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From the introduction of Moral Man and Immoral Society : “Individual men may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of conduct, and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to their own. They are endowed by nature with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind, the breadth of which may be extended by an astute social pedagogy. Their rational faculty prompts them to a sense of justice which educational discipline may refine and purge of egoistic elements until they are able to view a social situation, in which their own interests are involved, with a fair measure of objectivity. But all these achievements are more difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups. In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships. The inferiority of the morality of groups to that of individuals is due in part to the difficulty of establishing a rational social force which is powerful enough to cope with the natural impulses by which society achieves its cohesion; but in part it is merely the revelation of a collective egoism, compounded of the egoistic impulses of individuals, which achieve a more vivid expression and a more cumulative effect when they are united in a common impulse than when they express themselves separately and discreetly.” When we look at Presidents it has to be remembered that they (in addition to being just a person) are also the symbol for the group. Groups are always less moral than individuals. So Presidents are always terrible as they are understood to be an individual who is the representation of and who holds responsibility for the collective actions of the country. There isn’t a way to not have blood on one’s hands as a leader at a nation state level. The exercise of power harms others even if it is non violent and there isn’t really clear line between a nonviolent exercise of power and a violent one. “Once we admit the factor of coercion as ethically justified, though we concede that it is always morally dangerous, we cannot draw any absolute line of demarcation between violent and nonviolent coercion. We may argue that the immediate consequences of violence are such that they frustrate the ultimate purpose by which it is justified. If that is true, it is certainly not self-evident; and violence can therefore not be ruled out on a priori grounds. It is all the more difficult to do this if we consider that the immediate consequences of violence cannot be differentiated as sharply from those of non-violence, as is sometimes supposed. The difference between them is not an absolute one, even though there may be important distinctions, which must be carefully weighed. Gandhi's boycott of British cotton results in the undernourishment of children in Manchester, and the blockade of the Allies in war-time caused the death of German children. It is impossible to coerce a group without damaging both life and property and without imperiling the interests of the innocent with those of the guilty. Those are factors which are involved in the intricacies of group relations; and they make it impossible to transfer an ethic of personal relations uncritically to the field of inter- group relations.” And there is what’s happening the “transfer an ethic of personal relations uncritically to the field of intergroup relations” when you ask your question Eiba.
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Feb 14, 2024 04:36
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Eiba posted:So... "go ahead and vote for Biden"? Is that what you're saying? That is my current position. I was mainly curious to hear from people who thought it was not just reasonable but a moral imperative to not vote for him. I’m not saying to either way. I’m saying consider the group dynamics. Also consider the arguments in light of different group and how each group benefits from you listening to and acting on their argument. Which groups benefit from the “moral imperative to not vote”? What happens historically when voting percentages drop significantly in bourgeoisie republics?
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Feb 14, 2024 05:16
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Civilized Fishbot posted:No, my moral stance is that we're all responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. The consequences of our actions are very often not foreseeable or only foreseeable in rather limited ways.
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Feb 14, 2024 17:09
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theCalamity posted:I don't know why but this just feels inherently undemocratic and complicating a simple action. I’ve posted it previously in the other thread but I think it’s on point enough to warrant coming up in this thread. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ I think 18 Brumaire is a analogous as a historical explanation / example of how a revolutionary romantic movement (centered around a figure that is a joke and farce ) can overtake a democracy being run by a center liberal coalition that’s detached from the real needs of the population . Anyway the point… The question of vote vs not isn’t without context, we have historical examples of what can happen.
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Feb 14, 2024 20:08
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hooman posted:When you are trapped in a 2 party system and you want one of those parties to change, you have to withdraw your vote in order to force change. Historical situations suggest this is incorrect though. When there is a reduction in the percentage of the voting population, that tends allow minority groups and extreme groups to win or gain control. When enough folks withdraw their votes it creates the potential for revolutionary (and counter revolutionary) conditions to occur. It reduces the stability of the system. I think you should give historical examples where withholding votes produced the outcome you are asserting.
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Feb 25, 2024 01:45
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The US isn’t a parliamentary system and I think the analogy is bad because President is a very different beast than Prime Minister. The main difference is that if the other guy wins then he’s head of the other party. Vote withholding for president affects the leadership of both parties.
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Feb 25, 2024 02:10
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hooman posted:Can you please explain what you mean by the bolded? As it seems like Donald Trump losing the last election didn't change anything about the direction and structure of the Republican party. Right generally one loses and one’s out. One wins and that confirms that convention selected the right leader of the party. That’s why they pushed a narrative asserting he didn’t really lose so hard. That and that party is revolutionary romantic party now.
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Feb 25, 2024 03:27
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B B posted:You don't even have to be a leftist for the Democratic Party to ignore your views. You just have to be a person who thinks genocide is bad. Providing material support to an ongoing genocide is very important to the modern Democratic Party, and there's not much individual voters or motivated groups of voters like those in Dearborn, Michigan can do to convince the Democratic Party to stop supporting genocide. There is a very significant age divide in the party on Israel. How does increasing the non voting rate of folks who think what the Israelis are doing is genocide (and it is) affect the party behavior. These data driven motherfuckers, do they care what folks who don’t vote think?
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Feb 25, 2024 04:51
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Josef bugman posted:They should because it is a large and untapped market. They don't because, in general, it's considered better from an internal perspective to try to change other voters to your teams side. They don’t think like this. They’re hiring overpaid consultants who are going to look at the data, whip up an objective function and then optimize for the positions to take to get the most voters. Think about how that math is going to work with the data collected.
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Feb 25, 2024 18:59
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Josef bugman posted:then why should there be an expectation to engage in the Civic religion at all? Because that’s how it is changed. If one opts out, then the folks that do not opt out control the direction of the group. Changing the group is accomplished by becoming more involved in participation in it. Furthermore it doesn’t even take majorities to change groups. There is research on how ideas outside a group consensus becomes part of the consensus. The percentage of vocal participating folks needed to flip things on a given issue is lower than most people would think. Opting out is what one does if one wants the group to start dying. That’s fine if that’s what one wants. We got posters on the forums who explicitly want that and who advocate for not voting and not participating in civic religion to start to kill American civic religion. That’s honest and coherent, it is however not my choice. What I have an issue with is this concept that one withdraws to causes the change in the group one desires, that’s just not what happens. It’s an incoherent assertion. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Feb 25, 2024 |
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Feb 25, 2024 21:59
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Josef bugman posted:Is it? Because engaging in this sort of thing does not seem to be how it is changed. Can you think of an example that has delivered any categorical break in the prior body politik from the left, the equivalent of the death of the Keynesian consensus or realignment to Neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan, that was achieved via the ballot box? Those things were a reaction to the widespread influence of social democracy which had wins achieved by the ballot box. Josef bugman posted:The fact is I have experience of this process and also have experiuence of being frozen out and the entirety of my political ideals being utterly shafted by the political structues of a country/party. I've experienced it on both levels and your argument that "well, you have to be part of it to make it happen" does not actually hold true compared to my lived experience. These fights can take a long time. Sometimes longer than lifetimes. “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.” Josef bugman posted:One withdraws from supporting people in certain circumstances because one wishes to support others. I cannot vote for the Labour party any more because the love of my life is Trans and they are calling for her to be put on a different ward because of it. If they changed that I would vote for them again, but to what level do we have to go before it's okay to say "I will vote for you in these circumstances but not THOSE"? There are differences in the UK context vs the US context particularly on social questions. If it were my situation, I probably wouldn’t vote for labour over that. I’d find that intolerable. But also the UK stakes are different.
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Feb 26, 2024 04:21
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hooman posted:I am very lucky that I happen to live somewhere that has a voting system that does not necessarily produce a 2 party state. Here’s the problem federalist bourgeoisie republic. The state you live in isn’t politically analogous to the US. It’s analogous to one state in the US. To continue the example, The Labour Party in the UK isn’t analogous to the Democratic Party. It’s analogous to a single state’s Democratic Party. The stakes in our federal elections are fundamentally different than elections in other countries. We are a shambling monstrous relic that could have only come to being at the moment it did. Our system is like the model T, everybody else has the newest Prius. All (I can’t think of an exception here) the other federal systems of that era modeled after the US system imploded spectacularly. Arguably even ours imploded spectacularly in the civil war.
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Feb 26, 2024 06:28
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Discendo Vox posted:You repeatedly insisting that democratic government is a religion does not actually make it so. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad Dis. Hidden civic religion are real thing. All government is built on civic religion, hidden or not.
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Feb 27, 2024 06:19
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To more explicitly talk about the myths that underlying democracy, to cut the question down to bone rather than wading around in more fat and muscle. Dis I’ve got two questions for you when you get back: 1. If US elections are free and fair, and the public participates fully do you think they have good outcomes for society and better government? 2. If we have an educated and engaged public does that public make better “correct” choices in elections? Separately I think the idea of civic religion is a good way to understand why this discussion can be a poo poo show. It’s a religious discussion. It is in a literal sense about participation in a ritual of civic religion. Josef bugman posted:The conditions in the UK and a lot of other places are based on the USA's follies over the last several decades, and now we all have to live with the mistakes of being part of a dying empire. No, a potentially dying Republic that could become an empire. Empires have a single authority, they are authoritarian. We have some characteristics of imperialism, we exert control in the world over other countries to our advantage. But we don’t have that unitary single authority. This is the root of why voting for President is different when compared to elections in a European Parliament. If our vote go wrong we could slip into actual being an Empire and that’s happened in the past to other republics and democracies.
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Feb 28, 2024 05:57
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Imperialism is the power relationships between metropole and periphery. We 100% do some imperialist things in the world. Empires are imperialist. But republics can also be imperialist. The unitary authority is not the only major characteristic of empire. It’s the characteristic of empire we currently don’t have as country. Edit: missed a not Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 06:23
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Probably Magic posted:You're going to have provide proof to the negative then. He’s not going to. The idea of Democracy as religion in the context of American politics was a Niebuhr piece title Democracy as religion published in Christianity in Crisis. It’s not some loving fringe concept. DV just doesn’t want to talk about it and would like to pretend it’s not a viable or appropriate discussion.
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Feb 29, 2024 03:17
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DeadlyMuffin posted:How do you define a religion? If you’re looking for the modern grounds for using religion as critique of culture (and thus government) by religion. The big places for that are Christianity in Culture by Richard Niebuhr and a Theology of Culture, by Paul Tillich. If you want a short TLDR on using religion to critique things outside religion the introduction section of the text “Film as Religion” will get you through in about half an hour. If you really want to dig into the full scope and historical meat of the Christian criticism of civic religion that’s more complicated. The influence of the development of the Roman state on the idea of God during the inter testament period, the inversion on Roman symbols (like birth narratives) in early Christianity and the Christian Logos in conflict with the Stoic Logos are just like the start. If your looking for an criticism at the intersection of Marxism, religion, bourgeois democracy, and fascism read The Socialist Decision by Paul Tillich. Those two questions I asked DV that he doesn’t want to answer are from that, those are two enlightenment myths that are used to support democracy in a bourgeoisie republic, that the bourgeois principle undermines and breaks even as it uses them for support.
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Feb 29, 2024 17:28
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You don’t live here though. When the infrastructure act funds B a local government to add sidewalks and modern crosswalks to a very busy road that an elementary school is on, you will never ever know it happened. There are intensely local things that get affected by if the US federal government is more or less functional. Boring things many people do not realize are federal driven. Of course they don’t matter to a person living in the UK.
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Mar 3, 2024 23:59
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Yeah but all those “semi-good” things do actually matter here within the US where the election is taking place.
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Mar 4, 2024 01:00
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selec posted:Bar is this an unironic “but at least the trains run on time” argument about funding a genocide or am I reading it wrong? No, and that would be a pretty exaggerated way to interpret it.
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Mar 4, 2024 01:17
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hooman posted:You've deployed this line of reasoning a few times and it's playing the person not the issue. Right the consequences of our presidential election have a huge, possibly unique consequence among world elections. It’s not like opting out of other votes. It’s especially strange, inconsistent, to also go : “both sides are the same” so it doesn’t matter to the US Presidential. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 02:24
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Discendo Vox posted:midcentury Thomas Friedman. First Niebuhr isn’t some midcentury Thomas Friedman. For context here, Niebuhr write Moral Man and Immoral Society which King references in Letter from Birmingham Jail, Niebuhr idea that groups are less moral than individuals underlies Kings idea that we have responsibility to oppose unjust laws, explicitly because King says so in the letter. Further Niebuhr was the head of Union Seminary (in Harlem) for many decades. He sent Seminary students to study in India the nonviolent resistance movement with Ghandi. That’s how that enters the African American churches. Later he writes The Irony of American History which is the internal criticism of the US in the Cold War. LBJ gave him the medal of Freedom. So when DV hand waves away his importance ya know have the context in mind. Especially don’t go on think about the direct influence his ideas had on US foreign policy. Anyway enough about him for the moment. Discendo Vox posted:To the degree that the argument is raised today by authoritarians and by Niebuhr in the 1940s, it is to argue for the moral degradation of society in the absence of traditional moral religious authority or to undermine the concept of liberal democracy by painting it as a subject of blind faith. When you read this argument ask if I am doing this? DV is assuming I’m doing something he doesn’t like other people doing. If anyone other than DV thinks I am I’d like to know. Part of the problem here is that some of the conversants have a very very different understanding of basic religious concepts. DV isn’t aware of this having not participated in those conversation and not having a background in theology. Let’s look to another theologian MLK studied (wrote his doctorate about actually) Tillich. What is Faith? Faith is “Ultimate Concern for”. (Dynamics of Faith). When one sees the idea that Faith is belief without proof, that’s a garbage straw man. The real concept of faith is much more akin to a dynamic struggle with what matters to us more than anything else. The back and forth of wrestling with belief and doubt (and doubt demonstrates concern). The object of faith is what one is ultimately concerned with. DV thinks thinks these concepts of religion critiquing government as a civic faith goes back to 1899 . Again there is context he is unaware of. Christianity has been criticizing civic religion as long as it has existed. The Christmas story is a religious critique of civil religion (it is an inversion of an Emperors birth narrative) Theology is filled with critiques of civic religion eg Augustine and City of God. Religious apology of the early church is between the logocentric early Christian and the Stoic’s with their Logos and is about participation in the civic religion of the times. This listing could go on endlessly. DV wants to pretend that only authoritarians and conservatives do it. No, there are thousands of years of thought about government as civic religion and it’s a hugely diverse topic. Anyway circling back around. Discendo Vox posted:Participation in or belief in engagement with civic functions tied to the structure of the state is not considered a religious belief. Participation in symbolic acts, shared by a group or community, that we consider to have meaning, that’s very much religion. And you very much want to protect those civic functions, and you very much are deeply concerned with our democracy. Thinking about democracy as religion isn’t a threat to what you want to protect nor is it a threat your object of concern. You demonstrate how much our democracy matters to you though your anger. It matters and is clearly intensely important to you. Look at your own relationship to the idea of democracy.
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Mar 10, 2024 05:12
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Mormon Star Wars posted:(A careful reader might notice that part of the reason this thread exists is because people have started to doubt the efficacy of the system and the universalism of it's basic values!) Right and why does that happen? Years ago one of the subjects my wife was interested in and studied was what happens when undergrads goto university and study religion. Right out if the gate they give them biblical criticism. This breaks a lot of folks, especially evangelical and fundamentalist folks. They have serious doubt and they leave Christianity. Naive idealism encountering first real criticism and analysis basically unprepared. But there is another set of people for which it’s just not a problem, because they’ve had basic introductions to Theology and have an understanding of how we construct our relationships with meaning. Doubt isn’t a big deal once one has that, it’s sublimated into faith as a part of of faith. The irony (ha!) here is that by understanding Democracy as a civic religion one gets intellectual tool(s) that can be used to protect it! DV is fighting against a way to get what he wants. And Democracy does need protection right now! Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 19:54
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“ In the face of the split between classes, the democratic belief in harmony as held by the bourgeois is shattered; in the face of bourgeois class rule, democratic belief in harmony as held by socialism collapses.” (The Socialist Decision, 1933)
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Mar 10, 2024 20:47
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So I haven’t brought a specific book up on purpose, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. It rather in depth digs into this question of how do we justify and support democracy. I’d been kicking around starting a thread on Moral Man (and have even written a few effort posts) but this thread has convinced me Children is the better book to go through with a fine tooth comb. Anyway when I get around to it I’ll link to it here.
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Mar 18, 2024 03:47
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Jon Pod Van Damm posted:I may not live in your neck of the woods but your armed forces is over here in my country so your government have made your government's business my business. Right our elections and especially the presidential election are unique because the consequences are global and we should be more engaged and participate in them more because the consequences are higher for everyone.
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Mar 30, 2024 05:24
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Josef bugman posted:See this is the thing, I am unsure as to how choosing who helms the empire changes the underlying assumptions of Imperialism. It may be different in terms of what is done, but the involvement of the USA in various places does not change because the structures are still there. Yeah I’m gunna get that other thread started and it’ll deal with some of that. Works just been too busy.
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Mar 30, 2024 19:07
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