Identity

What Hacker News says

1. dsr3Sep 2022
   Thanks for the additional comments and correction. At first, I don't see the need to be super-specific at first because, using the analogy you mentioned, most people (that I know, at least), don't mention they have specifically The Republic or Apologia or Phaedo, they will just simply mention I read Socrates. But after some thought, I do agree that I should have been more specific on this case.

   But I would still argue that The Bible (or to be more specific in this context, Genesis and NT. I will continue to use The Bible as a term for the sake of brevity.), have significant contribution to the contemporary ideas in Western Civilization. Or at least, the thoughts that is derived from it. [1] argues that the Western idea of identity is born out of Luther and [2-3] has an extensive chronology about how The Bible influences Western thinking. For starter, directly quoting from [3], "The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order". I think Nietzsche also share the same sentiment about how the ideas started in The Bible caused the West to become 'weaker' compared to the original, dominant Greco-Romans values.

   [1-3], and of course Nietzche, are secular source that does not rely on the claim that The Bible is divinely inspired. I also would not claim that The Bible itself is not influenced by outside thinking, especially Greek philosophy. [2] directly writes that in the Paul labors, there is a fusion between Jewish morality and Greek philosophy. As a matter of fact, these external influences is probably why the NT canon is so successful.

   I also have to note that I do not claim that The Bible is 'the' contributor to the current thinking in the West, my main arguments is that it is 'a major contributor' to the current Western thought, without diminishing other texts. For bad and good, The Bible is indeed a major contributor. Diminishing the influence and contribution of The Bible to the current Western discourses seems like a forced attempt to understate the contribution of the Christianity.

   And re: "jingoistic innuendo that people without a Christian-inspired culture are not capable of democracy". This is a different question for another day, and to discuss about that claim etc is outside of my circle of (semi) competence.

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Demand-Dignity-Politics-Rese... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-... [3] https://medium.com/incerto/on-christianity-b7fecde866ec

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2. xtiansimonMay 2021
   Three thin.

   "'...perhaps to other social factors such as embarrassment.'"

   There is a lot of interesting philosophy around this. In 2019 Partially Examined Life [1] did an interview with Francis Fukuyama on his book "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018)"

   I was reading the HN post on research from Newcastle University on eating with your mouth open published in the Guardian. A HN user shared their own violent thoughts in reaction to this behavior. What's more, this recalled for me a former friend who is from Newcastle, who I'd very much like to punch in the nose. Though, not really. (I'm not a violent person, I just grew up in the 80s when the answer to everything was a puch in the nose. I liked the thought because it seemed ... suited to the medium?)

   Tie it up in a bow and throw it all away. That's part of human nature. One word in this article was sufficent to bias me against it, where another time I would dismiss it as Twitter-quality research and move on.

   Then I read this article on Twitter-quality research. I'm a proponent of words matter. Take this passage from the article:

   “The difference between these results and our prior work on subtle accuracy nudges highlights how complicated the relevant psychology is,” Rand says

   Complicated or Complex? Recall the maxim: a Swiss watch is complicated. A cockroach is complex.

   Really? Do researchers read other people's research? Complicated-Complex distinction. It's all the rage. This research is $#!t. Frack it! AGGGG!

   [1]: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/02/11/ep209-1-fukuyam...

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3. nerdponxAug 2018
   Fukuyama thinks he knows what that something is, and his answer is summed up in the title of his new book, “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the “master concept” that explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, ISIS, Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir. Oh, and the whole business begins with Plato’s Republic. Fukuyama covers all of this in less than two hundred pages. How does he do it?

   Not well. Some of the problem comes from misunderstanding figures like Beauvoir and Freud; some comes from reducing the work of complex writers like Rousseau and Nietzsche to a single philosophical bullet point. A lot comes from the astonishingly blasé assumption—which was also the astonishingly blasé assumption of “The End of History?”—that Western thought is universal thought. But the whole project, trying to fit Vladimir Putin into the same analytic paradigm as Black Lives Matter and tracing them both back to Martin Luther, is far-fetched. It’s a case of Great Booksism: history as a chain of paper dolls cut out of books that only a tiny fraction of human beings have even heard of. Fukuyama is a smart man, but no one could have made this argument work.

   Oof, no thanks. This article alone makes me want to subscribe to the New Yorker, if only in thanks for saving me the trouble of reading this book.

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