Astral Codex Ten

Christian morality

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Christian morality

Article

Christian morality is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 17, 2023 and November 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “kill them, horribly, in a way totally anathema to Christian morality”; “self-abnegation , which at least rhymes with Christian morality”. It most often appears alongside America, Athens, Christianity.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 17, 2023
  • Last seen: November 12, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
So, since the Nazis are bad, we should stick with slave morality, and view the increasing concern with victims as good, right? Girard is uncomfortable with this conclusion. He’s a conservative Christian, so he has to be against wokeness. But he identifies wokeness as increasing fidelity to the Christian imperative to care for victims. So he has to support something like “increasing concern with helping victims was good until about 1950, and then went too far and became bad”. This is a totally coherent philosophy that might very well be true. It’s just sort of awkward, and less elegant than his other claims, and he never really says it outright. A hostile reader would naturally accuse him of being a naive conservative: social progress was good right up until the point where it produced the society I grew up in, and then after that, it became bad.
It would help if Girard could come up with some specific way that wokeness went too far and became qualitatively different from the Christian imperative. The best he can do is sort of (very weakly, I almost feel like I’m reading subtext here) gesture at a kind of meta-victimization. Cancel culture is, in a sense, a return to the single-victim mechanism and Satan. Once again, we organize our ethics around a pantomime where if we could just get rid of these Bad People doing Bad Things, society would be safe and everyone would be happy. We have new names for the Bad People - racists, colonialists, fascists, “the alt-right”. But the fact that they cause all our problems and we have to suspend the normal rules of tolerance and civil rights in order to get rid of them stay the same.
Nietzsche wanted to rehabilitate pagan master morality, and Girard interprets Nazism as trying to enact this project. Victimize a bunch of innocent people - kill them, horribly, in a way totally anathema to Christian morality - to announce that victimizing people is back in fashion. Obviously this isn’t what the Nazis said they were doing, but Girard is a Continental philosopher and allowed to posit subtle psychological undercurrents, I guess.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
How come there isn’t a carefully-selected, persecuted group of people today who are morality-maxxing and doing much better than regular society? Is it the Mormons? Seems kind of disappointing, I don’t know, I kind of expected more than that. Is it woke people? I realize this answer will be unpopular, but if you’re a white male than wokeness involves a lot of self-abnegation, which at least rhymes with Christian morality, and they sure did grow quickly. It is effective altruists? I was going to say we weren’t growing fast enough, but 40% per decade is actually a low bar and we probably clear it easily. Maybe all we have to do is keep it up another 260 years!
Inline links: self-abnegation