So, this image popped up on my social media radar, today. It, of course, turned into a dumpster fire of a conversation. And, unsurprisingly, it demonstrated Seth Andrew’s point.

So, I don’t listen to Seth’s show. I’m saturated with podcasts and also since I’ve felt like the atheist community has become largely a cesspool of infighting and absurdity (much like the local polyamorous community here in Philadelphia), I’m mostly unplugged from movement atheism. Aside from the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm people and their affiliates, especially The Scathing Atheist, I don’t listen to much atheist-oriented podcasts, anymore.

That is to say that I don’t know enough about Seth Andrews to know what his positions are, specifically. From what I do know about him (he’s a friend of friends), it seems he and I would agree on most topics. But when it comes to this post of his, I think I can say I agree with the underlying sentiment.

As a leftist, I see a lot worthy of criticizing on the left. The fact that actual NAZIs exist doesn’t erase this point.

Woke

I grew up attending a school back in the early 1980s, and graduated in 1996, in an educational environment which valued things such as tolerance, diversity, community, and social movements dedicated to making the world a more peaceful and just world. In those days, I didn’t know terms like “social justice” or “woke,” but those terms would have described the culture in which I grew. And, from what I can tell, those values are part of the culture of the current culture of that same school. 

I like those values. I still largely value the same types of things to this day. But I’m also critical of Quaker values, for a number of reasons. It’s true that in comparison with much of the rest of the world, and especially our own United States’ cultures (yes, plural), it’s pretty idyllic. But if I’m concerned with the truth and the striving for a yet greater world  and worldview, I will not ignore the relatively small imperfections just because larger ones exist.

When I read criticism, from the Right, of my own Leftist communities I see a caricature and often many outright falsehoods in such criticism. But I also see genuine misunderstanding; a failure of two framings, worldviews, and sets of values to understand one-another. In other words, I see authenticity on the Right, Center, etc when they criticize “wokeness,” even if I disagree with their criticism. It’s possible to be authentic and also be wrong.

I’m aware of the fact that I’m playing the game of life on easy mode. I’m aware that the color of my skin, my gender, my sexual preference, and many other facets of my life give me an automatic set of advantages in our society that I am able to easily ignore or shrug off. That’s what privilege is; I’m able to not be faced with certain social injustices that many other people cannot ignore nearly as easily or at all. 

I also have some aspects to my life that give me a disadvantage, though this disadvantage is significantly less likely to get me discriminated against, beaten, or killed. But I am aware of the privilege which practicing traditional relationship structures and being religious (especially Christian) provides in our culture. 

The fact that I’m aware of this, that I’m (too some extent, at least) woke is, I think, a good thing. I’m aware that the tiny amount of discomfort and annoyance I have to deal with when trying to explain what being nonmonogamous means, or why being an atheist is not “just as bad as being a fundamentalist,” is easy in comparison to being (for example), a POC trans woman. But it’s still true that the world would be a better place, that justice would be better served, for those small injustices not to exist, right?

That is, even the small injustices are still unjust.

Providing NAZIs with “Cover”

The image above was posted to a facebook group I belong to. And since I decided to procrastinate at work, I decided to scroll through some of the comments below it. Now, the comments were all over the map, and there were many I agreed with and many that were making Seth’s point for him. 

The accusation is that people like Seth, and his defenders (in terms of this post from which the image derived), are spending too much time being critical of the Left while not paying sufficient attention, or perhaps out-right denying, the reality and threat of actual NAZIs. 

I don’t know how many actual NAZIs there really are. And if we added the white supremacists, white nationalists, and all the other bigots in the world, I imagine that the number would be “way too many” of all of them. Mostly because any number is way too many, in my estimation. 

But can we agree, I hope, that not all of the people on the Right, and especially the Center, are NAZIs or other bigots? I’ll assume we’re in agreement there. So, then, are those same people overwhelmingly complicit with many of the goals of all those NAZIs et al? That is, are the people who exist in the gray part of the continuum between woke progressive social justice warrior and actual NAZI all providing cover for NAZIs, insofar as they disagree with any particular pertinent conclusion of the woke Leftist in question?

I mean…I don’t know. It seems to me that many of them probably aren’t. And then I’m reminded, once again, of Sam Harris.

See, Sam Harris is seen, by many on the woke Left, as providing cover for the Right, especially insofar as he is willing to have conversations with people who have all sorts of questionable political perspectives. Whether it’s Charles Murray or Ezra Klein, Sam Harris is willing to have difficult conversations with people he doesn’t necessarily agree with. And Sam Harris, being human, is going to make mistakes, have bad ideas, and disagree with you (no matter who you are).

But there is a sort of irony here, since it was Sam Harris who, for me anyway, introduced the idea of moderates providing cover for extremists. In his case, he’s talking about moderate Muslims, Jews, and Christians providing ideological and political cover for extremists within their communities. In other words, people on the Left who criticize free speech advocates, such as Sam Harris, because they provide cover for the far-Right are utilizing the very same type of argument that Sam Harris uses against the Left for defending Islam and religious belief in general.

It seems to me that we might, as a culture, need to take a closer look at the logical structure of these similar arguments to see what values we might choose to apply to them. 

The Relativity of “Liberal”

In our various ideologies–whether they are political, religious, etc–there will be people who exist on greater or lesser fringes or closer to some cultural center or “norms” (which, of course, shift with history). 

In politics, we have the familiar Left/Right and Libertarian/Authoritarian diagram, as below:

This is the diagram which Seth’s meme refers to, and which largely encapsulates the various political ideologies in much of the world (though I’m sure it has it’s critics). 

For a person on, for example, the far right of this but towards the bottom, we have what we call, in the U.S., a “Libertarian.” They have tendencies towards a free market (which usually includes free expression) and allowing that market to choose who is successful and who is not. Our efforts determine our place in society, and they just want governments to generally leave them alone; lower taxes, legal drugs, smaller government. 

Looking at them from the point of view of someone from (again, for example), the upper left region of this diagram, one can obviously see where they would conflict. And they would not agree on very much, at least politically. 

But what about someone closer to the center? Where does a “classical liberal” land on this diagram? Are they near the center? A little more to the right? to the left? Above or below the horizontal line? To be honest, I’m not sure. I know Sam Harris thinks of himself as a classical liberal, and I know I share some of those values, but what this really means is Sam and I are definitely not in line with the culture of progressive wokeness.

Wait, but I thought I was woke? I thought I was progressive? I’m aware of my privilege and I want the world to keep learning and evolving into a better world, so then the question becomes to what extent are the cultures who refer to themselves as woke and progressive reflect the same values as those of liberalism. I mean, I know a lot of the woke progressives detest liberals, and this means that both the Trump-supporting MAGA hat wearing crowd and those they refer to as “libtards” often both dislike liberals, but I am not sure they are referring to the same groups of people when they use the term liberal.

For me (and, I think, Sam Harris), liberalism is about freedom of thought, speech, and determination in life. The idea is that there isn’t an overbearing cultural or social authority demanding submission to an ideology. No church, political party, or moral framework being imposed from above telling me how to live my life. I can choose to be what I want to be. That’s the gist.

To the MAGA crowd, it means a whiny snowflake artsy type with purple hair, probably a Wiccan, and probably a bunch of homos and lesbos. They are brainwashed and hopelessly naive, and most definitely won’t survive without the mommy state to protect them.

To the Progressive woke Left (which the previous crowd ironically includes within its collective term libtards, obviously derived from “retarded liberals”), “liberals” are the comfortable, entitled, and largely privileged center. They are hurting progress by being (ignorantly) politically tied to the corporate powers, and they are part of the problem. Because while the political Right, including those ubiquitous NAZIs, are the actual drivers of everything awful and bigoted, the liberals are just standing by with their Amazon Prime and brunches to be aware of the struggle against the impending fourth Reich. They are complicit.

In other words, both the Left and the Right view the center as complicit in the other’s destruction of America (or ‘Murica, depending). I mean, those are the framings, anyway. Except those framings are both dubious. 

There is a real divide in values here. And while it’s not binary, it’s definitely fractured and potentially irreconcilable. What’s worse, even if one of them were actually more rational, evidence-based, or even just plain right, the other factions would never be able to see it because of the nature of human tribalism and the subsequent demonization and enmity.

So, we’re fucked. Might as well just blow it all up. It’s all corrupt. Let’s just drain the swamp, completely. 

Oh fuck, I think I just figured out why we are here, at this political moment….

Where’s my MAGA hat….

And so I’ve found myself having slippery-sloped myself into the centrists’ nest, looking at the Left with distance and the beginnings of distain. I’ve become “problematic” and I’m probably providing cover for the Right and possibly for NAZIs, because I, indeed, will fight for a person’s right to say a thing even if I disagree with them. In fact, for many years part of my signature file on my personal emails is this exact phrase:

I’ll fight for a person’s right to speak so long as that person will, in return, fight to allow me to challenge their opinions as the content of their ideas merit.

This is the core of my ideological values. This is my highest goal. And I think I have found myself uncomfortable with the parts of the Left which are slipping from the libertarian left to the upper, Authoritarian, left.. So when I see memes such as the one below, I feel a pang of agreement.

And then I have the thought; shit, am I an alt-right type, about to be red-pilled at any moment? Do I have to, contractually, start attending Trump rallies?

I sure hope not, because fuck those guys.

I mean, whenever I engage with people on the left, I find we have largely the same goals and beliefs, but I think we might have different values, insofar as some of the Left seem, to me, to be advocating for a kind of world where certain ideas, words, and criticisms are “problematic” and should be ostracized and possibly outlawed. And people get booted from communities for being critical or not toeing the political line. And then I just realized (or was this all a set-up?) that I’m describing how those snowflakes on the Left are so politically correct that they can’t handle any criticism and live in their little “libtard” bubble, and so I might as well go get a MAGA hat, because these questions are obviously binary and you are either with the snowflakes or you are against them.

And it is exactly here where I think the problem exists.

We are Gray. We stand Between the Candle and the Star…

Because these questions are not digital nor binary. We have gotten to a place in our society that there is, for some people (and they are quite vocal) a kind of purity test that one must submit to. That’s how it feels, anyway. That’s not the truth, because the reality is much more nuanced than that, but the arguments on social media are the loudest, most angry, least-nuanced people who are the ones who keep coming back. Any attempt to see the gray areas between positions are not disallowed, but they are quickly scrolled past, at best, or labeled as giving cover by those loud voices.

Because to say something like “NAZIs have the right to speak,” whether or not you add the epithet “fuck NAZIs” is allowing a genuinely awful and destructive set of ideas to exist out loud, in the world. Those woke progressives, doing the necessary fighting against actual NAZIs, will so often bridle at any criticism of them. They are doing holy work, after all. The NAZIs cannot be allowed to return to power, so there is no room for criticism of their methods or ideology, because ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIs!

But this is a cover, and I see right through it. Nobody likes criticism. I’ll bet the Inquisitors would have responded the same way, as they were battling ACTUAL HERETICS! The analogy is weak, I know, because heresy is a label for being wrong about a thing that isn’t even real, and actual NAZIs are real people doing actual harm to real people, but the structure of the defensiveness is the same. 

And this is where we need to be able to pay attention. Because whether we are defending our wokeness, our inquisition of heretics, or our Nazism, it is the same set of human behaviors, tribalism, and groupthink at work. That is, it’s not the content of the arguments I’m objecting to (please, keep fighting NAZIs!), but it’s the unwillingness to clean one’s own house.

All criticism must start within one’s own self and one’s own group. It must be built into the fabric of your fight. So that when @centrist_John2472 on Twitter points out that your ideology, method, etc might be irrational or problematic itself, pointing out that you are fighting actual NAZIs sort of misses the point. We need to make each other stronger and better by hearing what we and our loved ones might be doing wrong, openly and enthusiastically, or we risk calcifying orthodoxy into our communities and ideologies.

A Rebel is Gonna Rebel

What happens when you tell a child not to do something? What happens when a word is a “curse” word (the history of that concept is really interesting, btw) or when a certain group is anathema? When you forbid something, it becomes interesting and potentially drawing to people, especially if they are already largely dismissed or socially awkward.

Forbidding words, groups, or ideas might be done with good intention, but it will never work. It’s pragmatically not feasible, and will cause a backlash. You want to understand the alt-Right? just look at human behavior in general. Humans go where they are told they shouldn’t go, and do what they shouldn’t do. How many kinks are formed by this very notion?

That’s why Donald Trump is so loved and revered by so many people; he doesn’t give a fuck. In his case, I think it’s partially narcissism and ignorance as opposed to mere rebellion, but it’s also just classic bad boy entitled swagger. It’s a rebel without a clue nor care.

It’s as American as it gets.

So, to the Left. I’m with you. We need to grow, progress, and make the world better. But the more you make ideas taboo and define yourselves as woke (fellow movement atheists, remember how the Brights were reviled? It’s the same thing), the more you are going to be ignored. The Right will never cede to your wisdom, whether you are right or not. They are just going to be human and tell you to fuck yourself and call you a snowflake, because nobody likes being told what to do. So, enjoy being right and also enjoy watching Trump win again while the Right continues to ignore, not understand, and yet still win on the political stage.

And to the Right, you’re acting like a damned child. You’re selfish and you’re woefully ignorant of so many things. I also know that they are not likely to be reading this, so that was really for the Left as well. Because that’s what they hear from us, and it’s not going to work. If you’re ideas are correct, then argue your points. Because I think we have reality on our side. But first we need to take the self-righteous stick out of our asses. Or we will lose any chance to save the future of this society and culture. We, on the Left, need to drain our own swamp, because we know the Right has no interest in actually doing so.

I think the Right is incorrect in maintaining capitalism and the like. I think a socialist direction is better. But the more we, on the Left, slide into authoritarian thinking, the more the Right will ignore us. So yes, there are real, actual, NAZIs out there. And yes, we have actual homophobic, Christian dominionist, and greedy capitalist politicians supporting this Trump administration and raking in millions while fucking over the environment, the majority of the people, and the place of The United States in the world. 

And if they keep up their trajectory then we would not only have a Right wing capitalist society, but eventually it will become more and more authoritarian. And then we truly will be a culture of Right and Left authoritarians yelling at each other, and all the rest of us caught in the middle as the country, and the world, slowly dies. And the Left will lose this fight, almost certainly.

To everyone: stop the authoritarian dictator within yourself, first.