion is something that is used by terrorist leaders as a tool to keep their followers focused and in line. Racism isn't more inherent than terrorism, it's taught by those using it as a weapon. One that only works if you don't know a sufficient set of such people well enough to immediately call bullshit. Who we would call evil, but of course might be perfectly nice people in person to the people they know, with internal justifications for the evil they do, and that's where all our arguments and politics currently break down: the point where me shouting "stop listening to your evil racist pastor" isn't going to get through easily to someone who interacts with that pastor weekly, often in charity situations, and sees the good side much more than the evil side. (You could also describe this as "everybody has an evil side" instead of "everybody has a good side." Terry Pratchett talks about this a lot in his novels, in a balanced sense in terms of the capacity for unbounded grace or for unbounded malice, often from the same person. But I lean a bit pessimistic, so I like how he has one of his characters put it: “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”)

hacknat 9y ago
I think that’s a fair point, but this is the first society in which the people you are most familiar with aren’t necessarily in your ethnic group (though even in the US it’s not so much the case).
- majormajor 9y ago
  I haven't done the primary research myself, but my understanding from other readings is that we're less unique there than we think. Before multicultural Western cities there was a fair bit of live-and-let-live multiculturalism in Roman society, depending on where you were, but especially e.g. with Greeks identifying as citizens of Rome and such. But much like today, on the more mono-cultural outskirts, such as Judea, things were much more ethnicity-centered, polarized and prone to violence. But either way, if we're the second or first, you're right that it doesn't seem to do us much good even if that is true, since they didn't find an answer that worked perfectly either... but, having a collapse of civilization is also hardly unique to diverse civilizations, so maybe the connection is just week overall - in which case what we need to focus on is just the reason for the acceptance of violent messages today. The "easy" left-leaning answer is "it's the economy/income inequality/poverty" but I'm only about 75% convinced, myself, that that's the only or primary thing.

tboyd47 9y ago

Agreed. This "good guys" and "bad guys" thing is not religious in origin; all world religions are older than it and have a much richer and more nuanced lesson on morality.

eesmith 9y ago

> Universalism is a powerful tool, it can create a society like the US, which has many faults and sins to be sure, but is the only society in history to elect a member of, what was very recently, a slave class to its highest political office. Universal also has its dark side in things like the fascisms of the early 20tj century. Haiti, the second republic in the Americas, elected people who had been slaves. For example, Faustin Soulouque, born into slavery in Petit-Goâve in 1782, elected President of Haiti in 1847 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faustin_Soulouque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faustin_Soulouque . He then became Emperor of Haiti. What do you mean by "Universalism"? Is it "focused around ... the doctrine that every human soul will ultimately be reconciled to God because of divine love and mercy"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalism Because I struggled and failed to see the connection between the German and Italian fascist movements movements and the American Universalism of the late 1700s. Those fascist groups were driven be nationalism. You can see that in the names. Partito Nazionale Fascista, ("National Fascist Party") was rooted in Italian nationalism. Nationalsozialismus ("National Socialism" or "Nazi") was positioned as alternative to international socialism. In "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer", the "Volk" means ethnic Germans. I think internationalism, expressed for example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale , is closer to what I think you might mean by Universalism than ethnic nationalism.

hacknat 9y ago
Sorry I should have defined my terms. When I said Universalism I wasn’t referring to religion, more the modernist concept that there are a universal set of values the objectively exist (i.e. my morality is good and yours is bad). Certainly I think this concept sprang out of religion, but it has certainly taken on a life of its own outside of religion, as most people think of it anyway.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Thank you for the explanation. I'm still having a hard time understanding the timing. How did that modernist concept of moral universalism create or contribute to a society like the US in the late 1700s? I thought you were talking about Christian Universalism because "Christian Universalism originated in the late 18th century with the Universalist Church of America" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Universalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Universalism ) and Christian Universalists consider Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration, as one of their founders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush ).

natecavanaugh 9y ago

> before they sack Jericho Joshua sees an angel and asks which side he is on, and the angel replies, “neither” (Joshua 5). I read this not as a contradiction to the good/evil narrative, because the conversation continues on chapter 6 and the Lord told Joshua he had given Jericho into his hands. So when Joshua asked the commander of the Lord's armies if he was there for them or their adversaries, and he said neither, it reads like he was there as an emissary with a message (or purposefully a dual purpose). I believe Joshua's first question was actually "are you here to kill us or them?", The commanders response seems to make more sense when continuing to chapter 6. As far as the concept of the Universal and our turning from it, theres an interesting theory called the Strauss-Howe generational theory [0]. Basically it divides history into 4 phases that are each around 80 years, and each part of the cycle springs from the previous generation. It's worth looking into :) Also in regards to needing an ideological bind in absence of familial ones, I think it's been common throughout history about placing ideology above all others (for instance, when a man sleeps with his brother's wife, that ideology outweighs family loyalty). I still have to disagree with the author on this one, as the trope she's discussing is an ancient one that's based on dualism, going back to the ancient Chinese. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...