Comment by bargl
5 years ago
I grew up in a very religious family. It was funny how you could get ostracized from the community for not following the guidelines. This really (REALLY) depended on the individual communities more so than say the religion and the relative power of that religion in that area. (EDIT: from my experience with 4 christian based religions.) For example, in Utah, not being Mormon or even being found out to consume caffeine could get you in all sorts of hot water.
What I from the left has similarities to the religious fervor of my youth. You either believe and are part of the solution. To do that you have to convert everyone, and if you aren't with us then you're against us. It might be that it just evokes a similar emotional response to me as being on the "outs" with my childhood faith.
Many people want to have faith in something. We've torn down religion as fairly corrupt, government has been likewise torn down for many people. Now we have massive leaderless movements that offer the same sort of thing.
My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now). If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of performing human interactions online. We need more humanization of people through technology not the dehumanization of people through technology.
"[T]hird-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus."
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grip...
It very much feels like a secular religion/cult to some folks I see. Faith based beliefs that attack data/science, chanting, martyrs, blasphemy, etc.
> My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now).
What movement do you mean?
> If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of performing human interactions online.
I absolutely agree with this. My experience with online interactions is that they've been filled with polarized sentiment for a long time (I've heard the sentiment "never read the comments" about news articles on the internet for at least 5 years), not just in the last few months.
Movement as in general cultural shift with the advent of social media. Not really a specific movement as in #somemovement.
For example. I'd fucking love to have this conversation with a group of people and instead of getting a ^ or (Insert down arrow) see your expression, you either nodding along, or making a slight facial tweak that lets me know I hurt your feelings so I can see, oh crap, I shouldn't have said "movement" and instead said cultural shift. That real-time feedback that build empathy and makes me not want to piss you off, or makes me walk away thinking, we'll we're never going to see eye to eye.
The movement from me having lunch with friends, to losing them on facebook because they support #somemovement and I have a nuanced opinion about it.
EDIT: I'm also not implying I hurt your feelings with the word movement, I'm creating a narrative specific to this thread to create an example of how in a in person setting I might have picked up on that, but in text I have to be super clear instead of being able to have an easy back and forth to get to the nuance of what I meant.
There are two phases to cultural change: talk and action.
The discussion about whether change is needed has been going on for something between 20 and 40 years, depending on who you ask.
This is an action phase, and action phases demand a certain amount of "with us or against us" structure, because one has to quickly decide which allies can be relied upon, which will flake under pressure, and which are actually in favor of the opposing opinion and trying to lure a group into a trap.
It is scary in that it is not an "anything goes, throw spaghetti at the walls and see what sticks" open forum time, but that's because while one side is throwing spaghetti at the walls, another side is chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil" in the streets and driving cars into counter-protests. And, it appears, possibly using their dominance in America's law enforcement structure to kill without consequence, which is the matchpoint for the latest demonstrations and fighting.