After talking about the Nietzism aspect of Mark’s readings that we read from last week, that helped me better understand the concept and connect his ideas with Josh’s in how they were either similar or different. From what I got from our talk in class is that Josh Mitchell does agree with Mark that there is a relationship between Christianity and identity politics.
What I liked about the reading we did for class this week was how Josh Mitchell started talking about what an identity is first, before he even got into explaining identity politics. I also liked how he talked about inheritance and how in American society we kind of went from talking about inheritance and then that changed to identity. He provided two explanations for identity. The first one is that identity refers to “kind” and how it went from something unstable to stable.the second version is a more radical meaning of the word which is that it evolved into the specification of a relationship. In the way he described it, it makes me think of how people have relationships with each other such as owing a debt (which he uses as an example). In this way, the second meaning of identity is where we see the transgressor and innocent victim relationships emerge. The victimhood aspect of identity politics somewhat reminded me of what Gad Saad talked about in his book the parasitic mind.
How each political party responded to identity politics is also quite interesting. The Republican party defends ideas on market commerce and tradition (going against marxism and progressivism). I believe he is saying that identity politics gets rid of the physical aspects of payment that the republican party believes in through working you will receive payment.
The gist is that the republican party doesn’t like identity politics but the democratic party does.
The whole mercy and justice correlation were interesting as well since mercy can supplement justice but can not be the substitute for it.
The way that Riley explained how identity politics is connected to Christianity made it more clear to me. The ideas of transgressions and moral purities come from Christianity. When the world is created by a pure entity, God, out of that we get humans who make wrong decisions (transgressions) and sins emerge. Sins are then become permanent stains on human beings. How they can rectify the moral good is by becomes an issue. However, God solves the issue in a supernatural way by creating another supernatural being that then beings the scapegoat and pays all the debts for the sinners in the community.
I’m not very religious but I know the basics so sometimes its nice to get a reminder on how it works.
Josh Mitchell is interested in how the western world thinks on western problems. There is a hint of Christianity there even though we do not even realize it. Therefore Christian foundations become inescapable since they become entangled with cultural discourses and affect the way that members of society think about things
I thought that Joshua Mitchell posed an interesting phenomenon of a world where transgressors were gone entirely. He framed a question of can the innocents be innocent without transgressors? After one purge takes place and white heterosexual males are gone then another group of transgressors ultimately will take their place and the cycle keeps repeating itself until the last identity group is reached. This group then takes on the stance of the innocent victim only to actually be using just enough power to scapegoat and urge its transgressor.
One reply on “Blog Post week of 11/9”
I also found it interesting that there were different interpretations of Nietzsche’s description of the relationship between truth and power. I think that Mark Mitchell had a misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and thought that Nietzsche was advocating for the will to power. What he means by will to power is that all living things are trying to expand their power over others. In reality Nietzsche claims that there is a complicated relationship between truth and power and that the two concepts are intertwined. This made me wonder: What are the conditions of us knowing what is true? Does the knower of truth have to have specific qualities or training to see the truth? Can we think of truth independently or superior to other values? What further complicated the relationship between truth and power is that there is a relativism with truth. According to different religions and cultural backgrounds there are often different interpretations of what is true and how we can go about seeking truth. For instance, within Puritanism, Puritans believed that there was only one truth and if you did not believe in that truth then you were a sinner. They were not relativists in any sense. This relates back to Mark Mitchell’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspective. There was a relativism in what Nietzsche and Mitchell believed to be true in their interpretation and Mark Mitchell tried to use Nietzsche’s words to back up his perspective on the will to power. Wokeists also play into this discussion of truth because oftentimes they were similar to Puritans in the sense that they thought their truth was the only correct truth and they would shut down any opposing viewpoints.