5 ms·

The phrase that stands out to me in this is "the riot of human diversity". It's a great phrase. Probably worthy of a book or even a manifesto. I'm a multicultu

by yosito 5y ago

The phrase that stands out to me in this is "the riot of human diversity". It's a great phrase. Probably worthy of a book or even a manifesto. I'm a multicultural person. Dual US/EU citizen. I've spent years living in each of the US, South America, the Caribbean and Europe. Since the mid-2010s, I've been acutely aware of different societal pressures to conform, and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded. Thankfully, I've got a few loyal friends, and a strong sense of self that have allowed me to recover and thrive. Through it all, one thing I've learned very well is that people in the world have very diverse views and opinions. It's a beautiful thing, and I will never make someone my enemy over their views. I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement.

hunterb123 5y ago
Never change! Diverse thought is much more important than "diversity" itself. These days it seems there is tolerance for the superficial diversity, but no tolerance for diverse thought. If you have a controversial thought you will be persecuted by the group until you conform. Also it seems if you are part of a certain diversity sometimes you are pressured to have a certain thought even harder than another person. Try to have a debate with them first, if you are met with hostility they aren't your friends, they don't know how to convey their supposed thoughts or even control their emotions. Politely tell them to fuck off and find a better group of more accepting people.
lodi 5y ago
> I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Is it more harmful to punish a child or to not punish him? Is a cartoon of Jesus harmful? Muhammad? Are "micro-agressions" actually traumatic? Furthermore, what does it mean to "do" something? Is "meat-eating" a default state, or are you actively "doing" harm every day you continue to not be a vegan? Are you "doing" harm if you purchase some sneakers without knowing whether they were produced in a polluting or exploitative manner? --- I'm personally not a moral relativist; I think there are better and worse answers to most of the issues above. But I've just found that short commandments like "do no evil" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" don't really offer any real guidance when tested against challenging real-world ethical problems.
- yosito 5y ago
  > Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Well, it's certainly not determined by some objective standard, or a god. Every culture, and even every individual has different moral views. When I say "do no harm" that's a relative statement, relative to the context and parties involved. What's morally apporiate changes depending on the moral contract between parties. I can call my drinking buddy a "fucking idiot" for making a mistake, and there's no harm done. But if I call my grandmother a "fucking idiot", it would harm her a great deal. What's harmful in one context may be fine in another. Morality is like an instinct that humans have evolved to allow us to detect when something may be considered harmful to ourselves, our partners, our community and our planet. It's not always an infallible sense, but it's often pretty good and useful to pay attention to. Back to your question: who determines what's harmful? Our innate sense of morality has evolved to show us what's harmful and what's not. The more each of us focuses on listening to and improving our own sense of morality and harm, the better we'll be at making decisions that avoid harm as a society and as a species. Ultimately, I'm a humanist, and one of my favorite quotes about morality is GK Chesterton's response when asked to write an article answering the question, "What's wrong with the world?". His response, "Dear sir, I am." One reason I don't concern myself too much with the morality of others, is that the only person's morality I am responsible for determining is my own.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Indeed, it seems the first struggle should be to develop the ability to do the things we think are correct before even considering that the most correct thing is. If you sit around developing elaborate ethical systems as to how to act in every situation, but fail to live that system, then it's ultimately a pointless waste of time. It's better to a decent guy all the time than a hypothetical saint acting like a practical asshole.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > Our innate sense of morality has evolved to show us what's harmful and what's not. Who is this "our" and "us" you're referring to if everyone has a different sense of morally? Are you talking about the evolution of a "culture" or of "every individual." If these are all different, why would their "evolutions" have the same goal? This all seems very empty. What's the difference between what you've said here and "all people have different moral frameworks, and they all follow those" (which I don't think is possible to dispute)?
photochemsyn 5y ago
Great comment, and tolerance and disagreement is to be encouraged. Where I find a lot of serious conflict and resentment is when it comes to expanding on 'do no harm'. For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster. Now, a lot of people I've talked to view these views as 'harmful' indeed. Investment capitalism, they believe, is the greatest engine of economic and social development in human history and any attempt to role it back would destroy the economy and bring mass ruin, poverty, desperation, North Korean dystopia etc. I usually respond by saying, well, the employees of a corporation should have just as much power over major corporate decisions as the shareholders in the corporation, and capital flows should not be entirely controlled by a few billionaires and their pet political puppets. If the general public believes capital should go to say, renewable energy corporations rather than fossil fuel corporations, there should be a democratic process, well, why not? So, we then need people to explicitly describe their own personal views on what 'do no harm' means before we can have a discussion in which participants do not view each other as threats to their own survival...
- nybble41 5y ago
  > For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster. I disagree with you on every single point, but I would still support your right to believe these things and not consider it "harm". Where we might run into problems lies in how you decide to go about implementing your proposed solution. To me the standard political approach of imposing rules backed up by fines, prison sentences, and capital punishment (beyond the usual proportional, reciprocal responses to others' actions) is harm in and of itself regardless of the intended outcome or "democratic process" and this point is non-negotiable. But if you want to collect together a group of like-minded individuals and create a society to your liking through entirely voluntary arrangements, be my guest.
  - photochemsyn 5y ago
    Well the model is Germany, where Tesla employees would have comparable representation (voting board members) to Tesla shareholders. It seems like a pretty good model, I bet even Elon Musk would support it as he's made his disdain for Tesla shareholders clear. Also, doesn't it just make sense that the employees of a corporation, the ones doing the work, might have at least as good of, if not a much better idea of, the direction the company should take on certain issues, as compared to the shareholders?
goodpoint 5y ago
> do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement. This is just a nice-sounding platitude. What is or isn't harmful is not written in stone. On the contrary, is a hugely polarizing topic that informs the legal system. People get to live or die because of views and opinions.
- yosito 5y ago
  > People get to live or die because of views and opinions. I disagree that my (largely uninformed) opinions really carry that much weight. If I were a doctor and patients were asking my medical opinion, then it would be extremely immoral to give them a harmful opinion. My opinioms about which politician said something racist or taboo are likely inconsequential. And of course if I did find that my opinion were having harmful consequences, I would change it, because I'm a moral person.
jjulius 5y ago
>I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. How do you define "harm"? What if one's view(s) prompt them to vote in favor of things (or support policies - take your pick) that bring harm to others?
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Maybe exercise some humility instead of jumping to the conclusion that you are right and they are wrong? I'd take the opportunity to seek to understand how someone living in the same world as you, with access to the same facts, and the same mental faculties, how such a person has come to a different conclusion about what does harm.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded. Lost a job? Lost housing? Lost income? Were you "cancelled" or did various groups of acquaintances simply decide they didn't enjoy your company and that feeling led to a gradual (or maybe not so gradual) falling away of contact and interaction? I'm not for one moment suggesting that you should have different opinions. But in general people have both: 1. opinions 2. preferences on how and when opinions are expressed 3. preferences for the company of people who don't violate (2) If you and your various (past) groups of acquaintances really didn't agree on (1), then it's maybe entirely natural that over time, you'd no longer be a part of those groups. And if you disagreed about (2), then it's more than just natural, it's inevitable. I have friends with whom I do not agree on a number of things, but they tend to be things that we don't need to talk about much, if ever. If either of us ever pushed their point in these domains, I suspect we would fairly quickly cease to be friends. I have some other friends (and even a few family members) where we don't agree, but we do agree about how to disagree, how to debate, how to argue, what kinds of evidential levels for our opinions are required if we are going to disagree, and how we will end discussion. In these cases, (1) is not shared but (2) is, and so these are people whose company I can still actively enjoy. I don't want to hang out much with people who see the world very differently from me, and more importantly, people whose timing and methods of expressing their opinions are quite different than what I find appropriate. If I'm not friends with these people, I haven't "cancelled" them, we've just followed an entirely natural path towards finding groups of people we can enjoy being with.
- Kye 5y ago
  Some people's idea of free speech is really about their freedom to punch down, and they suddenly become very anti-free speech when criticized. Then they double down, and people set boundaries, and they complain about those boundaries... Much of the noise about cancel culture looks a lot like DARVO.
  - dfxm12 5y ago
    There was a great line in last Sunday's Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David (half) jokes about free speech, saying something like "I don't know about free speech. Well, I should have it. The constitution should have said free speech for Larry David, everyone else, check with him first." Larry is effectively holding up a mirror to the type of people you describe, and yeah what you say is true about people who complain about cancel culture, too. I try to engage anyone worried about losing a job due to something like that. I'll ask, why don't you organize with your co-workers and collectively bargain for labor protections, or consider voting in politicians who are for stronger labor laws, and all of a sudden they remember that their corporatist leanings are stronger than any feelings they may have about the "cancel culture" boogeyman. It's plain to see that too much of the discourse about free speech or cancel culture doesn't come from a place of good faith...
Barrin92 5y ago
disagree with this and the language of "riot" of diversity is very telling. It's a sort of purely individual definition of freedom in which a free society is one of permanent dissent. Dissent not as a tool to come to consensus but as a way of life and it is fundamentally anti-governmental, it sounds nice but does not work. If everyone assumed this position, the end result is permanent dysfunction. I can't remember who said it might have been Zizek but he proposed that the proper understanding of democratic freedom is something akin to: "Say your opinion, say it freely, come to a consensus, but then shut up and obey.". That is to say, in any group that wants to function, diversity or dissent is not a permanent state of affairs, at some point when one needs to act options need to be closed off. Abstract freedom is always embedded within social order. You can only freely walk the street because you rely on the fact that everyone else conforms to the rules of traffic. "Do no harm" sounds nice but it's not sufficient, it may even be wrong because harm cannot be entirely avoided. You cannot navigate the world and act in the world as a group without actively making concrete choices, sometimes to the detriment of individuals. People like Snowden or Ai Weiwei celebrate resistance because permanent resistance is their job. Rebelling is their profession. It's very sympathetic on the surface but it does not address how people ought to organize society.

by yosito 5y ago

hunterb123 5y ago

Never change! Diverse thought is much more important than "diversity" itself. These days it seems there is tolerance for the superficial diversity, but no tolerance for diverse thought. If you have a controversial thought you will be persecuted by the group until you conform. Also it seems if you are part of a certain diversity sometimes you are pressured to have a certain thought even harder than another person. Try to have a debate with them first, if you are met with hostility they aren't your friends, they don't know how to convey their supposed thoughts or even control their emotions. Politely tell them to fuck off and find a better group of more accepting people.

lodi 5y ago

> I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Is it more harmful to punish a child or to not punish him? Is a cartoon of Jesus harmful? Muhammad? Are "micro-agressions" actually traumatic? Furthermore, what does it mean to "do" something? Is "meat-eating" a default state, or are you actively "doing" harm every day you continue to not be a vegan? Are you "doing" harm if you purchase some sneakers without knowing whether they were produced in a polluting or exploitative manner? --- I'm personally not a moral relativist; I think there are better and worse answers to most of the issues above. But I've just found that short commandments like "do no evil" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" don't really offer any real guidance when tested against challenging real-world ethical problems.

yosito 5y ago
> Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Well, it's certainly not determined by some objective standard, or a god. Every culture, and even every individual has different moral views. When I say "do no harm" that's a relative statement, relative to the context and parties involved. What's morally apporiate changes depending on the moral contract between parties. I can call my drinking buddy a "fucking idiot" for making a mistake, and there's no harm done. But if I call my grandmother a "fucking idiot", it would harm her a great deal. What's harmful in one context may be fine in another. Morality is like an instinct that humans have evolved to allow us to detect when something may be considered harmful to ourselves, our partners, our community and our planet. It's not always an infallible sense, but it's often pretty good and useful to pay attention to. Back to your question: who determines what's harmful? Our innate sense of morality has evolved to show us what's harmful and what's not. The more each of us focuses on listening to and improving our own sense of morality and harm, the better we'll be at making decisions that avoid harm as a society and as a species. Ultimately, I'm a humanist, and one of my favorite quotes about morality is GK Chesterton's response when asked to write an article answering the question, "What's wrong with the world?". His response, "Dear sir, I am." One reason I don't concern myself too much with the morality of others, is that the only person's morality I am responsible for determining is my own.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Indeed, it seems the first struggle should be to develop the ability to do the things we think are correct before even considering that the most correct thing is. If you sit around developing elaborate ethical systems as to how to act in every situation, but fail to live that system, then it's ultimately a pointless waste of time. It's better to a decent guy all the time than a hypothetical saint acting like a practical asshole.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > Our innate sense of morality has evolved to show us what's harmful and what's not. Who is this "our" and "us" you're referring to if everyone has a different sense of morally? Are you talking about the evolution of a "culture" or of "every individual." If these are all different, why would their "evolutions" have the same goal? This all seems very empty. What's the difference between what you've said here and "all people have different moral frameworks, and they all follow those" (which I don't think is possible to dispute)?

photochemsyn 5y ago

Great comment, and tolerance and disagreement is to be encouraged. Where I find a lot of serious conflict and resentment is when it comes to expanding on 'do no harm'. For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster. Now, a lot of people I've talked to view these views as 'harmful' indeed. Investment capitalism, they believe, is the greatest engine of economic and social development in human history and any attempt to role it back would destroy the economy and bring mass ruin, poverty, desperation, North Korean dystopia etc. I usually respond by saying, well, the employees of a corporation should have just as much power over major corporate decisions as the shareholders in the corporation, and capital flows should not be entirely controlled by a few billionaires and their pet political puppets. If the general public believes capital should go to say, renewable energy corporations rather than fossil fuel corporations, there should be a democratic process, well, why not? So, we then need people to explicitly describe their own personal views on what 'do no harm' means before we can have a discussion in which participants do not view each other as threats to their own survival...

nybble41 5y ago
> For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster. I disagree with you on every single point, but I would still support your right to believe these things and not consider it "harm". Where we might run into problems lies in how you decide to go about implementing your proposed solution. To me the standard political approach of imposing rules backed up by fines, prison sentences, and capital punishment (beyond the usual proportional, reciprocal responses to others' actions) is harm in and of itself regardless of the intended outcome or "democratic process" and this point is non-negotiable. But if you want to collect together a group of like-minded individuals and create a society to your liking through entirely voluntary arrangements, be my guest.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  Well the model is Germany, where Tesla employees would have comparable representation (voting board members) to Tesla shareholders. It seems like a pretty good model, I bet even Elon Musk would support it as he's made his disdain for Tesla shareholders clear. Also, doesn't it just make sense that the employees of a corporation, the ones doing the work, might have at least as good of, if not a much better idea of, the direction the company should take on certain issues, as compared to the shareholders?

goodpoint 5y ago

> do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement. This is just a nice-sounding platitude. What is or isn't harmful is not written in stone. On the contrary, is a hugely polarizing topic that informs the legal system. People get to live or die because of views and opinions.

yosito 5y ago
> People get to live or die because of views and opinions. I disagree that my (largely uninformed) opinions really carry that much weight. If I were a doctor and patients were asking my medical opinion, then it would be extremely immoral to give them a harmful opinion. My opinioms about which politician said something racist or taboo are likely inconsequential. And of course if I did find that my opinion were having harmful consequences, I would change it, because I'm a moral person.

jjulius 5y ago

>I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. How do you define "harm"? What if one's view(s) prompt them to vote in favor of things (or support policies - take your pick) that bring harm to others?

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Maybe exercise some humility instead of jumping to the conclusion that you are right and they are wrong? I'd take the opportunity to seek to understand how someone living in the same world as you, with access to the same facts, and the same mental faculties, how such a person has come to a different conclusion about what does harm.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded. Lost a job? Lost housing? Lost income? Were you "cancelled" or did various groups of acquaintances simply decide they didn't enjoy your company and that feeling led to a gradual (or maybe not so gradual) falling away of contact and interaction? I'm not for one moment suggesting that you should have different opinions. But in general people have both: 1. opinions 2. preferences on how and when opinions are expressed 3. preferences for the company of people who don't violate (2) If you and your various (past) groups of acquaintances really didn't agree on (1), then it's maybe entirely natural that over time, you'd no longer be a part of those groups. And if you disagreed about (2), then it's more than just natural, it's inevitable. I have friends with whom I do not agree on a number of things, but they tend to be things that we don't need to talk about much, if ever. If either of us ever pushed their point in these domains, I suspect we would fairly quickly cease to be friends. I have some other friends (and even a few family members) where we don't agree, but we do agree about how to disagree, how to debate, how to argue, what kinds of evidential levels for our opinions are required if we are going to disagree, and how we will end discussion. In these cases, (1) is not shared but (2) is, and so these are people whose company I can still actively enjoy. I don't want to hang out much with people who see the world very differently from me, and more importantly, people whose timing and methods of expressing their opinions are quite different than what I find appropriate. If I'm not friends with these people, I haven't "cancelled" them, we've just followed an entirely natural path towards finding groups of people we can enjoy being with.

Kye 5y ago
Some people's idea of free speech is really about their freedom to punch down, and they suddenly become very anti-free speech when criticized. Then they double down, and people set boundaries, and they complain about those boundaries... Much of the noise about cancel culture looks a lot like DARVO.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  There was a great line in last Sunday's Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David (half) jokes about free speech, saying something like "I don't know about free speech. Well, I should have it. The constitution should have said free speech for Larry David, everyone else, check with him first." Larry is effectively holding up a mirror to the type of people you describe, and yeah what you say is true about people who complain about cancel culture, too. I try to engage anyone worried about losing a job due to something like that. I'll ask, why don't you organize with your co-workers and collectively bargain for labor protections, or consider voting in politicians who are for stronger labor laws, and all of a sudden they remember that their corporatist leanings are stronger than any feelings they may have about the "cancel culture" boogeyman. It's plain to see that too much of the discourse about free speech or cancel culture doesn't come from a place of good faith...

Barrin92 5y ago

disagree with this and the language of "riot" of diversity is very telling. It's a sort of purely individual definition of freedom in which a free society is one of permanent dissent. Dissent not as a tool to come to consensus but as a way of life and it is fundamentally anti-governmental, it sounds nice but does not work. If everyone assumed this position, the end result is permanent dysfunction. I can't remember who said it might have been Zizek but he proposed that the proper understanding of democratic freedom is something akin to: "Say your opinion, say it freely, come to a consensus, but then shut up and obey.". That is to say, in any group that wants to function, diversity or dissent is not a permanent state of affairs, at some point when one needs to act options need to be closed off. Abstract freedom is always embedded within social order. You can only freely walk the street because you rely on the fact that everyone else conforms to the rules of traffic. "Do no harm" sounds nice but it's not sufficient, it may even be wrong because harm cannot be entirely avoided. You cannot navigate the world and act in the world as a group without actively making concrete choices, sometimes to the detriment of individuals. People like Snowden or Ai Weiwei celebrate resistance because permanent resistance is their job. Rebelling is their profession. It's very sympathetic on the surface but it does not address how people ought to organize society.