Thanks for another excellent and exciting post. "Nazi" has, for me, always been a label and little more, a particular form of evil that has no history, no period of development, almost no connection, on the surface, to deep social networks and their workings, including private life. I was happy to see the emphasis here and in your comment below on the inner world. I used to think that people who lived on their phones were self-absorbed, but I see now that they are other-absorbed. "A medium conducive to dialogue," you write. My thought was, hmmm, dialogue with people who have nothing to say? I celebrated a birthday recently with my two brothers and one of my sisters. Some of took long drives to make this happen. We all agreed, sitting around a birthday cake for a couple of hours, that a medium is no substitute for the face-to-face contact that helps us express our inner lives and respond as others do the same. I am happy to be among the people who know what we are missing. A great read, made my day. Thanks!
Thank you, Allen. Your comment about using the term *Nazi* in a non-specific or non-historical way truly explains a lot about how we use language and how a social confusion emerges there.
I'm intrigued by your idea about being "other absorbed" vs. self absorbed where social media is concerned. I mean, "other absorbed" sounds selfless or altruistic, which in the context of social media is not the case, and yet it captures something that I can't yet formulate, an unhealthy, obsessive preoccupation with others that has more to do with oneself than with those "others". . . a perpetual comparison with those others and a need to be "liked" by them, to find affirmation.
"Nazis, Nazis everywhere, yet no-one stops to think," if I may paraphrase Coleridge to breaking point. The resort to the 'lowest common dominator' (Nazi Germany) has reached fever pitch in recent years, hasn't it? Yet there seems to be nothing to be gained in this analogy, which serves largely as an attempt at thought-stopping.
Remember the object-oriented ontologists I mentioned over at Stranger Worlds? One of them, Timothy Morton, engaged with me in the most unexpected fashion. While I was in Manchester over the summer, I ran a thread on TwiX about my first hand experiences of protestors in the city and how the news reporting on the rioting in the wake of the government's shockingly poor handling of the murder of small children was not reflective of the conditions on the ground. To this, Morton posted a single image of a rioter displaying a swastika. It was literally intended to end the conversation. I challenged him on it. He declined to discuss it further.
I mention this example, as this impulse to jump to the Nazis is the single least politically productive trend I can think of ('fascism' serves the same role of course). Once you've escalated to comparisons to the Nazis, any further thinking is ended. This is a disastrous approach!
I'm very pleased to see you getting good ground out of Midgley's work. I continued her project in this regard in The Mythology of Evolution. One of my purposes in this book was to avoid collecting under the banner 'atheist' (which is a problematic label precisely because at the intellectual end of the educational spectrum the label is avoided as passe and associated with 'the wrong sort of intellectual'). Instead, I grouped under the name 'positivists', a term which has a relevant history here, and seems to me somewhat 'safer', although still problematic in that it is not what such people call themselves. But herein lies one of the root-clusters of the issue: that there is a collective of like-minded folk who cannot recognise this quality about themselves. It is one of the major contemporary issues that does not get discussed.
Thus I continue to push to find ways to break through on the Covidian front, but struggle because militarising this front only exacerbates the problem in terms of further disrupting the lack of discourse. I know you have also struggled with this problem in your own contexts. What is needed is the precise opposite of the 'cardboard Nazi' manoeuvre: we need a framework that someone on 'the other side' can recognise themselves within, such that the conversation can be begun. And this, it turns out, is immensely difficult.
I hope that these scattered notes contain something of interest!
Thanks, Chris. I don't think there's anything wrong with using the Nazi analogy, and in any event, it's going to happen anyway. In fact, I think it ought to be used. The trouble is when it's used thoughtlessly as name-calling and part of a political expedient. No doubt Hollywood did the world a disservice by depicting Nazis as evil-minded lovers of destruction and murder. We would have been better off had they beed depicted as they were, which was "good folk" and believers in a better future that required some hard sacrifices. How one reaches lost souls or confused hearts it seems to me is another question altogether. I would say, at this stage of the game, start with getting folks off social media, and start designing a medium conducive to dialogue.
This is an important conversation to have and to keep having because it encourages us to examine whether certain patterns in human behaviour that keep repeating through history are, in fact, repeating once again. One pattern that's relevant both to Nazi Germany and to that of our own time is summed up in a line from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis: "Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." In this sense there's an analogy to be drawn between life under the Nazis and during Covid, as well as our current resistance to the idea of comparing the Nazi regime to the Covid regime and the incredulous scoffing endured by German Jews who tried to warn other Jews that after 1933 it was time to escape Germany before it got too late. The Holocaust didn't begin overnight: it was, for instance, more than six years between the Enabling Act of 1933 and the start of mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps in 1939. If you had told German Jews in 1933 that six years hence they'd be exterminated in gas chambers in the millions, how would most of them have reacted? Would they have scoffed incredulously in the way most people did when comparisons were made between the segregation of German Jews in 1933 and the segregation of the unvaxxed during Covid?
So thank you for engaging in this conversation, gentlemen. I do hope we continue talking about this stuff for years to come, especially down the road when the globalists inevitably declare the next fake pandemic, force the shots on us again, and attempt once more to separate the disease-spreading vermin from the compliant population in a much more ruthless, technologically efficient way, having learned their mistakes from the first try in 2020.
Thanks Harry. It's the idea that our culture is immune to barbarism, that we simply can't be evil because we're progressive and so open to diversity. How could such a culture ever be evil? Of course, the problem is that evil is generally done by folks who believe what they're doing is for the good.
Thanks for the discussion everyone! I personally suspect that invocation of Nazis/fascists is too ubiquitous at this point to have any plausible impact whatever the meaningfulness of the analogies or relevance of the history. I'm always looking for other metaphors and analogies that 'go through', as most cannot.
Furthermore, I have often pondered whether, as Asa says, "evil is generally done by folks who believe what they're doing is for the good." Although there is certainly a great deal of harm caused in this way, I do not know if the many other inspirations for evil do not, on their own, contribute enough terrible events to make it less than clear which way this balance tips.
Very Well done, Asa.
Thanks for another excellent and exciting post. "Nazi" has, for me, always been a label and little more, a particular form of evil that has no history, no period of development, almost no connection, on the surface, to deep social networks and their workings, including private life. I was happy to see the emphasis here and in your comment below on the inner world. I used to think that people who lived on their phones were self-absorbed, but I see now that they are other-absorbed. "A medium conducive to dialogue," you write. My thought was, hmmm, dialogue with people who have nothing to say? I celebrated a birthday recently with my two brothers and one of my sisters. Some of took long drives to make this happen. We all agreed, sitting around a birthday cake for a couple of hours, that a medium is no substitute for the face-to-face contact that helps us express our inner lives and respond as others do the same. I am happy to be among the people who know what we are missing. A great read, made my day. Thanks!
Thank you, Allen. Your comment about using the term *Nazi* in a non-specific or non-historical way truly explains a lot about how we use language and how a social confusion emerges there.
I'm intrigued by your idea about being "other absorbed" vs. self absorbed where social media is concerned. I mean, "other absorbed" sounds selfless or altruistic, which in the context of social media is not the case, and yet it captures something that I can't yet formulate, an unhealthy, obsessive preoccupation with others that has more to do with oneself than with those "others". . . a perpetual comparison with those others and a need to be "liked" by them, to find affirmation.
"Nazis, Nazis everywhere, yet no-one stops to think," if I may paraphrase Coleridge to breaking point. The resort to the 'lowest common dominator' (Nazi Germany) has reached fever pitch in recent years, hasn't it? Yet there seems to be nothing to be gained in this analogy, which serves largely as an attempt at thought-stopping.
Remember the object-oriented ontologists I mentioned over at Stranger Worlds? One of them, Timothy Morton, engaged with me in the most unexpected fashion. While I was in Manchester over the summer, I ran a thread on TwiX about my first hand experiences of protestors in the city and how the news reporting on the rioting in the wake of the government's shockingly poor handling of the murder of small children was not reflective of the conditions on the ground. To this, Morton posted a single image of a rioter displaying a swastika. It was literally intended to end the conversation. I challenged him on it. He declined to discuss it further.
I mention this example, as this impulse to jump to the Nazis is the single least politically productive trend I can think of ('fascism' serves the same role of course). Once you've escalated to comparisons to the Nazis, any further thinking is ended. This is a disastrous approach!
I'm very pleased to see you getting good ground out of Midgley's work. I continued her project in this regard in The Mythology of Evolution. One of my purposes in this book was to avoid collecting under the banner 'atheist' (which is a problematic label precisely because at the intellectual end of the educational spectrum the label is avoided as passe and associated with 'the wrong sort of intellectual'). Instead, I grouped under the name 'positivists', a term which has a relevant history here, and seems to me somewhat 'safer', although still problematic in that it is not what such people call themselves. But herein lies one of the root-clusters of the issue: that there is a collective of like-minded folk who cannot recognise this quality about themselves. It is one of the major contemporary issues that does not get discussed.
Thus I continue to push to find ways to break through on the Covidian front, but struggle because militarising this front only exacerbates the problem in terms of further disrupting the lack of discourse. I know you have also struggled with this problem in your own contexts. What is needed is the precise opposite of the 'cardboard Nazi' manoeuvre: we need a framework that someone on 'the other side' can recognise themselves within, such that the conversation can be begun. And this, it turns out, is immensely difficult.
I hope that these scattered notes contain something of interest!
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Thanks, Chris. I don't think there's anything wrong with using the Nazi analogy, and in any event, it's going to happen anyway. In fact, I think it ought to be used. The trouble is when it's used thoughtlessly as name-calling and part of a political expedient. No doubt Hollywood did the world a disservice by depicting Nazis as evil-minded lovers of destruction and murder. We would have been better off had they beed depicted as they were, which was "good folk" and believers in a better future that required some hard sacrifices. How one reaches lost souls or confused hearts it seems to me is another question altogether. I would say, at this stage of the game, start with getting folks off social media, and start designing a medium conducive to dialogue.
This is an important conversation to have and to keep having because it encourages us to examine whether certain patterns in human behaviour that keep repeating through history are, in fact, repeating once again. One pattern that's relevant both to Nazi Germany and to that of our own time is summed up in a line from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis: "Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." In this sense there's an analogy to be drawn between life under the Nazis and during Covid, as well as our current resistance to the idea of comparing the Nazi regime to the Covid regime and the incredulous scoffing endured by German Jews who tried to warn other Jews that after 1933 it was time to escape Germany before it got too late. The Holocaust didn't begin overnight: it was, for instance, more than six years between the Enabling Act of 1933 and the start of mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps in 1939. If you had told German Jews in 1933 that six years hence they'd be exterminated in gas chambers in the millions, how would most of them have reacted? Would they have scoffed incredulously in the way most people did when comparisons were made between the segregation of German Jews in 1933 and the segregation of the unvaxxed during Covid?
So thank you for engaging in this conversation, gentlemen. I do hope we continue talking about this stuff for years to come, especially down the road when the globalists inevitably declare the next fake pandemic, force the shots on us again, and attempt once more to separate the disease-spreading vermin from the compliant population in a much more ruthless, technologically efficient way, having learned their mistakes from the first try in 2020.
Thanks Harry. It's the idea that our culture is immune to barbarism, that we simply can't be evil because we're progressive and so open to diversity. How could such a culture ever be evil? Of course, the problem is that evil is generally done by folks who believe what they're doing is for the good.
Thanks for the discussion everyone! I personally suspect that invocation of Nazis/fascists is too ubiquitous at this point to have any plausible impact whatever the meaningfulness of the analogies or relevance of the history. I'm always looking for other metaphors and analogies that 'go through', as most cannot.
Furthermore, I have often pondered whether, as Asa says, "evil is generally done by folks who believe what they're doing is for the good." Although there is certainly a great deal of harm caused in this way, I do not know if the many other inspirations for evil do not, on their own, contribute enough terrible events to make it less than clear which way this balance tips.
With unlimited love,
Chris.