What’s your take on separating an ideology from its proponents? Because while centrism in principle isn’t necessarily bad, I most frequently see self-described centrists equating people, usually on the left, protesting against a bad thing with people, usually on the right, doing the bad thing that’s being protested against, as a way of arguing that nothing should be done about those bad things. And that is a position that ultimately only runs interference for people doing bad things.
WhiteHawk@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. Do you want to know whether I think that a proponent of an ideology having a view I don’t like means that their ideology is evil? I do not.
teuast@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
It’s kind of a philosophical question, I guess. A concrete example would be during the 2020 BLM protests, people who self-describe as centrists argued (and still do now) that the protests, because they occasionally led to property damage and theft, were as bad as the police murdering unarmed black people, and all the other aspects of the criminal justice system that disproportionately punish black people for existing. This is a pattern common to most issues that results in centrists most commonly aligning themselves with the status quo, which, in practice, means they spend a lot more time fighting against the left than against the right.
I think a lot of people associate centrism with, like, skepticism, the idea of which is that you apportion your beliefs to the ordinariness of the claim and the evidence available to support it. The problem there is that while a skeptic should not accept a claim without evidence, there should also be an evidence threshold at which they do accept the claim. For a small example, I as a skeptic am happy to take your word for it if you say you got a dog, because I know that’s a thing a lot of people do, though I’m always happy to look at photos of your dog; for a larger example, most people who practice skepticism do accept evolution and climate change, because of all of the evidence for them. Likewise, while it is good to not blindly base your values on what one side or the other tells you, after an assessment of the evidence on both sides of an issue, one should be able to come down on one side if that side is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong, and that is the step centrists appear to consistently neglect.
Therefore, in a situation like BLM, or climate change, or following the rest of the world’s lead on healthcare, if rigid adherence to centrism leads the centrist to say both sides are bad, then I think that’s a pretty convincing case of centrism doing a bad thing. And because in practice, it does that bad thing consistently across a range of issues, I think a pretty strong case could be made for centrism in general being a bad thing.
Here’s a longer-form dive into this idea.
Sorry for talking your ear off. I have the day off work.
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WhiteHawk@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Centrism isn’t about saying both sides are bad (though that would be true in the US, at least), it’s about saying both sides are right on some issues and wrong on others.
teuast@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Tell that to centrists, or at least the American ones.