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30 August 2024
Leftism, for the purposes of this post, could have two different meanings. In a broad sense, it is an active, politically-oriented humanism that focuses on this life, and is practically atheistic. More narrowly, it is a specific culture attempting to implement that kind of humanism, taking up particular causes such as anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism.
One approach to leftism is to think of it as a flag you fly. Your personality makes you the kind of person who is into it. If you had a different personality, you might be an "altruist", a more or less non-political humanist who also focuses on this life, and is also practically atheistic. Leftism allows you to resonate with yourself. In this it is not different from any other ideology, including Christianity.
People might like leftism for its sense of moral clarity. If you want to have strong feelings about right and wrong, you should seek to minimize uncertainty. This requires you to minimize how much you consider counterfactuals. So, it makes sense that you would gravitate toward a worldview that involves no uncertainty, where you can make your claims most strongly in the public sphere. People will not question your basic assumptions, and thus you can state things most strongly. This gives you rhetorical power, helping you to win political fights. Leftism is "activist" rather than "altruistic" (at least in emphasis), so it's important to win political fights.
Given that particular motivation for being a leftist, it makes sense that leftists would be humanists who focus on this life, and are practically atheistic.
By "humanist", I could mean something "philosophical", like in effective altruism. This "philosophical" humanism is open to / vulnerable to / ought naturally to lead to the idea of "expanding the moral circle", reasoning that since people expanded their circle of concern to include those people of other races, they should continue to expand their circle, leading to concern for non-humans. In that case, "humanism" is a particular region in the space of caring for sentient beings. Or, the "philosophical" bent of "philsophical humanism" could lead it to other conclusions based on reason.
Or, it could mean something "instinctual", in other words, humans have moral instincts, generally favoring human well-being, and people act on them, trust what they say unthinkingly. It's possible to have both an instinctual and philosophical humanism at the same time, or maybe for the two to mix in one thing. The more instinctive the humanism is, the more certitude you can have in holding to it.
Humanism is something that everyone approves of on some level, at least, all self-interested humans do, in the sense that what is good for humans is good for them. It's a relatively easy value for humans to rally around. Nobody acts like humanism is a crazy value to have. This reinforces leftists' certitude. Similarly, leftists assume that God doesn't exist for practical purposes (or are avowed atheists). Belief in God is controversial, but we all accept that the secular world exists. So belief in God does not allow as high a sense of certitude as practical atheism.
The benefit of increasing certitude is that it empowers and emboldens people to act. The drawback is if it is mistaken, causing people to do insufficient good, or cause gratuitous harm, because they are out of touch with reality.
Leftists are concerned about the truth. I recently [as of first drafting this post] listened to an episode of The Dig about US colonization of the Philippines. The Dig is a leftist podcast. The whole point of the podcast episode was that certain things had actually happened in the past (enactment and enforcement of colonial US policies, Filipino migration to the US, labor agitation). Similarly, I have listened to some episodes of Citations Needed over the years (another leftist podcast) and the whole premise of the show is that people say misleading things which need to be exposed. The truth is something out there that we don't just know without listening to it, uncovering it, etc. The guest on The Dig, a college professor, had to do research to write his book. He didn't just know everything in the book before he started working on it. Also, reason is employed to extrapolate from evidence to discover the truth, something that is foundational to Citations Needed.
I can't say that I know everything about leftism, but only its most obvious features. Those features (the vibe and subject matter of podcasts and online articles) make me think that leftism is not friendly to the practice of questioning the foundations of morality. In other words, the truth is out there to be discovered, and rationally examined, but the truth about what morality is and where morals comes from is not out there to be discovered and rationally examined, rather it's something that we know innately (instinctively). Or it is simply not the practice of the left to ask if its ideas of moral truth could be wrong. So this seems to be a turning away from leftism's commitment to the truth.
Does it matter what the foundations of morality are? Is answering that question really going to lead someone to say that murder is OK (to pick one obvious example)? To the second question, I think the answer is no, but I say that because I've thought about why it's wrong according to my theory of morality's foundation, and my reasoning for why it is that way leads me to commit to other features of my worldview that affect how people should be treated, and what really constitutes their well-being, causing me to diverge from some other people's moral approaches, though we all agree murder is wrong. Morality is a huge part of leftism and politics in general, and so leaving it as a blank spot on the map of the world is likely to fail to discover some relevant truths.
Similarly, leftism's practical atheism and emphasis on this life, to me, seems to be a turning away from the commitment to truth. Asking the public sphere to be theistic is a lot, but I don't think I'm pushing the Overton Window too far to suggest that ethically-oriented atheists and practical atheists (both "activists" like leftists or "altruists" like effective altruists) spend a certain amount of time seriously considering arguments for the existence of God and also the consequences to doing good / pursuing human well-being in case there is a significant chance that God does exist (something like at least 10% chance). I think that openness to reality as it could be, out there, should cause us to consider whether God exists, and atheists and practical atheists don't currently seem to do that.
These issues with truth are the main criticism I would make to leftists, since I feel like it might make sense to them from their current worldview. But my own position is that of ethical theism, that the well-being of God is important and neglected, and so on an emotional level I react against atheistic humanism, one which explicitly rejects questions of God's well-being, or naive humanism, which unthinkingly assumes that God's moral status doesn't matter.
However, there are some points where I agree with leftism. I want to see people becoming more active and having more certitude in their pursuit of the good (although I don't want to maximize activity and certitude), and hopefully that can come without being at the expense of the truth or God. I would say that working toward a better negotiation between the three values of seeking activity, truth, and God has been a significant part of my life.
Also, while I think that the public sphere should optimize for people's relationships with God and eternal well-being, what is upstream of that is not necessarily out of line with any particular political philosophy. I recognize that this life has to be governed somehow or other, and non-capitalistic approaches are not off the table. I'm not dogmatic on political philosophies, but instead assume that multiple philosophies could be good if they were well-implemented, and all are bad if they are poorly-implemented.
Considering some of the projects of "narrow" leftism, I can think of ways that capitalism is bad for people spiritually (i.e. threatening their relationships with God and likelihood of being with God eternally), such as its fostering of consumerism. Likewise colonialism is psychologically traumatic, leaving people distracted by it for years after it is officially over. This distraction can incline people to see each other as enemies, rather than focusing on the enmity of Satan.
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The narrative of leftism can involve the "little guy" being fooled by the "big guy", the system, the power structure, into going along with the big guy's interests. This could encourage distrust of the big guy. Naturally, one could identify God as the ultimate big guy. Is God a bad big guy? Do we need to cultivate our self-governance so that we don't get taken in by him? We need to know whether God is good or bad. If he really is bad, then we should resist him. But if he really is good, then obviously he is not literally all-powerful (something constrains him, perhaps his goodness), and there is some other power structure that opposes him, which pushes against him to make the world gratuitously bad. That power structure is inclined to produce propaganda of its own, which can fool us into doing things with evil consequences, when we think that we are doing things with good consequences.
In Nathan J. Robinson's "Manufacturing Consent and the Case of Satan", from leftist magazine Current Affairs' July/August 2022 issue, he develops an account of Satan as the "little guy" who rebels against the corrupt bureaucracy of God. Robinson begins his piece with with a disclaimer saying that it isn't an attack on Christianity, but rather an "exercise in critical thinking, by taking one of the most familiar known stories of Good and Evil, and flipping it on its head as completely as possible to show how even in the case of the supposed most evil character conceivable, an alternate story could be constructed using additional information that might give us a wholly different understanding of what is going on." People tend to think that they're David and their enemies are Goliath, and often people's enemies are both David and Goliath at the same time, in different ways. From the perspective of a political person, especially a practically atheistic political person, the world is ruled by individual elites and elite culture. Powerful minorities who hold onto power. Perhaps in this era, neoliberals or something like that. But from the perspective of a religious person, the world is ruled by practically atheistic ideologies. Both secular leftists (the "little guys" or their champions) and the elite are practical atheists -- by their trusting and acting, they deny the existence of God. And ethically, they are humanists or egoists, not theists (so they do not acknowledge the moral status of God). The dispute over whether "big guys" or "little guys" rule is somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether people acknowledge God. I try to be politically neutral (this is a political choice). This enables me to focus on religious outcomes. As a political person, my alignment with the power structure (at least my de facto alignment by not being an activist against it, if that's how my attempts at neutrality are to be construed) may make me look like I'm on the side of "Goliath". But as a religious person, I am on the side of "David", that is, God, who is the dirt that we step on.
Everything we do to someone else, God, as all-knowing, experiences firsthand. God is good, goodness itself. (Morality is a personal being whom we call "God".) So when we do wrong, we violate God himself. He lives in the present moment and has had to live through century after century of us abusing each other and rejecting him. Because we are the ones who choose whether to trust God, he has to come up with a version of himself and his religion which we'll trust, which is usually not the truth. He is the one who is maximally committed to us, and we are not as committed to him. So we have the power in the relationship. We set up ourselves as gods over each other and over him.
God can't do wrong, so he must contract with evil beings to will our temptation, and they have extracted terms from him that make the world gratuitously evil. We don't understand where this evil comes from, and sometimes it tempts us to lose trust in God, or tempts us to willfully reject God. People have hard jobs, and so does God.
Sometimes "big guys" can be good. Or the good person in a story can be simultaneously both the "big guy" and a "little guy". And sometimes the "little guy" (both individually and as a culture) can be bad.
Doing the right thing requires us make choices of which morality to pursue. In order to do the most good according to one frame, we must do bad according to another. To pursue religious good seems to threaten secular or political good, and vice versa. Robinson seems to want us to use critical thinking (or a similar word would be "discernment"). He offers a kind of temptation to question Christianity (although that may not be his real objective). I offer a temptation to question secular leftism. After either there could be a time of confusion, where a person needs to use their own mind to sort things out. So truth-seeking (critical thinking and discernment) is needed.
If by chance a leftist reads this and wants an introduction to my views, I have another blog they can read, more developed although somewhat provisional. I think it's important to communicate the right mood along with the right thoughts, and that plain writing is somewhat bad at this, so I have a demo of an album I recorded that covers a lot of the ideas I'm into, including some relevant to leftism. I also have an attempted proof of the existence of God, which is an important part of my moral foundation.