So...I love to frame my opinions in humanism and atheism. Even if I'm not an atheist any more, my political perspective effectively involves me acting as if I am. And I tend to invoke humanism in my own perspective. But does humanism necessitate believing what I believe?
Eh...I'd say no. One could make a lot of different decisions in building up their worldview.
So let's start with philosophy and theology, pretty basic, yeah. I guess my position is the position most humanists take. Biology, yeah. Although many atheists dont study the actual history of humanity super deeply. And they can go in different directions from there. Especially going into morality.
Like, for me, morality is a response to a darwinistic world. It's a survival strategy. But it's very well possible to go in other directions. Fascists love to invoke darwinism to argue life should be a survival of the fittest struggle, I watched a video where some guy was talking about reading Mein Kampf recently and that's where Hitler went, for example. A lot of racists will use theories about the biological differences between races to argue for racial hierarchies. A lot of fascists, even today, are secular. Look at European politics. Western germany's brand of conservatism is that of Fredrich Merz and the Christian Union party. And that's the better of the conservative parties. The east germans are less religious and their opinions on "god said so" are replaced with just rank racism and a desire to return to authoritarianism a la the USSR. So you can be secular and still have crap opinions. And really really bad ones.
Ayn Rand was an atheist. She went in this direction of extreme selfishness and hyper capitalist perspectives. At the same time, the Marxist Leninists also were also atheists, and argued religion was the opium of the masses and counter revolutionary or whatever. They basically built up their own weird state religion around communism with all of these doctrines they were encouraged to believe based on the threat of raw force if you didn't.
So...no....you dont need to go in the same moral or political direction as me at all. my own manifestations of morality and politics arise from my own historical context, where I reject the christian right's explicit brand of politics, and in response i get...secular liberalism. I admit, it's better this way, but it's not inevitable.
Even among western liberal perspectives, the exact manifestation could've changed. Had I been more economically successful and came from a different economic class, maybe I would have adopted more meritocratic attitudes instead and been more of a centrist liberal. After all, my political journey was basically....conservative, moderate conservative, libertarian, moderate, and then I just kept going left. My economics was driven specifically by the conditions of the great recession, which coincided with my own shift away from christianity and conservatism. It's very well possible under different circumstances, one could have gone a bit less left.
If I went left, had I not been convinced basic income could work, I might have just become a standard social democrat and more aligned with bernie's politics. My anti work politics feel natural to me as a rejection of the system as it exists, but again, it really did take me fricking dropping out of the labor market and realizing our fixation on work IS THE PROBLEM. Had I been more inclined to believe work was an inevitability, I might've just fit a more bernie sanders style mold.
The fact is, I dont have a monopoly on truth. my own politics arose as a response to my specific life path. A different life, in a different location, and things would've manifested differently. Atheists have gone in weird fascist or social darwinistic directions, they've become hardline libertarians. They've become communists. Among liberals, they become either centrist libs, or progressive libs, and my own brand of HCC is specific to me.
Dont get me wrong. At the end of the day my rejection of the christian worldview defined the start of my shift to the left in a real way, but that was basically a result of the political environment of the times, and my own real world lived in environment. You can theoretically go whatever way you want. Hell, some people even love to act like "cultural christianity" is a good thing. I think I've heard even fricking Richard Dawkins of all people refer to themselves as "cultural christians" and acting like western values owes a debt to christianity. Which...to me...I find a bit ridiculous. As I said recently, you take christianity out of western values and you make the western values better. You take the western values out of christianity and you get dangerous regressive extremism. The right and their version of "western values" are basically just....literally the worst aspects of those values. It's just extremist religion and work ethic. Thats all they really care about. All the pretense of freedom and democracy, they're willing to throw it away to defend the religion and work nonsense. But....yeah. Some atheists still...do that. I find it baffling, because its like "bro, you broke one form of social conditioning, why do you accept another?" But yeah.
I just wanted to write about this since it's been on my mind recently., especially with me going back over fundamentalist religion again listening to GMS vids.
No comments:
Post a Comment