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Analogies to Religion as a Conversation Stopper: A brief-ish thread.
Everything I don't like is a religion. That's more or less the message these days, at least when what you don't like is the Left, or social justice, or whatever the hell you happen to have convinced yourself "postmodernism" is. 
You can imagine how these go. White privilege is *like* original sin, wokeness is *like* salvation, etc. etc. And since all these things are *like* religious things, the thing these things constitute is like a religion. For a recent example, see here.
Ladies and gentlemen, these are parlour tricks, and not especially good ones. But they have a pedigree. Anthropologists have been performing some version of them for well over a century. Gift-giving in Polynesia, hygiene in Brazil, cattle rustling in Sudan: all religious.
Now as a rule, anthropologists are easily impressed, but even they eventually grew tired of the game. Hell, some began to flat-out satirize it.
sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1…
sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1…
Because you can do it with virtually anything.
Yet it still gets played, and played with such enthusiasm and regularity that it cries out for an explanation. After all, we already have a perfectly adequate word at our disposal to describe whatever social justice leftism is: ideology. So why muddy the waters with religion?
At one level, it seems quite straightforward: This is a rhetorical move to cast the Left as irrational, maybe even anti-rational, and therefore unfit for deliberative democracy. Just as you can't argue someone out of their faith, you can't argue someone out of SJWism. So why try?
OK, makes sense. But it's strange to see this argument coming from the mouths of people who celebrate free speech and valorize its truth-identifying power. On the one hand: "We are champions of reason," but also "These people cannot be reasoned with."
Funny how that works.
Funny how that works.
And the more you look for it, the more you see it. What else do you think they're doing when they accuse us of virtue signalling? No longer zealots, now we're con artists, pretending to be something we're not.
Different tactic, same strategy.
Different tactic, same strategy.
It's about killing a conversation. Or, if not quite a conversation, it's about giving critics of the Left an excuse to not take its ideas seriously.
Why do they do this? I'm not entirely sure and I don't want to generalize. A power play, surely. But for some (certainly not all, probably not most, but for some), I think it also reflects a nagging doubt about the power of speech and its ability to persuade.
Which for obvious reasons is deeply ironic.
