This started from a Bluesky post but it's been going on for millennia or longer. Anytime somebody proposes a turnkey solution, you know that they are speaking out of ignorance or out of selfishness.
The oldest example I know of from personal experience probably goes back millennia, maybe even as far back as human speech. Ever watch the movie "What Women Want"?
This is a thirteen-year-old male attitude. There is supposed to be one thing a guy can do to get any woman he wants. Ladies, when you hear a guy say "What the hell do women want?", whether he says it to you or not, run. He wants a button he can push. He doesn't want a real relationship -- he doesn't know what a relationship is.
Demagogues feed into this thirteen-year-old mentality by offering simple solutions to complicated problems. So do dictators. That's why their earliest support comes from the ignorant, the mentally immature and from educated people whose training has been pipelined to make them ignorant of much of reality. I've talked about pipelining in this thread before. I know college professors who fall for urban legends and produce work that incorporates fallacies or, at best, can't fit into the big picture of a subject, because the writers are ignorant of everything their pipelined research cuts them off from.
Academics who fall for the turnkey fallacy include people in STEM who think human cultures can be run on math or logic, people in the liberal arts, and people who think of themselves as liberals but still think there's only one solution to everything.
Which gets me to the Bluesky post. It promoted morals as a counterweight to politics. It had several problems.
It clearly appealed to a "come to Jesus" attitude. Well, as we all know, the religious right wants a "come to Jesus" movement, only not only do they really mean Jesus, they mean the evangelical concept associated in the last decade with child sexual abuse, spousal abuse, ignorance, violence, and incompetence.
Second, it relied on a composition by a Christian minister. One of the things Christianity does is fail to understand the scripture it ostensibly takes as its basis. In Jewish scripture, the section known as Neviim, Prophets, survived the Babylonian Captivity for two reasons. One is that the prophecies included either came true immediately, or they came true on the schedule incorporated in the prophecies. That's a feature of Jewish law. If your prophecy doesn't come true on one of those schedules, you're a false prophet.
The other reason is that everything included in those books relates to Jewish law. Samson had to be a nazir for life because there was no central shrine for him to go to, to offer his sacrifices and have his hair shorn. He lived after the Philistines destroyed the Shiloh sanctuary. David ruled that the widow's other son did not have to die because the people trying to convict him of murders did not qualify as witnesses. They were on-lookers but they did not perform hatraah, community policing to try and prevent the killing.
So appealing to Prophets as morals somehow above and beyond Jewish law is a misunderstanding of both the meaning and history of the material. Musar, which Proverbs refers to (in Writings), is not ethics that supersedes the law. It is an inner drive that keeps one faithful to the law.
Third, my legal studies classes defined politics as the way you get things done in an environment of people with differing goals, aims, desires and so on. That means it's perfectly normal to have politics going on in a religious organization. But it's only going to result in a "come to Jesus" moment in the sense that the organization agrees on what to do and how. There won't be some sudden epiphany -- another religious concept.
Put it together, and the reverend who wrote the article possibly found that the politics in his religious organization doesn't track with what he sees as moral. So he's demonizing politics and then extrapolating outside his organization.
And that gets into something else I've found out through experience. Organizations are mass phenomena, not individual phenomena. They are not designed to suit the wishes of every member. The culture of which they form part is the same way. Its laws are the same way. They carry out the general mores of the culture, which may clash with some subculture (I've talked about that before too) or individual.
We're living in a time when one of the subcultures is so ignorant of how everything works that it is trying to make the entire culture live by its wishes. In other words, as I've said more than once, the thirteen-year-olds are trying to run the school.
And the school is letting them do it. It took a while, but some of the older kids are speaking out about this. And it exposes that they haven't taken the hard classes that would let them speak effectively. What's more, some of them were so comfortable at school up to now, they never developed the outside experience that would have given them a clue earlier. So they break away because nobody at the school listens to them, and they get on the outside and are shocked to find that the outsiders they ignored while they were fat dumb and happy, knew all along that this was going on.
I stopped joining organizations when I was in my teens. Either I got tired of being expected to espouse ideas I didn't agree with, or I found that the organizations didn't live up to their billing, or the organization shifted in ways I didn't agree with.
There is no one solution to these situations because there is no one situation, plus you are an individual not a peg to put in a hole. Plus situations change. You must be ready to break away and work on your own. You must be ready for your situation to change so that you have to change what you do and how, and you must be ready for the same thing to happen to your allies. You must realize that your set of allies will change for reasons of their own -- and sometimes you will have to ditch them for reasons of your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment