Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.
I mostly agree-ish. But the priest is really a metaphor for us all. See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology. The problem there is rather simple: ideology is unstable, and people compensate for that via censorship. The reason people compensate that way is more complex… it has to do with the relationship they’ve created between themselves and the ideology, codependency. If the ideology is attacked, it feels like a personal attack. If the ideology is destroyed, it can feel like philosophical death. People, like the priest, respond like an act of self-preservation.
We do this with all kinds of topics. Sexism, racism, nazism, … the Right would also do this for communism and socialism. If someone came to you with a thought experiment to explore the merits of racism from an objective perspective, how easy would it be to participate? Not so much, reasonably so, I’d imagine.
You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored. That sounds great and all… but it really isn’t any better. When humanities experience of the world revolved around their connection with god, it made sense to censor the heathens. Common sense to do so, dare I say. That idea doesn’t look so good in retrospect, but what’s changed now is just the context we live in. What hasn’t changed is the problem.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.
Every system has its gray areas and decision points.
That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.
Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.
How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That’s a good point, and it’s really what happens at a fundamental level when you decide your ideology is who you are. We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume, and we even joke sometimes like “you know if they’re vegan because they never stop talking about it.” It’s not rational to think the sanctity of an ideology should correspond with our own sanctity, but alas we fall into that trap so often as humans. How it happens can be like the frog in boiling water situation.
300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:
…all the while, they have no problem discussing the right way to punish your children versus a slave.
300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now. We’re doing the same stuff as before under the current cultural context. The only difference now is, we have more awareness of this dynamic while typically considering it just a thing of the past.
We should have conversations with people because that helps them understand. Sometimes when we try to convince them to instead just bury the thoughts because they make you a bad person, all we actually do is inspire more curiosity and secrecy. What we certainly don’t do is figure out where these crazy ideas came from in the first place, which means we aren’t exactly solving the problem with any sense of longevity via the approach of censorship.
My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes. We are always becoming something, never a static identity. If you were born Hitler, then you’d have grown up to be Hitler. The real question is, how do we use this knowledge for the betterment of mankind?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.
And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.
Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.
In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.
The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.
And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.
We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.
(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).
But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.
I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.
So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.