2024-08-09, On the inherited christianity of liberal subjectivity

Original Post ** Part 1

I've been talking about it in deeply Western terms but from my perspective a lot of what I'm thinking about is just variants of, how do I explain the deeply Christian ideology of many things that believe themselves to be secular and atheist, including lots of people who strongly emotionally identify with their existence as Other-than-Christian and take every bit of aesthetic and belief they can see in themselves as evidence that's true.

Also I am not just this obnoxious on social media. One of my partners was about to head out to relax and said "I'll go where the Spirit takes me" and I flinched and they laughed and I said, "I wrote 'Geist' like five sentences ago. Get out. Lol." They laughed, I laughed, we went on more reflective of the embodied teleology of routinized governmentality.

(Yes I'm in that age of people who say 'lol' like a word.)

Another interpretation of that little story is that the same sort of stuff that is argued as inappropriate in one space is loved in another, which indicates there's some form of structuration in the spaces that configures that.

So maybe I'm not an asshole for saying "Hey you're doing a Christianism" to someone when they say the banalist sentence about errands or work; maybe there's some expectations that make me an asshole for doing it?

Discursively we cite weird care ethics (my partners opt into being philosophized at by being my partners, people on social media don't) and then it gets into weird things about reply-guys and so on and so forth...

...but none of that really makes space for "what if the comment is to stop a harm?" (Which is what an Indigenous person speaking to Christian behavior may be.)

In which case the ethical response is to make the argument, but this is clearly NOT what's expected.

So, the expectation is, evidentially, about behaving in some way other than ethically, such that "calling people Christian colonizers when they didn't explicitly ask if they were, even if otherwise ethically motivated" is a violation of those expectations.

Mapping the expectation fully obviously would take more data than that, but the contradiction against ethics is performative.

** Part 2

Here's an example of this:

There are a lot of American anarchists who believe in their anarchism because they think it will make society better, and they believe they should make society better because they believe in civic duty, and they believe in civic duty because they believe enacting society according to an order is better, and...

We don't need to unpack it more to see: these anarchists believe in an order, and thus these aren't like, anti-civilized anarchists.

Fair enough.

So, what's the important part of anarchy, then, if it's not about not-being-ordered?

Well, it'd be about choosing to be ordered, choosing to do that civic duty, right?

Well, that choosing to be good, when it is a choice...

...is what Christian salvation is.

The idea crops up in other ideologies too, some that have nothing to do with the West, but it isn't those ideologies that Western anarchist philosophers explicitly cite and build their ideas on.

And while lots of people might have superficially different reasons, I haven't yet found anyone - even myself - whose anarchist practice doesn't ultimately derive from being conditioned into believing in the morality of certain ways of choosing to be good.

And all of this might sound ridiculous when the people who call themselves Christians are often organizing things that Christianity couldn't help but label as "very evil,"

but that's where stuff like "leftist postliberalism" come in: the ideas sound different when they're in a different time and place, dealing with different social structures.

And so one could hear all this and go, "Well yeah, some Christian stuff is good"

But... then we're at an impasse: Why is it good? Can you explain why without pointing to the Church, at some point, just... saying so?

This is literally a rhetorical question: How do you know making society is better is good, but that doing it with fascism is ba…2868 chars truncated…st and the Church talks about Spirit, esp. in OG german)

Responses * Iin Turntide Islands Responding to Part 2, someone in Turntide Islands said:

#+begin_quote So many thoughts on this but I think I'll just ponder them for now

One question though: are all forms of morality dependent on Christianity? I'm wondering how something like utilitarianism could be derived directly from Christian doctrine, for example #+end_quote

I replied:

Ohhh that's a cool and complicated example to pick because you have the idea coming up in a Christian-structured society, but then later is more formally argued as deriving from Christian values, because of shifts in values in other ideologies.

Short answer: When formulated, utilitarianism didn't formally derive from Christian ethics, but it did say it was aligned with them: Jesus Golden Rule is straight cited at the best known example of utilitarianism, in its foundational treatise by, uh... Mill...

(I like to try and chat here without checking notes.)

It derived instead from Greek folk like... some Greek folk.

Buuuut most Christian ideology is derived from those Greek folks ideologies, so you get into "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck" territory

Which is why some early English Protestants and later American Protestants took these threads and stitched them together to say, "look, it seems pretty clear the common good of Man is God's will, and so caring about the effects of things is probably pretty important"

This was in response, as I see it, to a weird emphasis in Lutherans on performing interior subjectivity, which in the Catholic world and early Lutheran world was much more protected as a person's own little bit of Godliness. With that bit of doctrine in place, measuring the effects of what a person did was kind of the only way to measure goodness, so Mill and later folk were focused on how to measure, unlike later utilitarians who had to argue the value of the measuring system at all.

ANyway the lutheran focus on subjectivity kind of shattered the idea of one brotherhood of man which is why "the common good" can be Americans and it be brotherly love to go hunt down potential refugees and kill them.

But if you follow the doctrinal stance of, brotherhood of man, then utilitarianism pretty cleanly derives from literally the same doctrine vance is citing for our border policy which is... weird, like just, logically

shorter answer: utilitarianism can be derived from church doctrine on brotherly love and beauty, and has been a bunch, but that keeps proving to be ground for more confusion than clarity, which I'm wondering isn't because the folk doing the deriving aren't doing their math from a position of brotherly love toward beauty...

...and there things get very murky and I just wanna go stare at islamist sacred geometry or do some beading.

I hate how much actually diving into the depths of the body of philosophy available to me means looking at what church folk said about a very different world and figuring out the ways in which the people who wrote afterward failed to appreciate the differences that were existing.

tl;dr: hard to look at any concept expressed in English and not be able to trace it back to Thales of Milesus, a pre-Socratic philosopher who, by inheritance, p much everyone's ideas depend on.

But there are non-Thalesian ways to argue for a concept that would match the shape of utilatarianism; I'm real murky on them but I know some Buddhisms hold something like it as a value, and I gotta reckon other folk do to.

From my understanding of Lakotaean ideology, utilitarianism is a value that might be the better/best value in a set of values, but the concept of the whole on which it relies doesn't really translate, so best I can do is "the whole when it is in a certain stability to the whole its a part of"

fascinating question is basically, is there a morality that we can feel as moral that is not moral to what we've experienced, i.e. a morality that is alien yet felt and believed as moral?

Which is weirdly kind of what the Original Sin shit is about, from weird theological perspectives, like: what does it take for a person to trust in a morality they can't understand?

and a lot of stuff is then, 1) getting people to act like they trust it, because that will get them to (theoretically), or 2) outright trickery

But without some mechanism for that relationship: encountering a different morality and not being a shithead about it, Church theology and now leftist philosophy agree, is basically impossible.

And both have basically the same answer for what that mechanism is, which is... a bad answer: grow up, get sad, work hard, get serious, spend a lot of time on hope.

But the ways to do that all basically rely on inducing cognitive habits that in any other circumstance would be understood as deeply crazy, and that just doesn't feel good.

Which brings me to my, overcoding as sabotage shit.