"At the risk of making myself sound like the villain of the piece: “Our plans are measured in centuries”. How long have we been here? See the scope of it all. Humans alternately enslaved and liberated by the discovery of their own powers. A project to raise sapience free up to eternity. I might sound transhumanist here (and I am) but I wasn’t the first to see the left as engaged in a transhuman project. The tradition of all dead generations weighing upon us as a nightmare. Escaping the realm of necessity for the realm of freedom- all of these are Marxist ideas."
or to quote Disco Elysium:
Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity's future... I have to say, I've never *entirely* understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.
You: Wait, you're saying communism is some kind of religion?
Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn't dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it.
You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?
Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up.
You: Even when they ignore us?
Steban: Even then.
"Communism is a secular religion that replaces belief in god with belief in humanity's future" really stood out for me, for some reason
Bo problem. But on the other hand, if there's an article of yours that I hate, do you prefer to receive the criticism via email, comments, or a substack note/blog post?
Comments or notes/blogposts are both good. You can send emails but it's 50/50 whether I will see them if they're responses to the Substack emails I send out, so I'd recommend comments or posts on here.
OK this is totally irrelevant to the point of the piece, but I don't think craws particularly stick out, even when being used to grind stuff? Like as I understand it, the craw is a kind of muscular throat pouch that certain birds have, and they consume hard seeds along with grit, and then kind of grind the seeds in there to break them down so when they're actually swallowed they'll be digestible. But that action isn't all that visible from the outside, it's _not_ directly related to the various kinds of throat displays that birds have (which should be obvious when you realize those display features are often only on males, whereas both males and females are doing the craw / gizzard grinding thing).
It seems like you kinda mashed up "sticks out like a sore thumb" and "sticks in my craw", which I suppose is extending "craw" to refer to the human throat, like getting a bit of something stuck in your throat when you swallow. (I also have always wondered whether a sore thumb sticks out? If my thumb hurts, usually I reflexively curly my fingers around it to keep it from getting banged up again. But language is weird.)
I believe that dangly throat thing that a lot of male birds have, and which some of them can rather ridiculously inflate, is called a wattle. See for instance: https://birdscanflystore.com/blog/temmincks-tragopan/
And a gizzard is sort of an extra stomach, before the main acid-secreting stomach, which serves a similar function to what the craw is doing for birds that have that -- basically just holds hard / shell-covered things that the bird is eating, along with bits of sand / pebbles, and contracts to grind stuff.
Fantastic piece. I have lived in both the most conservative state in the union and the most liberal, where people were otherwise much alike except for disagreeing about everything. I've had to learn to speak both languages and translate. And I've always been attracted to and collected friends among the brilliant, obsessed with ideas, more attached to abstractions than people crowd...and seen many of them flip from one side to the other, or from being religious to the point of fundamentalist to a fundamentalist atheist. Normal people on both sides don't tend to do those things, nor to be nearly as scary or obnoxious as the worst caricatures that the other focuses on.
I'm sad to say that over the decades, about 20% of my cerebral, fascinating, brilliant friends have gone mad and completely fucked up their lives. And the rest of us have become pretty boring because that's what seems to happen eventually.
I do think that part of this instinct is actually driven by boredom. This personality type...your brain is constantly scanning for information and cramming in data and analyzing analyzing analyzing. And when you spend all your time doing that, you kind of end up figuring out one thing, taking it apart and putting it back together again, and then you get bored. You need a new puzzle. You figure it out and can predict and understand it all and then you see when it's jumped the shark way before other people, and start craving to conquer a challenging new endeavor and way of thinking. It sounds terrible but...just thinking the same thing and believing in the same convictions for years or decades on end starts to just to boring and you get an itch, and something that used to seem very right starts to seem annoying.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and it really is just that the internet has exposed the worst in people and both sides and made a lot of people more extreme and crazy seeming. But I do think there's an element there of a sort of insatiable curiosity and just eventually getting bored with one crowd and looking elsewhere because even if it's bad or distasteful in a different way, it's still very interesting and you can flex your brain again, coming up with new theories and testing things and exploring a new way of thinking.
Interesting explanation, and it might hold true for a certain type of intellect, but I typically see people realign themselves out of disillusionment more than boredom. Figuring out the puzzle usually exposes artifice or hypocrisy; all movements are fraudulent at the core.
Finding a long-term political home requires cultivating a certain amount of charity toward your ideology: recognition of its foibles, and affection for its unattainable ideals.
Yes, good points. Though I do find that for me, at least, once I've focused on a topic and researched and read and thought about it for a few years, I generally end up losing interest somewhat and wanting to move on...and start getting annoyed at people who are belatedly coming to the realizations I'd had years earlier and not wanting to hear about it anymore. Like all the "wokeness has gone too far and is basically a 7th-grade mean-girl coded religion" stuff from the past three years...was that not obvious more like 8 or 9 years ago, and why are we still talking about it ? That could just be a me problem though. You're absolutely right that eventually you'll find hypocrisies and/or fraud with any institution or school of thought.
> Let me tell you some of my stories. One woman threatened to beat me with a crow-bar because I organized an event ‘against identity politics’. There was already so much angry discourse around the event that my only response was to find this funny.
I'm curious if you'd be willing to elaborate on this? My guess is that the event was not actually against identity politics?
On a slightly related note, you talk about how identarianism is the cause of some of the bad behavior you mention, but isn't this article framed in a fundamentally identarian way? Personally I don't think in terms of "leaving the left" or "joining the right". I simply have beliefs about the world, like "racism is bad", and just because some other people who purport to hold similar beliefs turn out to be evil people, that doesn't have any bearing on the validity of the belief itself.
Someone who engages in reasoning of the form "people on my side of an issue have been mean to me, therefore I'm leaving that side and joining the other side" is fundamentally viewing the conflict as not about competing ideas and wanting to find the correct ones, but about competing tribes and wanting to find the one that benefits them the most personally. Isn't that exactly what identity politics is?
And while I agree that the Marxist approach you describe is better than the alternatives you present, it's still an identarian approach, attempting to pit the poor against the rich rather than the white vs. the black. You don't seem to be advocating for any fundamentally different way of viewing the world, just for a reorganization of what the relevant tribes are.
Identity politics is not the view that there are conflicting groups in society- I think almost everyone takes this for granted. Identity politics is something like the view that society is a massive collection of countless, kaldiescopic clashing identity groups, all with objectively different interests, and with overtones of the micropolitics and discursive idealism I refer to. Historically that's a weird phenomenon, at least to some degree, but historically the view that politics is about clashing social groups goes back, at least to some degree, to the classical writers.
" "people on my side of an issue have been mean to me, therefore I'm leaving that side and joining the other side" is fundamentally viewing the conflict as not about competing ideas and wanting to find the correct ones, but aboit what identity politics is?"
I wouldn't say this is necessarily what identity politics is, though it certainly is bad, and has 'echoes' of identity politics and that's why I'm attacking that sort of attitude in this piece.
The extent to which the Marxist view is 'tribal' in your sense of the term is a complex question. Ultimately on this view, there are very few capitalists, and very many workers. The clash isn't so much between capitalists and workers, as between workers organised to a degree by capitalists, and workers who self-organise. The fight is really more with capital itself, as a reified self-moving process, than with capitalists. However even if we grant that its tribal in your sense, I don't think that means it shares in the intercine nastiness and ineffectiveness of identity politics in the sense I mean it.
Almost everyone agrees that politics involves clashes between sociological groups. To say that this is just what identity politics is misses that identity politics is uniquely a 'beast of our age'. That's not to say that there hasn't always been *some* politics that is identarian, even in the sense I mean it, but there's something especially focused on identitarianism in the current political discourse- I am an t,u,v,w,x,y,z indvidual and that defines my politics and, in the extreme case, only people with that exact constellation of traits get what I'm talking about. Identitarianism is a very hard thing to define, but I think a definition that sees it about any clashing groups with membership conditions is way too broad.
I think it depends on your definition of “identity politics”… I think in this case it just referred to an obsession with splitting people into the two groups of “oppressed” and “oppressors” based on race, ethnicity, gender etc., while the author prefers the more Marxist method. Technically anything that tries to classify the population into categories could be called “identarian”…
Even if you disagree with phrasing it as “leaving the left” and “joining the right”, such terms are very useful in knowing what kind of ideology a person holds — like person A who’s a communist is more likely to not be racist than person B who’s a republican or something. Or, like I have no idea what your political ideology is, but if you said something like “I lean left on social issues and right on economic issues” I would instantly get what you mean.
I agree with most of that, I just found the framing interesting. Especially if you define identity politics as the dividing of people into oppressor and oppressed groups, Marxism is one of the *most* identitarian ideologies, clearly labeling the bourgeoisie as the oppressors.
I suspect my politics are closer to yours than our Ursine Author's, but I still think the piece was masterful. So, I'm just going to predict how my thought will evolve based on this piece. I plan on doing a lot more reading on his version of Marxism, and after doing so, I will return to my current belief that calling yourself a Communist or Marxist is bad because it gives your ideas a massive "attack surface" since there are untold examples of those kinds of governments failing and almost none that I would count as "successful." Despite that, I will also gain new appreciation for the ways in which class structure creates incentives which fundamentally "oppress" some people(s) at the expense of others. Therefore, I will probably end up thinking of myself on "the left" because they have better values, even as more and more intelligent people/my friends start to gravitate to the right.
You mention elsewhere, if I recall correctly, that you want a society with no outgroup. And I agree that's a good ideal to strive for, even if we as humans cannot quite reach it because it goes against our nature. So I was disappointed to see this piece treating the right as your outgroup. If they weren't your outgroup, it would hurt you to characterize an entire large fraction of the population as "a bunch of segregationists and people who make jokes about trans women killing themselves". Anyway, I hope that if we are more aware of these things we can better fight them and perhaps end up with a kinder society.
"At the risk of making myself sound like the villain of the piece: “Our plans are measured in centuries”. How long have we been here? See the scope of it all. Humans alternately enslaved and liberated by the discovery of their own powers. A project to raise sapience free up to eternity. I might sound transhumanist here (and I am) but I wasn’t the first to see the left as engaged in a transhuman project. The tradition of all dead generations weighing upon us as a nightmare. Escaping the realm of necessity for the realm of freedom- all of these are Marxist ideas."
or to quote Disco Elysium:
Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity's future... I have to say, I've never *entirely* understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.
You: Wait, you're saying communism is some kind of religion?
Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn't dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it.
You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?
Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up.
You: Even when they ignore us?
Steban: Even then.
"Communism is a secular religion that replaces belief in god with belief in humanity's future" really stood out for me, for some reason
Well, that's actually an important plot point in UNSONG by Scott Alexander. Ihttps://unsongbook.com/ It's a delightful and provocative read.
This piece was masterful. I hope my intellectual descendents are around in 100 years to cite it as an example of sanity in an insane world.
Aww, thanks!
Bo problem. But on the other hand, if there's an article of yours that I hate, do you prefer to receive the criticism via email, comments, or a substack note/blog post?
Comments or notes/blogposts are both good. You can send emails but it's 50/50 whether I will see them if they're responses to the Substack emails I send out, so I'd recommend comments or posts on here.
Dead on.
"nonetheless it sticks out like a craw"
OK this is totally irrelevant to the point of the piece, but I don't think craws particularly stick out, even when being used to grind stuff? Like as I understand it, the craw is a kind of muscular throat pouch that certain birds have, and they consume hard seeds along with grit, and then kind of grind the seeds in there to break them down so when they're actually swallowed they'll be digestible. But that action isn't all that visible from the outside, it's _not_ directly related to the various kinds of throat displays that birds have (which should be obvious when you realize those display features are often only on males, whereas both males and females are doing the craw / gizzard grinding thing).
It seems like you kinda mashed up "sticks out like a sore thumb" and "sticks in my craw", which I suppose is extending "craw" to refer to the human throat, like getting a bit of something stuck in your throat when you swallow. (I also have always wondered whether a sore thumb sticks out? If my thumb hurts, usually I reflexively curly my fingers around it to keep it from getting banged up again. But language is weird.)
Ah I always thought it was sticks out like a craw because of those throat displays! I see, makes sense.
I believe that dangly throat thing that a lot of male birds have, and which some of them can rather ridiculously inflate, is called a wattle. See for instance: https://birdscanflystore.com/blog/temmincks-tragopan/
And a gizzard is sort of an extra stomach, before the main acid-secreting stomach, which serves a similar function to what the craw is doing for birds that have that -- basically just holds hard / shell-covered things that the bird is eating, along with bits of sand / pebbles, and contracts to grind stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizzard
Personally I'm glad I just do this with molars. Eating sand and pebbles sounds unpleasant.
> of course, you would say that you’re a white man
Missing quotation mark at the end of this I think.
> domestic violence prison violence
Missing comma
Fantastic piece. I have lived in both the most conservative state in the union and the most liberal, where people were otherwise much alike except for disagreeing about everything. I've had to learn to speak both languages and translate. And I've always been attracted to and collected friends among the brilliant, obsessed with ideas, more attached to abstractions than people crowd...and seen many of them flip from one side to the other, or from being religious to the point of fundamentalist to a fundamentalist atheist. Normal people on both sides don't tend to do those things, nor to be nearly as scary or obnoxious as the worst caricatures that the other focuses on.
I'm sad to say that over the decades, about 20% of my cerebral, fascinating, brilliant friends have gone mad and completely fucked up their lives. And the rest of us have become pretty boring because that's what seems to happen eventually.
I do think that part of this instinct is actually driven by boredom. This personality type...your brain is constantly scanning for information and cramming in data and analyzing analyzing analyzing. And when you spend all your time doing that, you kind of end up figuring out one thing, taking it apart and putting it back together again, and then you get bored. You need a new puzzle. You figure it out and can predict and understand it all and then you see when it's jumped the shark way before other people, and start craving to conquer a challenging new endeavor and way of thinking. It sounds terrible but...just thinking the same thing and believing in the same convictions for years or decades on end starts to just to boring and you get an itch, and something that used to seem very right starts to seem annoying.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and it really is just that the internet has exposed the worst in people and both sides and made a lot of people more extreme and crazy seeming. But I do think there's an element there of a sort of insatiable curiosity and just eventually getting bored with one crowd and looking elsewhere because even if it's bad or distasteful in a different way, it's still very interesting and you can flex your brain again, coming up with new theories and testing things and exploring a new way of thinking.
Interesting explanation, and it might hold true for a certain type of intellect, but I typically see people realign themselves out of disillusionment more than boredom. Figuring out the puzzle usually exposes artifice or hypocrisy; all movements are fraudulent at the core.
Finding a long-term political home requires cultivating a certain amount of charity toward your ideology: recognition of its foibles, and affection for its unattainable ideals.
Yes, good points. Though I do find that for me, at least, once I've focused on a topic and researched and read and thought about it for a few years, I generally end up losing interest somewhat and wanting to move on...and start getting annoyed at people who are belatedly coming to the realizations I'd had years earlier and not wanting to hear about it anymore. Like all the "wokeness has gone too far and is basically a 7th-grade mean-girl coded religion" stuff from the past three years...was that not obvious more like 8 or 9 years ago, and why are we still talking about it ? That could just be a me problem though. You're absolutely right that eventually you'll find hypocrisies and/or fraud with any institution or school of thought.
I'd recommend geoism and radical markets rather than Marxism...
> Let me tell you some of my stories. One woman threatened to beat me with a crow-bar because I organized an event ‘against identity politics’. There was already so much angry discourse around the event that my only response was to find this funny.
I'm curious if you'd be willing to elaborate on this? My guess is that the event was not actually against identity politics?
On a slightly related note, you talk about how identarianism is the cause of some of the bad behavior you mention, but isn't this article framed in a fundamentally identarian way? Personally I don't think in terms of "leaving the left" or "joining the right". I simply have beliefs about the world, like "racism is bad", and just because some other people who purport to hold similar beliefs turn out to be evil people, that doesn't have any bearing on the validity of the belief itself.
Someone who engages in reasoning of the form "people on my side of an issue have been mean to me, therefore I'm leaving that side and joining the other side" is fundamentally viewing the conflict as not about competing ideas and wanting to find the correct ones, but about competing tribes and wanting to find the one that benefits them the most personally. Isn't that exactly what identity politics is?
And while I agree that the Marxist approach you describe is better than the alternatives you present, it's still an identarian approach, attempting to pit the poor against the rich rather than the white vs. the black. You don't seem to be advocating for any fundamentally different way of viewing the world, just for a reorganization of what the relevant tribes are.
The event was against identity politics.
Identity politics is not the view that there are conflicting groups in society- I think almost everyone takes this for granted. Identity politics is something like the view that society is a massive collection of countless, kaldiescopic clashing identity groups, all with objectively different interests, and with overtones of the micropolitics and discursive idealism I refer to. Historically that's a weird phenomenon, at least to some degree, but historically the view that politics is about clashing social groups goes back, at least to some degree, to the classical writers.
" "people on my side of an issue have been mean to me, therefore I'm leaving that side and joining the other side" is fundamentally viewing the conflict as not about competing ideas and wanting to find the correct ones, but aboit what identity politics is?"
I wouldn't say this is necessarily what identity politics is, though it certainly is bad, and has 'echoes' of identity politics and that's why I'm attacking that sort of attitude in this piece.
The extent to which the Marxist view is 'tribal' in your sense of the term is a complex question. Ultimately on this view, there are very few capitalists, and very many workers. The clash isn't so much between capitalists and workers, as between workers organised to a degree by capitalists, and workers who self-organise. The fight is really more with capital itself, as a reified self-moving process, than with capitalists. However even if we grant that its tribal in your sense, I don't think that means it shares in the intercine nastiness and ineffectiveness of identity politics in the sense I mean it.
Almost everyone agrees that politics involves clashes between sociological groups. To say that this is just what identity politics is misses that identity politics is uniquely a 'beast of our age'. That's not to say that there hasn't always been *some* politics that is identarian, even in the sense I mean it, but there's something especially focused on identitarianism in the current political discourse- I am an t,u,v,w,x,y,z indvidual and that defines my politics and, in the extreme case, only people with that exact constellation of traits get what I'm talking about. Identitarianism is a very hard thing to define, but I think a definition that sees it about any clashing groups with membership conditions is way too broad.
I think it depends on your definition of “identity politics”… I think in this case it just referred to an obsession with splitting people into the two groups of “oppressed” and “oppressors” based on race, ethnicity, gender etc., while the author prefers the more Marxist method. Technically anything that tries to classify the population into categories could be called “identarian”…
Even if you disagree with phrasing it as “leaving the left” and “joining the right”, such terms are very useful in knowing what kind of ideology a person holds — like person A who’s a communist is more likely to not be racist than person B who’s a republican or something. Or, like I have no idea what your political ideology is, but if you said something like “I lean left on social issues and right on economic issues” I would instantly get what you mean.
I agree with most of that, I just found the framing interesting. Especially if you define identity politics as the dividing of people into oppressor and oppressed groups, Marxism is one of the *most* identitarian ideologies, clearly labeling the bourgeoisie as the oppressors.
I suspect my politics are closer to yours than our Ursine Author's, but I still think the piece was masterful. So, I'm just going to predict how my thought will evolve based on this piece. I plan on doing a lot more reading on his version of Marxism, and after doing so, I will return to my current belief that calling yourself a Communist or Marxist is bad because it gives your ideas a massive "attack surface" since there are untold examples of those kinds of governments failing and almost none that I would count as "successful." Despite that, I will also gain new appreciation for the ways in which class structure creates incentives which fundamentally "oppress" some people(s) at the expense of others. Therefore, I will probably end up thinking of myself on "the left" because they have better values, even as more and more intelligent people/my friends start to gravitate to the right.
You mention elsewhere, if I recall correctly, that you want a society with no outgroup. And I agree that's a good ideal to strive for, even if we as humans cannot quite reach it because it goes against our nature. So I was disappointed to see this piece treating the right as your outgroup. If they weren't your outgroup, it would hurt you to characterize an entire large fraction of the population as "a bunch of segregationists and people who make jokes about trans women killing themselves". Anyway, I hope that if we are more aware of these things we can better fight them and perhaps end up with a kinder society.
Thank you for writing this.