Open Letter to Woke Students

[Gary Childress]

Well, as the adage goes, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." The fact that we "want" something does not obtain it for us; nor does it rationalize why we deserve it at all.

Again, I am just saying that, as humans, it is hardly surprising that we want to have human rights. As for deserving; reality recognises no such concept, it is just another "illusion", or "figment".

Well, the version of reality we see and the one that actually exists can be two different things.

But yes, given your worldview suppositions, that would have to be your logical conclusion. That, and that there's nothing to back the rights except the raw use of power.

I don't think there's anything evident to back rights. Rights are transgressed all the time. Nothing seems to stop it in reality, other than the human will to have them. Courts that still uphold the values of the Enlightenment and now try to ascribe secular bases for them, still rule on things like that. No one knows if anything happens to those who get away with violating the rights of others. As far as anyone can tell, it's a crap shoot. Most of us like the idea of being protected from harm or abuse of others, it has its obvious merits if everyone cooperates, but it doesn't stop abuse from happening. I see little difference between a world run by a God who doesn't micromanage human fate and the world as it actually is. For all I know a creator may have created the world, but nothing else after that follows from anything I observe, other than the fact that the world is able to at least accommodate various forms of life in it.

[Gary Childress]

Well, the version of reality we see and the one that actually exists can be two different things.

Yes. That's sort of the way I view some religious views. They don't jive with the reality that seems to exist unless we wish to say that everyone one who has ever suffered extraordinary misfortune was a heretic or atheist and everyone who ever had great luck was a Christian, and that (unknowable to us) all those who did evil went to hell and all those who did good went to heaven).

Granted, there are obvious advantages to the fact that religious orders bring people together in devout relationships to each other where cheating or betrayal is professed to be unhidable from a god who will hold people accountable for it (and therefore ensure people behave themselves even when no one is watching them) but that's a clear-cut advantage that itself doesn't require there to actually be a God in reality, only a belief in one.

Humans coming together in good faith can bring enormous benefits. That's part of the reason that reputable socialist thinkers have found reason to consider it as an option as opposed to the American fable of the "rugged" and independent individual. I suspect you would have no problem with socialism if it were not for the fact that many governments that have called themselves socialist have done enormous harm to their own people. I mean, theoretically, "socialism" minus the harm would be a fantastic way of getting good things accomplished. We could (if manmade) perhaps stop global climate change in its tracks if we could all pull together, set aside our selfish desires and do what is necessary in a way that is voluntary on the part of everyone. Roosevelt's New Deal was hardly free market capitalism. Stalin's brutality murdered millions but the unsavory fact remains that Russia, under his leadership miraculously transformed itself from a largely agrarian society into an industrialized powerhouse within 20 years--one that was luckily (as it turns out) capable of stopping Hitler. (Hopefully, the same could be accomplished without the inclusion of barbarity, but who knows?)

Russia really did stop Hitler and defeat Germany for all intents and purposes in WW2. The cost was absolutely horrible and unthinkable to us but when one is faced with barbarity of the scale the Nazis inflicted on the Eastern peoples of the landmass over there, fighting back with equal barbarity is perhaps the only viable choice, unless one wishes to simply curl up and die.

But, make no mistake, Stalin was a monster, I don't dispute that. But as absurd as it appears to our civilized and sheltered minds, they pulled off quite the industrial feat by the end of WW2. Did Stalin pay for his barbarity when he died? I'm not so sure. He allegedly died relatively suddenly of a stroke. Some innocent young children beset by cancer are not that fortunate. That's reality. In some ways, I'm fortunate (not necessarily among some of my post-industrial peers around me) but among Haitians or Indians and others, I'm the Kardashian family on steroids (just horribly depressed sometimes).

Reality is what it is. I see little reason to believe this world is regulated by any divine overseer or accountant. To me, evidence points more toward a creator (if at all) that set the wheel in motion for whatever reason in whatever way and left it to run in a lot of ways that just don't make great sense to us human beings. You could say that the "creator" works in "mysterious ways", but if it weren't for the fact that there seems to us to be little rhyme or reason to the world that poses direct similarity to what we would call "justice" we wouldn't have the saying, "God works in mysterious ways" to begin with. That maybe fits a world with a God who works in mysterious ways but it also fits in a world where events don't always jive with our notions of justice. It doesn't even mean that there exists a "divine" version of justice. Since we apparently don't know the mind of God, there's not much reason to hypothesize that there is some form of "divine justice" that we are just unable to comprehend. Maybe there isn't.

[Immanuel Can]

I don't think there's anything evident to back rights. Rights are transgressed all the time. Nothing seems to stop it in reality, other than the human will to have them. Courts that still uphold the values of the Enlightenment and now try to ascribe secular bases for them, still rule on things like that. No one knows if anything happens to those who get away with violating the rights of others. As far as anyone can tell, it's a crap shoot. Most of us like the idea of being protected from harm or abuse of others, it has its obvious merits if everyone cooperates, but it doesn't stop abuse from happening.

A tidy summary of the world without God, for sure. Good luck with human rights going forward...we're all going to need it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Do you ever get the sense that much of the conversation here, perhaps even *conversation*? is a rehearsal of deranged exchange between lunatics who fight over what is, at the base, a fundamental lack of a sense of what life, the world and 'reality' actually are, and what they are not?

What am I trying to say? That perspectival positions, the *lenses* installed and operative in specific persons, attempt to convince others of what they are absolutely certain they *know* as absolute truth, but yet, in the end, stumble time and again to make coherent, convincing statements, except of course to those who make up the chorus of the already convinced.

Gary writes: I don't think there's anything evident to back rights. Rights are transgressed all the time. Nothing seems to stop it in reality, other than the human will to have them. Courts that still uphold the values of the Enlightenment and now try to ascribe secular bases for them, still rule on things like that. No one knows if anything happens to those who get away with violating the rights of others. As far as anyone can tell, it's a crap shoot. Most of us like the idea of being protected from harm or abuse of others, it has its obvious merits if everyone cooperates, but it doesn't stop abuse from happening.

Immanuel writes: A tidy summary of the world without God, for sure. Good luck with human rights going forward...we're all going to need it.

Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy wrote: Let us look ahead a century: let us suppose that my attempt to assassinate two millennia of antinature and desecration of man were to succeed. That new party of life which would tackle the greatest of all tasks, the attempt to raise humanity higher, including the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical, would again make possible that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state, too, would have to awaken again. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.

Interesting to focus on the meaning of *the hardest but most necessary wars* and the suggestion that it is possible not to *suffer* the casualty that is inevitable when one's entire perspective is upended, and when one is forced (i.e. has no other choice available) but to reground oneself on a very different metaphysical platform.

The mistake, at least from my own perspective, is to assume -- also with an absolutely declarative tone of certainty -- that the *assassination* that Nietzsche refers to, and the proposal of the death of a god-conception, must necessarily result in an atheist's typical position. The classical atheist often seems to be just as locked into his position as is the classical theist. Is there an alternative?

Here is the problem though: try to imagine the cost of the struggle Immanuel (for example) would have to go through on a personal level if he were to arrive at a point where all that is *phantasy* in the Christian metaphysical dream were to be realized as such, on that honest inner plane, as being essentially false. Imagine that the structure, the pillars that upheld *belief*, were to fall -- what then? What would happen to the person and to the personality constructed (as I might say) upon a false base? Would it be anything less than an immense personal crisis? How would he get through it? But my real point is how would the Self be re-platformed? and what *metaphysics* would replace the former hallucination?

At least from my perspective (an informal student of the contemporary political and cultural scene and all its upheaval) I am quite aware that there are multitides of people who are deeply caught in the post-Christian struggle -- as if to say it is like a whirlpool that captures people and from which they cannot escape. I do not minimize in any sense this struggle and the *condition* in which people (we) find ourselves.

Upon what can we (now) ground ourselves? It is a rhetorical question because I do not believe there is an easy answer. It is as if, after thousands of years of bold assertion, our own bold assertions have jettisoned us, spat us out, and there we are, all over again, trying to suss out the very World itself: what it is, why it is, what it means, what life means, and what we are to do with ourselves.

[Gary Childress]

I don't think there's anything evident to back rights. Rights are transgressed all the time. Nothing seems to stop it in reality, other than the human will to have them. Courts that still uphold the values of the Enlightenment and now try to ascribe secular bases for them, still rule on things like that. No one knows if anything happens to those who get away with violating the rights of others. As far as anyone can tell, it's a crap shoot. Most of us like the idea of being protected from harm or abuse of others, it has its obvious merits if everyone cooperates, but it doesn't stop abuse from happening.

A tidy summary of the world without God, for sure. Good luck with human rights going forward...we're all going to need it.

Wish yourself luck too. You're in this world as well and would doubtless benefit from human rights more so than living in a world devoid of the care and concern we give each other. Whether there is a God or not, having "rights" helps us. If you won't believe in rights unless you have guarantees that there is a God to enforce them, then I don't know what to tell you. But I suspect that you would be a good person whether there is a God or not. Like me you have probably done nothing seriously evil in this world and don't wish to. Maybe we're all like that until circumstances force us or else entice us to do evil.

[Alexis Jacobi]

A discussion among *hard-core* Christians who are critical of Lindsay's non-Christian perspective.

Here Lindsay discusses (with a Christian) his non-Christian position.

James Lindsay talks about his opposition to American Christian nationalism.

[Immanuel Can]

Wish yourself luck too. You're in this world as well and would doubtless benefit from human rights more so than living in a world devoid of the care and concern we give each other.

But what happens to me, for good or ill, is in the hands of God...and I am content that it should be. So "luck" is not a thing I ever wish myself. Even if there were such a thing, I would not need it. "Luck" is a figment of the skeptical world, not my world.

Whether there is a God or not, having "rights" helps us.

But you're skipping the important question: HOW do we "have" rights? Who provides them to us?

The answer to that question determines their legitimacy, durability and range, of course. If you try to give them to yourself, then they don't extend beyond your own nose, and nobody else needs to give them to you. If you try to get them from your society, then they extend only so far as your society, and only so long as your society doesn't change its view of what your rights are. The only way to get universal rights is to have them grounded in a universal authority.

But rights are not privileges, either. Privileges come and go; rights are permanent. This is why the founders of the US Constitution refer to them as "unalienable." What that word means is that nobody can "alienate" them from you -- not even yourself. They are yours permanently, universally, whether you claim them or not. And when somebody tries to take them away from you, he cannot; he can only violate them -- but they will still be your rights.

This is also exactly the way we ordinarily make "rights talk." When, for example, women said they had a "right to the vote," they were most certainly not limiting their claim to being, "I personally want to vote," nor were they claiming, "My society says I can vote," because every single one of them knew very well their society, at that moment, denied them any chance to vote.

So what were they claiming?

Unalienable rights. They were actually claiming the right against their society. They were saying, "I am owed the right to vote, and if you, in my society, don't grant it to me, you are doing evil and are in violation of my universal, unalienable, human right to vote." If that were not what they meant, then we could make no sense of their protest at all.

I suspect that you would be a good person whether there is a God or not.

It would be nice if that were true, but also immaterial, either way.

Like me you have probably done nothing seriously evil in this world and don't wish to.

Umm...hate to tell you, Gary...but there's probably been plenty for both of us to regret. Has your conduct even here, on this board, always been what you'd wish? That's the point of forgiveness of sins; we all need it: you and me both.

[Immanuel Can]

A discussion among *hard-core* Christians who are critical of Lindsay's non-Christian perspective.

Here Lindsay discusses (with a Christian) his non-Christian position.

James Lindsay talks about his opposition to American Christian nationalism.

Lindsay's a self-professed agnostic, actually. He even used to be an outright Atheist, and has long been a friend of Peter Boghossian, who is about as Atheist as one can get.

But he's become friends recently with a great number of Christians and other Christian-interested types, like Tom Ascol, Michael O'Fallon, Voddie Baucham and Jordan Peterson. What pulled them together seems to have been their antipathy to the Woke propaganda. Lindsay's even given recent talks in churches and at Christian conferences, sharing the stage with such convinced Christians. See here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk2xIM ... n91bcvnYxA

I'd say he's a man on a spiritual journey, and not at the last station of that line yet.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The only way to get universal rights is to have them grounded in a universal authority.

Then, logically, it follows that universal rights should not be desired. Universal rights is therefore connected to universality, but universality requires a terrestrial power-center as well as influencing power, ideological power, centralized power over thought. To say “God will control these universalized networks from on high” seems a wee bit absurd.

The rejection of “universal authority” on the plane of a culturally determined religious hegemony thus shows itself as pretty darned problematic.

Christian, or Hebrew-Christian universalism here shows itself as something disconcerting.

The larger conversation has to do with the reality of what is happening as the Christian picture melts, and also what alternatives exist.

See page 5

[Alexis Jacobi]

I'd say he's a man on a spiritual journey, and not at the last station of that line yet.

As the Culture Wars rage, and as the metaphysical conflicts behind them manifest their wounded, their damaged, their desperate, and their innovating, all sorts of “positions” and assertions come to the fore.

My purpose is to become capable of looking at it all squarely.

This perspective is, I have gathered, anathema to your perspective and apologetic activism.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The rejection of “universal authority” on the plane of a culturally determined religious hegemony thus shows itself as pretty darned problematic.

I meant that the rejection and opposition to a universal authority centralized in cultural hegemony will always have deeply problematic issues.

[Immanuel Can]

...universality requires a terrestrial power-center ...

You're not understanding what a "right" is. It's not some kind of promise that people cannot even possibly violate. It's a "should." It's a thing that illegitimate powers most certainly CAN violate, and often do; but it's a statement that they "ought not" to do that, even when they do; and that, on the authority of the Creator.

Consider the case of the suffragettes, as I mentioned it. Their alleged "right to vote" was being denied. What did they mean, then, when they said, "We still have a right to vote"? They didn't mean, "Our society can't deny us the vote" -- IT ALREADY HAD. It meant, "Our society ought not to deny us the vote, because we have the [God-given, for it can be given no other way] right."

Rights assertions, then, are the moral opposition to existing oppression. But since those rights are clearly not socially-grounded (since it is the society itself that is already denying the rights and oppressing the protestors), they can only be grounded in the belief in a society-transcending Authority.

So the opposite is clearly true: "rights" are not dependent on a "terrestrial power center": they're the voice of the oppressed shouting AGAINST the "terrestrial power center."

[Alexis Jacobi]

But he's become friends recently with a great number of Christians and other Christian-interested types, like Tom Ascol, Michael O'Fallon, Voddie Baucham and Jordan Peterson. What pulled them together seems to have been their antipathy to the Woke propaganda. Lindsay's even given recent talks in churches and at Christian conferences, sharing the stage with such convinced Christians.

To be pulled together through a mood of antipathy will not, and cannot, be sufficient if the core issue is a much larger metaphysical issue : the erasure of a whole horizon.

My view is that it will amount to a temporary bandaid and a reaction position. But in and of itself it may not “hold water”.

It is not going to cure the immense civil-metaphysical discord.

[Immanuel Can]

I'd say he's a man on a spiritual journey, and not at the last station of that line yet.

As the Culture Wars rage, and as the metaphysical conflicts behind them manifest their wounded, their damaged, their desperate, and their innovating, all sorts of “positions” and assertions come to the fore.

Are you accusing Lindsay of being "wounded, damaged and desperate"? That's pretty amusing, if you really know anything about the man. He's pretty far from all of that, you'll find. He appears to me to be very capable, courageous, intelligent and formitable. If I were you, I'd be reluctant to take him on in any open forum...or in the fight ring, for that matter. He's a person with a strong sense of intellectual direction, you'll find.

[Immanuel Can]

To be pulled together through a mood of antipathy will not, and cannot, be sufficient if the core issue is a much larger metaphysical issue : the erasure of a whole horizon.

Are you on meds? This is just babble.