Did you know we’re all pagans? That’s right. America is majority pagan. We worship Ishtar and the Onion God and have cool-ass pagan festivals featuring palm fronds and sacred orgies. Public feasts in every town distribute meat and mead, blessed by pagan priestesses in ancient regalia, to all the townsfolk, at public or patriot expense. Meteorologists offer fruit to Shango on live television to assure us they are doing everything in their power to realize good weather for our crops and games. Our first commandment from the Sky Spirit, who rules over the Moon Goddess and the Sun Lord and thus whose advice is clearly the better, is “So long as none be harmed, do as ye will.” Our children are all sure to carry their household gods with them, wrapped in finest silks, for luck and wisdom on their dangerous expeditions. We keep chests full of the deathmasks of our ancestors to forever honor them. At night, we pray for their beneficence.
Oh wait. No. Just kidding.
I must have forgotten what the word “pagan” means. Apparently it’s just a synonym for “liberal progressive” (good luck finding that in any dictionary that exists). Indeed, even Christians are pagans, if they worship at the altar of human compassion and evidence-based reasoning. Because that’s the definition functionally used by John Daniel Davidson, editor of The Federalist, in his new book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come (Regnery 2024), which at one point reached number seven on Amazon’s best seller list in “History of Civilization & Culture,” and number fourteen in “Political Conservatism & Liberalism.” Really, it’s just standard alarmist bullshit from our fringe plague of ultraconservative doomsday cultists: American Christian Nationalists. But people are eating it up. I went all over this subject with Godless Engineer on his show recently (in Does America Need Christian Nationalism?). Here I provide a write-up.
A Breaking Points Exegesis
This all started for me with a brief interview of Davidson about his book on the YouTube channel Breaking Points on their show Counter Points, which features a liberal and a conservative host. The episode is called The Decline of Christianity in America. The liberal host, Ryan Grim, gives the impression of being not just a liberal but a skeptical atheist as well, although unfortunately he did not read Davidson’s book (for which he apologizes) and thus wasn’t prepared for the weird nonsense Davidson was about to spew. But even the conservative host, Emily Jashinsky, who works at The Federalist with Davidson, seemed a bit taken aback by it. I subsequently read Davidson’s book myself and can confirm that what he presents in the interview is pretty much what’s in the book. Indeed, the book is worse. If the hosts had read it, they might have been prepared: in it Davidson makes clear he believes literal demons are controlling our computers and inhabiting objects in our society to corrupt us, and to stop this we need to reassert a fascist Christian control over all aspects of society. In other words, he’s a lunatic.
I’m not kidding. Davidson thinks Satanic Temple is actually worshiping Satan. He is actually bothered by teenagers turning to witchcraft (a.k.a. religious freedom); and when he connects this fear with his oldfart loathing of social media, he ends up with a whole section panic-harvesting over the existence of WitchTok influencers (pp. 153–56; yes, that’s a thing), who are controlled by demons (p. 158). His entire chapter on AI (yes, he has an entire chapter on AI) argues that demons control our computers. Oh, and UFOs are demons, too (pp. 300–02). He believes ancient religions were run by actual demons (p. 17). He explains the God-commanded genocides in the Bible as actually a war against a literal invasion of Earth by demons (p. 48). Indeed his book talks about “demonic powers” as a concern over forty separate times. Crazy pants.
The Counterpoints interview still does a good job of at least summarizing the main thrust of his book and some of its core points. Its lynchpin premise, of course, is that “there’s really only one alternative to Christianity, and it’s not secularism, it’s paganism” (0:49), a classic false dichotomy, built to co-opt the English language to invent emotionally triggering nonsense (like “secularism” is now “paganism,” a word that is more scary to Christian ears, even though the semantic legerdemain is illegitimate—as my opening paragraph makes perfectly clear). Gradually you start to realize he means not just “alternative to Christianity” but to ultraconservative Christianity—hence “liberal” Christians are also worshiping false gods and therefore “pagans.” Davidson couples that bullshit with a true fact he deems frightening: Christianity is in decline in the U.S. and Christians are on track to be a minority in just a few decades. Uh oh. Of course, his Christianity is already a minority; thus he likes to count the “pagan” Christians when it makes him feel less scared. Otherwise he’d admit: what he means by “real” Christianity has already lost majority status, and is only desperately clinging to majority power by illicit means. His prophesied “Dark Age” is already here. And so far, I don’t see the collapse of civilization. Meanwhile, most of its troubles are being caused by his religion.
You’ll find Davidson’s full redefinition of “pagan” in his book. There, “pagan” means any belief that “truth is relative” (p. 11). Again, no dictionary on Earth says that. But also, no pagan in history has ever held that (and almost no atheists ever have or do). With that bogus maneuver, Davidson tries to expand that to therefore mean anyone is “pagan” who thinks “we are therefore free to ascribe sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things and activities, even to human beings if they’re powerful enough,” like, say, “a pharaoh or a Roman emperor.” But there is no secular deification of people in America; it’s Christians doing that (look at Donald Trump; that’s as deified as you can get). Davidson always uses words weirdly. So, what he means, really, is that a “pagan” is anyone who replaces God as any focus of their life, including just life itself. Anything that replaces God is “pagan.” Even Christians who do this are pagans. Hence, he says, he doesn’t mean “pre-Christian polytheism” (the actual thing the word means) but that paganism “will be defined, as it always was” (it never has) “by the belief that nothing is true” and “everything is permitted” (p. 15), which, of course, describes no one (much less actual pagans). Not even American atheists believe “nothing is true” or that “everything is permitted.” And America as a whole is on no trend toward any such ridiculous point of view. So Davidson’s feared paganism is like fire-breathing dragons: a fictional thing that has never existed, and is on no track ever to exist.
Davidson’s main objective with all this is that he believes “America, as we know it and understand it, is only possible with a Christian people” (1:22). Because, supposedly, “rights” and “dignity” only come from being made in the image of God (1:44), by which he means things like “freedom of speech, religion, consent of the governed,” and thus “all of the things that we associate with our American system of government and our American way of life are products of Christian civilization—they can’t exist on their own outside of that context” (1:45). So once Christianity fails to control American culture, we will “devolve into a form of post-Christian neopaganism,” since “there is no basis for” our American ideals “outside of a Christian moral cosmology.” And yes: he says “cosmology,” which is code for his literally demon-haunted world that can only be rescued by his Hebrew storm-god’s blood magic. We have to remember: Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory. Hence he means “made in His image” literally, complete with Biblical Creation, the Cosmic Curse of the Fall, and Cosmic Blood Magic. He thinks all moral facts derive from these things as a cosmological principle.
But, as usual, Davidson literally doesn’t know what he is talking about. For example, when he complains that “general morality has to be based on something” (3:07) he literally does not know about any secular moral philosophy (I confirmed this in his book: he never even mentions anything to do with the actual history of moral philosophy anywhere in it). He thus does not know how morality is based on plenty of things that aren’t ghost-monsters or space-wizards. For readers interested in the best ontological grounding of moral facts, see my discussion and links in Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge & the Problem of Evil; and for why these are actually more secure foundations than any theism can offer, see The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory. I won’t repeat any of that here. What I will address here is Davidson’s bogus account of human history.
Davidson boldly claims that what “holds true across vast expanses of time and geography and cultures is that if you are not ‘part of my group’ then it’s my moral duty to take what you have or subjugate you for the benefit of me and my people” and “that’s what we see over and over again throughout history, the history of pagan peoples and cultures” (3:27). Which is wildly false. First, there is no more of that behavior in pagan than Christian cultures, and indeed there has been much less of it in most pagan cultures. And second, it has never been the case that any society has promulgated the ethic that “it’s my moral duty to take what you have or subjugate you.” All societies that did those things actually embraced moral systems stalwartly against it—just like Christian societies did. They all, Christian and pagan, simply invented excuses for ignoring their own values, or pretending their crimes were actually somehow in furtherance of them. There is no observable difference between pagan and Christian cultures here. Davidson’s account of history is a sham. But as I noted last week (in Was Daniel Dennett Wrong in Creative Ways?), creating false realities is precisely what all Christian apologetics must do. False history is a key step.
I covered all this before (even in respect to the same false claims about the origins and basis of modern values) within my discussion of Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life. So I won’t dwell further here on that general point. You can explore that there. Here I will focus on Davidson’s more specific and particular claims.
How Exactly Is Christianity a Solution?
Any keen viewer will already be thinking of some serious counterpoints to Davidson’s claims. Ryan was no exception. He correctly points out (starting at 3:36):
We’ve been a Christian Nation for a couple hundred years. We have launched more Wars than any other nation, maybe in history, like in the 200-plus years that we’ve been a country. [Here Emily chimes in, “We’ve done some subjugating”] We’ve done some subjugating. There have been only a few years out of all of those years—even during our quote-unquote “isolationist” period while we were enacting a genocide—that we were not at war with other people and subjugating them.
Hence Ryan amusingly asks, “When is this ‘Christianity’ going to kick in?” (4:16).
Davidson obviously replies by saying we should not mistake an ideal for an outcome. But he was making claims about outcome. And Ryan just explained: Christianity has the bad outcome that Davidson was claiming the absence of Christianity would have. Davidson then tries to shift his claim to mere philosophical and moral claims, not the reality, but that means we get to measure pagan and secular societies by the same standard: do they make the same or better claims; and are they as well or better grounded? We cannot judge them by the standards of what they did, if we aren’t allowed to judge Christian societies by the standards of what they did. This fundamental contradiction in Davidson’s position is typical of apologetical rigmarole: he needs the equivocation fallacy, to move the goal posts whenever needed, to create the false impression that Christianity is somehow better; when it isn’t—it’s worse (see my summary in Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity).
That’s why Davidson needs the false narrative that “many other moral and religious systems…claim inequality between people” (4:54) and that Christianity is “where we get human rights, the basis for human rights, and human dignity” (5:02). But of course, that’s simply not true. In outcomes, Christianity exacerbated inequalities. It is canonically against women’s rights; and it created and maintained for centuries the most brutal slave society ever realized in human history—and not only literally started a war to keep it, but when it lost, it replaced it with one of the most racist societies ever realized in human history. In values, moral opposition to slavery began with pagans, not Christians (in both the Greco-Roman world and China, facts I’ll revisit shortly); and became a motive force within Christianity only after the recovery of pagan thought in the Renaissance and the resurrection of secular philosophy in the Enlightenment. Christianity, left to its own devices, never adopted this notion for a thousand years. So Christianity clearly has no such effect; and this ideal didn’t come from Christianity. It required other causes. Now Secular Humanism provides a stronger and more enduring basis for such values; because, unlike Christianity, they are not incidental to it but fundamental. So it isn’t true that “you can’t have the culture without the cult” (5:34). You absolutely can. We have no need of cults. Rational evidence-based reasoning is a far better creator and preserver of human values.
Yet Davidson’s position is even less factual than that. “Why should I think all men are created equal,” he asks, without the Bible? (5:44). But that is not in the Bible. There is no passage anywhere that says humans are “created” equal, nor any passage that says they ought to have equal political rights. It says the opposite. It says women should have fewer rights than men, because women were not created equal; it says throughout its legal code that Gentiles should have fewer rights than Jews; it even commands slavery and genocide, and however you try to justify that, by whatever horrid logic, it always entails an abandonment of this principle of “all men are created equal” and therefore deserve to be treated equally.
To have equality before the law, this must include women, slaves, and even criminals, a concept Christianity has always opposed. This notion did not come from the Bible. It came from pagan philosophy: particularly Stoicism, and its concept of all people being created equal before God; and Epicureanism, and its concept of proper laws and mores being a social contract among negotiating equals. And it was resurrected from there by philosophers of the post-Renaissance, who tended to be pagans by Davidson’s own definition: liberal and alternative Christians (like Universalists, Unitarians, and Deists: see Matthew Stewart’s study, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic), and not the ultracon Christians that Davidson is trying desperately to justify (see That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation) and No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West).
Indeed, in his actual book, Davidson repeatedly contradicts even his own claims: almost in the same breath he praises “freedom of religion” and “freedom of speech,” and then calls for censorship and religious oppression under a Christian heel, indeed even a specific sectarian Christian heel. His book is quite explicit about this: his desired program is explicitly fascist, top to bottom. It does not sound like he actually wants to move forward toward any real enactment of the ideals he praises. He wants to destroy them. Exactly what Ryan observes Christianity has always done. So it sooner seems we need to get rid of Christianity, not empower it.
Right?
So What Exactly Is the Problem?
In Davidson’s fantasy, “Christianity, you know, brought a moral revolution to this, this pagan morality, and this pagan cosmology” (though he didn’t describe any pagan cosmology) and then it “posited a radically new way of understanding the world and our relations,” and “that had never before been seen” (6:25). But what exactly does he think hadn’t before been seen? The only concrete example suggested in the interview was slavery. But Christian America did not abolish slavery; it codified it; it even fought a war to preserve it. Can he mean democracy? That was pagan. As Thomas Paine wrote, “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude,” and when John Adams said American democracy was built on the principles of the ancients, he lists only pagans: “Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Dionysius Halicarnassus, Cicero, and Tacitus.” Can he mean the separation of powers? Also pagan (that was what Adams meant by Polybius, who fully described and discussed that principle). Can he mean human rights? Also pagan (that was what Adams meant by Cicero, who fully described and discussed that principle). Freedom of speech? Pagan. Freedom of religion? Pagan. Dignity? Pagan. So what is he referring to? (For all these points, see, again, That Christian Nation Nonsense.)
Davidson’s thesis thus depends entirely on a false history of the world. If what “we should expect is a resurgence of this pagan mentality, the pagan ethos,” then it isn’t “one that’s based on force and coercion,” but on tolerance, equality, and freedom. Take away Christian fascism, and what we should expect is indeed a return to the pagan mentality: every human being will become more valued and more free. For example, the Bible repeatedly commands and justifies the violent suppression of free speech and religion; it never expresses a kind word for either principle. Ancient pagans lauded both, and often implemented them. The Persian-Zoroastrian Cyrus the Great codified religious toleration as law. The Chinese and Roman Empires at their heights were entirely tolerant of all religions. They suppressed only what they believed were political actions, like illegal assembly or denigrating the authority of the state; they did not outlaw any belief, or any form of peaceful worship. It was Christians who did that. Because their Bible literally told them to. Likewise, pagan statesmen like Pliny lauded emperors who granted freedom of speech, and condemned those who didn’t. It would take well over a thousand years for any Christian to come around to anything so magnanimous (and even then with no help from the Bible).
In reality, Christians did not bring to the West anything of substance that was good. For example, Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy and No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West. These refute many wildly false claims found in Davidson’s book, such as on p. 57 that the pagan Romans had no charities. Those also link to my articles refuting yet more, such as his false claims on p. 53 about the actual status of infanticide under the Romans and Christians (see What About Orphans, Then? and Four Representative Examples of Roman Attitudes Toward Infanticide). I can add here that he falsely describes the Ashkelon Infants as victims of infanticide under a brothel on p. 54 (there is no evidence of either claim); but even if that unusual find were as claimed, we could more plausibly cite the mass murder of children at a convent, illustrating no net difference.
Christianity instead brought a ton of bad—such as severe religious intolerance and suppression of nearly every human right. Ryan points this out (7:29): “if the country is founded on these Christian ideals,” then why did it have “Christians supporting slavery, Christians supporting the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, Christians supporting the Spanish American War and the Philippine[–American War]” and other failures. Davidson interjects that “these are departures, these were departures from Christianity…I mean, these are departures from the claims of Christianity, right?”
But Ryan comes right back at him with a killer analogy:
[What you’re saying is] sort of like “True communism has never been tried.” Well, people mock that idea. When actual Communists will say, look … [Here Emily chimes in: “When’s the communism gonna kick in?”] Yeah! The communists, like you, say, well, the Soviet Union wasn’t great, Cuba wasn’t great, but then that wasn’t real communism. But communism only had like a 200 year run. Christianity has had 2,000 years.
Davidson misses the point, completely ignores it, and changes subject to ra-ra patriotic emotivism, blurting out, “Christianity has produced the greatest civilization the world’s ever seen!” But what can he mean at this point? Technology and science? That’s not Christian (see The Myth That Science Needs Christianity). Yet if you take that away—what is even great about it? (Much less “the greatest”) Its democracy and ideas about human rights and equality? That’s not Christian either. Women’s equality? Not Christian. These ideas all originated on a basis of secular philosophy, on evidence-based reasoning; not on the Bible or any premises unique to Christianity at all.
Davidson also can’t mean the West’s abolition of slavery (as he tries to argue toward the end of minute eight). Because that is Ryan’s point: two thousand years, and Christianity never abolished that. We had to literally kill hundreds of thousands of Christians en masse to abolish it (even other nations only ended slavery after a disastrous series of slave rebellions and bloody wars, and thus did not “peacefully” just let slavery go; and still their reasons were more economic than moral). So how has Christianity “produced” anything supposedly great about modern civilization? It seems more like it has been in the way, while progress has always measured the progressive defeat of Christianity and its actual principles, not their instantiation. Unlike all iron curtain states from the Cold War, Christianity actually had thousands of years of free reign to shape society exactly how its ardent believers wanted. And that didn’t get us anything good. Good stuff only came when we started tearing all of Christianity’s work down. Women’s suffrage, abolitionism, democracy, animal rights, racial equality, sexual freedom, religious freedom, the end of heresy and witchcraft trials. Not in the Bible. Not Christian ideas. All opposed by devout Christians.
That Inconvenient “Slavery” Thing
Slavery is a big problem for Davidson’s thesis. So he tries to weasel out of that with more targeted fake history. His first tactic is a tu quoque fallacy, “pagans defended slavery too.” But even that fact he describes incorrectly, with a cherry-picked version of history that doesn’t reflect reality. He argues, for example, that “the ancient Aristotle said this” and “you know, the ancient pagans, they understood inequality means that some people are naturally slaves and some people are naturally rulers” (6:09). This is, of course, exactly what all leading Christian philosophers of slavery said, for almost two thousand years. Even the canonical Paul (both the fake and the authentic Paul, as I discussed, with cited verses, last time). It’s also not exactly what Aristotle said. And even Aristotle’s position was largely rejected by subsequent philosophers, particularly the Stoics and Epicureans (and we can suspect, the Cynics as well, who rejected, at least conceptually, all human institutions and inequalities).
You can check the Wikipedia article on “Natural Slavery” for a primer: “Stoic thought disagreed with the Aristotelian concept of natural slavery, as it was expressed in Seneca’s Letter 47 and elsewhere.” So did Epicurean thought. The Stoic position was based on a similar idea to what later Christian abolitionists would develop (that all beings were created equal by God). So Christianity didn’t invent even that; while the Stoic idea is more defensible and rational (it is built-out on evidence and reason, not vague oracular utterances). So that would be an argument to return to pagan Stoicism. Meanwhile, the Epicurean approach (example, example, example) is what most of Western society has actually adopted: arguments against slavery now are based on rational thought, given the notion that laws are merely social contracts that people invent, which entails an innate starting-point of equality among its negotiators. This view evolved into modern Rawlsian perspectivism and Game Theory.
There is no evidence that Aristotle’s primitive theory of natural slavery survived into the Roman era. The Stoic-Epicurean view appears there to have prevailed, at least among its thought leaders. And yet they weren’t the first to critique the idea of natural slavery; we see that position even before Aristotle. For example, the playwright Aristophanes put this exchange in one of his comedies:
Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; […] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. […]
Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?
Praxagora: The slaves
The joke only works if you agree that what Praxagora said is hypocritical (see The Methodological Application of My Theory of Humor). Which means Aristophanes (and everyone in the audience expected to laugh at this) understood that the concept of natural slavery was suspect—and that ideals of equality were known and considered lofty, and that they would entail abolishing slavery. Otherwise, no one would think this was funny. So the ancient position on slavery was more complex and ethical than Davidson thinks. It’s hard to find anything Christianity could actually have added to it.
Notably, the sole known exception proves the rule: only one Christian author ever took a truly hostile position against all slavery, Gregory of Nyssa, who originated the “image and sovereignty of God” argument, and appeals to the value of human rationality as the Stoics did, and to the injustices of non-negotiated contracts, as the Epicureans did. But Christendom ignored him. Christianity worldwide stuck to Augustine, instead, who was definitely pro-slavery. He didn’t defend natural slavery, but by his time, no pagan did either. And yet, by the time of Aquinas, natural slavery was back in (example, example, example, example; and see his Commentary on the Politics 1.4.11, §388). At this point Davidson gets a lot of the ensuing history wrong. For example, he incorrectly claims slaves had no rights under the Roman Empire; but in fact there were laws regulating what one could do with slaves (they just weren’t that expansive), and there were ethical principles as well. The net effect is that many slaves were substantially better off under the Roman regime than later Christian regimes—the American regime being the worst of all.
Cornered on this point, Davidson tries to save face by spinning inaccurate yarns about the history of Christian theological debate about slavery. He mistakenly implies this was a debate over abolition, but it wasn’t. What he is describing are debates in the late Renaissance that were only about how to treat slaves and who to enslave—not whether slavery was kosher. And those debates didn’t turn out all that well for slaves (follow the timeline in Catholic Church and Slavery and you’ll see that every step forward was soon shot down). And even what reforms resulted only impacted Catholic-controlled colonies, and thus had no significant impact in America, and weren’t even pertinent to the British Empire (for more accurate accounts, see European Christianity and Slavery and Catholic Church and Slavery).
Nevertheless, Davidson tries to spin the fact that they were having a debate at all as a worthy contribution of “Christianity” (10:49), claiming “this is a product of Christian civilization.” But it’s the other way around: that Christians had to debate the humanity of slaves indicates how far Christianity had devolved society. In antiquity that debate had long been won; Stoic and Epicurean thought prevailed over the Aristotelian. In the Roman period it would have been considered absurd to even question whether slaves were human. And many pagan thought leaders condemned their abuse. So it simply isn’t true that this was “not the kind of thing that would have been debated in a pagan society at all” (10:52). It very much was, and in terms of ideology the pagans were actually already on a better page by the time Christianity toppled all the moral progress they had made.
Ryan also thinks to challenge Davidson here by calling to mind the situation in China. That intrigued me. I had never looked into the subject of slavery in Chinese history; so I checked. Ryan could have made much more of it against Davidson’s point. Peruse Slavery in China and China’s Long Road to Abolishing Slavery and you’ll discover China had a much longer history of abolitionism than the West, and always on purely rational grounds. They had no need of Christianity or any superstitious mythology to argue the point. The Chinese always regarded slaves as people, and always regulated how they could be treated, and never developed slavery into a major institution at all. Slaves were in fact rare in China. So clearly the Bible was not needed for this; to the contrary, in the West it appears to have had exactly the opposite effect, of stalling any of this for thousands of years and even provoking wars over it.
Ancient China was functionally very similar to the Roman Empire (see Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? and Some Ancient Chinese Philosophy on Why We Ought to Be Moral). And yet it never developed a slave society at all. Its economy in no way depended on slaves, who existed only in isolated cases and in very small numbers—and mostly punitively, the result of usury, criminality, or clan conflict (and do remember, slavery is still legal in America; and still exists illegally as well, such that America is today about where China already was two thousand years ago). You can read today an eyewitness account of how and why China finally abolished all forms of slavery in The Abolition of Slavery in the Chinese Empire, which occurred in 1910. Actual punitive slavery (productive-labor slavery) was resumed by Communist China in 1949 and has since escalated there to a vast scale. The pagan Chinese of yore would have been appalled; and not because of Jesus. So, clearly, we do not need the Bible to be against slavery. Rather, in the West, it seems we needed the Bible to maintain slavery.
The Actual Basis of Human Rights
Across the novels 2001 and 2010 you can find a subtle critique of Plato’s Republic. Plato was the first philosopher of fascism, and his Republic is the first elaborate argument for fascism as a political system of public control. The basic idea was that people will only “be good” if they are convinced of an elaborate lie, essentially some religious myth about their fate in the afterlife; and therefore a system must be set up whereby anyone who would challenge or question or change the myth must be kidnapped and coerced to stop or else simply killed. In the story of 2001, the computer Hal was secretly ordered to prevent the crew of his ship from learning about their mission; so when they started asking questions and getting close to finding out, he had to kill them. The absurdity of that is precisely shared by Plato’s vision.
This is identical to what Davidson wants: a fascist regime that will suppress anyone questioning, doubting, or challenging the fabulous “control myth” he thinks is needed to keep people in line. Just like Plato. The problem with this is that it is not only doomed (any such system will eventually be torn down in outraged rebellion) but it is self-refuting at its own core premise: the Guardians of Plato’s Republic are supposed to know the truth (that the myth is false) and “guard” it for the pragmatic, neoconservative reason of preserving a well-ordered society; but that means the Guardians have to have good reasons to maintain this supposedly righteous order other than the myth. Which means—the myth isn’t needed. You could instead just educate the public on the actual reasons to behave in prosocial ways. And instead of wasting resources watching every individual in society for ideological “deviance” and arresting or killing “deviators” (indeed even mere “questioners”) you could instead deploy those resources toward policing actual deviators—people who commit actual crimes—and not just anyone and everyone who is asking questions or coming up with new findings or ideas.
All theistic fascisms fall to the same folly. They lead to nothing but chaos: all the wars and rebellions preceding the American Revolution that educated the Founding Fathers into abolishing religious control of society—the exact opposite of what Davidson claims they did and himself wants to do (for a solid discussion of this point from a rational conservative, read Rebellion by Robert Kagan). Davidson’s own position is thus self-refuting: there is no way for him to maintain adherence to any vision he has for society, because it depends on a myth that is not grounded in any controlling evidence. His “Guardians” simply have no reason to maintain “his” interpretation of the myth. Since no one can phone God and ask him what he really thinks or wants, Christian leaders all get to just “make up” whatever that is supposed to be (for an example, see: The Entire History of the Catholic Church). Which leaves all moral values completely un-anchored to reality, and thus completely open to deviation. Which is why Christianity has for thousands of years promoted horrific evils and crimes against humanity. And this is why Christianity cannot control anything, and thus cannot produce the outcome that even Davidson wants, much less any outcome that is actually good.
The only way to ground any system of values is in empirical evidence—in observable reality. This was the fundamental insight of the American Founding Fathers, and thus why they abolished all religious basis for law and government, and insisted our principles be arrived at on evidence and reason. That is the only anchor to reality that exists. God is therefore a useless theory. Even if he exists, he has left it to us to deduce what is right from the evidence of reality, and not by trying to guess at what he’s thinking based on primitive and contradictory human scribbling—because the latter has never worked. I cover this problem in detail in The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory. But as an example here, I shall explore the “values” that Davidson falsely claims we need a Christian myth to justify, and explain what actually justifies those values—which are exactly the same and only things by which God himself could ever justify them. Which is why we don’t need God to do that—and why we don’t need any Guardians of any myths about what God supposedly thinks, which are always just human folly, a fallible interpretation of random scribblings, and not any actual communication or clarification from God.
We’ll start with the modern concept of human rights. These derived originally from Stoic cosmology, not Christian. But when combined with the secular arguments of Epicurean social contract theory, and even Aristotelian notions of rational capability (since his theory of natural slavery had long been proved factually false, and thus no longer had any theoretical use), we get the modern notion. I demonstrated this already in Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge & the Problem of Evil, so there is no need to retread that ground. The upshot is simple: as the UN Declaration on Human Rights itself says, all people desire “freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and yet, as a matter of empirical fact, the only way to reliably maintain those things is if we agree to universally respect certain rights. It is likewise an empirical fact that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” That is why we ought to value and preserve them. Otherwise people will be “compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.” And that is why “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” This will result in “social progress and better standards of life” and will best ensure “public order and the general welfare.” Which is all an empirically confirmed fact. We don’t need to interpret bizarre ancient oracles. We already have evidence and reason as the foundation and justification of human rights.
In fact, it is by abandoning that understanding that we will ever fall into an erosion of human rights. This is why Christianity has always, everywhere, been the enemy of human rights, not its promotor or securer. This is why women’s rights plummet under Christian tenure. This is why sexual rights plummet under Christian tenure. This is why slavery thrived under Christian tenure (and still does). This is why censorship and suppression of religious and intellectual freedom has been the output of every unfettered Christian regime in history. Jim Crow? Christian. Capital punishment? Christian. State torture? Christian. Christians have proven for thousands of years that they are not especially competent to run any society. Christianity must be replaced with a rational, evidence-based foundation, whereby no authority can dictate reality but reality itself.
Just War Theory
Another attempt Davidson makes is to argue that Christianity gave us “just war theory” (in minute 12). As always, this is false. See the Origins of the Just War: Military Ethics and Culture in the Ancient Near East. To the contrary, just as with slavery, slaughtering noncombatants (even to the point of literal genocide) is not only moral according to the Biblical God, it is even mandatory—and Jesus says not one jot or tittle of god’s law will be removed until the end times. Jesus is depicted as recommending pacifism not because all violence was a sin, but because fallible humans are not competent to decide when it is a sin—so the mass murder of noncombatants was God’s job. The concept of “noncombatant immunity” (that civilians should not be indiscriminately killed in war) was not even a thing until the 20th century (see Richard Arneson’s 2006 study “Just Warfare Theory and Noncombatant Immunity”, as agreed even by the National Catholic Register in Noncombatant Immunity and the Death of Innocents). Richard Hartigan’s study “Noncombatant Immunity: Reflections on Its Origins and Present Status” and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy trace the Christian history behind it, but it does not differ substantially from the pagan history of the idea before that.
It is a popular tactic of Christian apologists to conflate different things, such as what ancient and medieval just war theory held, and the 20th century concept. The modern notion never existed before that. All prior discussions of “just war” actually justified murdering innocent civilians, and offered only pragmatic (not biblical) reasons for exempting certain people. Christianity cannot be the cause of something it failed to cause for almost two thousand years. When, instead, we look at the prior concepts, they aren’t as laudable. For example, Aquinas said the innocent should not be deliberately killed—but then said anyone who was materially “supporting” an unjust war is not innocent, which puts noncombatants back into play. Which is how the strategic carpet bombing of Japan and Germany was justified: on Aquinas’s own stated principles.
From the sources above (especially Hartigan) you’ll learn that a gradual development of actual immunities was excruciatingly slow, and based on callous rational principles, not “cosmology.” For example, later in the Middle Ages authorities eventually came to recommend exempting merchants from attack, because militaries needed to be able to buy stuff, and then later noncombatant serfs (who were functionally slaves), because they were the people being conquered and thus were regarded as property too valuable to kill. Hence they were literally classified with animals and olive trees as exempt from military destruction. And for the same reason: they were valuable property; not “they have dignity” or “rights” or anything like that. Which all, incidentally, went directly against the Bible, which often commands the destruction of all noncombatants and sometimes even animals (e.g. 1 Samuel 15:2-3 and Deuteronomy 13:15-16).
The first time that we hear of actual laws of war are the Lincoln-era Lieber Codes, which were not Christianity-inspired, but pragmatic social contracts like ‘we won’t abuse your POWs, if you don’t abuse ours’. They still made no provision of immunity for mere noncombatants, but classified most of them as enemies and thus valid targets of attack and harm. And this was the first full codification of a “just war” principle that survived mere proposal. It thus became the foundation of all subsequent international law of war. Which still took almost a hundred more years to come around to the idea of noncombatant immunity. And that arose not on any biblical principles but purely rational and humanist principles. For comparison, our modern ideas of just war had already been standard in pagan China for thousands of years. No Christianity needed.
So in reality, in the West Christianity appears to have been a drag on progress towards these ideals, not a cause of them—much less a necessary cause.
Godwin’s Law
Ryan eventually starts giving examples (in minute 12) of far more peaceful countries than America; and Davidson tries cherry picking exceptions, an entire approach that is a non sequitur, as it does not respond to Ryan’s point. Davidson even tries to cite the Comanche as violent warmongers exemplifying “pagan” morality. Which is galling. All their wars were defensive, and caused by genocidal imperialist Christian invaders, so it is a profound and disgusting insult to blame the victims here (just survey the Comanche Wars). Conflating defensive wars with wars of aggression is not going to rescue Davidson from having been refuted by Ryan. Nor is cherry-picking especially violent societies like the Aztecs. Because Ryan’s point is that there are ample examples unlike the Aztecs, of entirely peaceful pagan societies (examples, examples, examples), which refutes Davidson’s claim that pagans can’t be peaceful. Of course, as Ryan had been explaining, the eternal Christian obsession with war also disproves any claim that Christianity will make societies peaceful—at all, much less is needed to. Christianity has had the opposite effect: it has made the world everywhere far more prone to war.
Nevertheless, like Luke Skywalker denying Darth Vader is his father, Davidson can’t have this be true. So he resorts to the mother of all cherry-picking fallacies: the Nazis! He claims the Nazi era was a post-Christian society. “Nazis were absolutely pagan!” (13:30). Of course, that’s well known to be false. They were not only by-far majority Christian, their entire program against the Jews was based on Martin Luther’s. But maintaining his false reality, Davidson claims that “Nazis were honest enough, like the Marquis de Sade,” a historical Nihilist Davidson is obsessed with, even though he had literally no substantive influence on Western civilization and doesn’t even rank as a Western philosopher (you’ll find no entry for him at either the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Stanford), and who doesn’t even compare with the Nazis, who never argued anything like he did. Yet Davidson falsely attributes his ideas to “the Nazis” and claims the Nazis also said “if we’re going to reject Christianity, then the Christian morality has got to go” (13:32). But no Nazi really ever said that.
All public Nazi propaganda was Christian, Hitler was Christian, most Nazis were Christian (as were almost all the Germans who elected them). And their programs and policies were Christian. Indeed, they were explicitly anti-atheist, denigrating atheism as communism, just like McCarthy-era Americans did. And one of the common arguments they leveled against Jews was that they were “really” atheists (and hence “Bolsheviks”), and were the killers or rejectors of Christ. There were some fringe few atheists and neopagans among the Nazis, but their views were so unpopular they got sidelined or had to keep their views to themselves. The dominant force among the Nazis was Positive Christianity. And most Germans were Lutheran or Catholic. Davidson can produce no source attesting that “their God was sort of the pagan Volk” as he claims (13:57).
Meanwhile, Davidson’s obsession with the Marquis de Sade is not only bizarre because of his complete irrelevance to Western society, and complete irrelevance to the Nazis, but even more so because it entails ignoring all the actual founders of Western moral philosophy living at the same time. If you want to know what the West’s moral foundations look like without gods, you really should be talking about de Sade’s contemporaries David Hume, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and even Immanuel Kant, whose entire mission was to ground moral facts in pure reason, without dependence on any religion, much less “Christ” or the Bible. Not a single one of these philosophers is even mentioned in Davidson’s book (Hume alone gets name-dropped, but only in a quote of someone else, and with zero discussion).
The Christian false narrative about the Nazis, already a cherry-picking fallacy but also a completely bogus historical account of them and their origins and ideas, is all Davidson has. So he really could not rebut Ryan’s argument. It simply has never been true that “the ontological claim about what people are was fundamentally different” in Christianity “than what pagans posited” (15:25). Every non-Christian society from which we have a discussion of the matter has something sufficiently comparable. The Stoics even had the exact same idea (that humans are created in the image of God and thus equals). The Epicureans came to the same conclusion on pure reason (all human beings are rational animals who must be coequal negotiators to any rational social contract). The Chinese had similar ideas. So did the Hindus. Today, modern rational morality, and features of it like the importance of human dignity, can be well grounded in scientific facts about people and the world (see The Real Basis of a Moral World and All Your Moral Theories Are the Same).
The bottom line is: God cannot help us here. Anything God is supposed to believe or say can only be true if it is defensibly true without him. God must have good reasons for any moral stance he recommends, or else we have no good reason to follow what he recommends. But if God has good reasons for what he recommends, we can be made aware of those reasons ourselves. We thus do not need God’s advice. We do not need to “guess” at what God wants or really meant. The reasons he would be right are themselves sufficient to rationally ground all moral facts. So that is all we need. Christianity is irrelevant.
Davidson’s argument is that we need the cosmology—we need a despot who tortures the baddies and pays the goodies with candy bars. But that is a childish conception of morality. The very definition of an adult is the recognition that we do not have to be coerced into behaving; we behave because it is who we want to be. Getting people there psychologically is therefore the only empirically sound goal to promote. Ancient superstitious cults are useless. And this is demonstrated in practice: Christianity has for thousands of years been a force for evil and disaster. It has utterly failed to produce the effect Davidson claims. It had its shot. It failed. Now it’s time to move on to something that actually works.
The Actual Nazi in the Room
It surprises no one that Davidson claims “neopagan” America is “bringing back” slavery—but what he complains about in his book is not any actual slavery (like modern wage slavery or actual commercial penal slavery, which he should be as against as we are). Rather, he thinks allowing other people’s freedom is an “enslavement” of…himself. It’s that same twisted, bizarre, illogical view of all conservatives now: that allowing people to be free, somehow enslaves them. Hence Davidson, like conservatives generally, reframes any restriction preventing him from suppressing the freedoms of others as suppressing his own freedom. “How dare you oppress me! I should get to oppress women, and non-Christians, and refugees, and gay and trans people, and interfere in their rights, freedoms, and dignity. Otherwise I’m a slave to a pagan regime!” That’s raving lunacy. Nonsense on stilts. Fascist ranting that has Orwell turning in his grave.
Even when Davidson has something to actually complain about, like vaccine and mask mandates during a plague (at last something that actually affects him), we still get nothing but fantasies and bullshit. And yes, he hits that tune in his book; just as you’ll learn there that he also believes in doing nothing for refugees or to stop the mass theft and murder brought by the modern Nazi regime of Vladimir Putin, or any other actually moral thing. The bullshit is the same in every case, just as with vaccine and mask mandates, where he gets everything wrong, both factually (in America no one was ever required to get vaccinated or wear a mask—they were only required to if they insisted on threatening to kill or maim other people with their presence; plenty of people could avoid that and not have to get vaccinated or wear a mask) and morally (vaccination and masking was an act of moral compassion for the welfare of the weak and elderly—a precaution to avoid killing or maiming people—which I thought was supposed to be a Christian thing). This is the true face of Davidson. He’s just another Nazi. And his chief complaint is “How dare you dislike me for being a Nazi!” We are enslaving him with our moral judgment of him. How pagan of us!
When we get to his actual political program, you’ll not be surprised to learn it is to recommend all the evils he falsely claims to be against—he wants to enslave all of society to his sectarian Christian dogmas, complete with brutal censorship and suppression of personal and religious freedom. Indeed, the question one must always ask whenever a ridiculous theory of history and current events is proposed, is “What is the pitch?” This must be in aid of selling something, right? Whether a product or a policy. So what is he selling? You’ll find hints throughout his book, but you get it spelled out in the closing chapter, where he recommends totalitarian and draconian measures to turn children’s lives into 1984, where their access to information is totally controlled and their lives regulated by force to resemble a monastery (he literally uses that word). He says Christians should isolate themselves into tightly controlled and monitored Christian communities so they can do this to their children. He also argues for absolute sexual control—the state must ensure everyone is either married or celibate.
Though Davidson is nihilistic about centralized political power, his aim is to recreate it from local Christian power, from the ground up (pp. 308–09). Hence in aid of this Neonazi program he asks Christians to flee cities, because towns are easier to swarm and control (pp. 310–12). He thus argues against even bothering to win elections at the national level, and advocates instead taking over cities and towns through electioneering there—and then physically destroying “non-Christian” institutions. He declares Christians must control, for example, what is in every public library. So much for freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, or even reason and knowledge. And he wants to tear down almost all basic public services, “ripping out, root and branch, every outgrowth of the invasive pagan state” (p. 314). So, we must suppose, no more health inspections of restaurants, for example.
All of Davidson’s bugbears amount to the standard conservative bullshit (p. 16):
The lionization of abortion, the rise of transgenderism, the normalization of euthanasia, the destruction of the family, the sexualization of children and mainstreaming of pedophilia, and the emergence of a materialist supernaturalism as a substitute for traditional religion are all happening right now as a result of Christianity’s decline.
Eventually he throws in immigration, pandemic restrictions, the Ukraine War, affirmative action, environmentalism, public welfare, any and all bureaucracy, and every other stock conservative gripe (he even denounces the liberal Christian “social gospel” promoting civil rights and public welfare in the name of Jesus: pp. 86, 95, 128–29). Which as I wrote before typifies the New Christian Apologetics: policy is now their God, the object of their faith, devotion, and worship. They just call it God so they can pretend they’re not idolators, or the new Pharisees (see Addressing the New Christian Apologetics and Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist).
Illustrating the extent of Nazi control he wants to take over society, Davidson complains that allowing gay people to have their own public parade is a product of “leftist bureaucrats” that must be opposed. He advocates a more draconian and exclusivist control of society and local government that shuts down and bans anything in public contrary to his specific Christian ideals (pp. 313–14). Freedom of speech and conscience is to be destroyed, not respected. Predictably, he is thus against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies (pp. 315–19). In fact almost everything he is against amounts to, essentially, racial equality and women’s and gay rights—and, of course, all non-Christian beliefs. He is repeatedly obsessed with public “drag performances,” which are mentioned over twenty times across his book. Indeed, he says Christians should take over towns and cities and ban those entirely (“not just ones that target or allow children to be present, but all drag performances”). Anything deemed “porn” is to be banned from society entirety (and he thinks almost everything is porn). Blue laws (regulating commerce on Sundays specifically) are to return. “Whatever the policy or regulation, the goal should be to ban, limit, or penalize anything opposed to traditional Christian morality” (p. 316). And any opposition to this draconian totalitarian state is to be declared “persecution,” a suppression of freedom, and shut down by force.
Meanwhile, ironically, Davidson wants us to be even more actually pagan—with more public religious festivals complete with pageantry and temples (p. 322); except, of course, he means they all must be solely in support of his ultraconservative Christian beliefs. You know, kind of like the Nazis did. Everything else is to be banned. So don’t use those palm fronds the wrong way. You’ll be arrested. We can only infer what this will mean for Muslims and Jews. I don’t think they will fare well under his regime. But any alternative sexuality is pretty much doomed. He’s disturbingly obsessed with trans people (the subject comes up over thirty times in his book, and he devotes two entire chapters to it), but even apart from that, almost everything else he is “concerned” about has something to do with sex—from abortion to displays of sexuality, sexual freedoms, including of course gay marriage, and his unhealthy obsession with “pedophilia,” which is another word he does not use according to the actual English language (letting teenagers have consensual sex with each other, for example, he classifies as pedophilia, and as promoting pedophilia). He even sees the suicide rate as having something to do with excess sexual freedom (particularly, somehow, single motherhood and pornography) and thus as a problem of sexual morality that therefore must be regulated by the state (p. 285). More on that below.
Perhaps Davidson’s second most extensive obsession indicated in the book is euthanasia. That word appears almost a hundred times in his book (the word “suicide,” over fifty times). His chapter on abortion and euthanasia calls them pagan “human sacrifices” (even though they aren’t sacrificed to or for anything external to the only existing people concerned). But, as usual, nothing he ever says about this is true. He never correctly describes any actual legalized euthanasia program or policy; and there is no looming euthanasia “problem” to be worried about. Nearly three times more people die by guns in America than by euthanasia worldwide, and yet euthanasia is strictly voluntary. Taking away an individual’s access to euthanasia is another Nazi suppression of freedom.
Davidson’s third most-discussed complaint is censorship—even though he offers no examples of any actual censorship for him to worry about (sorry, but there is no censorship evinced in “the Twitter Files”); and even though he is the one who wants to actually implement a massive program of state censorship. This delusional hypocrisy describes all ultraconservatives now—they are the only ones actually implementing state censorship, not the liberals, as I demonstrate in An Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions. Davidson’s delusional hypocrisy here rises to the level of hilarity when he simultaneously denounces the federal regulation of social media (that doesn’t exist) and calls for state censorship of people’s access to social media to quell its role in causing suicide (p. 285). This is a guy who can’t pick a lane.
Davidson’s persecution complex is on full display when he fails to understand why Christianity is perceived as a fascist ideology—while literally pushing it as a fascist ideology. Indeed, his book has a whole bit against Bernie Sanders (p. 282) that exposes how Davidson doesn’t understand what freedom of religion actually is and thus actually entails—and thus why bigots like Davidson are unqualified to hold office in America. They literally call for censorship, suppression, and unequal treatment for Americans of other religions. They are therefore, by their own admission, not capable of treating American citizens as free and equal before the law. Davidson complains that the Christian belief that Muslims are evil worshipers of Satan endangering America and deserving of eternal torment is simply “religious freedom” and that “no religious tests for office” should therefore permit such Christians to hold office (and thus power over Muslims).
What Davidson fails to grasp here is that that specific belief disqualifies you as an equal arbiter of citizens’ rights. You cannot figleaf this fact by simply slapping the label “religious” on it. If you cannot uphold the United States Constitution, then you should not be able to serve. And that’s that. Davidson himself proves this with his entire self-declared program of suppressing all public expressions of Muslim faith, and taking away the reigns of power from anyone who might be Muslim. Just as Davidson would never support a pagan candidate who defended human sacrifice as “freedom of religion” and thus argued his pro-murder beliefs could not disqualify him from office, Davidson ought never support a Christian candidate who defends the sacrifice of human rights and equality as “freedom of religion,” either. Merely calling bigotry “religious” does not exempt it from moral condemnation or political disqualification. “No religious tests” means mere religion cannot decide your quality; it does not mean what you believe about people and the world cannot decide your quality. If you cannot see all Americans as deserving of equal rights, you cannot honestly swear to uphold the Constitution; and if you cannot honestly swear to uphold the Constitution, you cannot serve.
That is why we all see Davidson’s Christianity as simply a figleafed fascism. Because it is.
What’s Going on with Youth Suicide?
I’ve covered this subject before (see No, Atheism Does Not Cause Suicide and A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology). But Davidson importantly misreports ordinary suicide statistics himself, and exhibits a complete failure of critical thinking about them. For instance, on p. 143 he tries to raise alarmism over a report by Sally Curtin that “the suicide rate for those ages 10–24 increased by nearly 60 percent in the years between 2007 and 2018″ in an attempt to claim a collapse of civilization is underway. He doesn’t mention that this wasn’t true in every state. The study he cites itself says “nonsignificant increases occurred in 8 states,” ranging from Connecticut (where the rate was always low) to New Mexico (where the rate was always high); while in some states where the suicide rate did increase, like New York and New Jersey, it remained far below the national average across the whole period studied. And he doesn’t mention that this isn’t new. The suicide rate for this same age group was higher between 1975 and 1995; so the current uptic looks more like a return to a previous normal than anything actually new. More importantly, Davidson fails to ask why this is. What’s different in those eight states where this return to prior rates didn’t happen? Or those states where the rate remained low even while increasing? And what suppressed the youth suicide rate nationally between 1995 and 2010?
Davidson spins this statistic to argue for a suppression of access to social media, draconian restrictions on sexual freedom, and a monastically totalitarian control over kids’ entire daily lives. A critical thinker might have instead actually checked for what science has found is actually more likely the cause, and thus what societal changes are more likely to actually help. Surprise! It’s exactly the opposite of what Davidson proposes. In Peter Gray’s analysis “Why Did Teen Suicides Increase Sharply from 1950 to 1990?” he examines various proposed causes and finds scientific support for only one of them:
Children and teens in the mid-20th century and earlier had far more freedom to play, roam, explore, socialize, take risks, contribute meaningfully to their community, and do all the things that make young people happy and help them develop the character traits that promote resilience than they do today … Freedoms were not just suddenly taken away; they were gradually taken away. Because it occurred gradually, many people did not notice the change, or if they did, they thought of it as small because the year-to-year change was small. But over that whole 40-year period, it was huge.
So, actually, we should not be advising a catastrophic decrease in child and youth freedom. We should reject Davidson’s Nazi impulses and actually let go of our entire helicopter-parenting ethos. When Gray then looked at why there was a substantial decline in suicides between 1995 and 2012 that later returned to where it had been in the 70s, he found—again—exactly the opposite of what Davidson concluded (see Why Did Teen Suicides Decline Sharply from 1990 to 2005?): “computer technology and video games brought a renewed sense of freedom, excitement, mastery, and social connectedness to the lives of children and teens, thereby improving their mental health.” In other words, increased access to digital media. Then, after around 2005, “the power of teens as digital natives declined, as an increasing number of adults were also digital natives,” and parents began, once again, constraining what kids could do and offer. The early digital era had facilitated fundamental child needs like “autonomy,” “competence,” and “relatedness.” Not enough to get us back to pre-1975 suicide rates. But enough to get us back to mid-70s suicide rates.
When Gray looked at the most recent period (in “Multiple Causes of Increase in U.S. Teen Suicides Since 2008”) he notices an interesting datum: this didn’t happen in Europe. That means it’s not godlessness (as Europe is hella more godless than America). It’s something particular to America. Which also means it can’t be sexual freedom or access to social media. Because Europe has as much or more of that. Here Gray has less data to work with because this is a more recent period in which historical changes have been more complex and harder to quantify. But he loosely sketches out a hypothesis that is, in its general picture, probably correct: due to a near complete lack of social welfare investment in this country compared to Europe (a.k.a. socialism), American youth suffered more from the economic collapse of 2008—precisely when suicide started ticking up again.
Young people and children have endured and sustained more worry, greater poverty, worse wages, poorer job prospects, more expensive education and medical care, and all the stresses that accompany these (indeed this has become a meme now: example, example, example; and see right). Teens see this and lose hope. Young adults live it and lose hope. And we have yet to recover. Indeed the pandemic ten years later even set youth back on almost every metric—an event we could have been more prepared for, if only we invested more in the science and infrastructure needed to weather national catastrophes, a solution American Christians are allergic to. But we can see Canada. We can see Australia. We can see Japan. We can see Europe. This didn’t happen to them. So we already know the solution. It’s not Christianity. It’s socialism.
This is why Christian Nationalism is dangerous. It drives us toward catastrophically ruinous decisions that will make everything worse by recommending we do exactly all the wrong things. And this is why delusional death cultists like Davidson need to be quelled by reason and evidence, far and wide.
Wait … T.S. Eliot?
Last but not least, I have to digress on…T.S. Eliot. Um. Why? Because Davidson based his entire book’s thesis on Eliot’s 1939 essay “The Idea of a Christian Society.” Which Davidson clearly never read. Eliot’s essay is flawed on its own terms, but Eliot would be rolling in his grave if he could hear how Davidson was abusing it. Eliot originated the dumb “redefinition” of the word “pagan” that Davidson runs with, and did that for much the same reason—to build an affective fallacy (because “pagan” evokes a stronger emotional revulsion than “modern”). You can read Eliot’s tract online. But you’ll benefit from reading Nasrullah Mambrol’s Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society.
Nevertheless, I read Eliot. So I can vouch for Mambrol’s conclusion: although Eliot does inaugurate the same idiosyncratic definition of “pagan” to denounce all godless modernity, what Eliot argues in this tract that Davidson cites is the exact opposite of what Davidson does: “a full appreciation of what Eliot means by Christian in political and economic terms,” Mambrol concludes, is “that it should entail the social eradication of economic iniquities and inequality.” Oops. Eliot was a dirty liberal communist! A pagan! Demon possessed! Of course, he wasn’t a communist in the narrow sense Davidson would think (Eliot was against secularism). He was a Christian communist: he believed in a communism based on biblical Christian religious faith. Indeed, I think Eliot would agree with my entire critique of Davidson’s version of Christianity in Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist. Eliot was the kinda guy who’d said, “Hey, Jesus said to give all your wealth away to the poor and share all things with your neighbor…so, time to pony up, pal!”
Eliot’s definition of pagan as “the state” being the source of moral values was, of course, a false dichotomy (no atheist or humanist believes in that, but neither do they believe moral values come from gods; so Eliot’s entire argument violates the Law of Excluded Middle). And Eliot describes a lot of lofty ideals, but never offers any practical ways to realize them (much less as would follow from any evidence). But Davidson still forgot to mention what Eliot actually meant by “returning” to a Christian society: Eliot meant capitalism had to be destroyed and replaced with a religiously motivated communism. In fact, capitalism is basically what Eliot means by paganism (the placing of money before God). Eliot was also a raging environmentalist who calls for state intervention to protect land, sea, and climate (Davidson, by contrast, is a climate science denier, almost literally declaring any environmentalism demonic on pp. 132–33).
We can let Eliot speak for himself here. On page 33 of the above-linked edition, he says:
The realisation of a Christian society, must lead us inevitably to face such problems as the hypertrophy of the motive of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the use of labour and its exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialised society which must be scrutinised on Christian principles.
Which is basically Marxism: labor must own its fruits (no capital hoarding, no middlemen skimming); usury must be curtailed; labor and natural resources must no longer be exploited; commercial society must be dialed back. From each according to his means; to each according to his need. That isn’t just Marx. That’s the Holy Bible. Hence Eliot would refrain from admitting this to be “Marxism” solely on the principle that his version will “surely” work because it will all be built on Christian faith. Eliot’s confidence in that was as dumb as Davidson’s (no society functions on any foundation but rational evidence-based reasoning). But his ideal was still exactly the opposite of Davidson’s. Which illustrates the problem I’ve been getting at: Christianity cannot solve society’s problems, not only because it has proven it can’t (by never once ever having done so), but also because these fevered ideologues can’t even agree on what Christianity’s solutions are supposed to be. One random dude, and it’s theocratic fascism. Another random dude, and its theocratic communism. Neither can actually phone God to find out. Neither realizes only evidence can decide.
Still, Eliot was more responsive to reality than Davidson. His Christian grounding was no less naive, but unlike Davidson’s dream of capitalist jackbooting, Eliot’s socialism and environmentalism were in outline correct. When Eliot goes on to rail against “the economic system” of modern society (on p. 61 of the above-linked edition), he uses the example of the profit motive destroying the arts (he wants a patronage system, not a profit-maximizing system), and then he adds:
We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly [and lo, they did–ed.]. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of ‘soil erosion’—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert [Eliot wasn’t making this up: that literally happened right before he wrote this–ed.].
I would not have it thought that I condemn a society because of its material ruin, for that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of its excellence. I mean only that a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom.”
That dirty little commie environmentalist.
Conclusion
Davidson is trying to win a fasco-Platonic culture war (as many like him are: see Addressing the New Christian Apologetics). He’s losing. Because there are no Guardians to control the narrative and falsify history or reality to suit his delusional vision for the future. Christianity, particularly his brand of it, is toxic and hypocritical (see Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist and What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad). It is destructive of the good society, not conducive to it (see Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity). It needs to go away; not be put in charge.
It does need to be replaced with something. All ultracon madness must be voted out. Only the sane must rule. But then Secular Humanism will serve us perfectly well. It is what you end up with when you strip away all the toxic and hypocritical bullshit, and all the myths and lies and made-up baggage, and just have remaining what can be justified solely on evidence and reason, plain to all. You thus end up with everything supposedly good about Christianity; and none of the bad. You also end up with a lot of other good things Christianity rarely inspired and cannot ground (just see Which Worldview Produces the Better World).
So let’s do that instead. No more demonological cultists screaming for fascism. This is the ruin that Trump will bring us. So don’t fail this trolley problem. Save civilization. Get out and vote for Joe Biden—so we can at least tread water and not drown in the next four years. Then level up with someone better in 2028.
Well, there is the FSM – Flying Spaghetti Monster and the feasting on his saucy meatballs.
Ramen my friend. 🙏🏼
This guy would be a lolcow if it wasn’t so dangerous.
In that interview, it really is remarkable how he can sound so calm and collected, making concessions and seeming nuanced. It’s vital to bear in mind the absolute scale of deceptive insanity he believes in and think about how often suppsoedly nuanced conservative views in general are just rhetorical smokescreens putting on the appearance of reason. I actually have to wonder how views that are indeed so extreme that even fellow ultraconservative Christians don’t always swallow them can be proferred by someone who is deceptive enough to keep his craziest stuff away from interviews. Is it just the megalomania of a cult leader?
As for the contradiction you identify in how Davidson can judge Christianity by what it professes and everyone else by what they do: I think this is a combination of fundamental attribution error, egregious in-group bias and essentialism. He is able to see in his own group that there are good strivings hijacked by bad actors and agents, and never get to the point of admitting a) that the good strivings therefore don’t mean very much because they can be rhetorically hijacked by the bad actors and bad trends, b) in fact any good striving that isn’t detailed enough to actually prevent that (“Be nice to your neighbor” and “Practice charity” isn’t good enough, and Jesus in the Gospels would provide some ideas that could be used as a way of getting toward an ethos of radical compassion but that isn’t Davidson’s anti-Christ religion), and c) there can also be straightforward bad desires. Westboro Baptists are just screeching hatemongers, and also rabid conservatives. But he probably literally cannot see that the same is true of every group he dislikes or doesn’t empathize with, from actual pagans to Muslims to atheists and secularists. Hell, if he wasn’t being dishonest about American history, he’d have to admit that the *fucking Founding Fathers would count by his own standards, because they were proposing a degree of secularism he clearly despises, so even they were clearly wrong even to him . And since these belief systems are essentialist, his can be fundamentally noble, rather than having good ideas to keep and bad ideas to jettison, and everyone else’s can be fundamentally evil, such that taking anything from them is moral relativism.
We’ve remarked on it before with Peterson, but it is particularly funny to see people terrified of relativism acting as if they do not give a crap about determining truth and indeed making deeply pragmatic arguments (“We have to believe in God because otherwise we won’t have morality!”). This is postmodern conservatism.
I also love the constant Christian claim to universal brotherhood. No, that’s not what most versions believe. What most versions believe is that there are two groups: A brotherhood of Christians and a group of people in league with evil.
The slavery “debates” are also quite funny. Even the abolitionists had deeply racist ideas, so Christianity is no tonic to straightforward white supremacy. But, again, Davidson is being mealy-mouthed with his counting. The Christians debating the topic, using the Bible, were not, even under his lunatic stance, moral relativists. So the fact that Christians can argue against slavery he counts, but not that apparently Christians can argue for it. And, of course, he decides to ignore that it is not as if Christians are the only people who are anti-slavery today . (And, of course, takes a ton of stolen valor from black Christians and secular thinkers alike. White evangelicals love to count black evangelicals and point to their very real oppression, ignoring that it was overwhelmingly white Christians oppressing them, but they never seem to bve able to admit that really they should all be taking the stances of black churches and using them as the proof case for Christianity… because this is all the most cynical racial identity politics).
As for “just war” theory: He again is cherry-picking. Islam has a lot of commandments restricting when and how to go to war. (They routinely ignored those commandments, but then again so did all the European Christians – it’s a cliche among anyone studying “just war” ideas that they very rarely ever get applied in practice, and mostly act as a propagandistic balm to the ego). Mencius and the Chinese also had just war ideas: https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/de/harmony-in-the-chinese-just-war-tradition/#:~:text=Ancient%20Chinese%20theorists%20developed%20four,authority%20in%20a%20moral%20sense. .
As for the most overt Nazi shit: Nazis always love to invoke everyone’s supposed moral relativism and cultural Bolshevism, but the actual conversations are always them saying viciously evil shit, others loudly scorning them and shaming them, and them calling that discrimination, mocking it, calling it cuckoldry, and acting as absolute moral nihilists.
As for the local politics: This is actually really common in Christian thought these days. See Dan Olson’s geocentrism video. This is just a mutation of the classic dishonesty of conservative federalism, which has never been about sincerely empoweirng local communities and always about robbing the people they hate of any champions.
brilliant! in my comment below, I discuss how religion is a “metaphysical mode of being” but we all have a “metaphysical mode of being” because we act like (and indeed ARE) individuals with perspectives and not strictly a loose, physically bound collection of particles. Therefore, the argument isn’t about “mode of being” (since everyone has one). Once we have that figured out, we can see that the argument again boils down to natural versus supernatural ontology. Just like every single other time. And if you read Dr. Carrier’s SGWG (or take your pick), you’d’ve learned that it’s never been a supernatural explanation! Every time we have explained something, it’s always been a natural explanation! Just like they always unmask a real human being at the end of every scooby-doo mystery and not an actual ghost! (even though it’s a cartoon featuring a talking dog! And not a “realistic” live-action show like the X-Files, which featured such mythical fantasy elements as “FBI agents who give a fuck about the truth” :P)
These lunatic ideas resemble to an astonishing extent what the ultra conservative Muslims especially the Salafis advocate for in the sad Middle East including my home country Egypt.
I can feel this in a very real sense because I was a Salafi and the fascism and authoritarianism were some of the main things that caused most of my cognitive dissonance regarding conservative Islam and Islam in general later on.
Also echoing your last paragraph but for the UK where I currently reside if you allow me :
Save civilization. Get out and vote for Starmer’s labour party—so we can at least tread water and not drown in the next four years.
Richard, I love your work!
My question is, why pay these fundamentalists any attention anyway?
Is it because what they preach is dangerous? If thats the case,
DON’T STOP….!
I used to be wacky too about this stuff until I gave myself permission to move to the grey area and listen to what Sam Harris had to say, then Ehrman, Pagels, Goodacre, Miller, YOU…..etc etc etc…. Then all that religiosity and legalism all falls apart.
Thanks again for your diligence!
Todd
Yes. These beliefs are dangerous; indeed, they are so even when benign (see What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad).
And the only vaccination for a delusional disorder is the truth. As you discovered!
Not only through straight debunking (so that would-be targets of misinformation can learn which sources and stances are unreliable and thus be forearmed) but through teaching-by-example: my entire approach has evolved in the last ten years toward emphasizing the skills of fact-and-logic-checking.
What people can learn from articles like this is not just that Christian Nationalists are lying to them (which effort fools even gullible secularists, like Tom Holland), but also how to tell.
Hence you may notice I discuss here not just counterfacts, but what one should do when posed claims like this: how to question and vet them, and thus find out on one’s own whether they are true or false, accurate or distorted, healthy or toxic.
ok, so religion is a metaphysical (“going beyond shallow materialism,” which we all do by definition by acting as individuals with a perspective–a loose association of particles can have no “perspective”) “mode of being” (blah, blah, blah), but everyone has a dialectical (“everyday”) “mode of being”! We just call our metaphysical MoB that which our dialectical MoB most closely corresponds to and which we most closely identify with (this is partially individual and partially social, therefore, it cannot be strictly identified with the individual/rational in isolation)! Therefore, no one can say that they don’t have a metaphysical mode of being and no one can say that they don’t have a dialectical mode of being! That’s what Davidson thinks we’re really arguing about. But you’ve recognized that we CAN [almost completely] separate one’s MoB from whether one has a supernatural or strictly natural ontology (metaphysics) and make the argument about the ontology! If you make the argument ABOUT ontology, that’s when Davidson turns into an amoeba! Because though the supernatural may be metaphysically unfalsifiable, it’s not dialectically unfalsifiable! I “dialectically falsified” it for myself when I became an atheist over 15 years ago! I had the faith of a bull rider holding on for dear life! I didn’t even get off the metaphorical bull! The bull died of natural causes! It lived a long life! And for the past 15 years, it’s like my Christian relatives want me to raise the dead! Well, the skeleton of the bull is now on display in a new location in my “temple of the mind,” my “cathedral of garbage”! But now I’m painting it! 😛
Everyone has an MoB (whether they know it or not, and whether firmly held to or not, and whether they switch MoB’s daily like hats); and every MoB entails a certain metaphysics.
But that doesn’t validate obsolete dialectical approaches to understanding anything. It’s really just a trivial observation of semantics: every belief entails an ontology, because that is what distinguishes beliefs from whims.
But yes, people try to socially effect control by trying to control your beliefs. This is the method of organizing society that the American Founding Fathers rejected and tried to outlaw the state from ever using.
They did not imagine this extended to court-provable facts, though. The state did get to dictate those, provided they did indeed undergo that rigorous test—like an evidential inquest or a trial at law; and we now have a system of scientific test and review the likes of which they could never have imagined, which faces its own problems just as trials at law face theirs, but is still recognized as fact-finding. People can disbelieve these findings, but they cannot act against them (you cannot “believe” your way out of being convicted of a crime or offense or paying your allotted taxes).
A sharp observer might notice that this is actually how people should be. Facts rigorously proved trump all facts not. Our MoB should arise from the best established facts, and not just be chosen willy nilly or decided by peer pressure or feelings.
look, I’m not defending (as in “acting as a defense attorney in the court of public opinion”) Russia or China. I don’t know what you want from me, but it’s like I’ve been saying with Max Blumenthal and The Management of Savagery. We managed our savagery (supporting Israel) in the 70s by giving a bunch of money to Wahhabists and then funding those devout mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the godless commies! Even to this day, we still perform the “savagery” (for lack of a better term) of supporting Israel while “managing” it by supporting Saudi Arabia! We can’t even do good stuff without the management of savagery! My understanding is that there’s a direct link between Obama’s deal with Iran (what the youngs might call “a rare Obama W”) and his deal with Saudi Arabia to rain hell on Yemen! It’s a sick world! And the illness is the ruling class! Why did we invade Iraq? The ruling class thought it’d be a good idea! They let too many neocons into the ruling class! But even Clinton was a neocon if you look at it dialectically! His problem was he never meant anything he said! So he can claim that he didn’t really mean [to sign off on policy] to support an official policy of regime change in Iraq, or to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, or to bomb the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan!
Ok, so Russia and China manage their savagery differently! What do you want me to do about that? I’m not a Chinese citizen! I’m an American citizen! I can’t tell them how to do “communism”! I can guarantee you that anti-communism is a more cult-like mental pattern in this country than communism is in most “communist” countries! [I don’t know what it’s like in China ’cause I’m not actually a China simp, but] Vietnam usually has more independent office holders than the United States! Communists aren’t terribly impressed that we have two ruling class parties to give the working class the illusion of choice! It’s not the illusion of having a choice; it’s the illusion that you’re a primary rather than, say, at best a tertiary (Dems) or quaternary (Repugs) interest of the people who ostensibly represent you! Also, haven’t we fucking learned that isolating other countries doesn’t fucking work!? We’re far beyond the stage where we can “isolate” China! We’re the ones who are isolating ourselves! We’re the ones who are gonna make war with China a self-fulfilling prophecy! Remember the Philosophy Tube video on Judith Butler (https://youtu.be/QVilpxowsUQ?si=OiVfRkjJqrYjENts) about the phantasms? The whole point of the ramp-up to fascism is that you’re trapped in the thought loop of “X is bad! Don’t you think we need to do something about X!?” and you can’t get out of it! I can guarantee you (though you don’t have to take my word for it) that the US has consistently failed to demonstrate that our relationship with the Philippines is centered on the best interests of the Philippines citizens rather than on maintaining maximum influence in the region! You can see the perverse incentives! Remember that Reuter’s article on our anti-China Covid propaganda there! (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/)
tl;dr: I’m basically arguing we need more diplomacy, less “war footsy” (what better term is there for “strategic ambiguity”!? https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/05/23/what-is-americas-policy-of-strategic-ambiguity-over-taiwan)!
So I always admire the Chomskyan focus on our own culture, our own nation, the areas we have the most influence. But I’ve soured in it ever so slightly in the modern era.
The fact is we should condemn bad behavior anywhere. Yes, there is splash damage to watch for; yes, we should pick battles where that condemnation will be useful; yes, we should focus on morally significant condemnations. But condemning China and Russia actually matter. The left’s unwillingness in America to unequivocally advocate for Ukraine (even as, yes, lots of folks are doing it) has empowered Russian imperialism. We’re letting red-browns and fascists waving the sickle and hammer dictate what the left looks like to the world, and it makes us look like hypocrites and lunatics. We look like we’re puppets of Russia Today. And so we actually are policing our own at this point. Folks like Coffin and Maupin cannot be allowed to be able to dictate even a tiny portion of how the left is viewed.
Like, we can admit that the Chinese aren’t “doing” any kind of Communism. There is no government of the dictatorship there, not even a proletariat. If “Communism” means repression, perpetual state tyranny, a massive socioeconomically-powerful native elite, militarism, imperialism, greenwashing, real estate bubbles, propaganda and genocide, I’d rather have capitalism, and that’s as an anarchist for more than twenty years. Bin it. It’s not a viable model for the future.
How are we ever going to get anyone to actually think we’re serious about liberation, freedom, equality, solidarity, empathy, peace, etc. when we’re not able to just plainly say, “Fuck Russia, fuck China, fuck Hamas, fuck the Saudis, fuck al Qaeda”?
And, from the perspective of actually assessing the global system: American imperialism is very bad, but it’s at least not as overtly revanchist, revisionist and illegal as Russian imperialism. (Chinese imperialism is a lot more complex, but it’s starting to look a lot more naked and crass as they gain power).
And of course peace should be our goal. But standing up to Russia and China right now is exactly like standing up to American military elites before the Iraq war. They should know that there will be costs to aggression. That’s part of negotiation.
Don’t get lost in abstractions, comrade. What we want is working class power! China had to industrialize! Countries don’t act just based on ideals. They also act in order to “survive.” much like with people, the actions a country takes in order to survive (as they understand it) might not make sense from the outside. Since China is a country and not just an idea, it’s doing what they feel like they need to in order to survive. That always involves “the management of savagery.” do you think they would be less authoritarian if they were less “communist”? If not, do you think you can do anything to make them more communist!? Whether or not we ever do “communism” here, are you legitimately afraid we’re so fucking stupid that we’re gonna slavishly follow the model of a different country! Don’t make it so abstract! from my perspective, you’re acting like you actually believe that “DPA” speech at the end of “Team America”! No! America is more a dick and more an asshole than any other country in world history! But you can’t even see that if your nose is on the wall of the fish tank, looking at the fish tank on the other side of the room!
Sure, in America, we can say “Fuck Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt,” but we still give them billions of dollars every year! And we can condemn China all we want, and they’ll keep building their high speed rail and their cities and making all the shit we buy! AFAIK, no one is saying we need to uproot our entire system of government and replace it with China’s. No one wants to do that! Get over yourself! If you wanna be an activist, you have to be intentional about it! You have to tie your activity to something concrete! Remember “Sleep Now in the Fire”? “raise your fists and march around, just don’t take what you need. I’ll jail and bury those committed and smother the rest in greed,” says The Voice of Capitalism! Indeed, when they shot the video, they did arrest Michael Moore, but the caption at the end says, “no money was harmed.” that song was written at “the end of history.” “there is no alternative,” Maggie said, which is echoed in: “there is no other pill to take, so swallow the one that makes you ill.” We Americans need to stop acting like adult children of alcoholics! We need to stop seeking protection from our abuser! We need to break the spell of the American exceptionalism delusion! We can do that by conquering our fear of the rest of the goddamn world! If we say 90% of the world is living the wrong way, who’s to say that we’re not the ones who are wrong? America IS a way of life! It’s a way of life, for the most part, founded on hundreds of years of technological advancements in human and natural exploitation! Tupac was right! We have to change the way we live! The way we eat! We need to start focusing on what really matters! Dr. Carrier has the part figured out where he’s mostly making a living outside of the corporate world where you’re working just to help some capitalist exploit humans and nature.
Part of why America is so screwed is that we don’t make things here! We outsourced our manufacturing! We don’t need as much stuff as they make! But we do need some stuff! But we don’t give a fuck about what we need! We abstracted it with money! But like the dude said, “you can’t eat money”! The abstract doesn’t make the concrete! It’s always the other way around!
Sorry if this was hard to follow :/
It’s not clear what your policy prescription is, Mario.
And that’s where all this gets in the weeds.
“We should shut down all trade with China” is a policy that has massive global and local repercussions (physical, economic, and political) that might not be better than the alternative; and even being able to do it is massively expensive. Just in chips manufacture, we have spent billions trying to gain independence, and are still decades away; our struggle to be oil-independent for the same reason has taken decades and has still not succeeded; now you want us to do this in a thousand other industries simultaneously. It is not clear how this would even work. And that’s before we get to the effect of retaliatory action: China will stop buying our stuff, too, collapsing the American economy altogether. Even if America were an entirely Marxist state by now, it would still be destroyed by such a trade war.
Reality is way more complicated and hard than the dreams and visions of idealists. Solving its problems is no simple task, even conceptually, much less at implementation.
Maybe we can at least pick one lane of thousands and pressure companies to move their labor yards out of China. But that’s no easy task; we don’t even have enough domestic labor to replace theirs, and labor costs increasing will cause inflation which will drive voters to oppose your policy. And whether their votes are rational or not is irrelevant because the result is the result: you cannot wave a wand and get rational voters, and sans such wand, your policy can never be realized. And that’s even assuming the U.S. controlled all the relevant manufacturing capital, rather than shareholders, who already won’t vote to increase redevelopment and labor costs.
And that’s just the first layer of problems with one single policy. Then what are you going to do about the developed world’s dependence on rare earths China mines for us—which we literally can’t replace, because new mines to replace theirs elsewhere literally don’t exist. Are you going to suggest we invest trillions of dollars in space mining? Where are those trillions going to come from? Healthcare? Social security? Even if you say “the military,” you’ve solved only one of hundreds of trade issues your policy created. Each of the others will require you to magically find dozens of American militaries that don’t exist to redirect funds from (trillions to redevelop electronics manufacturing, trillions to redevelop new sources of home goods, trillions to redevelop new chemical manufacturing plants to replace China’s, and on and on).
So you have to get into the specifics of policy, and not dream them up from the armchair, but get to the actual facts of what policies can even be realized (what is even physically possible; what will American voters actually allow; where will the money actually come from; what do we do in the decades in between while we wait for all this new capacity to develop). Then you will start to understand why we are where we are, and not somewhere else.
Ultimately, who we really are is gonna matter more than who people think we are. If people are gonna be so delusional that they’re gonna wanna fight us over who we are, then we’re going to have to be ready for that! The key to undoing people’s delusions is to unravel them. Just like how those of us who were Christians deconstructed! You can’t cut the Gordian Knot like Alexander the Dipshit 😛
I very much have the same opinion as you Frederic. However, I have a question. You said:
a list I wholeheartedly agree with, but (at the risk of sounding too Egyptian and too ex-Muslim I know) I want to ask you why doesn’t this list contain “fuck Israel” as well? (I am assuming you already agree on “fuck Iran and UAE”)
I Just want to make my position clear that I agree with stance against Hamas and their crimes and that I think the only solution in Palestine/Israel is a single secular multi-ethnic state (this may seem as an unnecessary paragraph but my name and nationality carry too much baggage here that I usually get asked about my stance on these things whenever I talk to Westerners about this conflict)
And I’ll add to Hassan’s point:
Hamas isn’t even “Gaza” and Israel’s government isn’t really even “Israel,” and yet there is no way to replace either. Israel’s long history of getting away with war crimes is fact (as just one horrifying example going back decades see my story on the Liberty disaster; and just to pick one random example of hundreds since, the current Israeli razing of agriculture in central Gaza is a textbook war crime that will never be punished).
The government of Israel is functionally as evil as Hamas. And yet, we need a military ally in the region, and we can’t side with Hamas, because they will never do our bidding, but we know Israel will. We fund Egypt for the same reason, and Egypt is no friend of Israel. We do not do these things because they are morally right. We do them because we have no choice. The only available option is the least worst option, whatever that is. Idealism cannot dictate reality. We’re stuck with reality. And defunding Israel is no simple task, even if you could convince irrational American voters to do it. It’s in the weeds as policy goes. As all policy proposals are. Because reality is complex and hard. It bends not to the dreamers.
One can still dream about better states of affairs (one state solution; two state solution; re-shipping all Israelites to start a new country in a much more peaceful location like Brazil, where the needed land is finally bought rather than stolen at gunpoint). And we can take what actions we can toward it (like persuasion, awareness, divestment). But to tie this all back to the article we are commenting on: Davidson is probably an armageddonist: most who share his ideology want war in Israel, to accelerate the summoning of Gozer the Gozerian to destroy the planet. Almost literally.
So there is certainly no rational pathway to solving global problems via Davidson’s worldview. At all. Much less this problem. His worldview is actually committed to making that worse.
Well said, Fred. I completely concur.
Regarding China: First of all, we should always be skeptical of excuses. “Don’t worry that we’re doing exactly what the capitalists are doing, it’s just so we can compete” is what a capitalist who is beholden to a communist population would say. It’s also what monarchists, and oligarchists, and everyone else would say in that position. So extreme skepticism should be warranted for claims like “They needed to industrialize”. I doubt even Marx would find that compelling. You can find an excuse for it within Marxist doctrine, but, well, you can find an excuse for anything in any doctrine. We know from what happened after the Berlin Wall came down that the elites in Russia were deeply venal opportunists who at a moment’s notice would become brutal criminal arch-capitalists.
(This leads to discussions of vanguard partyism and all sorts of things from there, but that’s less important. Even within the context of a vanguard party approach, one still needs to police the lunatics. Even Lenin saw that with Stalin).
And with China, it rings especially hollow because the timeline is exactly wrong. Say what one will about Mao and even later leaders like Xiaoping (and their model is still vicious and awful and didn’t protect the working class in any way that we actually want – even with successes against things like really brutal landlordism and peasant immiseration), they still could be viewed as using some kind of third way. But since China embraced liberalization, they’re just another breed of capitalist dictatorship virtue-signaling to a popular native politics. They’re scarcely different from Hussein or the Saudis or anyone else. A huge, internationally-integrated hierarchy with immense state (indeed specifically military) involvement.
And beyond that, what is being done to the Uighurs, Tibetans, etc. is inexcusable, and even so by the Party’s own rules. China actually deserves a lot of credit for having had quite reasonable local devolution rules to protect minority cultures. They’re just blatantly ignoring them. Reeducation camps don’t help the working class. They’re not helping Uighurs, and they are hurting their cause internationally. And leftists who are engaging in apologetics and denialism for it (and I very sincerely hope that doesn’t include you!) are also hurting the cause of socialism.
It’s just a simple fact that, for most people globally, if what’s on offer is what the Soviets or what China has to offer, we’re not going to get meaningful support. Heck, that’s why the Non-Aligned Movement started in the first place. Capitalism is so miserable that some people will choose the alternative, but this isn’t going to be a large enough movement to make real reform.
Nor is what they’re doing making them materially safer either. Picking a fight with Taiwan is encouraging the rest of Asia to militarize to fight them. Japan is openly toeing the line of rearmament because of Russia and China. Revisionist policy always is unsafe in anything like a multipolar world. And I suspect you would be quite clear on that if we were talking about the Iraq War or the Afghanistan War or anything else. Let’s be clear: While the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were vile, at least those governments really sucked and good was done in eliminating them. But Taiwan? Taiwan isn’t Hussein’s Iraq.
When China prepares to mine, and to build a blue water navy, and to put missiles at key locations, they’re not engaging in diplomacy. This is just preparing to engage in aggression. (And, yes, that is true even given that the United States has saber rattled with them under the Trump administration).
Now, of course the US is the most dangerous force on the planet currently… because we’re the hegemon. But everything China has done for the last decade indicates that they are not actually going to be any nicer of an empire. And so I really think this shows that many leftists miss the point of anti-imperialism. Empires are bad, no matter what. But there’s a category of leftists, especially non-American leftists, who effectively argue that if it’s not America or Europe then it’s not imperialism. That’s goalpost moving evil, not any sincere argument.
Islam: You are correct, “fuck Israel” is on the list as well. I have marched with Palestinian rights organizations for twenty years now. It just didn’t make that because in the Western left that sentiment is perfectly commonplace. (And, again, unless the other parts are also said, we are vulnerable to a charge of hypocrisy. I do not reject funding Israel’s military because I want to fund Hamas. I reject it because we should be embracing the international consensus, ending apartheid, and moving toward either a one or two state solution as organically decided by the people involved. Chomsky and Achcar have a really excellent book going into detail on that discussion with different perspectives).
To be clear, Israel does have real security concerns… none of which is being helped by their decisions, nor massive American arms. And I feel awful for Israelis threatened by bombs, and hostages… because they are victims of what their government has ensured will happen by making a dungeon.
I concur with Fred on all that.
Focus on what matters. Focus on material conditions. Don’t get lost in abstractions. Basically all politics is an abstraction of class struggles. Be who you are and you won’t care how other people define you! Republicans will never stop thinking democrats are communists! That’s not my fault! I wasn’t even a communist until, like, 2 or 3 years ago! They’ve been saying stuff like that since before I was born! What I care about the most is how well do we provide for people’s basic needs? Our current mindset on meeting people’s needs is basically “America is rich enough for you to meet your own needs! Fuck off! Go make money!… Ok. Fine. If you want some crumbs, I have some hoops for you to jump through!” until we start focusing on our own needs (which include things like intellectual and community enrichment!), we’ll always be too worried about what’s going on in the world to give attention to it! The point of communism is to meet people’s needs! When the people find their true selves, all the things the ruling class has us convinced to worry about won’t mean shit! And people can find their own meaning and purpose individually and in voluntary/familial or regional or some other kind of intentional association! Let’s synthesize the master-slave dialectic by creating a society of universal friendship! Not by picking the right masters and slaves!
Mario, you’re the one lost in abstractions and ignoring the material realities on the ground here.
We’re trying to point that out to you.
This is why high ideals are idle if they cannot be translated into specific policies that can actually be realized. Which requires working out how to realize them (like, for example, how to get Americans to vote for them; as otherwise, it’s pie in the sky). And requires attending to the incredibly massive web of complexities that grounds every situation as well as any proposed change to it.
This is Fred and my point about China. You cannot ignore factual realities on the ground like China’s crimes against ethnic and religious minorities or its militaristic piracy plans for the entire South China Sea (recently brought to physical, observable outcome), or its openly stated objective to invade and subjugate a free and democratic Taiwan, or its massive program of rounding up political prisoners into slave camps, suppressing freedom of speech, “disappearing” journalists, colluding with international crime families, and all its own criminal enterprises (global cybercrime, state theft of intellectual property, even gruesome organ harvesting from prisoners for profit). And that’s just the short list.
Marx would have been horrified by China. It is no example of socialism to admire. Its socialism is no different than that of the USSR or Nazi Germany. “The Nazis had national health care, therefore they weren’t evil” is simply not a valid line of argument. Nor will anything like that work for China. Conversely, neither can the likes of Davidson honestly argue that China is what all socialism ends up like, because we know that’s false, as Europe, Japan, and the British Commonwealth all prove.
Dr. Carrier: with all due respect, you’re giving me the fact fire hose again. You can purport to speak for Uncle Karl all you want, but he was about figuring out what things really mean! I am begging you to take a step back and look at countries in a new way! One reason I screamed at my uncle the last time I was on the phone with him is that I was telling him that the state has this tendency to choose violence as the first and only line of correction, and then he said homeless people choose to be homeless. Then he said that by screaming at him, I was choosing violence. That just made me scream at him harder. He was confusing form with content! When people are denied/deprived shelter, THAT is a FORM of violence! When Sam Harris calmly says that if we don’t do something about radical Islam or whatever, we’re all gonna die, THAT is a FORM of violence (it’s also a form of screaming lol)! When the US government let companies charge 3rd world countries whatever they wanted for the vaccine, that was also a FORM of violence! So don’t talk to me about violence if you’re only talking about certain forms! And don’t talk to me about state homicide if you’re only talking about certain forms! You’re the one who introduced me to Bayes’ Theorem!
Mario, using rhetoric to conflate different evils as the same and rounding all evils up to the same degree is multiply fallacious. You will never build a correct or accurate view of reality that way. Certainly not in defense of the greater villainy.
This conflation fallacy is dangerous. If you invent excuses to call everything violence, you justify the despot using violence on anyone. If the townsfolk allow there to be ten homeless people in their town and we are to count that as violence, then do we get to send shock troops in to inflict real violence on that community? The non-equivalency starts to become stark here.
You cannot change what things are by changing what you call them. Understanding material reality requires making and understanding distinctions that materially exist. There being a homeless woman in LA is not “equivalent” to there being a journalist who was kidnapped and threatened into silence or murdered. Homeless camps are not “equivalent” to brutal hard-labor slave camps for political prisoners. Allowing homelessness is not “equivalent” to piracy or genocide. Not giving some people a home is not “equivalent” to coercively suppressing the human rights of an entire population.
And you need to abandon your black and white fallacies as well as your conflation fallacies. That allowing homelessness is a weaker indictment upon a society or a government than genocide or mass state oppression also does not make allowing homelessness “good” or “right” or excused from censure. Degrees of evil materially exist. This cannot be erased with rhetoric.
Thanks for your response Frederic.
I concur as well and I apologize for not catching the point that the negative sentiment towards a lot of Israel’s actions is commonplace in the Western left from your original response to Mario as rereading it after your response made it clear that even in the original, you clearly was talking about correct moral stances that the left don’t clearly express.
You can’t diplomacy your way out of Putin’s war of aggression.
And though a rational person could diplomacy their way out of the Gaza war, no one involved in that war is rational, so there is little we can do for it.
Ideal outcomes are usually never available. We have to settle for the least worst available outcome.
And that is what makes real-world politics a lot harder and more complicated than neat apothegms can capture.
When it comes to China, the ball is in their court. They are the ones choosing a massive military buildup and claiming open intent to invade other countries. They have already gotten close to violent military action against Taiwan and the Philippines. And that’s on them. They are the Vladimir Putin in that scenario, not Benjamin Franklin. If their war actions result in war, they will be to blame for it. And diplomacy will have no function at that point.
I was saying we need to focus on what’s really important. What really matters. Everyone is so concerned about specific things regarding how we run our world empire and dictate other countries’ internal policies that they don’t question the wisdom of having a world empire and being a world dictator! People think human nature is about competition! They think “strong men make good times”! They believe it has to be the case that America runs everything, “therefore I get to have a say in everything.” that’s why the rest of the world thinks we’re assholes! I can’t even convince other smart people that irrationality is based on unconscious fears and that many of us are unaware of these fears and have let the fear impact our political viewpoints! That’s why “people can’t talk to each other”! Our lives are too abstract! We can’t feel each other’s pain! We can only feel our own pain! I had to torture myself to learn the appropriate amount of empathy! Maybe everyone else needs to do that too! Maybe people need to torture themselves to realize that their lives have an impact on people they’ll never see! If you’re afraid to torture yourself, you’re probably too afraid to see the people we murder and torture on the other side of the world as people! Yes! When I tortured myself “voluntarily,” then I was able to see how I was being tortured by society, and most of that was because society does program us to torture ourselves, but not in the “right” ways! Mostly in ways that’ll make us obedient, compliant laborers!
No one here disagrees with your general sentiment.
The problem is translating that into specific, realizable policies.
And that step is not as easy or as straightforward.
By contrast, Davidson’s worldview rejects your general sentiment on several levels, owing to his bizarre cosmological beliefs and fascist ideation. America’s imperialism is for him necessary in order to battle demonic forces in a cosmic battle for control of the universe. So he will never see things your way. Nor will anyone else seduced by his strange worldview.
I hardly see how China can take us seriously as an entity purporting to deny them a regional sphere of influence. We are the nation that invented the Monroe Doctrine, after all! Was it right for us to establish the Monroe Doctrine? (no). Would it have been right for England, Spain, and Portugal to “deny us a sphere of influence”? (um, probably also no?) But, again, I keep seeing us failing to demonstrate that our top priority is the interests of the actual citizens of the actual countries neighboring China and not merely maximizing our own influence in the region! (The US has the paternalistic “generosity” of my dad’s side of the family lol). If the ball is in China’s court, then they’ll keep playing by the same rules we thought were working in our favor, and we’ll keep complaining when they find a way to make those rules work in their favor! And there’ll be nothing we can do about it other than piss and moan! Unless we really want to invade! But China doesn’t have to hypnotize Africa into dealing with them! We were willing to invent the Domino Theory in order to keep fucking the 3rd world. Are we willing to dust it off now or are we gonna keep letting China show the rest of the world an alternative to the Washington Consensus? lmao!
First, tu quoque is a fallacy. So your entire argument is pointless here. America’s past evils has no relevance to whether China’s actions today are also or even more evil.
Second, what China is doing isn’t a Monroe Doctrine. Claiming the seas of a dozen other nations and using terror to do it by, for example, leading pirate raids against Philippine ships in Philippine waters is not “a Monroe Doctrine.” Its theft, greed, and, quite literally, criminal piracy.
Likewise, massive military buildups for the purpose of invading China’s equivalent of Ukraine, with the explicitly admitted purpose of duplicating the mass theft and murder of the Putin regime, only in Asia, and thus forcing other nations to waste massive resources building up their militaries to deter or fight that evil purpose, is not a “Monroe Doctrine.” It’s villainy.
And that’s just the first on a long list of crimes China is involved in.
The reason China’s government is evil is not because, as Davidson would have it, they are pagans, manipulated by demons, or even supposed communists. It is evil because it is an undemocratic totalitarian regime, doing what such regimes inevitably always do. Its villainy is practical, physical, and observable. What to do about that is no simple question. But attempting to play China off as “just like” us today simply won’t fly. Because it is contrary to all reality. And beliefs must track reality.
We did occupy the Philippines for, like, 50 years or something. (funny: we also worship criminals in this country and want them to be our leaders, but I guess you could say that about a lot of countries). I bet some Filipinos, during our occupation, wished they could somehow overthrow the shackles of their oppressors, even if it meant a different foreign military coming in. idk. Of course, we also basically still occupy Okinawa. And we have a pretty big presence in South Korea. But we were fine with their military dictatorship ’cause they weren’t commies. It may be the case that you don’t see our military presence as a big deal because it’s been there your whole life, but, you know, Obama did this whole “pivot to Asia” thing. Maybe you would say that was a response to stuff China was doing, but… it was stuff China was doing in what it saw as its own “sphere of influence,” right? You can see the military ramp-up as evidence that they’re preparing for war, but I keep seeing evidence of their trying to grow the economy to lift their citizens out of poverty, and I don’t see an elective war as being in the interests of bringing people out of poverty. Would it be in the interests of a segment of their “class society”? Would it be in the interests of their “capitalists”? The “capitalists” in China aren’t the only ones who have a say, unlike this country. Every country that invades other countries in wars of choice always ramps up propaganda. What’s the anti-Taiwan/anti-Philippines Chinese propaganda looking like these days? I’m trying to give you specific examples of things you could point to that I would see as evidence that China was really trying to look for an excuse to invade one of their neighbors. But I would still wonder what I’m supposed to do about it. China isn’t going to invade us, so I don’t see how it would be in our interest to invade them, even if they do invade one of our
flunkyally nations. shrugAsked and answered.
In particular, as regards Putin:
He struck precisely when a lot of even conservative Americans were turning on NATO (in their case because they were Trump bootlickers, but still). Even after the annexation of Crimea, I would still have had the default position that NATO has acted to be a force for power projection and an American proxy.
But Putin got a weakening of that, such that NATO is now pretty clearly marginalizing the US (since we’re not reliable), and then he invaded Ukraine.
So the whole “Putin is just reacting to Western threats of aggression” line doesn’t work anymore. He engaged in direct manipulation of the elections of his geopolitical rivals, something that is always evil no matter who does it, and when as a result he got some of what he wanted, he used that to violently grab more of what he wanted. And then lie about why.
This doesn’t mean that peace shouldn’t be a key approach here. But, frankly, it’s clear that Zelenskyy is absolutely willing to engage in some negotiation. He’s just not going to roll over against an imperialist. And any honest leftist should be applauding him for that.
As for why, Lazerpig has a recent good video going into detail about how Putin pretty clearly has gotten out of touch and gotten high on his own supply. Which is another part of why diplomacy is going to struggle for awhile: Putin is in the classic position of a right-wing dictator where a) his power hinges on his ability to give red meat to the masses and exploit the rally-around-the-flag effect (this is well known in the genocide studies literature as a critical driver of genocides) and b) he has crafted a culture of toadyism, organizational fiefdoms, and corruption such that he can no longer trust any of his information, and yet seems to be too proud to realize this means he needs to pull chute.
Putin is immune to reality at this point. Yes, this does mean that threats, even ones that will be backed up, will not easily deter him because he underestimates his opposition’s will and overestimates his ability to keep manipulating global culture; no, this doesn’t make diplomacy any easier. I also highly recommend Perun’s Russia analysis. He (and another YouTuber I am currently not remembering) make good analyses about the current incentives Putin and the Russian elite perceive. And because of their warped informational pipeline, they really are still convinced that they can win and make this all worth it.
Take this next part as just my speculation, but: I actually don’t buy that Putin is trapped because of his “special military operation” rhetoric. If tomorrow he came to his senses, I think he could make an emergency meeting with Zelenskyy or with a proxy like Lukashenko, get Zelenskyy to do some token anti-Nazi shit like an anti-Nazi bill and disavowing or condemning Azov atrocities, and call that a win. I think he is actually not all that afraid of an imminent mutiny or overthrow, or even losing an election: I think he’s stubbornly trying to protect his legacy.
Frederic: what are we doing here? This is the first time I’m wading into anything Russia in this thread. Look. I know we all love being the factual fire hose, but, what? You don’t think it was ok for us to interfere with Ukraine, right? You remember that Victoria Nuland phone call, “Fuck the EU!”? And didn’t we send Boris Johnson to tell Ukraine not to negotiate with Russia in, like, April ’22? We can’t say Russia wouldn’t have accepted negotiations or whatever. That’s abstract. Sending in Boris was concrete!
No, Mario, that’s not abstract, it’s concrete.
We know Putin never had and never has had any interest in “diplomacy,” because there was nothing to negotiate. He simply invaded Crimea and Ukraine. He had no legitimate reason to. He simply wanted them. We have vast amounts of evidence confirming Putin’s actual agenda and reasons. No fantasies can replace that, certainly not his own dishonest propaganda (please don’t be another “useful idiot”).
And we absolutely should be helping Ukraine. In fact, NATO should have sent troops in. As they would have done had Putin invaded Poland. And Poland does believe he plans to, and have good reason to think that, and as we can expect, Poland is diverting massive resources to building up its military for this reason, which is why all this imperialist bullshit harms the world: it drains everyone’s coffers to address the threat.
But there is no meaningful difference between Ukraine and Poland, other than the mere happenstance accidents that delayed Ukraine’s admission to the treaty organization. We cannot say “okay, let Putin steal Ukraine and murder its citizens” simply on the arbitrary principal that “Ukraine is east of Poland.” You either fight against imperialism, or you enable imperialism. There is no third way.
Mario:
I mean, we’re talking? But what I was responding to was your point: “Ok, so Russia and China manage their savagery differently”. Which is ably put! And so we started discussing why it’s actually important for the left to be unequivocal and clear about condemning all savagery, and how that has to tie in with peace movements. Why “I’m not in those countries” doesn’t extend to being silent about atrocities on the international stage or being willing to concede that other countries do bad shit…
Especially since (something we haven’t even brought up yet) the right in this country routinely align themselves with foreign countries. The Russia-Ukraine fight is now a proxy for American authoritarian “anti-woke” sentiment versus democracy and reality.
I don’t really care what American or British leadership may or may not have done. Russia clearly was a threat. Ukrainians were preparing for that threat and needed greater international support, including NATO membership. That action was too late. But now, solidarity with Ukrainians against Russian aggression is critical. Peace without justice and that rewards revanchism and land grabs is unacceptable, and I suspect we’d agree on that score if we were talking about America invading Iraq. And Putin’s invasion was unjustified, unprovoked and illegal. So talking about what people were doing to anticipate what Russia may have done in that context is silly: It’s debating over what people were anticipating about the rabid dog. (And, in general, a lot of people globally underestimated Russia’s brutality and resolve. Biden’s administration and the Ukrainians got that right).
But do you really have any belief that Putin would have been talked out of it after he annexed Crimea? He annexed Crimea . And even if he had, would it have required things like going after the money of Russian oligarchs?
And the Johnson thing in specific is just Monday morning quarterbacking: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/22/boris-johnson-ukraine-2022-peace-talks-russia . Negotiating is complex and you have to be willing to walk from the table. But what I suspect you may be saying if this was America would be what I’d say about, say, America regarding Iran: Russia deserves nothing. In a just world, their military would go through war crimes trials, they would pay reparations, their leaders would be sanctioned and tried, and they would grant essentially all Ukrainian demands . Anything less than that is us pragmatically agreeing to compromise on justice for peace. That may be necessary, but let’s not pretend it isn’t anything more than it is.
Fred: I’m a communist, not a “leftist.” That means I’m a materialist, not an idealist. My problem is that I get called an “idealist” by people who call themselves “pragmatists,” when they’re the real Idealists. Dialectical Materialism just means, to paraphrase comrade Britney, that for an Idea to become Reality, a human has to do labor! That means, “Think and Grow Rich” should’ve been called “Make Other People Work For You and Grow Rich.” When it comes to countries, a nation-state is a body of machinery for regulating class relations, not a black box where you input leaders and morality comes out! The reason Putin doesn’t care about international law is that we don’t care about international law! We don’t even talk about it! We talk about a “Rules-Based International Order,” aka Might Makes Right! Put GWB in the Hague, and maybe Putin and Netanyahu will follow (hey, why not, they all like each other!), but we won’t surrender Bush to an international court because we have that “invade the Hague” act!
The problem with looking at world leaders from an Idealist perspective (what Marxists call “the Metaphysical Viewpoint”) is that it distracts us from something we can do that’s hard (trying to learn about and understand the actions and policies of other countries), by offering us something we can do that’s easy (condemning countries and world leaders for “immoral” actions). It gives us an event rather than a process. I’m a researcher. It’s not my job to condemn. It’s my job to understand. When I condemn, I do it because I want to, not because anyone tells me I have to!
That’s what dialectical materialism is about! Processes, not events! I will say whatever you want as long as you convince me it can be part of a process where REAL fkn change happens at the end! 😀
Your method isn’t working, Mario. You keep ending up on contrafactual idealist beliefs about the world, rather than paying attention to the concrete material realities that disprove your idealist beliefs. That’s a failure mode.
This is, indeed, really the same failure mode as Davidson is trapped in. He just picked a different idealist vision to obsess over, interpret everything with, and try to force a fit to. The solution to his mistake is the same as to yours: a more concerted empiricism.
Mario:
With all due respect (and let me be clear that I like you and this conversation), I think the distinction between “idealism” and “materialism” as some hard-and-fast rule is bull hockey.
For one thing, Marxists sticking with what Marx himself was able to create theoretically is just nonsense. We’ve learned better. In another response I’ll get to Marx’s immense contributions to sociology, but his whole approach of using what was popular in economics and philosophy in his context at the time to make sweeping predictions about the world is just bankrupt. So while history definitely is material, we don’t have a materialist theory yet, at least not a complete one. And so, right now, any policy proposal we make sort of has to be “idealistic”. Even if history is deterministic in some kind of really overt way, we don’t know where it’s going.
More importantly, Marx’s theory was just as “idealistic” as anyone else’s, in the relevant sense we’re discussing. No one in this conversation is an idealist in the philosophical sense: We’re not imagining that consciousness or human interactions or anything else are anything beyond material phenomena. What are we are doing, and I worry a lot when Marxists conflate this because it produces really cynical and gross politics (again, not that I think you are guilty of this!), is discussing things we want .
Marxist theory can so powerfully influence us to think that the future must inherently be a Communist utopia that we actually like (for reasons Marx and Engels could articulate, in humanist terms that the movement never should have forgotten – and yes I am an anarchist but this disagreement is even more elemental than that) that it can make us forget something important.
Because it’s also much, much clearer that the world will end with the sun dying and heat death.
And yet no Marxist I’ve ever met is fighting for that outcome.
Because it’s not an outcome we want.
Marxists can get a lot of rhetorical traction by trying to pretend what they want is inevitable and so they don’t even need to consider if it’s good, but that’s nonsense in so many ways. The postmodernists on this score were right: we should be, at least based on what we currently know, very, very skeptical of gigantic theories of inevitable progress. But the most fundamental error here is a really basic one: There’s a fundamental difference between an outcome you like and one you think is likely.
And so, in the actual world we live in, as activists fighting for justice (and, yes, I will side with Chomsky against Foucault on this score), we have to actually figure out what will accomplish goals we want to achieve. Both because history demonstrably isn’t as neatly inevitable as Marxists once thought and because we have to choose different tactics.
Fred: The reason I was calling you an idealist is entirely that you seem very focused on “having the right ideas.” Wanting a “material theory” is just the desire to start from metaphysics rather than dialectics. You will know the dialectical tree by it’s metaphysical fruits! We (modern communists) don’t think Stalin was a cool guy to hang out with or whatever, but he was the guy who was there! He happened to be the dude in the important position at the important time! He was kind of the Soviet Lincoln, if you think about it! Sure, he was repressive, but he defeated the fascists and kept the union together! (If only Lincoln could’ve survived to finish the job started by Nat Turner, John Brown, and WT Sherman!) Do we call Truman evil for dropping nukes on people? No! People insist on evaluating him by his overall track record (even though it also included incinerating half of Korea). That’s why I called you idealist! 😛
Dialectical materialism doesn’t make unwarranted claims. It’s not an “unwarranted claim” that you and, say, your company’s CEO are in different classes that are definitionally in conflict with each other! It’s also not an unwarranted claim that this conflict has been known to play out in certain ways! That’s not Platonic formalism! It’s closer to a neo-Aristotelian formalism! Dr. Carrier has an article about that kind of formalism! You could also read a book called “Marx’s Social Ontology” by Carol Gould (https://philarchive.org/archive/GOUMSO-3)
This is another fallacy. That class systems exist does not mean “dialectical materialism” is true or applicable to everything.
And the distinction between material reality and idealism matters: ideals cannot ignore realities. An ideal that ignores reality can never be realized. It is therefore useless. Reality thus constrains what ideals can be realized. Therefore, we must start with reality, not with an idealization.
This is why plain old empiricism always beats whatever you think “dialectical materialism” is. It’s empiricism all the way down.
Mario:
I don’t know what gave that impression, but it reaffirms for me that Marxist perspectives can actually really cloud some pretty elementary distinctions.
There’s two things going on. First, I would like to have a good morality. That means I want to want actually good outcomes and to want to prevent and mitigate bad outcomes. Discussing the basis for that morality is another conversation, but I broadly agree with Richard that we can find very substantial scientific basis for both ethical and even meta-ethical questions. In any case, I base my ethics in compassion, universality, and human flourishing.
Second, I want my models of reality to match reality. Because I know that all I have are models, and always will. This is a pretty basic Kantian/Buddhist point: We cannot experience absolute truth. There’s an argument to be made that only the universe in its totality (“the Tao” in a sense) could experience absolute truth, because only it would have immediate access to the totality of all things that exist… and while I personally am a pantheist, I recognize that there’s no evidence that this totality can be conscious at all, let alone anything like what humans can be. We only ever have a limited vantage point.
So the “right ideas” in the kinds of discussion we are having are ideas that usefully model and explain reality and can produce policy prescriptions for my goals and aims. That’s as materialist as is philosophically possible. I am not the iron laws of history. Marx had a model, and while revolutionary in its scope and carefulness, it was based on the social science tools he had, which sucked. I am assuming you, like the vast majority of Marxists, are in the Marxist intellectual tradition and have worked on and expanded the model. (The fact that this tends to produce an array of different wholly idiosyncratic models is another problem, but hey). So both you and I want to have “right ideas” in the sense that we are both choosing a model of reality, in this case historical reality, that looks like it matches the actual underlying reality. And we both suspect that there are indeed pretty substantial laws of history, that history is actually not all that contingent (though that suspicion is based on a sample size of one).
So, for example: In the context of what I think Russia “should” get and what should be aimed for, that’s not based on some arbitrary idea. Insisting on a set of social norms that embody principles of justice, etc. is a deeply pragmatic, materialist thing to do. If nations are allowed to profit from unilaterally threatening the international order, they will be incentivized to do so. Making it so that they cannot do so is not just moral (it prevents unjust enrichment), it’s also a utilitarian norm to enforce.
“Dialectics” is not a magic wand that changes this. Insofar as dialectical reasoningn is useful, it only tells you how concepts or events or phenomena can interplay to produce new states of affairs. I’m less hostile to dialectical reasoning than Richard is, though I do share concerns that it can boil down to a clunky way of just referring to causality or memetics or any number of categories while adding very little conceptual heft and I suspect that it may just be too reductive of a way of thinking about causality, but that’s irrelevant. My reasoning is precisely as dialectical as yours. I see the Russian historical antithesis to the international order that we have and see that we need to act to make sure that the synthesis is not even more destructive than our already-flawed international order.
You talk about values, like peace, you’d like to preserve, so clearly you have no problem with doing that, even though peace is historically not guaranteed. You implore certain ways of thinking and acting. So this really does seem like Marxism allows Marxists to rhetorically carve out a space where only they are thinking correctly, by goalpost moving and special pleading.
So, for example: Stalin wasn’t a cool guy, but he was the guy to be in a position at a time? Okay, sure. So was Trump. So was Hitler. So was every leader in history. That’s just tautology. Again, unless you a) have an article of faith that all of history will automatically lead to a good Communist state of affairs (in which case why complain about anything, as your actions are irrelevant?) or b) argue that because Stalin claimed to be in a tradition fighting for a state of affairs that you want that he therefore was, you haven’t said anything here. It’s wholly possible, as a matter of historical fact, for the Leninists to have been counter-revolutionary in either action and/or aspiration. And that’s exactly what happened: The Soviet dungeon went on for decades and undercut worker’s rights and authentic worker’s democracy while backing authoritarians and never materially leading to any end of class or hierarchy. We can discuss lots of potential reasons why (vanguard partyism, class reductionism, propaganda, Russian political culture and its intense dishonesty that the Czar propagated and that has now been a part of their culture for decades thanks to authoritarianism), but that’s the reality. If we are going to be scientific and data-driven, and not just have inerrant dogmas (and that’s something I firmly believe Marx would agree with), then we have to bin all of that and not make excuses for it.
Yes, Stalin helped beat the Nazis. So did Roosevelt and Churchill. Should we embrace Western capitalist colonialist nation-states then? No. And the idea that only Stalin could have is sheer nonsense. Stalin actually made defeating Hitler quite a bit harder by first giving him a non-aggression pact despite his obvious eventual intent and then engaging in stupid, self-destructive purges. The T-34 could have been much less of a disaster if Russians hadn’t thrown lives and material away uselessly. So there’s no evidence whatsoever that his special leadership was needed to beat the Nazis. But even if he was, the Soviets went on for forty-five goddamn years after the Nazis. Any system that makes a destructive, murderous strongman before a deadly war, keeps them around after, and then brings around more destructive, murderous strongmen is just a failure.
And I do in fact call Truman evil for a lot of reasons, including, yes, the actually-unjustified bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (motivated in fact in part by hedging against the Soviets) but also because he was an American President and was involved in dirty shit. All post-war American Presidents violated international law to an immense degree.
So, again, this “materialism” seems to be an inconsistently applied excuse to pragmatically accept some outcomes due to their long-term utilitarian results (even though the people enacting those outcomes weren’t omniscient and couldn’t expect those outcomes) but to not do so for others. It’s not a useful framework.
And if all that “dialectical materialism” is is the claim that CEOs and workers have diverging interests, then dialectical materialism is trivial bullshit. I’m being blunt here because this is a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Dialectical materialism and Marxist historical theory includes way, way more than just the recognition of class, including: Superstructure and substructure analysis that ultimately inevitably leads to class reductionism (rather than doing the smart thing and not making an a priori universalist declaration as to whether economic material reality precedes geopolitical material reality or familial material reality or cultural material reality – I highly recommend reading Albert et al.’s Liberating Theory as it is a useful intersectionalist tool for leftists), immiseration, hegemony theory if you’re using later developments, predictions about the lumpen, etc. etc. And that entire framework has materially not accurately predicted events. Immiseration has not led to immediate revolutionary fervor, both because elites can continue to deploy false consciousness with race and gender and religion and culture war appeals (though even calling it false is sort of begging the question – aren’t working and middle class people just choosing autonomously to value something beyond their economic identity?) and because in fact capitalist systems can accommodate some socialist demands (e.g. minimum wages, recognized government unions, some government-owned industries, etc.)
There’s tons of other issues but suffice it to say that I reject “dialectical materialism” in the sense that I think that Marxist theory as a whole has a lot of bathwater along with some baby. I personally don’t care if someone chucks out all that bathwater and still calls themselves a Marxist: I think it’s still a meaningful category, the same way that we use neo-Darwinism today. (Maybe neo-Marxist or synthetic Marxist or something would be better). But they need to actually do that, and follow the actual sociology and the actual activism’s empirical discoveries.
And it should be really obvious from what I said, but: I don’t reject class-based reasoning because I think it’s Platonic formalism. No shit. It is somewhat arbitrary, and so in sociology we actually have developed complex metrics of socioeconomic status that go beyond mere income or wealth because that kind of status signifier is actually a lot more complex than it looks (e.g. look at how little actual power and life improvement lottery winners get despite wealth that should make them protected for life, because they don’t have skills and social capital and status positions that come alongside normative means of acquiring wealth), but that’s a minor issue. No, my problem with it is that I think that the theory makes false predictions . Not because class conflict doesn’t exist, but because in actual reality class conflict exists in a broader set of interrelated social institutions (not least the state) and because the way it actually plays out doesn’t actually look a lot like Marx anticipated.
So, yeah, it’s empiricism all the way down. And one of the dangers of dialectical thinking is that it claims to prioritize scientific and empirical mechanisms but then can lead one to making assumptions from a rather limited set of data available at one point to a series of supposedly inevitable resolutions of contradictions, when in fact contingent historical events (even something like a natural disaster) will change how those contradictions are resolved and one can’t actually antiicpate the contradictions’ resolutions anyways. It’s all a predictive model, and even if it were much better than it appears to be, there’s still error bars . So we should be looking for even better models, and making sure that our models are trained on the actual things we need. This is why in sociology we will use Marxist perspectives, but also CRT, CLS, intersectionality, Weberian analysis, etc. etc.
Fred: since the thread is already so unwieldy, I’ll just say: one of Marxists’ key insights was to point out that we don’t need to worry so much about “absolute truth”! I’m sure Dr. Carrier would agree that, even if we’ll never find “absolute truth,” we can improve our knowledge. That’s important. if dialectical materialism “reduces” (or appears to) to another kind of analysis, I would try to notice how you’re saying that renders it worthless or tautological or whatever (but you wouldn’t say that about Relativity when it “reduces” to Newtonian mechanics—I know, “silly” comparison). But all I see myself as doing is distinguishing dialectics from metaphysics and only working in one domain at a time. Of course it’s all empirical, but you still have to separate dialectics from metaphysics! You have to separate analysis of “the will” from that of “the way.” that’s the main thing I see myself as doing. I don’t see myself so much working from models as from patterns of activity. We don’t so much need models when we have very clear empirical data about patterns of activity, IMHO!
The problem, Mario, is that you never explain what “dialectical materialism” is as a procedure or a logic, that differs from any other procedure or logic invented long before it. You seem to only use it as some sort of vague, hand-wavy, totally abstract application of some sort of intuitions that seem either trivial or divorced from reality.
As such, it has no use. You should stick to traditional logics, well-developed empirical methods, and the best-established findings of the relevant sciences (including standard, mainstream sociology, economics, history, and political science).
[Comment removed by the editor for lacking relevance and sources. See Comments & Moderation Policy.]
Dr. Carrier! I practice Natural Religion! It’s not unlike “ancestor worship”! This dude would definitely think I’m a pagan! But before I could say “Lana Del Rey makes me cry because she’s my goddess,” [note: I don’t literally consider her a “goddess.” Natural Religion isn’t about “belief”; it’s about imagination!] it had to be the case that I cried so many times while listening to her music that I created mental associations between her music and crying! And that’s wrapped up with my memories of all the things that made me cry! Of course, I also listen to her music at other times, and so I can associate her music with all my friends who like her music and times I’ve spent hanging out with them while listening to her music. She says herself, “My pastor told me, when you leave, all you take is your memories, and I’m gonna take mine of you with me…” Of course, Davidson would probably also consider her and her pastor (Judah Smith) pagans! Meanwhile, Lana Del Rey is off being herself somewhere! “The lion cares not for the opinion of the sheep”! Lana Del Rey doesn’t need anyone to tell her she’s a Christian! She KNOWS it! I think that’s the key to everything. When you KNOW yourself, it takes away ALL the power from these losers, because that’s their only power: telling other people who they are so they can exploit them!
More correctly, what Davidson is doing is not trying to convince you that you are a pagan, but to convince terrified superstitious voters that you are, in order to drum them up to action against you and your interests. That affective fallacy is targeting his fellow marks, not his intended victims of oppression. He wants them to believe false things about you so he can get them to authorize the use of force against you. That’s his entire schtick.
Many Christians are worried about who they are! They’re afraid of the devil! They think the devil’s gonna get them and their country if they don’t watch out! If they were more secure in who they were, they wouldn’t be afraid of evil in the form of “progressive cultural values.” They would be more concerned with real evil, which usually takes the form of oppression!
I disagree. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of feeling secure. It is impossible for someone who believes all gay men are pedophile rapists to “feel secure” in that belief, for example; because the belief is false, and there is no possible way to live with someone who believes that. Consequently, they not only will always feel insecure, they morally ought to always feel insecure. Because their worldview, and hence their morality, is toxic and false. The only solution is to abandon it. Not “feel secure” in it.
The striving for feeling secure you reference is precisely what drives Davidson’s entire fascist agenda: the only way to “feel secure” as a sexist, racist homophobe, is to take over society and revert all its resources and institutions in service to sexism, racism, and homophobia. And that simply cannot ever be allowed.
So, it is true their insecurities are driven by fear of almost non-existent things (like immigrants stealing their jobs, for example; or their gay neighbor raping their kids), and the conservative political machine happily exploits those fears. But their actual conundrum is more fundamental: they believe the world is supposed to be a certain way. Women are supposed to make babies and make the home, men are supposed to rule and earn, kids are supposed to obey, all sexuality is supposed to be suppressed, God is supposed to be worshipped and served to the specific Conservative Christian letter—because if not, civilization will be taken over by demons and devolve into chaos and collapse. Their entire foundation is simply false. And this is why the only cure for that ill is to escape the delusion, not to “feel secure” in it.
While you can’t go broke underestimating the cynicality, venality and manipulativeness of the American right, I actually am not so sure that even on this blatant bullshit that he’s not at least partially high on his own supply. Conservatives really do struggle with figuring out who’s part of the in-group because they need that line to be movable (since they can’t just say, “This person is in a group I’m in common cause with but I condemn her anyways”), and I think he may have very well really convinced himself on some level that everyone who doesn’t share in his nonsense really is engaging in paganism and idol worship.
Of course, if true, that’d only be the result of other people over time who treated him as a mark, including people who are demonstrably venal and dishonest, but hey.
Oh, certainly. My comment does not depend on Davidson being insincere. Even as a true believer, it is still the case that he does not imagine himself persuading us of anything, but only of persuading his in-group of it. Which can of course include himself. Quite a lot of Christian apologetics is about self-convincing (solving cognitive dissonance).
Dr. Carrier! My dad is a person who thinks all gay people are predators because one time a gay dude supposedly tried to SA him or something. If you’ve seen my dad, you’d know that he didn’t have anything to worry about. Indeed, whatever did really happen, as he tells it, he was able to take care of himself. So he should’ve gotten over it. I lived at home for 5 years after [dropping out of] college. As you rightly note, this was “impossible,” and yet I survived it. Wow. But yes. You’re exactly right. My dad is exactly one of these insecure people who thinks there are real demons running around all over the place–inside me, for example–yes, more than once, dad has put his hands on my head and commanded Satan to come out. The last time he did this, I had to remind him that putting your hands on someone uninvited was a FORM of assault! 😬 But if he were secure in, again, who he was, i.e.,secure in his sense of self, he wouldn’t CARE enough to hate queer people, and maybe then, he could learn to care ABOUT them, and maybe he could even learn to LOVE them, which he already thinks he does, though it currently takes the FORM of what we could only identify as “hate”
Richard –
It’s not that often that you go into such overtly political areas on this blog – but each time you do I’m a little more surprised by what you reveal about your views.
I believe you’ve mentioned in passing that you were at one stage a Marxist – which obviously can mean all sorts of things. I also notice that you used to have a photo of Obama visible on your bookshelf.
And while a lot of what you say in this article could come from any sane person across a wide political spectrum, a lot of it is considerably more leftist in outlook than I had you pegged as.
So: Have you written elsewhere about your political development and views? Do you plan to write more?
And also specifically – that photo really has me wondering – what are your thoughts on Obama and his legacy?
(1)
I was once a Marxist in the early 90s then was converted to a hard-core Ayn Rand acolyte for a few years, and then realized that was also bollocks, and since developed “evidence based policy” as my platform, rather than ideology-based; I have since developed into a hybridist (a measure of socialism and capitalism must coexist to supply checks and balances against each other’s excesses and failure modes). I am definitely a lefty (and have been for decades now). But I am critical of both sides—because not every lefty has good ideas or an accurate take on reality or employs a sound methodology.
I discuss some of this in Typos List for Sense and Goodness without God (where I discuss what I would change in that book’s politics section). You can also find a politics subject category in the drop menu in the right margin here (or bottom, on a small screen device). You’ll see I write on politics a lot. And definitely will write more (I have one article in development now, for example, on “How Far Left Is Too Left,” which may by coincidence be on point for your question).
But yes, there are sane conservatives who would agree with my take on Davidson. Most prominently, Robert Kagan, whom I cite in this article above, because he practically wrote his own antidote book on this kind of nonsense.
(2)
Obama wasn’t perfect (it is unrealistic to expect any president ever to be; presidential elections are Trolley Problems, and will be until we replace our system with ranked-choice voting, which I don’t expect to happen anytime soon). But he was the best president we had in my lifetime. Carter was the best human being to ever hold that office, but he wasn’t entirely competent at the job. Obama was both a good man and a competent leader.
Obama, like Biden, still hewed to machine politics and mainstream DNC ideas (I understand his decisions to continue the drone program and not pardon Snowden, for example, even though I do not believe those decisions were correct). But overall, you cannot find a president in the last half century who did as much good.
Indeed, a lot of what Obama did well, wasn’t well covered in the media. See Obama the Ominous Tyrant (or Not). Clinton, by contrast, was in many ways morally suspect and too right wing to serve the liberal cause as well as he could have (he very much was the American avatar of UK’s New Labor agenda); though he still did worthy things, e.g. he is the only president to ever end government deficits, generate a surplus, and start paying down the national debt, making Clinton the only actual fiscal conservative to ever hold the office. The Republican presidents in my lifetime, meanwhile, have all been criminal disasters by comparison (excepting perhaps Ford, but only because he didn’t serve long enough to do much to rate).
And a lot of what people claim to be Obama’s failures, were actually entirely the fault of his conservative opposition (who, for example, poison-pilled budget bills to prohibit Obama dissolving the Guantanamo prison, and who are alone the ones who killed his HCA Public Option in service to the medical insurance lobby). He would have done so many even better things if he had a less obstructionist Congress—including, I fully expect, returning to Clinton-era budget surpluses.
I long for a return to the sane, competent, rational, accomplishing president that Barack Obama was. Even if the next isn’t everything I’d want; because by comparison, such a president now would be a godsend (figuratively speaking). It’s all been downhill since. Which is not to say we shouldn’t elect Biden. The first-past-the-post voting system we have saddled ourselves with simply requires it. He’s not a disaster, and is mountains better for our country than Trump. Biden is just, relatively speaking, weak tea. But he’s the only rail left to switch to. Hence, the Trolley Problem.
As a leftist, I definitely have stuff to criticize Obama for, but I also recognize there’s a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking going in with that.
Like, yes, it’s easy to say that he had a massive mandate and should have fought for more than the ACA… but the ACA was an immense achievement in a hostile climate, as indicated by conservatives not letting it go even today. It’s not unreasonable for him to have seen political capital being finite in 2009.
And it’s easy to say that he should have been more open about race and gender issues, but even just having a black man in power at all galvanized a nascent fascist movement.
I think one can be more critical about some things, like not ramming through his Supreme Court picks, but it’s still easy to understand a liberal not yet coping with just how venal and law-negating the Republicans would become. A Constitutional crisis was and is inevitable, but it’s easy to see in the moment trying to make the Republicans be the one to truly do it first.
There’s a reason Marxists are obsessed with history! We see the need to learn from it! Think about how Sam Harris doesn’t think history (in the case of Islam, for example) is relevant, and how that leads him to say “stupid things”! Think about how people were talking about Saddam in the 90s. How people were talking about Qaddafi during the Obama regime! Our military intervention in those countries didn’t improve the conditions there, because that’s not why we intervened! We intervened in order to get rid of a guy because “he was gonna cause irreparable damage,” but we ended up getting rid of entire societal infrastructures. Because the real reason we intervened in those places was neoconservatism/neoliberalism, which are really two heads of the same dragon! All I’m looking for is an alternative to sending in the two-headed dragon every time we don’t like something a country does!
This is another fallacy.
Just because history matters, does not mean everything Marx thought about or inferred from history is true. That’s a non sequitur. The premise does not lead to the conclusion. Anarcho-capitalists and neoconservatives and neoliberals also think history matters, and also use history to argue their perspective. That no more makes them right than it does Marx.
That imperialists use lies, rhetoric, and propaganda to effect inept or immoral plans under guise of doing good has been known and correctly described by historians since Thucydides. It is not something Marx discovered.
And cherry-picking the worst cases to build a false policy generalization is also a fallacy.
There are successes that serve as counter-examples—Europe, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, South Korea, Kuwait, now Ukraine (and possibly soon other Baltic nations Putin has made moves to prepare invading, or the free democracies of Taiwan or the Philippines, which China has explicitly stated it intends to seize territory from). Even the fates of Germany and Japan after we defeated them represent how to do this correctly.
And that’s just to the credit of the United States. If we include global interventions, the success list multiplies considerably.
To illustrate the difference, Bill Clinton has long said his greatest regret was not intervening to stop the Rwandan genocide. He’s right. Whereas, by contrast, the second Iraq war under Bush was a vain act of greed built on lies.
Likewise, Afghanistan was a justified war, but prosecuted so ineptly it collapsed in disaster. If we had put the troop strength and resources into that war that we instead sidelined into the second (and illegal) Iraq war, we could have gotten the same result there that we did in Nazi Germany, with a rapid victory, and then using the equivalent of a Berlin Airlift to fix what we broke, thus wiping out the Taliban entirely (killing or imprisoning them all for crimes against humanity, just as we did the Nazis), building up Afghan infrastructure, and leaving in place a native constitutional democracy that would actually have worked, which would all have left the people of Afghanistan far better off.
Military intervention is not inherently evil. Indeed, any world government requires it, as a simple matter of policing violations of human rights. Criminals do not get to be “above the law” simply because they build a large enough cartel as to require militaries to arrest them. And in the absence of a world government, all that remains is whichever government or governments can afford to intervene. Which, admittedly, can sometimes mean “none,” but only for want of money, not for want of a just cause.
The only moral issues are: what is the intervention really for (good or evil) and how is it prosecuted (well or poorly) and how is it concluded (rightly, e.g. with local independence, as we rightly achieved in Japan and Germany after the second world war, Albania after the first world war, Ukraine now, and so on; or wrongly, e.g. with some form of imperial overlordship, as we foolishly attempted in Iran and in Central and South America).
Material reality is complex and admits of variegated distinctions. It cannot be all flattened into some abstract idealism.
9/11 was not an act of war, Dr. Carrier! 9/11 was a criminal conspiracy (in the sense that there were 19 hijackers)! We went to war because doing things the legal way would’ve been too big of a hassle! My calling our wars of choice against 3rd world countries (if they weren’t already, they were after we were done with them!) “racist” isn’t about having “high standards.” It’s about being a good world citizen. Are we World Dictator or are we just one country?
And with the homelessness thing, I’m calling it violence for material reasons, not “idealistic” reasons! It’s very concrete to me, not abstract! The solution to homelessness is to stop the gatekeeping on housing! You will find that the reasons “we can’t do that” are entirely mental! It is entirely mental (an idea) that housing “must” be a commodity! It is entirely mental that we “can’t” give people housing first! That we have to make people jump through hoops before treating them like human beings (i.e., providing their basic needs—is there anything that should be a higher priority?)!
Dr. Carrier. Don’t strawperson my position on humanitarian intervention! Vietnam did one in Cambodia in ’79! Guess whose side we were on! (hint: the same side as China!) Just off the top of my head, there was also one in, what was it, Bangladesh(?) about the same year. My criticism of our “humanitarian interventions” are always that, it just so happens that, every time we look, we can tie our motives and plans for these interventions to that two-headed dragon I was talking about! When we do an intervention strictly for humanitarian reasons and not for ulterior profit motives, maybe then I’ll break out the pom-poms, but not before then!
You’re mystifying it, Dr. Carrier! We did the overlordship for material reasons having to do with western corporate profits and hegemony! I’m not cherry picking when we did it, like, 80 different times! I think that’s just since the start of the cold war!
None of any of these added comments relates to my point.
You do this a lot. You keep changing subjects. Over and over again. Making conversation with you impossible.
You need to pick a lane and stick to it. Or else not comment. Because otherwise you are just generating noise here that gets nowhere and only exhausts readers’ time. Because they aren’t interested in your thousand different side points that have nothing anymore to do with the article they just read and that you are here supposed to be commenting on.
Mario:
Obviously this is a later response informed by some of our other discussion, but I did want to put Marx into a useful context.
See, I would absolutely saying that saying Marxists are obsessed with history is false and silly. Obviously you’re right that history is important and we need to understand it.
But, in my experience, Marxists aren’t actually obsessed with historical details, at least beyond the minutiae of the history of Marxism and who said what to whom at which Internationale. Because the theory primes you to look for contradictions, periods of change, and economic relations, they actually aren’t obsessed with understanding history fully without a complex activist theoretical frame first. (Yes, you can’t study anything without some original theoretical frame to begin with though you can test that frame and change it over time in a feedback loop, but wise study therefore chooses either multiple useful frames or tries to use as minimal of ones as possible).
As someone with a sociological background, Marx is someone who I have a complex relationship with. On the one hand, he and Engels really were incredibly original. One thing that is often forgotten is that a huge amount of their perspective was to argue a fortiori using well-accepted conservative philosophies. You want to say that there’s a dialectic? Fine, but it’s clearly historical and material. Everything Hegel is saying about history is better explained by material dynamics. You want to say that labor is the foundation of value? Fine, then capitalism is exploitative. Insofar as they changed even conventional capitalist economics and philosophy, they did so by forcing those philosophies to face pretty substantial contradictions and tests.
More importantly, Marx and Engels were some of the first people with a real sociological imagination. People like Aristotle had political theory, and people like Machiavelli had non-normative theory (such that a lot of political scientists read The Prince as basically the first modern or at least proto-modern piece of political science because it’s so clearly a “Want to do X? Do Y” pragmatic text), but people weren’t really thinking in terms of a) the intersection of different social institutions, b) in a rigorous way about how history would change over time and c) in a solid institutional fashion. Weber was only 19 when Marx died and Durkheim only 25. Marx and Engels really were writing really robust sociological theory. I can understand why Kapital is still a favorite. I don’t read German and most of the translations I’ve read are a little dry (though there are definitely great quotables), but it still would have been mindblowing.
And due to their political influence, lots of schools of thought in the social sciences had Marxist theoretical influence.
So Marx is a towering figure in the social sciences, and I’ve read papers using a Marxist methodology that actually made really fascinating arguments and sussed out interesting interactions and ways of thinking about the data.
But…
As all those other guys, Weber and Durkheim and Simmel, and then later Merton and Cohen and Mills and Oakley, advanced the discipline, we saw that Marxist predictions tended to fail, that the apparatus tends to lead one away from empiricism, that it’s too macro-structural with too little data.
I actually think a meaningful comparison can be made between Marx and the psychological structuralists. The structuralists were almost certainly right that you could reduce all psychology to the interactions of basic units. And they really did some great work. But the functionalists blew them out of the water because their research paradigm couldn’t work with the quality of data available. You could study functions being agnostic to the specifics of the underlying neural ontology. And, with Marxism, you can study history without having to pick, a priori, to make economics into the fundamental driver of activity.
So, for example:
When you say that we didn’t intervene in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. to improve things for the people there…
Yeah, pretty obviously. And it didn’t take Marxism to notice that. It barely even took historical analysis, though obviously knowing imperialism and colonialism’s history helps.
And notice that imperialism and colonialism were precisely the things that first really challenged Marxism 1.0. People like Lenin and the hegemony theorists actually had to develop a ton of additional theory because imperialism and state action were so essential to the shape of history that the theory was vulnerable to the argument that actually geopolitics were driving history.
I just read an article, I wish I could find it again, that argued that, in fact, racism and colonialism were precedent to capitalism . That capitalism emerged as a kind of institutional and ideological gloss over the specific pattern of naked exploitation. That’s why it so masterfully fit into the pre-existing ideological frames of elites and of European cultures, that’s why it has proven so adaptable, and that’s why it is rhetorically and practically abandoned when white folks get slammed. It’s why, even though it is so transparently in the interests of economic elites to favor immigration and labor mobility (especially when you can use capital mobility to trump labor mobility), that even elites often don’t even privately, even though it so obviously contradicts capitalist ideology and even basic capitalist theory to have labor be less mobile than fucking video game consoles.
So notice how you invoked “neoliberalism”/”neoconsevatism”. That’s idealist thinking, Mario . Those ideologies don’t actually exist at a basic level. And, like all ideologies that emerge for propagandistic reasons, they’re not even fully sincerely held. We’ll open up markets but keep up our own tariffs and subsidies. And yet you found them meaningful to talk about. Because you can use them as shorthand for a series of policies and perspectives that can be engaged with, with real material impact.
Anyways, know how we get an alternative? Protest, possibly direct action in some cases, changing minds, discussing and debating, activism. But all of that too is not Marxist theory. Marxist theory would tell us to just organize labor until the revolution happens, or at best start the revolution. And, broadly speaking, I would like to do that! But that’s not going to be what’s going to reduce the rate at which we bomb countries. Right now, anarchists and Marxists and lefties alike are all going to need to organize to push the present neo-liberal capitalist state as far to the left as it can go.
Which leads us to anarchist theory like expanding the floor of the cage that is much more specific and focused and useful.
Hey, man. You’re not arguing with me! You’re arguing with a bunch of other people you’re misidentifying with me. You keep tangling up the dialectical with the metaphysical! If you can disentangle what “neo-” IS from what we CALL it (i.e., if you can separate the dialectics and metaphysics in your own head, as in, without having to do whole systems of equations on paper), then you wouldn’t have been distracted by the specific terms. You would’ve KNOWN what I was talking about (and I have a feeling you know well enough). You’re also arguing with my Marxism by, like, telling me what Marxism is, as if I don’t know what Marxism is and you do; as if it’s some fixed, static thing when the whole point of Marxism is that everything is dynamic! Even Marxism itself! So if you’re confused about what I’m calling things, or if you think I’m getting confused between what something is and what we call it, just ask!
Mario:
I’m afraid I am trying to engage with you in as good of faith as I can. I agree with RIchard that you have a tendency to change topics or to offer platitudes.
Me discussing my perspective on Marxism from an academic background, for example, was me trying to put the “Marxists are obsessed with history” into context. I just don’t think that’s a very meaningful or common criticism, and it’s certainly low-hanging fruit.
And I don’t think I am tangling the dialectical with the metaphysical. I think that you’ve carved out a category that is a hybrid of metaphysical and physical that you call “dialectical” with moving goalposts so that you can constantly be right. I don’t think you’ve done this consciously: I think you’re just ramming up against a failure mode of Marxism, which is exactly this. And it produces an endless motte-and-bailey.
In our conversations, you’ve expressed perspectives on policy, values, ideology, worldviews, and even broad metaphysics. So have we. So why are only you being dialectical? And if someone has to adopt your theory just to talk to you, is your theory just a quasi-religious set of axioms rather than something useful? I’m happy to engage with whatever dialectical methodology you want to apply to any issue… when you actually do that.
So: It doesn’t matter if you “disentangle” the propaganda around an ideology from an ideology and see the structural effects of that ideology. It’s still an ideology. You are still discussing idealism . You and I both reject neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideology, both in the sense that we reject their self-serving mythology about how nice and reasonable they are and in the sense that we reject what they actually do and believe. But states aren’t neo-liberal. Corporations aren’t neo-liberal. Social institutions can’t do ideology. People can.
If a Nazi or an anarchist burns down a building, the building is still burnt down. The consequences are the same, socially embedded or physically embedded. Maybe their messaging and context may change the outcomes, but that too is embedded in actual physical processes.
In reality, what you’ve just done is stark idealism . Indeed, it borders on post-modern. Unless I’m misunderstanding you… but I think that would be quite understandable as I don’t think you’re being clear.
As for your Marxism: I recognize full well that your Marxism likely fixes some complaints. That’s a point I actually have made several times. I think that’s bug, not feature. I engage with Marxists and all of them are fragmented sectarians with different interpretations of the dogmas and scriptures. Some are like liberal religionists in that they are hybrids, don’t care as much about tradition, use non-Marxist methods, etc. and some are more conservative. But the fact that all Marxists seem to have a totally idiosyncratic interpretation of what Marxism is tells me that the underlying ideology is essentially failed.
So if everything is dynamic, what do you call the thing? When all the boards on the ship of Theseus are gone, is it still the same ship?
Notice how scientists do this. They actually are quite clear. We use neo-Darwinian in contrast with Darwinian. String and loop theorists use different terminology.
If Marxism was a healthy, robust intellectual framework, we’d be able to identify specific theoretical combinations. “Oh, he’s an intersectional Marxist”. “Oh, he’s a Weberian Marxist”.
But Marxists today call themselves Leininists, or Trotskyists. The latest you’ll get historically is hegemony theory, Marcuse, etc. Marcuse died in fucking 1979. The theory is stuck in decades or centuries old concepts.
In the academy, Marxist theories are heavily hybridized when deployed and highly specific, and Marxist theoretical predictions are often falsified. Because there it’s used not as a quasi-religious order but as an actual, you know, theory .
And, again, I can’t speak to your views until you are more specific, but in my general experience: Marxists complain that “class reductionism” and lots of other criticisms are reductive or have been solved…
But when I discuss forcefield theory, or expanding the cage, or intersectionality, or illuminated individualism, or my personal “core and shell” theory, or anything else, I get the same canned responses. In particular, the Marxist response to criticism around techno-managerial/coordinator class issues has been pretty doctrinaire generally.
So I will happily ask you to clarify any position I am unsure of, as that’s obviously an eminently fair request. I don’t have a fixed idea of what you will necessarily say in response.. which is, itself, as I’ve said, sort of a problem 😉 .
But so far, I don’t think any of your specific perspectives have been salient. Indeed, I think that the issue has been the other way: You seem to say that Richard and I are metaphysical without ever explaining why that’s actually a failure mode and what we should focus on instead, and when we try to engage pointing out that we have in fact quite concrete concerns, it doesn’t seem as if we get salient responses.