The idea of the ‘Splinternet’, being discussed in many quarters, is interesting. Networks of global online collaboration, personally and professionally, are easily overshadowed by larger divergent and conflicting political, national and legal interests (China, The EU, America).
Here’s a refreshing jolt of Scottish insight and depressive realism for you (don’t know if I know enough to know about how much I think is true). A lot of the problems in the tail need to be analyzed.
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Dear Reader, if you’re thinking belief doesn’t matter, please check out what can happen to people when they come in and out of hope, attached to deeper system of belief, even if that system is generally an ideology with debatable epistemological roots.
Of course there are always violent knuckleheads at such events, but it’s remarkable how many people find themselves sharing common intellectual ground:
What you personally think is true, and what you know, can profoundly affect your experiences and the decisions you make. This bleeds into the thousands of daily judgments your make, moral and otherwise.
Rod Dreher (formerly Catholic, currently Orthodox, religiously conservative but often writing for a liberal mainstream) brings up a former piece of his on Ta Nehisi Coates’ popularized racial identity separatism: ‘Amy Cooper, Race, And Mercy’
‘He [Coates] set himself up to be disillusioned because he expected of liberalism something it couldn’t deliver. (“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.” — Flannery O’Connor). He really seems to have thought that we were moving inexorably to the elimination of that particular evil in this world.’ And we are!
Jason Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates here. Theodore Dalrymple’s review of Coates.
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To some extent, a Marxist or post-Marxist framework has won many minds, including those viewing the world primarily through the ‘-Isms’ (feminism, environmentalism, racism, liberation theology, a politics prioritizing collective identity, constant radical overthrow of anything established).
Change becomes an immediate necessity, and any injustice, or perceived injustice, becomes an actionable reality. Any established tradition, practice, or responsibility someone else has decided to carry becomes oppressive.
Unfortunately, such a view, mainstream in many quaraters, never really condemns violence in pursuit of its aims.
Why did law enforcement allow these cells to proliferate across the US? Professional agitators exploit local communities and use justified anger to further divide all of us – when they say: “All good cops are dead cops” they mean black and Hispanic cops too – ask them. I did. https://t.co/IC6iw3kEtu
— Lara Logan (@laralogan) May 30, 2020
If identity politics is a watered-down form of Marxism [quite a bit of truth in this] then some Leftists are advocating a return to more pure Marxism, in the face of institutional weakness and capture (‘woke’ elites, competitive globalism and flabby, high liberal institutionalism, ‘neo-liberals’ etc.). A lot of the industrial utopianism Marx advocated (dependent upon and reactive to Hegelian (H)istoricism and a ridiculously reductive materialism), is easily transferable to computing technology and (S)cience.
In America, personally, I believe a more religious, more traditional civil fabric is being eroded in favor of…something else (freedom of speech and religious liberty perhaps no longer enjoying a popular majority).
As for my thinking, the Platonic model found in the Republic (one of many models I’m using), keeps me up at night: Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic can be found here.
On this site, see:
From The Liberal Bastions-James Baldwin, Often…Jason Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates here. Theodore Dalrymple’s review of Coates:
James Baldwin’s works are there to be read and thought about, his words and ideas echoing in your mind; your words formed in response.
Take or leave those words and ideas. You can write a paper, and forget them. They may deeply move and stir your moral imagination, or not.
Such is freedom.
Related On This Site: What about black people held in bondage by the laws..the liberation theology of Rev Wright…the progressive vision and the folks over at the Nation gathered piously around John Brown’s body?: Milton Friedman Via Youtube: ‘Responsibility To The Poor’……Robert George And Cornel West At Bloggingheads: “The Scandal Of The Cross”…
As to politics and social institutions, sent in by a reader, here’s a talk given by John McWhorter about his views in ‘Losing The Race‘, a man who strikes me as politically amorphous, unsatisfyingly moderate for some, and often very sensible. As has been the case for a while, there [are] a whole range of views out there
Repost-Eugene Volokh At The National Review: ‘Multiculturalism: For or Against?
