Reddit reviews An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America

Social justice is the replacement for liberal (Calvinist) Protestantism that many have incorporated into their lives, as the Protestant consensus in Northern Europe/North America has evaporated. It has the same intellectual structure, the same underlying mythology (original sin/privilege, the elect/oppressed, etc.), the same millennarian eschatology (the second coming/smashing the patri/kyriarchy), and same flaws and excesses (intolerance, ostracism, moral smugness).

It can be a force for good, just as Christianity can be, but it can also be a force for extreme dickishness.

Edit: Joseph Bottum's An Anxious Age goes into a comprehensive sociological analysis of this phenomenon.

> For instance, they use the word "Cathedral" pejoratively to refer to mass mind control.

That came from Moldug's ideas about modern progressivism being the child of liberal Protestantism, the role of liberal activists as modern clerisy, and liberalism in general being best understood as a post-Christian heresy. The "cathedral" label was part of trying to contextualize modern liberalism and mock its pretensions to superiority, not to denigrate Christianity.

Of course, that point has been better made by non-crazy people like Joseph Bottum.

I would say that I have learned, or come to the conclusion, that the fundamental disagreement is not solvable, because it is grounded in rather deep-seated worldview/life approach differences that go well beyond red pill and blue pill sexual/relationship strategies.

Blue pillers, in general, think it is wrong to engage in generalizations, regardless of their truth (although they often very much doubt their truth as well) because they see this as dehumanizing and demeaning to the individuality of each person, which, in their worldview, is basically the "prime directive" -- and (and this is key), not just in pragmatic sense, but in a moral sense. Blue pillers have an air of moral superiority about them, which is sometimes express and sometimes implied, but almost always present. It mirrors in many ways the phenomenon that Joseph Bottum describes in his book An Anxious Age.

Red pillers tend to be more pragmatic in their approach/worldview, and see generalizations (if generally true in substance) as being very useful rules of thumb to shape behavior, even if they recognize that they are not applicable to every single individual, and in every single context. The approach is pragmatic/rule-of-thumb, not categorical in practice (regardless of the popularized phrasing which can suggest that), but also not idealistic or moralistic.

This is a difference in mindset, worldview and life approach that is so fundamental that it renders it virtually impossible to have any kind of rational discussion which bears fruit between the interlocutors. It's why these threads just go round and round and round again, covering the same ground and never getting anywhere in particular -- it's two different worldviews, period. One side can't convince the other, because the entire thing is based on a deep-seated difference in worldview that shapes one's views and actions in life far beyond anything having to do with the red pill or its opposite.

Of course, this doesn't mean the entire exercise is fruitless. For while the interlocutors are generally not convincible, there are fence-sitters, lurkers and peanut gallery denizens who read and may be moved this way or that by what is said here, in ways that are hard to predict. And so it may very well have a greater purpose and impact than what is obvious from perusing the endlessly fruitless threads.

Has anyone read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age? I picked it up last week to start exploring his concept of the “buffered self” which helps explain the decline of the church in the West. I’ve read some other books on the topic (like Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age and Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion), both which offer some interesting ideas as to what caused the decline overall. There’s certainly a lot to explore, though given how complicated it all is.

After 10:36 on the 2nd part of the interview, the topic of discussion is no longer about An Anxious Age.