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The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

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Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#121

Post by int_19h »

f154hfds wrote: post #65

Forgiveness in the Bible is formalized as a cancelled debt: the act of forgiveness is when you decide to eat the cost of a debt owed (Matthew 18:21-35). I think forgiveness is mostly misunderstood by our society. It has several implications: 1. Forgiveness does not equate to trust or even reconciliation. If I lent you $1000 and you never paid me back, I might forgive your debt but will be much less inclined to trust…

> This debt is on the cosmic books so to speak: it's very real and must be dealt with either by forgiveness or retributive justice (or a combination of the two). Restorative justice is important but can't fix the original debt.

Retributive justice can't fix the debt, either - it just makes more people hurt than before.

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#122

Post by int_19h »

inglor_cz wrote: post #92
eastbound wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, we tell lies, to people who pretend to believe them. Everyone lies and we know it, our companies have mottos and everyone knows they’re fluff, and we teach kids to “thrive in ambiguity”, which is a beautiful phrase I’ve found on a job offer and which I have found symptomatic of our economy. I still wonder what it was like to live in ex-RDA. Did people tell lies that others pretended to believe?

I wonder if a descent to full-blown Soviet "Vranyo" (brazen lying) can be prevented. As in: "They lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them." Pretty much the only brake pad on that machine is that capitalism actually requires at least some efficiency from the players, and a web of lies like that will destroy any institution. Bu…

Orwell wrote this in a letter in 1944:

"Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#123

Post by munificent »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #16

Whoever figures out a secular distillation of the concept of grace is going to be very, very successful in community-building. The lack of it is painfully apparent, and it offers something to both the accused and the accusers. Now, whether people actually want that from others in these cases, or are merely enjoying the use of power a little too much, is another discussion.

A related concept that I think about all the time is that we have an intuitive understanding of what reputation and trust mean for individuals based on our evolutionary history as social animals.

But it's not at all clear that an intuitive trust or reputation model that works well for individuals scales to something reasonable when applied to groups and institutions.

Bayer (well, IG Farben) made the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Is Bayer still evil even though no one who did that is still there? Can they be forgiven? Should they be? Where does the conscience of an organization reside and how can others tell if it has been remediated? Can an organization feel shame or remorse?

Is the US good or evil? What kind of reasonable aggregation function could you possibly define that takes as inputs enshrining slavery in the Constitution, the Trail of Tears, later freeing the slaves, the Marshall Plan, etc. and is able to somehow weigh those against each other to produce a single meaningful output?

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#124

Post by WalterBright »

Natsu wrote: post #119
WalterBright wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that is the only way I can see to truly act within my religious beliefs I've been unable to find in the Bible the phrase that says "take from bob and give it to bill and you will be righteous". My interpretation of the Bible is that Jesus encouraged people to freely give of their own to help others. I'm genuinely curious where your leftist views derive from Christian principles.

Actually the Apostles try having "all things in common" for a while in Acts 4 or so, find that their initial ideas don't work out that great (see, e.g. Ananias), but eventually set up institutions of communal living with some monasteries and such.

There's nothing wrong with voluntary communism. It's the forcible kind, though, that is unjust.

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#125

Post by reb »

ldldldo wrote: post #79
giraffe_lady wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't think it's compatible with contemporary western morality that holds that actions are either valid expressions of self-actualization and so require no apology, or are transgressions for which no forgiveness is possible. The idea that regardless of a person's "right" to make a certain choice, an action can be so harmful that it cannot be corrected, but also that it can be forgiven is too far from how…

This is true, but "contemporary" isn't the right adjective. This is the culture of the moralist left, of the blue cities, of the Coast, of Progressivism as the only moral ideology In the US, at least, if you engage with conservative culture, with Christians, with rural people, with the people who are tired of "cancel culture," you will still find plenty of grace. I'm an independent. Over the last few years, it has be…

> This is the culture of the moralist left, of the blue cities, of the Coast, of Progressivism as the only moral ideology

> In the US, at least, if you engage with conservative culture, with Christians, with rural people, with the people who are tired of "cancel culture," you will still find plenty of grace.

As is often the case with generalization born of prejudice, this effort to split good and evil along ideological lines fails to match up with reality. Plenty of Progressives give grace to people around them. Plenty of Christians ostracize and abuse even the people closest to them. The vocal hypocrites on either side loom large for their ideological opponents and the quietly good on either side are easily ignored, except by their ideological peers. This pattern holds in rural towns and huge cities.

The problems of selfishness and hate for others are difficult to solve, and unfortunately even a framework as simple as Christ's demonstrates that. Try not to get too comfortable with the belief that people who see the world differently aren't still trying to navigate it kindly.

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#126

Post by krapp »

dropit_sphere wrote: post #120
krapp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The new thing is that we’re too smart and cool for all the things religion teaches, while we scratch our heads trying to solve all the problems it gives you the solution for. First of all, that isn't new. The Renaissance, when philosophy, science and law began to divorce themselves from religion, started about 700 years ago. Second, nothing useful taught by religion actually requires religion itself. You don't need…

>Second, nothing useful taught by religion actually requires religion itself. This hinges very much on your definition of "useful;" if you don't believe in God or the resurrection of the dead, then talk concerning them is of course pointless. But if you do, they are very useful indeed.

My definition of useful in this case is humanistic. The utility of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" doesn't depend on belief in the supernatural, nor do concepts like grace and forgiveness.

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#127

Post by savryn »

broadwaylamb wrote: post #59
mjburgess wrote: post #4

Forgiveness as a kind of mourning makes sense, but is counter-intuitive. I think we've come to regard "forgiveness" as inevitably ending with reconsiliation. But perhaps, more often, it shouldnt. That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act o…

> That is, forgiveness is how I see the other when I see them not as an enemy or friend, but as a tragic part of nature. I have moved on. Our ability to forgive has, perhaps, been distorted by the perception that it's an act of kindness. I think, rather, it's the most rutheless form of grief there is. I don't see how forgiveness is ruthless. It takes great compassion to accept people and situations as they are withou…

>I don't see how forgiveness is ruthless

for that type of person, what it really means = you're dead to me

hence why they mention mourning as a key feeling. I think I'm like this too.

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#128

Post by ilyt »

tsylba wrote: post #80

Once a media is accepted and known by the multitude it becomes performative, a spectacle where authenticity vanished preempted by new social rules. Beaudrillard's hyperreality describes the situation where we don't live in reality anymore but in the image of the reality we build, akin to an AI learning from data generated by another AI. It seems our current internet culture - heavily centralized, and universally used…

I'd like to say by educating people and showing them how to spot that, but I'm afraid that would just make spectacle more elaborate

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#129

Post by savryn »

jmull wrote: post #85
yanderekko wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and? Again, this is just an explanation of why one should expect insincere apologies - because the apology is being made for financial reasons, not genuine contrition.

I don't disagree that insincere apologies usually don't work very well. My point is that the "socioeconomic pressure" in many cases has nothing to do "bullying," "threats," or "playground politics". It can be self-inflicted: If you lower your value to the people who give you money, they will no longer want to give you as much money.

Well if this take away from my spins // Which'll probably take away from my ends // Then I hope this take away from my sins

Re: The case against the Twitter apology and our culture of performed remorse

#130

Post by hellfish »

tsylba wrote: post #90
user3939382 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hyperreality describes the situation where we don't live in reality anymore but in the image of the reality we build This concept is almost tautological since the only conceivable alternative would be universal omniscience.

I might have add "upon itself". There is much to say about what is reality, and you can bring researcher like Hoffmann stating that we see of reality only what is good for our peak survival (don't need infrared, don't see infrared). Hyperreality is something else altogether. First, it's a common theme in postmodernist to state we live in a construct culturally accepted and ever evolving. Hyperreality states that we a…

> First, it's a common theme in postmodernist to state we live in a construct culturally accepted and ever evolving

Hasn't this always been the case?

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