A 2019 study by the “More in Common” project found “the more educated a person is, the worse their Perception Gap” their distorted view of and tendency to attribute extreme positions to those on the “other side.” But the “one critical exception” is that it applies only to Democrats, not Republicans.

submitted by Chipit from perceptiongap.us

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]wendolynne 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

"They don't believe in argument, they reject Western values like science and reason, and believe that the Enlightenment was the worst thing to ever happen in human history. Yes, they really believe this." - Well, I don't reject science or reason, and I believe the Enlightenment was great. And I'll debate you. Ad hominem attacks are pretty low on the pyramid.

[–]Chipit[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Well, I don't reject science or reason, and I believe the Enlightenment was great.

The concept of "race" was birthed by the Enlightenment. Before that, there wasn't any racism, just Christians and heathens. But the white man came up with the idea there is "objective truth" and used it to oppress peoples of color. The Enlightenment's ontology, rooted in the new science of the 17th century, created a vision of human beings in nature which provided weapons to a new race-based ideology which would have been impossible without the Enlightenment.

The entire idea behind today's Left-wing thought is that there is no objective truth, only differing points of view, all equally valid. For example, there is no valid genetic basis for human intelligence, there are merely different kinds of intelligence. Native Americans do poorly at intelligence tests designed for whites, but excel at tests designed to measure storytelling intelligence.

White supremacy as enabled by the Enlightenment is most commonly conceptualized as a way for lower-class whites to feel socially superior to people from other ethnic backgrounds. More important, though, white supremacy is a tried-and-tested means for upper class whites to grow their wealth and power. This thought is all over the place on the Left and I am astonished that you are not familiar with it.

[–]wendolynne 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I have never heard of racism being tied to the enlightenment before. citations please.

[–]Chipit[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Here you go: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/

[–]wendolynne 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Ah, I see the confusion now. This article is about the "Social Justice Warriors" (SJW), a very vocal and radical subset of the left. I don't claim to represent them. The author of the article appears to be a liberal who is also frustrated by trying have a rational discussion with these SJW.

There are lots of factions on the Left, and it is a mistake to assume everyone is locked into a common groupthink.

As for blaming the enlightenment for racism, there may be some truth to it, or not, this article does not address that claim, which is what I was specifically asking for.

[–]wendolynne 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

For the record, I am also not a Trotskyite.

[–]Chipit[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The article is about Critical Theory, which powers the left. The idea that the Enlightenment birthed racism is not a new one, has been around for a while, and again I am gap-mouthed astonished that you are unfamiliar with it.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html

"At its heart, the movement contained a paradox: Ideas of human freedom and individual rights took root in nations that held other human beings in bondage and were then in the process of exterminating native populations."

Enlightenment thinkers including Locke and Kant advanced theories of scientific racism that had harmful consequences.

If you accept Enlightenment thinking like facts and logic, you are accepting and endorsing white supremacy. If not, please cite sources that support the far left's endorsement of white supremacy. I don't think I've encountered a white supremacist far leftist before, but there are all kinds out there. There are certainly enough racists on your side to make room for one, though.

If you can demonstrate where there is a credible, established effort to dismantle and disrupt Critical Theory on the left, I would very much like to see it. As far as I can tell, anyone with the courage to speak out gets cancelled.

As for blaming the enlightenment for racism, there may be some truth to it, or not, this article does not address that claim, which is what I was specifically asking for.

"Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.

"Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.

"For adherents to Critical Social Justice Theory, then, there’s just no point to engaging in conversation or debate with people with whom they disagree. They reject the premise that such a thing is possible at all, because what is discussed or debated are, if changeable, in some sense matters of opinion. They don’t see the world this way at all, though. “Racism is not a matter of opinion” is, after all, one of their thought-stopping mantras. For them, disagreements across a stratifying axis of social power are a matter of being, experience, reality, and even life and death. These are not matters to be debated; they’re far too important for that."