[2/3]
(cont.):
• "So what point are you trying to argue for? That 'society' (whatever that is) shouldn't 'encourage' what you dismiss as 'institutional fantasy'? What if other people don't agree with you? What if they don't consider it fantasy? What if it's something very important to them?" — Well, sure, we might derive that implication from Capracus' question, it actually seems kind of obvious. But as a matter of your approach, I think of questions about shaping a discussion↗, and that can include Capracus, as well, but, again, we'll come back to that, though I think some part of it is obvious. Still: If we think of the question as, ¿What should I single out as an example? perhaps it might occur to wonder why this or any discussion should need to stake itself against anything so particularly.
Thus: What point is he trying to argue for? I'm not entirely certain he was making that kind of point. You, however, presumed such context, that society shouldn't encourage institutional fantasy, a context very nearly like expecting religion, religious belief, and religious behavior among social humans will someday go away. There is actually a much more functional reading: "When you live in a society that encourages the acceptance of institutional religious fantasy is it really surprising that you end up with behavior like this?" No, it is not surprising at all. Now: How does it work, what are the implications, and how is it best addressed?
Even as a more compressed, colloquial expression of what are we going to do about it, the question is not necessarily a matter of whether society should encourage or not; to some degree, socialization itself requires some manner of cooperative compromise that eventually evolves into something akin to behavioral cult and code according to a communally accepted creed of importance transcending the mundane. A pretense of virtue seems universal among societies we have records of, even at their worst. To make a mundane political point about the hypocrisy of rightist lamentations against virtue signaling might overlook the underlying reality that virtue signaling is actually a socialization behavior of much significance in human history and societal evolution; that is to say, virtue signaling is part of what social creatures do. Though a coincidental aspect is that given rightist lamentation, progressives and liberals are almost entirely gobsmacked by the performative antisociality as virtue signaling occurring among traditionalist-supremacist interests.
It seems an interesting setup; the question of what point he is trying to argue for stages your own proposition that society shouldn't encourage institutional fantasy. But to a certain degree, the philosopher in you is already aware the answer to your questions about disagreement—"What if other people don't agree with you? What if they don't consider it fantasy? What if it's something very important to them?"—is not so straightforward.
The current antivax question includes religious beliefs, and harms other people. Who do we owe what if someone doesn't consider being protected by Jesus' blood a fantasy, and, sure, it's important to them, but on the list of reasons for not being vaccinated, no, that doesn't really work. What if it's something very important to them? That reminds me of "sincerely held beliefs", a notion by which the state is supposed to enforce particular prejudice against other people because not doing so would offend someone else's sincerely held beliefs.
I tell an old story, sometimes; it's from the Nineties, when Christianism assailed politics in my area, and we were repeatedly asked to actually vote on Christian principles and demands in elections. The old story is about a library book complaint, and the punch line is the argument that Christian parent's First Amendment right to free religion is violated as long as the author, library, and everyone else's First Amendment right to free speech remains intact. We didn't call it cancel culture, back then; it was just censorship. But that's also a period in which a particular complaint started resonating in mundane politics associated with traditionalism and conservative Christianism, that their rights were violated by being prohibited from disrupting other people's rights. Over the last quarter-century, at least, the traditionalist argument has played this faux-victim role over and over again. Once upon a time it was books and movies and music, and it's one thing if some people disagree with the author of a novel and insist that the anticommunist book is in fact pro-Communist and anticapitalist, and maybe it's really important to them to disqualify this iteration of God, goodness, and righteousness, but the part where a freaking Shakespeare joke can only be elder group lesbian porn is entirely one's own fantasy, I mean imagination, I mean decision. (No, really, the one was McCammon's Demon Walk, and the other L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.)
We've heard similar complaints throughout: Creationism and "Intelligent Design"; the arc of the Gay Fray leading to marriage equality begins with either family courts and labor boards not being mean enough to gay people, if we take the Christianist narrative, or it opens with what books are allowed to be in the library (Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies), if we follow the narrative out of Oregon towns and onto the state ballots there and in Colorado. Who can remember Mitt Romney fumbling "Blunt-Rubio", because, you know, your rights as an employer might be violated if you can't tell your employee's insurance company what medical services and treatments your employees are allowed or not.
There are times when the reply can feel inconsequential: "What if other people don't agree with you?" Well, then they don't agree. "What if they don't consider it fantasy?" Well, that's their business. "What if it's something very important to them?" Again, that's their business. Still, at what point does it become anyone else's?
In my youth, stuffy traditionalists used to take the swinging of the fist to the tip of the other's nose as an example to proscribe free speech, that another's right to free speech ends at the traditionalist ear; that has largely been a one-way principle, and in the time since has fueled the idea that certain assertions of traditional values are suppressed if they cannot suppress others.
Certes, disputes about music and movies and books continue, but the underlying principle, the presupposition of privilege, is similar in many questions, so it includes all sorts of consequential assertions to disrupt marriages, health care access, and yes, even the immediate health and safety of other people.
So, those folks who might disagree, as such: Yes, we know it's important to them, and they don't consider it a fantasy, but, Yazata, in your opinion, how many other people need to die for them in order that their rights aren't violated?
And, yes, I know, there is a lot wrapped up in all this; that's one of the points of working through the paragraphs in reverse order. Reading through them in order presents a neat and easy pathway to equivocation. Picking them apart, that we might understand how your shaping of an argument works, shows there really is quite a lot that goes into it.
Thus: What point is he trying to argue for? I'm not entirely certain he was making that kind of point. You, however, presumed such context, that society shouldn't encourage institutional fantasy, a context very nearly like expecting religion, religious belief, and religious behavior among social humans will someday go away. There is actually a much more functional reading: "When you live in a society that encourages the acceptance of institutional religious fantasy is it really surprising that you end up with behavior like this?" No, it is not surprising at all. Now: How does it work, what are the implications, and how is it best addressed?
Even as a more compressed, colloquial expression of what are we going to do about it, the question is not necessarily a matter of whether society should encourage or not; to some degree, socialization itself requires some manner of cooperative compromise that eventually evolves into something akin to behavioral cult and code according to a communally accepted creed of importance transcending the mundane. A pretense of virtue seems universal among societies we have records of, even at their worst. To make a mundane political point about the hypocrisy of rightist lamentations against virtue signaling might overlook the underlying reality that virtue signaling is actually a socialization behavior of much significance in human history and societal evolution; that is to say, virtue signaling is part of what social creatures do. Though a coincidental aspect is that given rightist lamentation, progressives and liberals are almost entirely gobsmacked by the performative antisociality as virtue signaling occurring among traditionalist-supremacist interests.
It seems an interesting setup; the question of what point he is trying to argue for stages your own proposition that society shouldn't encourage institutional fantasy. But to a certain degree, the philosopher in you is already aware the answer to your questions about disagreement—"What if other people don't agree with you? What if they don't consider it fantasy? What if it's something very important to them?"—is not so straightforward.
The current antivax question includes religious beliefs, and harms other people. Who do we owe what if someone doesn't consider being protected by Jesus' blood a fantasy, and, sure, it's important to them, but on the list of reasons for not being vaccinated, no, that doesn't really work. What if it's something very important to them? That reminds me of "sincerely held beliefs", a notion by which the state is supposed to enforce particular prejudice against other people because not doing so would offend someone else's sincerely held beliefs.
I tell an old story, sometimes; it's from the Nineties, when Christianism assailed politics in my area, and we were repeatedly asked to actually vote on Christian principles and demands in elections. The old story is about a library book complaint, and the punch line is the argument that Christian parent's First Amendment right to free religion is violated as long as the author, library, and everyone else's First Amendment right to free speech remains intact. We didn't call it cancel culture, back then; it was just censorship. But that's also a period in which a particular complaint started resonating in mundane politics associated with traditionalism and conservative Christianism, that their rights were violated by being prohibited from disrupting other people's rights. Over the last quarter-century, at least, the traditionalist argument has played this faux-victim role over and over again. Once upon a time it was books and movies and music, and it's one thing if some people disagree with the author of a novel and insist that the anticommunist book is in fact pro-Communist and anticapitalist, and maybe it's really important to them to disqualify this iteration of God, goodness, and righteousness, but the part where a freaking Shakespeare joke can only be elder group lesbian porn is entirely one's own fantasy, I mean imagination, I mean decision. (No, really, the one was McCammon's Demon Walk, and the other L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.)
We've heard similar complaints throughout: Creationism and "Intelligent Design"; the arc of the Gay Fray leading to marriage equality begins with either family courts and labor boards not being mean enough to gay people, if we take the Christianist narrative, or it opens with what books are allowed to be in the library (Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies), if we follow the narrative out of Oregon towns and onto the state ballots there and in Colorado. Who can remember Mitt Romney fumbling "Blunt-Rubio", because, you know, your rights as an employer might be violated if you can't tell your employee's insurance company what medical services and treatments your employees are allowed or not.
There are times when the reply can feel inconsequential: "What if other people don't agree with you?" Well, then they don't agree. "What if they don't consider it fantasy?" Well, that's their business. "What if it's something very important to them?" Again, that's their business. Still, at what point does it become anyone else's?
In my youth, stuffy traditionalists used to take the swinging of the fist to the tip of the other's nose as an example to proscribe free speech, that another's right to free speech ends at the traditionalist ear; that has largely been a one-way principle, and in the time since has fueled the idea that certain assertions of traditional values are suppressed if they cannot suppress others.
Certes, disputes about music and movies and books continue, but the underlying principle, the presupposition of privilege, is similar in many questions, so it includes all sorts of consequential assertions to disrupt marriages, health care access, and yes, even the immediate health and safety of other people.
So, those folks who might disagree, as such: Yes, we know it's important to them, and they don't consider it a fantasy, but, Yazata, in your opinion, how many other people need to die for them in order that their rights aren't violated?
And, yes, I know, there is a lot wrapped up in all this; that's one of the points of working through the paragraphs in reverse order. Reading through them in order presents a neat and easy pathway to equivocation. Picking them apart, that we might understand how your shaping of an argument works, shows there really is quite a lot that goes into it.
The interesting thing is the weakness of what Capracus asks. I said we'd come back to it, and in its own way it's a pretty straightforward consideration that seems to have gotten lost along the way. The problematic breadth of the question has to do with acknowledging that no, it's not really surprising that such tragic outcomes occur. The thing is, it's not just "the acceptance of institutional religious fantasy", but, rather, the communication, accommodation, and acceptance of all sorts of institutionalized fantasies. Watch Americans reckon with our catastrophe in Afghanistan; observe how Nazis, terfs, and incels share traditionally institutionalized expectations of women that are very familiar to conservative Christians. Institutionalized fantasy?
In trying to untangle the historical-traditional threads, there comes a point at which determining the chicken and egg of institutionalizing religious sentiment within our human societal endeavors becomes futile; it is comparatively recently that we have sought to separate them.
But, yeah, that's about it. I mean, as one known to razz Capracus↗ when the occasion seems to call for it I am, this time 'round, much more fascinated by the reactions disputing his inquiry.
It's also true that more than any particular religion, religious belief, or religious affiliation, the most influential connections between acceptance of institutional religious fantasy and tragic outcomes of conspiracism feel somehow obscure, because they have to do with societal response to ranges of antisociality when those iterations are dressed in particular, often religious, symbols. The effective currency is empowerment, a generally foreseeable result↗ when societies undergo rapid social changes, and it's true, a lot of politics have run on suggestions of empowerment that simply cannot come to bear, so that some feel even more disempowered when those ambitions fail. In the end, what it comes down to is that maybe it's important to those people, and maybe they really don't think their justification is fantasy, but what they require is that others are harmed, so, no. Do you disagree, and think society should encourage such "institutionalized fantasy"?
[(cont.)]