Not to plug my own piece in First Things (of course I am), but Bullivant points to 2012 as a watershed in the dynamics of nonversion, and a shift from Nones/Atheists/Agnostics being a hard core of fanatically dedicated libertarians, the far-far left, and out-homosexuals. I had someone object to my article on the grounds that everyone they knew in the atheist community in the 90's had thought deeply about religious questions, and I responded that professed-atheists then were a small percentage of the population, rather than the 20-something percent that they are today. We saw a massive swing beginning around the 2010's of people who were atheist without really belonging to one of the tiny pre-2000 subcultures, or what we might crudely describe as "normie Atheists."
Like I said in our interview a while back, I don't really like the term "woke" because it refers to extreme people, and extreme people being extreme is a dog-bites-man phenomenon. Of course people who make a living in HR, run DEI nonprofits, potentially profit from group set-asides, or have deep-seated psychological resentments are going to be attracted to this. What interests me is the "New Ideology," the political religion, the comprehensive belief system that the "woke" and normal people have in common. The man-bites-dog story is when well-adjusted upper-middle class folk with families and normal jobs spout dogmas and doctrines that they hold in common with the so-called "woke," that would have horrified all decent people a mere 30 years ago, and don't understand why anyone would disagree with them. That's where my expertise in totalitarianism and political religions come into play. Arendt is right that most of the time, evil is pretty banal.
And that, I believe, is why it's so hard to actually measure it. What we saw in 2012 was an essentially religious phenomenon. It was a mass-conversion that occurred invisibly because the names we use for beliefs didn't change when the substance of the beliefs changed. Massive numbers of people left Christianity for a new religious system that we don't yet have words to describe, and because it was (perhaps deliberately) left undescribed we cannot adequately articulate what happened. And that's why we have so many people who still use the rhetoric or language of Christianity to defend a profoundly un-Christian worldview grounded in a metaphysics and ontology hostile to orthodoxy. It's like an inverted pseudo-problem: rather than clarifying our language to dissolve the problem, I think a clarification of language would only illustrate the real gulf between Christians and those who converted to the New Ideology. And that would probably be, in the long run, a good thing when people are forced to acknowledge the difference and choose.
Thanks for the "What the heck happened in 2012" link.
I had a thought, circa 2020, that the previous decade was the first of my life in which I couldn't really identify anything that had improved or become more convenient in the past 10 years. I think this stagnation made the social and political deterioration all the more noticeable and unpleasant.
If the iPhone marked a new political era, it also seems to have marked (after the first few refinements) the end of about 40 years of constant noticeable improvements in consumer computing technology. Which, like it or loathe it, translated to real improvements in convenience and entertainment that most people appreciated, even if it might have made them more dysfunctional and nutty.
The promise of technology improving our lives and solving our problems -- dating back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution -- is mostly spent, and if it fizzles out entirely, modern man won't know what to do with himself.
It's hard to think of any social problem that was not exacerbated by going off the gold standard.
Not to plug my own piece in First Things (of course I am), but Bullivant points to 2012 as a watershed in the dynamics of nonversion, and a shift from Nones/Atheists/Agnostics being a hard core of fanatically dedicated libertarians, the far-far left, and out-homosexuals. I had someone object to my article on the grounds that everyone they knew in the atheist community in the 90's had thought deeply about religious questions, and I responded that professed-atheists then were a small percentage of the population, rather than the 20-something percent that they are today. We saw a massive swing beginning around the 2010's of people who were atheist without really belonging to one of the tiny pre-2000 subcultures, or what we might crudely describe as "normie Atheists."
Like I said in our interview a while back, I don't really like the term "woke" because it refers to extreme people, and extreme people being extreme is a dog-bites-man phenomenon. Of course people who make a living in HR, run DEI nonprofits, potentially profit from group set-asides, or have deep-seated psychological resentments are going to be attracted to this. What interests me is the "New Ideology," the political religion, the comprehensive belief system that the "woke" and normal people have in common. The man-bites-dog story is when well-adjusted upper-middle class folk with families and normal jobs spout dogmas and doctrines that they hold in common with the so-called "woke," that would have horrified all decent people a mere 30 years ago, and don't understand why anyone would disagree with them. That's where my expertise in totalitarianism and political religions come into play. Arendt is right that most of the time, evil is pretty banal.
And that, I believe, is why it's so hard to actually measure it. What we saw in 2012 was an essentially religious phenomenon. It was a mass-conversion that occurred invisibly because the names we use for beliefs didn't change when the substance of the beliefs changed. Massive numbers of people left Christianity for a new religious system that we don't yet have words to describe, and because it was (perhaps deliberately) left undescribed we cannot adequately articulate what happened. And that's why we have so many people who still use the rhetoric or language of Christianity to defend a profoundly un-Christian worldview grounded in a metaphysics and ontology hostile to orthodoxy. It's like an inverted pseudo-problem: rather than clarifying our language to dissolve the problem, I think a clarification of language would only illustrate the real gulf between Christians and those who converted to the New Ideology. And that would probably be, in the long run, a good thing when people are forced to acknowledge the difference and choose.
Thanks for the "What the heck happened in 2012" link.
I had a thought, circa 2020, that the previous decade was the first of my life in which I couldn't really identify anything that had improved or become more convenient in the past 10 years. I think this stagnation made the social and political deterioration all the more noticeable and unpleasant.
If the iPhone marked a new political era, it also seems to have marked (after the first few refinements) the end of about 40 years of constant noticeable improvements in consumer computing technology. Which, like it or loathe it, translated to real improvements in convenience and entertainment that most people appreciated, even if it might have made them more dysfunctional and nutty.
The promise of technology improving our lives and solving our problems -- dating back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution -- is mostly spent, and if it fizzles out entirely, modern man won't know what to do with himself.