Thread by @_kruptos

1. In order to properly work through the whole “racism” question, we have to understand that it emerges as a product of modern, liberal industrial society. Almost every aspect of the discourse is abstract, manufactured, a product of propaganda for political purposes.

2. Christians are especially easy to manipulate on this issue because of the injunctions to love your neighbor as yourself, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and even the call to love your enemy give unscrupulous people the opening to use these teachings for propaganda purposes.

3. But to help us even begin to understand the biblical material we have to grapple with how unnatural modern life is and how even many of the so-called “solutions” that try to solve the problem of created by trying to solve the so-called problems of race are. That’s a mouthful.

4. I recognize that because of the charged nature of this debate, there is really little way to win an argument here, so I am not really going to try. But I want to sketch out the problem, which is not always what it seems.

The main problem is that modernity is not natural.

5. What is natural and even healthy, is, to use a technical term, a high in-group preference. That is, I am biased to love and care for my family and my tribe, people with whom I have a kin relationship, ahead of others who are not.

6. Even when faith in Christ disrupts this somewhat, it is common to see people convert as whole families or tribes, even tribal federations. The Christian community becomes a family of faith. Even if you are aware of believers elsewhere, your relationships are with …

7. … your local faith community. Your life is bound within a web of personal relationships to real people. There were natural variations and hierarchies mirrored around the family structure.

Modernity disrupts these relationships.

8. With the rise of the merchant class in the west a number of ideas were introduced into the social consciousness. One of these being “equality.” Equality before the law. Equal representation. One man, one vote. This sort of thing.

9. This notion that society is based on the rights of the individual. Or that the individual was the basic unit of social and political organization was also disruptive. As was industrialization, which broke down the household as the basic social unit.

10. Additionally, the idea of merit was used to break down the political power of wealthy aristocrat or semi-aristocratic families. Power and wealth would not be passed on from parent to child through high in-group preferences. Ability would choose who would advance.

11. And here is where we can begin to clearly see the problems emerge.

What are the implications of the “meritocracy” and the ideas upon which it is built?

The meritocracy says, basically, that advancing the best and brightest is more important than the integrity of the family.

12. The “meritocracy” argues that building a rich, powerful, technologically sophisticated society is more important than having a society with a strong network of families and the communities upon which they are built.

13. You cannot maintain social and family cohesion and have a sophisticated industrial society at the same time. Why? Because the success of the great social project is more important than any institution in society. “Creative destruction.”

14. If I run a business, who should I hire? The best and the brightest? Over my own children?

Where will you find these best and brightest? You will scour “the nation” - itself an unnatural abstract construct imposed by propaganda - and advance the best and brightest.

15. They will be taken from their communities, eroding them and their social cohesion, in order to built the grand project of industrial power. Everything must be brought under the auspices of the technological system, from families to farms to communities.

16. But what happens if there is an unequal distribution of the kinds of skills necessary to succeed in this technological society? Generations before, these inequalities would have been dealt with locally among one’s own tribe or people.

17. As more people are brought under the technological system, this becomes a greater and greater problem. One of the foundations of the set of ideas that broke down the old order was this notion of “equality.”

18. As more and more are brought into the technical system they all want equality. The ideology has said this is the case. People are more or less the same and if someone isn’t advancing it must be a problem in the system. Why? Because all people are equal.

19. The interesting thing is that the same mechanisms that built the meritocracy were put to use to build DEI. It’s the same methods employed and it’s even employed in the same way.

20. The meritocracy argued against nepotism, breaking down those old family legacies of power by using the goal of “equality of opportunity” as its wedge, empowered by technical means of evaluating people’s abilities. The doing of this undermines more organic social organization.

21. Now DEI is employed to create a different kind of equality of opportunity. Not one based on a technical assessment of ability, but one based on more immutable characteristics of race, ethnicity or gender.

22. But these problems become problems because of the scale of modern technical society which broke people down and then tried to sort them by ability to give everyone equal opportunity. When this didn’t produce the desired results, new techniques were used to “solve” them.

23. But many of these problems are downstream of the scale of modernity and the technological society and the way that it breaks down natural, organic relationships between family, kin and neighbour.

24. Families and in-group preference, while it has been corrupted by sin is still its foundation in the created order. Most biblical teaching on loving neighbors and dealing with enemies flows out of the scale of organic communities.

25. The problems we face are not theological problems, but problems of the artificial nature of modernity, its scale and it’s technical reality, it’s unnaturallness and the way that it demands all things conform to ideology and technical realities.