The secular left has a stand-in for religion: social justice.
My post yesterday likened activist Democrats to the "good girl" sitting in the front row in high school. She is empathetic, considerate, and does her homework. Republicans are the rowdy boys at the back.
It was a mixed compliment for Democrats. A great many people perceive that "good girl" as a know-it-all and a punctilious scold, too quick to direct what virtuous thing classmates should do. In student body elections, the class might prefer the earthier boys who better reflect the class's honest emotions of restlessness, frustration, and horniness. The class doesn't want to be good. They want to be their honest selves.
John Coster has thoughts on yesterday's post. He supported Bernie Sanders and has a left orientation, but not the secular left that shapes Democratic policies. He identifies as an Evangelical Christian. Over his 40-year career, he owned and operated electrical contracting companies. That evolved into work overseeing the design and construction of multimillion-dollar projects for Amazon, Microsoft, and T-Mobile.
Guest Post by John Coster
Sunday’s post got me thinking about the intersection of masculinity, virtue, and politics.
Over the past 50 years, technology has reduced or eliminated jobs that required physical "masculine" strength. When I was an electrician apprentice in 1976, I was required to carry 80-pound pieces of four-inch steel conduit up three or four sections of vertical scaffolding -- without safety tie-offs. You would never see that today, and that's a good thing because it was very unsafe. Advancing technology has allowed prefabrication from automated factories to eliminate many skilled "craftsman" jobs. Many commercial buildings are now assembled. Car mechanics are now called "technicians," who use computers to diagnose problems and replace the part. My EV is a computer on wheels. The old NPR show "Car Talk" would seem quaint and irrelevant to young people today.
Technology has democratized labor. It now rewards the "good girl" student who can figure out the problem and automate it. In fact, even the "knowledge-worker" jobs are dropping along with wages, as AI takes over many of those tasks. As physicality becomes increasingly irrelevant to the economy, men have experienced a loss of their social standing, sense of identity, and even attractiveness to women.
The challenge of the "shoulds," as Peter says, is that there isn't a common moral framework anymore. The Left uses biblical concepts of love, acceptance, kindness, compassion, and stewardship, but ignores or even has contempt for the very religion that brought those values. Tom Holland's book Dominion presents how the advent of Christianity grew over the centuries to become the most powerful cultural force ever known to humanity. He says, for example, that the very idea of human rights, that humans are sacred, did not exist as a social concept before Christianity. When you think about it, human sacredness is the common concept at the heart of the Pro-life/Pro-choice debate; the only difference is whose life is the most sacred?
The left goes further with its secularized "religion" to promote, normalize and force the celebration of ideas like gender theory (i.e., that biology and identity are separate), and shames those who disagree. People on the Right feel helpless, for example, when laws are passed like here in the State of Washington, that take away a parent's right to even be informed that their child is seeking gender-affirming care or help with gender dysphoria in school. Essentially, the Left claims its own moral authority. For conservatives who see their identity, purpose and values tied to more traditional (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) teaching, these Left-leaning agendas are seen a fundamental assault or existential threat, even if those on the Right are not particularly devout or literate about the theology of their faith. Those also tend to be the ones who embrace Christian nationalism.
The folks on the Right I talk to, see the acceptance of a deeply flawed leader as the only way to stop the erosion of their core beliefs.
The honeymoon of technology companies that want to own your mind and automate everything, with the hard-right political leadership (for now) that envisions a return to the past, is an interesting paradox. I predict it will be a troubled marriage. The technology titans will outlive Trump of course, so he is useful to them for now, but their loyalties will be as sticky as are his.
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12 comments:
Technology changes things like the long bow piercing knight armor, guns killing with the ease of a pulled trigger, cars being several horsepower and now AI enters the picture. The sex of the person is increasingly irrelevant except our culture has not caught up. It supposedly takes 5 generations before you are no longer influenced by your past descendants. I still remember my Gia telling me you can’t trust Turks because they rape Greek women. Am I more skeptical of people of Turkish people? I know it’s crazy, but I think maybe a little. Gia is still in my brain influencing me. So to is sexual stereotypes.
Other than the acknowledgment that technology has changed the workplace, almost every other assertion by Mr. Coster is on shaky grounds and I assert they are wrong. Students of Socrates and Confucius will find it shocking that Mr. Coster would assert that concepts of love and compassion and others are the invention of his particular religion. It would take a week or two of these blog posts to analytically show how wrong he is.
Religious apologists like Mr. Coster like to make bold assertions that are patently false. Let me take just one. I copied and pasted his assertion about a Washington law into Chat GPT and asked if it were true. The response began, "As of January 2025 there is no law in the state of Washington that removes a parent's right to be informed if their child is seeking gender-affirming care ... ."
The living of a moral life is, perhaps, life's highest goal and we all should strive daily to seek such principles. Such a life-long quest is way too important to be left to small-minded religious people like Mr. Coster. Chief among those principles leading to a moral life is to be truthful. Mr. Coster's religious views seem to impede his ability to find truthfulness.
At their best, religions promote universal virtues and values, the sort of loving kindness that lets people get along and enables society to function. At their worst, they foster fear, anger and hatred and are used as an excuse to justify man’s inhumanity to man. Guess where the Trump cult lies on that spectrum.
People can be as religious as they want, but the government cannot. It needs to focus on following the Constitution, not somebody’s catechism. Physical strength if fine, but it’s only the strength of our commitment to our founding values – that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights – that can prevent us from degenerating into a Fourth Reich.
Thanks for your comment Phil. I bet we could have some fun conversations about the anthropology of religion. But Maybe AI is still not the best source of objective truth. Check this out https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2023-24/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/House/5599-S.E%20HBR%20APH%2023.pdf
Also Phil, Holland is an historian and not a Christian. May I suggest reading him and perhaps reconsider your own understanding the history of applied moral reasoning.
Mr. Steely, a much better comment than mine. Social justice is not a stand in for religion and adherence to the Constitution is where we'll find strength in government, not adherence to religious dogma. Good comment.
John C, thank you for posting the link to the law you referenced. This law protects homeless children who might be in danger if their parents find out they are asking questions about gender affirming care. Taken out of context it looks as though parental rights are being threatened, but this is not the case. It's the same with laws that protect girls from having to tell their parents they are pregnant. The person who raped them might be the father or uncle, so telling the parents puts the child at risk. This is why these types of laws are necessary. Many conservatives do not understand this.
The wokescolds contributed to a backlash that helped elect Donald Trump. In addition to all of the destruction that Trump may wreak, we will at least have the dark amusement of watching them react to what their obnoxious virtue signaling helped create.
The only people that helped elect Donald Trump were all those multi-billionaire elites and other deplorables who know very well that he’s a big fat liar, a convicted felon, a rapist and a traitor, but voted for him anyway. Enjoy smirking at the wreckage.
I agreed with the late, great Christopher Hitchens' objection to the conceit that organized religion was necessary in order for human society to conclude that murdering, molesting and stealing are wrong and bad. But loving one's enemies, and according dignity and value to every human, may be something else again.
At the end of the day, though, as a practitioner of love and acceptance, Jesus himself made it tough love, and conditional acceptance, sheep or goats, upon pain of eternal damnation. Social justice is all about THIS world, with Jesus perhaps primarily disagreeing about what (if anything) comes after.
Thanks for your usual thoughtful comment Jennifer. I agree that is what that law states and the reason for it. I was responding that Phil’s assertion that no such law exists was incorrect. But here’s the rub: the interpretation, enforcement and adjudication are quite subjective aren’t they? And that what has the conservative Right concerned. Unfortunately this forum is intentionally short so generalities can be misconstrued as absolute.
Thanks, Phil. Religion was a big part of my youth. I'm grateful for the values it taught me, but not so much the dogma. Civics was also a big part of my youth. My father was a West Point graduate and WWII veteran who took his oath seriously. So did I, and now I find myself ruled by a president who called for the Constitution to be terminated and whose angry lies are eagerly swallowed by the so-called "religious" right who believe God anointed this criminal abomination to lead the nation back to a White "Christian" rule it was never intended to have. May they reap what they sow.
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