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Philosophies of hate
As an ex-Christian I am steeped in the language of the bible. My framing of moral virtue and what ought to be good in the world flows from the parables and exemplars I was exposed to growing up, and while I reject the notion of original sin there are certain aspects of Jesus’s philosophy which resonate. The one I keep coming back to over the last weeks and months is the parable of the carpenter, namely we ought to take the plank out of our own eye before seeking to accuse others of having a speck in theirs. This undercuts arguments of whataboutism because it highlights an intrinsic defect in many of the far-right anti-left arguments by stating they need to sort their own house out before drilling down into the problems of the left.
Pointing to a small clique of leftist violent radicals while you allow the far-right to take a wrecking ball to pluralistic rights has been a philosophical tactic long used to demonise anyone who calls into question the power structures those on the right seek to entrench. None of this is new. Go back to Egyptian and Assyrian sources and you see the moral virtue puff pieces warning against calling the old order into question, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man calls out the entrenchment of the old at the expense of the present generation. Leftist radicalism is a matter of perspective, as the building of a better world for everyone involves deconstructing the house using tools the…
