Yeah I guess is he is wrong if you are a nihilistic secular materialist, which is the dominant view.
Hearing a coherent view that is different is part of what’s interesting.
The dominant view? Weird definition of dominant. I happen to actually be something like a nihilistic secular materialist and as far as I can tell I'm in a vanishingly small minority. I see this kind of comment a lot and I am dumbfounded by it all the time.
Most scientists in the US believe in God or a higher power, most Americans do too. The current government is chock full of weirdos with supernatural beliefs and its common on both sides of the aisle.
Where are all these nihilistic materialists people are always talking about?
> Weird definition of dominant
By dominant, I mean among people who would read Plato.
Can you point me to a single academic department or branch of government who acts under different pretenses?
> Most scientists in the US believe in God or a higher power, most Americans do too
Ok. But this is mostly a result of unexamined conflicting ideas. The cultural domination overwhelms to the point where most people are secular materialists + God. Their assumptions are almost identical (God is a scientist, things just happen, etc). Radically different Christians do exist (God led me to the grocery store for a purpose), but it’s not the norm.
Do you subscribe to the idea that Christianity is not in decline?
> Where are all these nihilistic materialists people are always talking about?
The managerial class of western society.
I'm sorry, but I am firmly ensconced in the managerial class of western society and the people around me are not nihilistic materialists. They are, perhaps, liberal in the classical sense, but that isn't nihilistic materialism.
Almost all Americans believe in moral ideals, human rights, etc, etc, etc. Christianity may be in decline, but that is at least partially separate.
Well I agree that folk Christianity has morphed into a humanism. But what do those people do if you push on that. What intellectual framework do they use to make sense of the world?
In my experience the humanism part is an unexamined social nicety that isn’t consistent with the rest of their beliefs.
Genuinely, I think if you push on PMC types you will first, indeed, get some vaguely utilitarian thinking, but then if you push further, you will arrive again at teleological justifications. As far as I can tell, this kind of thinking is basically endemic in the human race and I frankly despair at the possibility of human beings crawling out from beneath it.
Its not a deep observation that you can't be a utilitarian without an enfolding moral framework and most people have one and in western civilization that framework is basically the one inherited from the cultural aether. From my point of view that kind of sloppy thinking is basically the same as believing in God.
I think there's a plurality of views in the US but material utilitarianism is how most people including scientists seem to argue for policy.
The current government is kind of an iconoclastic reaction to some of the recent failings of that view.
Please elaborate. Genuinely curious.
I'll be frank with my perspective: trying to understand recent (say the last 50 years) of US history on a "materialist -> idealist" axis is hilariously absurd. There has been literally no moment in the history of the united states that I can think of where anything like a truly materialist public facing justification for policy has ever been offered.
And while its true that the failings of the ruling cast tend to be mercenary in nature, which is to say that they are mostly out for themselves, this really is neither here nor there philosophically, and is more a condition of ruling classes everywhere and one not deeply related to the navel gazing of philosophers.
> There has been literally no moment in the history of the united states that I can think of where anything like a truly materialist public facing justification for policy has ever been offered
The key word there is public facing. Can you imagine a White House staffer suggesting a course of action based on a spiritual prompting? In Islamic culture that does happen. In ancient Greek culture that happened all the time.
The public message is rhetoric designed to appeal to whatever mythos exists in the public with a shred of meaning or importance.
Humans do tend to be spiritual (and I understand why you feel different), we just don’t have a society that’s providing narratives and explanations of the world that feed that desire.
Are you kidding? American leaders use spiritual justifications for their actions all the time, especially if you include value-laden statements about, for example, human rights, as fundamentally idealistic in nature.
The entire frame of American political life and foreign policy is idealistic in nature, not practical.
Just to chime in: it's entirely possible and not at all contradictory to believe in human rights and other base ideals/"moral axioms" while being a secular materialist. The only difference is in where the belief is justified.
I consider myself a secular materialist in the way it's been talked about here, yet I still hold those views that you deem "idealistic". I just rationalize their origin in a different way.
I always cared about those ideals (human rights and such) since I can remember, yet I hadn't even heard of the concept of God before the age of eleven. I vividly remember thinking "Damn, they gave the creator of this Universe the same name as the word they use when venting in frustration!"
Right, but I'd argue that if you believe that (for example) human rights are some kind of fundamental fact of the universe then you really aren't that different from someone who believes in God.
If you just have a preference for a world where people behave as though human rights exist, then you can be a materialist.
> believe in human rights and other base ideals/"moral axioms" while being a secular materialist. The only difference is in where the belief is justified.
Anything beyond convenience and conflict resolution is justified by a metaphysical belief in human rights.
I don’t think you are responding to my full comment.
Maybe so, but I think asking the leadership class to be anything but mostly selfish and mercenary is really moving the goalposts. I think its genuinely true that at any given moment in human history, from the medieval european "universal" catholic church to the Tibetan Buddhism, its people in charge are, according to the purported moral standards of the time, mostly out for themselves, but happy to use moral or mystical language to justify their position in the hierarchy. Given that, the current moment seems pretty much like any other with respect to the culture producing/running entities.
Maybe you just think that the decrease in the power of like evangelical Christianity or conservative Catholicism constitutes a turn towards materialism? I just don't see it. Unjustifiable metaphysical beliefs are rife in society and the decline of purely Christian hegemony (if it is happening at all, given that we have had a series of pure wins for Christians at the highest levels in this country recently) is a separate thing.
They are apparently too busy recycling ideas in academic philosophy to make it out to the local church of nihilistic materialism.
There's a strong argument to be made that Plato himself laid the seeds of nihilism and it's irrefutable that the Judeo-Christian conception of God would be radically different without it's heavy Platonic influence.
> Judeo-Christian conception of God would be radically different without it's heavy Platonic influence.
Yes.
> Plato himself laid the seeds of nihilism
No.