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>It feels anti human. Because it is. The zeitgeist on the left (so, academia) is consumed by personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing, and a great deal of inte

>It feels anti human. Because it is. The zeitgeist on the left (so, academia) is consumed by personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing, and a great deal of intellectual work has been done to post hoc rationalize these feelings and package them in catchy phrases. Terms like "cultural appropriation" and "privilege" or "systematic racism" or "toxic masculinity", may have some technically useful meanings to anthropologists, but within the public sphere they function only as a combined virtue signal and rhetorical weapon. What makes these weapons difficult is that they are so tightly wrapped in an image of compassion such that even those that wield them may not understand their true nature. A clever design. This is a good example of how anything can be used as a weapon, even compassion. I really wish all these academics pushing the narrative of privilege etc would chill out for a second and just enjoy the world as it is, in all it's messiness. To stop seeing the world as purely an evil constructed on the mass graves of the innocent. Even if it were true (and in some sense it is) this is still the world we have. This is where kids are growing up, people are falling in love, where discoveries are being made. Sometimes you gotta just say 'fuck it' and enjoy the world you have without constantly speculating about how it should be, how it should have been, about whether the fruits you are enjoying were earned with blood. We cannot, in each successive generation, reform ourselves to undo the injustices of the past, not only because it's practically impossible but because the meaning of injustice changes. And society is finite in its malleability. To be sure, some things can be done, within a generation or two. Maybe three. But after a while, what's done is done and you have to move on. EDIT: It's curious how sometimes a post gets upvoted, then downvoted, then several more cycles. Now its at 1. I'd be curious to know the "velocity" on this one, dang.

prox 4y ago
While I find some parts of your sympathetic, conflating the left with academia is not really a valid approach. That some (on the left) have picked up on academic usage of some words or models is perhaps more accurate, and the misuse of words and terms. Which is far more prevalent in my experience. There was an interesting article about some social inequalities where when we talk about something more -is actually making it worse-. Apparently doing sensitivity and diversity trainings have the effect of making outcomes worse or ineffective , counterintuitively (its this part of your comment I find most sympathetic) https://hbr.org/2019/07/does-diversity-training-work-the-way-its-supposed-to https://hbr.org/2019/07/does-diversity-training-work-the-way...
- HKH2 4y ago
  > While I find some parts of your sympathetic, conflating the left with academia is not really a valid approach. The parts of academia that are relevant to this discussion (humanities and social sciences) are certainly dominated by the left.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Your criticism is fair, but I’m not sure there is a better framing. Between corporations, political elites, and the media, the most influential and highly visible folks that identify as being “on the left” are much more influenced by Judith Butler than by any socialist thinker.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >That some (on the left) have picked up on academic usage of some words or models is perhaps more accurate, and the misuse of words and terms. That is absolutely true. And there has even been some pushback from the academics who coined these terms. But, in the end, words are tools, and tools meet a need, and there was apparently a great need for a new narrative that explained personal feelings of failure and self loathing. So it was inevitable that these terms would be used in this way. These words, as tools, are also potent for those who desire power, and look for any means to win, including invocation of race and gender stereotypes. It is galling for anyone who values liberty to see this, when the goal has always been to deprecate the prejudice function, and not merely to call the same function with different arguments. It is fascinating, though, how the desire to improve, to be more virtuous than before, can turn out so badly! It's a real slippery slope situation - we made progress, civil rights, women's rights, interracial marriage, gay marriage, sexual identities, gender identities acknowledging the momentum of racist policies in our demographics...but then it turns into: gender is purely a construct, lets modify children's bodies if they think they're trans, lets force people to use certain pronouns, lets have teachers share their sex lives with kindergarteners, lets give women and students of color the power of professional life and death over white teachers, lets teach reverse CBT. And if you try to make this point, you're called a racist and a bigot! Social justice warriors push an insidious form of injustice that harms everyone. Because, as the GGP put it, it's anti-human.
throwawayacc2 4y ago
> Terms like "cultural appropriation" and "privilege" or "systematic racism" or "toxic masculinity", may have some technically useful meanings to anthropologists, but within the public sphere they function only as a combined virtue signal and rhetorical weapon. This is so true. It’s a very beautifully expressed feeling I had trouble articulating before. Thank you for putting it into words like this. It’s also ridiculous to me there is a push to “teach” these concepts to kids when it’s fairly obvious they’ll just abstract them away to something stupid like “man bad” or “white people bad”. I feel like it’s sort of like trying to explain to kids with no CS experience some nuanced tradeoff like, I don’t know, the CAP theorem for example. They’ll probably understand that if you go with AP instead of CP you risk losing data and that’s bad so now we always use CP. All they’ll be left of with is “AP bad, CP good”.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- javajosh 4y ago
  Thanks. George Orwell made this point well in "Animal Farm". The nuance of the initial revolution was gradually lost, and became "four legs good, two legs bad".
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Only narcissists and not very aware people are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness." Because that's what it takes to ignore abusive levels of inequality and systemic threats to the continued survival of the species. The point is not about what happened in the past, it's about what is still happening now - and how the narratives from the past continue to be used to justify it. Ignoring this is neither compassionate nor realistic - although it is toxic, pretty much by definition.
- blitz_skull 4y ago
  If it requires being “not very aware” to enjoy life without frothing at the mouth in anger at all the messiness of the world, I consider myself a proud narcissist / “not very aware” person. I think you’ve missed the commenters main point which is that all this hand-wringing about how terrible things are—isn’t actively solving any problems we have today, or any problems we had yesterday. I would even dare to guess it won’t solve the problems we’ll have tomorrow.
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  > Only narcissists and not very aware people are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness." I do not believe myself to be a narcissist and I think I am at least somewhat aware of the world and it’s problems. Yet, despite this, I do “ enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness”. I think what is preventing you from doing the same is ideology and close mindedness. From the comment, you come across like a fundamentalist christian refusing to enjoy life because “the world is sinful”. Enjoy life man. Since we’re on the article, take a page from the Buddhist philosophy and let go, for a moment at least :)
  - blitz_skull 4y ago
    It’s funny you say this, because it’s precisely because of my fundamentalist Christian worldview that allows me to love and accept the world as it is. Sounds like you’ve had some bad run-ins with Christian fundamentalists. Sure the world is broken, but most Christians realize the world is inherently beautiful (not to be confused with ‘good’). If the God of the universe died to save it, there’s got to be fundamental value there. Therefore if someone thinks the world is ugly and can’t enjoy it, that’s an internal thing they gotta fix, not an immutable, self-evident truth about the world… again it’s precisely because of the Bible that I believe these things.
wrycoder 4y ago
> consumed by personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing I’d suggest that it’s not about those things for the accusers themselves. It’s simply about gaining power. And they do it by preying upon “personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing” in other well-meaning people. They’ve discovered that yelling “cultural appropriation” works quite well with people who are constantly looking for other people to feel sorry for - which of a kind of projection.
- namlem 4y ago
  I don't think so. I think it really is about guilt and shame, because these people just rebranded Catholicism without realizing it. Most of them probably grew up Catholic I bet, and internalized Catholic ideology to such a degree that they can't help but view everything through that lens.
  - prewett 4y ago
    If so, they missed the key part of Catholicsm/Christianity: the death of Jesus atones for our sin, guilt, and shame. I've slowly come to the opinion that it is about a power play / emotional manipulation, because there is no way to atone. If you're white (for example), you're just an oppressor by the structure of society you were born into, so the sin is membership in a structurally advantaged group defined by race. You can't change your race nor change the past, so the best you can do is hope that supporting the political agenda of your accusers is good enough.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Europe was Catholic long before the US, so it’s something else unique to the US…
andsoitis 4y ago
> personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing Do you think the Christian concept of "original sin" planted (at least some of) the seeds for this mental model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  self-loathing is technically a type of sin… but that doesn’t mean peoples conceptions match the teachings (they often don’t). CCC 405 “ Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin — an inclination to evil that is called “concupiscence.” Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.”
NoraCodes 4y ago
> To stop seeing the world as purely an evil constructed on the mass graves of the innocent. Even if it were true (and in some sense it is) this is still the world we have. [...] To be sure, some things can be done, within a generation or two. Maybe three. But after a while, what's done is done and you have to move on. Putting aside the rhetorical tools you're discussing, what would you say to people who currently feel the effects of these historical, and contemporary oppressions? People with unwanted pregnancies who find themselves unable to access abortions, African-Americans who are descended from families that were unable to purchase property they would have been able to afford due to redlining and are thus at a disadvantage, Gen X Jews whose parents were denied entry to elite schools and whose families thus suffered economically, gay and trans people who are currently, in the US, facing a government that has all but stated it wants to eliminate even the tenuous hold on legal existence they have? I am all for telling people to find the good in the world. There is a lot of it! But some of these negative phenomena that sociologists describe have real consequences for real people in the present day, and I don't really see how "just stop thinking about it" is a solution for them.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >what would you say to people who currently feel the effects of these historical, and contemporary oppressions? I would have quoted me a bit more generously. This is what I would tell them (and myself, since we are all oppressed, and all of our ancestors were oppressed, at some point, by someone): >We cannot, in each successive generation, reform ourselves to undo the injustices of the past, not only because it's practically impossible but because the meaning of injustice changes. And society is finite in its malleability. To be sure, some things can be done, within a generation or two. Maybe three. But after a while, what's done is done and you have to move on.
  - NoraCodes 4y ago
    Fair enough - I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't said that, the quote was merely to delimit the area I was addressing. Am I correct, then, in thinking your response to people currently harmed by social structures they have no choice in interacting with is, basically, "I agree that this sucks, but I don't support changing anything to fix it."?
mekoka 4y ago
The goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue - Alan Watts, attributing the original thought to Confucius. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cegl1BZ-0tI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cegl1BZ-0tI
dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents and certainly not into ideological flamewar. Those things are not what HN is for and destroy what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32068220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32068220.

prox 4y ago

While I find some parts of your sympathetic, conflating the left with academia is not really a valid approach. That some (on the left) have picked up on academic usage of some words or models is perhaps more accurate, and the misuse of words and terms. Which is far more prevalent in my experience. There was an interesting article about some social inequalities where when we talk about something more -is actually making it worse-. Apparently doing sensitivity and diversity trainings have the effect of making outcomes worse or ineffective , counterintuitively (its this part of your comment I find most sympathetic) https://hbr.org/2019/07/does-diversity-training-work-the-way-its-supposed-to https://hbr.org/2019/07/does-diversity-training-work-the-way...

HKH2 4y ago
> While I find some parts of your sympathetic, conflating the left with academia is not really a valid approach. The parts of academia that are relevant to this discussion (humanities and social sciences) are certainly dominated by the left.
rayiner 4y ago
Your criticism is fair, but I’m not sure there is a better framing. Between corporations, political elites, and the media, the most influential and highly visible folks that identify as being “on the left” are much more influenced by Judith Butler than by any socialist thinker.
javajosh 4y ago
>That some (on the left) have picked up on academic usage of some words or models is perhaps more accurate, and the misuse of words and terms. That is absolutely true. And there has even been some pushback from the academics who coined these terms. But, in the end, words are tools, and tools meet a need, and there was apparently a great need for a new narrative that explained personal feelings of failure and self loathing. So it was inevitable that these terms would be used in this way. These words, as tools, are also potent for those who desire power, and look for any means to win, including invocation of race and gender stereotypes. It is galling for anyone who values liberty to see this, when the goal has always been to deprecate the prejudice function, and not merely to call the same function with different arguments. It is fascinating, though, how the desire to improve, to be more virtuous than before, can turn out so badly! It's a real slippery slope situation - we made progress, civil rights, women's rights, interracial marriage, gay marriage, sexual identities, gender identities acknowledging the momentum of racist policies in our demographics...but then it turns into: gender is purely a construct, lets modify children's bodies if they think they're trans, lets force people to use certain pronouns, lets have teachers share their sex lives with kindergarteners, lets give women and students of color the power of professional life and death over white teachers, lets teach reverse CBT. And if you try to make this point, you're called a racist and a bigot! Social justice warriors push an insidious form of injustice that harms everyone. Because, as the GGP put it, it's anti-human.

throwawayacc2 4y ago

> Terms like "cultural appropriation" and "privilege" or "systematic racism" or "toxic masculinity", may have some technically useful meanings to anthropologists, but within the public sphere they function only as a combined virtue signal and rhetorical weapon. This is so true. It’s a very beautifully expressed feeling I had trouble articulating before. Thank you for putting it into words like this. It’s also ridiculous to me there is a push to “teach” these concepts to kids when it’s fairly obvious they’ll just abstract them away to something stupid like “man bad” or “white people bad”. I feel like it’s sort of like trying to explain to kids with no CS experience some nuanced tradeoff like, I don’t know, the CAP theorem for example. They’ll probably understand that if you go with AP instead of CP you risk losing data and that’s bad so now we always use CP. All they’ll be left of with is “AP bad, CP good”.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
javajosh 4y ago
Thanks. George Orwell made this point well in "Animal Farm". The nuance of the initial revolution was gradually lost, and became "four legs good, two legs bad".

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Only narcissists and not very aware people are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness." Because that's what it takes to ignore abusive levels of inequality and systemic threats to the continued survival of the species. The point is not about what happened in the past, it's about what is still happening now - and how the narratives from the past continue to be used to justify it. Ignoring this is neither compassionate nor realistic - although it is toxic, pretty much by definition.

blitz_skull 4y ago
If it requires being “not very aware” to enjoy life without frothing at the mouth in anger at all the messiness of the world, I consider myself a proud narcissist / “not very aware” person. I think you’ve missed the commenters main point which is that all this hand-wringing about how terrible things are—isn’t actively solving any problems we have today, or any problems we had yesterday. I would even dare to guess it won’t solve the problems we’ll have tomorrow.
throwawayacc2 4y ago
> Only narcissists and not very aware people are able to "enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness." I do not believe myself to be a narcissist and I think I am at least somewhat aware of the world and it’s problems. Yet, despite this, I do “ enjoy the world as it is, in all its messiness”. I think what is preventing you from doing the same is ideology and close mindedness. From the comment, you come across like a fundamentalist christian refusing to enjoy life because “the world is sinful”. Enjoy life man. Since we’re on the article, take a page from the Buddhist philosophy and let go, for a moment at least :)
- blitz_skull 4y ago
  It’s funny you say this, because it’s precisely because of my fundamentalist Christian worldview that allows me to love and accept the world as it is. Sounds like you’ve had some bad run-ins with Christian fundamentalists. Sure the world is broken, but most Christians realize the world is inherently beautiful (not to be confused with ‘good’). If the God of the universe died to save it, there’s got to be fundamental value there. Therefore if someone thinks the world is ugly and can’t enjoy it, that’s an internal thing they gotta fix, not an immutable, self-evident truth about the world… again it’s precisely because of the Bible that I believe these things.

wrycoder 4y ago

> consumed by personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing I’d suggest that it’s not about those things for the accusers themselves. It’s simply about gaining power. And they do it by preying upon “personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing” in other well-meaning people. They’ve discovered that yelling “cultural appropriation” works quite well with people who are constantly looking for other people to feel sorry for - which of a kind of projection.

namlem 4y ago
I don't think so. I think it really is about guilt and shame, because these people just rebranded Catholicism without realizing it. Most of them probably grew up Catholic I bet, and internalized Catholic ideology to such a degree that they can't help but view everything through that lens.
- prewett 4y ago
  If so, they missed the key part of Catholicsm/Christianity: the death of Jesus atones for our sin, guilt, and shame. I've slowly come to the opinion that it is about a power play / emotional manipulation, because there is no way to atone. If you're white (for example), you're just an oppressor by the structure of society you were born into, so the sin is membership in a structurally advantaged group defined by race. You can't change your race nor change the past, so the best you can do is hope that supporting the political agenda of your accusers is good enough.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Europe was Catholic long before the US, so it’s something else unique to the US…

andsoitis 4y ago

> personal shame, guilt, and self-loathing Do you think the Christian concept of "original sin" planted (at least some of) the seeds for this mental model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

mensetmanusman 4y ago
self-loathing is technically a type of sin… but that doesn’t mean peoples conceptions match the teachings (they often don’t). CCC 405 “ Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin — an inclination to evil that is called “concupiscence.” Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.”

NoraCodes 4y ago

> To stop seeing the world as purely an evil constructed on the mass graves of the innocent. Even if it were true (and in some sense it is) this is still the world we have. [...] To be sure, some things can be done, within a generation or two. Maybe three. But after a while, what's done is done and you have to move on. Putting aside the rhetorical tools you're discussing, what would you say to people who currently feel the effects of these historical, and contemporary oppressions? People with unwanted pregnancies who find themselves unable to access abortions, African-Americans who are descended from families that were unable to purchase property they would have been able to afford due to redlining and are thus at a disadvantage, Gen X Jews whose parents were denied entry to elite schools and whose families thus suffered economically, gay and trans people who are currently, in the US, facing a government that has all but stated it wants to eliminate even the tenuous hold on legal existence they have? I am all for telling people to find the good in the world. There is a lot of it! But some of these negative phenomena that sociologists describe have real consequences for real people in the present day, and I don't really see how "just stop thinking about it" is a solution for them.

javajosh 4y ago
>what would you say to people who currently feel the effects of these historical, and contemporary oppressions? I would have quoted me a bit more generously. This is what I would tell them (and myself, since we are all oppressed, and all of our ancestors were oppressed, at some point, by someone): >We cannot, in each successive generation, reform ourselves to undo the injustices of the past, not only because it's practically impossible but because the meaning of injustice changes. And society is finite in its malleability. To be sure, some things can be done, within a generation or two. Maybe three. But after a while, what's done is done and you have to move on.
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  Fair enough - I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't said that, the quote was merely to delimit the area I was addressing. Am I correct, then, in thinking your response to people currently harmed by social structures they have no choice in interacting with is, basically, "I agree that this sucks, but I don't support changing anything to fix it."?

mekoka 4y ago

The goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue - Alan Watts, attributing the original thought to Confucius. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cegl1BZ-0tI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cegl1BZ-0tI

dang 4y ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents and certainly not into ideological flamewar. Those things are not what HN is for and destroy what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32068220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32068220.