Razib on Fundamentalisms
Razib took a fragmentary post of mine to spin out this characteristically insightful post.
Societies have norms. When individuals and groups violate those norms society sanctions them in some manner because of their revulsion at the violation of those norms. But many modern Americans have a tendency to mask the causal factor behind this revulsion, the transgression against particular taboos or beliefs & folkways held sacred, and talk as if in reality it was some more abstract and distant ultimate principle which motivated them. For example, the extraction from children from “dangerous” parents is to allow the children to “make up their own mind” and not be “brainwashed,” because after all humans with free choice and will always make the “right” choices. So you simply turn it into a general issue of individual choice as opposed to a specific reaction to an infraction against the unwritten moral law. A more more explicit exploration and discussion of the values which “mainstream” Americans hold might be in order for our society I would think. But then, I value transparency….
To what extent are all projects of social control — conventional education, the effort to fight mental illness, the effort to inculcate bourgeois habits — an extension of “the wisdom of repugnance,” to eliminate practices and ways of life we find unfamiliar or disruptive and thus revolting?
Speaking of which, I’m very excited about Stacy Peralta’s new film on gang culture. I hope to see it soon.
Razib told me once that culture doesn’t shape people as much as people shape culture according to their needs.
I think that is stone brilliant, and (i think) also original.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jun 6, 01:00 PM · #
Um, are some generally conservative guys somehow managing to reinvent Disclipline and Punish? Because that would be sweet.
— Sanjay · Jun 6, 01:44 PM · #
sanjay, you seem to imply that focault’s insights can’t have a conservative slant. i don’t see that at all. in fact, to switch to the more broad area of post modernism in general alister mcgrath argues that atheism is doomed because it presupposes the positive knowledge. phillip e. johnson, the doyen of the ID movement, is a big fan of critical theory. that being said, i would say i’m a conservative insofar as i want to preserve western liberalism, broadly construed….
— razib · Jun 6, 10:41 PM · #
also, re: reihan’s point re: “wisdom of repugnance,” i think there is variation in this. the psychologist jonathan haidt has done some work which shows how people in different political outlooks have different moral sensibilities by emphasizing different values. that being said, at the end of the day, i know very few tolerant and “open-minded” people who would be sanguine about a family which partook of the “victimless” crime of first-order incest. even taking the children out of it, would people object if a family had adult first order incest occurring regularly? (e.g., child comes home from college and starts having sex with their parents consensually while other children under the age of 18 still live at home)
— razib · Jun 6, 10:48 PM · #
No, that’s fair Razib, ideology on this site is a wondrous jungle anyways. I was wrong. On the other hand it’s not clear to me that what you’re saying up there isn’t, well, sort of heavily trod-upon ground.
— Sanjay · Jun 8, 02:34 PM · #
Sanjay, you may have given us a motto for our site:
The American Scene: An Ongoing Review of Politics and Cuilture, a.k.a. The Wondrous Jungle
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 8, 03:32 PM · #