The 21st Century Ideology

There’s an assumed metaphysics behind mainstream 21st century thinking on both the left and the right: 1. every individual belongs to a cultural collective, 2. culture determines values and that 3. the values of each culture Platonically emanate out of its religion.

On the left, these people argue for multiculturalism. On the right, these people argue for civilizational war as an objective reality regardless of how you wish to respond to it (Samuel Huntington); much like how some people think race war in an objective reality. The weird left engages with this narrative in a weird way. E.g. Zizek says only a Christian can be a real atheist.

I don’t find the 21st century’s self-evident truths to be particularly convincing. I will group my answer under a number of headings:

The relativity of concepts.

The fact that Marxism can be shoehorned into value-speak doesn’t prove that value-speak is more fundamental. It is known that different sets of ideas can be mutually reducible to each other:

Let the color grue be defined as “green till today and blue from tomorrow”. Let the color bleen be defined as “blue till today and green from tomorrow”. Grue and bleen appear to be complex colors defined on the basis of the fundamental colors blue and green. However, the color blue can also be defined as “bleen till today and grue from tomorrow”. Now blue appears to be a composite.

Analytic philosophy calls these “gruesome” properties.

Marxism does its best to avoid introducing positive values, let alone being a culture.

Value-speak can also be shoehorned into Marxism. In Marxist analysis, values are determined by an outcome of material processes.

According to Marxism, religions are grafted-on tools that facilitate post hoc apologetics. Many people do sincerely believe in religion. They are all weak-minded fools who are being manipulated by their leaders. (I say they are “fools” in the sense that they will lose over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness_for_Christ Not in the sense that they deserve to be oppressed.)

This explains why people claim to be part of a religion when they systematically refuse to follow the values it teaches. This, and the fact that Marxism goes out of its way to avoid providing positive values is precisely what many people find abominable about it.

How Marxism can propose positive programs without values.

Some things in Marxism look like goal-oriented behavior:

r b: people do things that don’t make financial or economic sense all the time, and can often be a lot harder to bribe than they would be if material factors would be as all-determining as Marx and you claim.

Raphael

I agree. The Marxist answer is that those people lose over time. The Social Darwinist conclusion is: therefore, the poor must die. The Marxist conclusion is: therefore, society must be reconstructed to let everyone do the work they enjoy doing.

rotting bones

Source: https://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=111352#p111352

These are what emerges from below when the dispossessed unite in solidarity and take back what’s theirs, a rational outcome of popular organizing in terms of a confluence of materialistic goals. Marxism isn’t adding any extra spice.

What I’m taking from Marx.

I’m not following Marx on his values. I’m following a reductive method of analyzing societies first popularized by Marx. The approach itself predates him. Thoreau writes in Walden that every college student learned political economy in his day. Nowadays, it is associated solely with Marx in an attempt to discredit it.

I don’t take his semantic and philosophical claims seriously. In the polemical tracts where Marx does seem to be speaking of values, I find him bombastic and unconvincing. (It wouldn’t surprise me if he intended polemics like the Communist Manifesto to sound bombastic.) Where I speak of values, my go-to is the liberal philosopher Rawls: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#TwoPriJusFai

Of course, some people argue that a method of analysis is also a value, but then everything is a value. This lens of “values” means adopting the 21st century approach to begin with, a case of doubling down on one perspective and refusing to see the world from another. Basically, it’s the “atheism is a religion” trope again.

From the lens of values, I think seeing things in terms of values is of dubious value.

I tend to avoid speaking of values because it’s always an imposition. If I tell someone: “Rawls says X. Now do it!” I am telling them to abandon what their reason says is good and subordinate themselves to Rawls; otherwise, I will be really mad at them.

This is the factor that makes liberals sound like hysterical school marms. People can always just say, “no”.

The Marxist perspective is better for coalition building. Without values, people don’t need to agree to fight for the same goals as long as their materialistic goals align.

The 21st century lens is actively harmful.

Dividing people into groups is known to undermine solidarity. Let me give you a simple example to show you what I mean. Those who assimilate to Western culture in Kolkata often turn out to be fascist. A common sense conclusion many would draw in accordance with mainstream 21st century metaphysics is that Western culture is fascist. You can clearly see what’s wrong with this through a Marxist class analysis: If someone can assimilate into Western culture while living in Kolkata, the city of beggars, what does that say about their wealth and status in society?

It is for reasons like these that I believe class analysis fits the facts better.

Even on the left, 21st century metaphysics is being used to tell people to stay within their own culture, destroying cosmopolitanism. It’s so bad that nowadays, many people think a leftist is a small-minded gremlin who wants everyone to stay inside one culture and interact like primitive tribes, whereas being right-wing means being cosmopolitan!

I agree with the spirit of this criticism. Formative influences in my childhood include, in no particular order: 1. Casual Islam. Only my mother prayed, and only because she wanted to. 2. Bengali art. 3. Soviet space mania with its ancillary physics and mathematics. 4. Books from across the world, and 5. A steady stream of pop media diet.

So no, I don’t appreciate the 21st century’s insistence on classifying me with “Muslim” “culture”.

I have nothing against variation among humans.

I’m only rejecting culture as the explanation for human variation. I just think it’s covered by: 1. Marxism’s “everyone should be allowed to do the work they enjoy”, 2. Psychological variation, 3. Institutional practices, etc. I don’t need “culture” to explain anything.