So yes, Christians disrupted social expectations by *converting to Christianity* and by monastic vocations. That has nothing to do with Christianity being a warrant for professional addition beyond one's social station. If anything, it's the opposite: virgin martyr or monastic are a step down in worldly terms. Christianity is distinctive in often favoring renunciation rather than ambition, though some Christians may have a vocation to high social rank.
I think calling "stereotypes" (it's a word that should always have scare quotes) "dehumanizing" is a very dangerous exaggeration. No one who buys into a lazy generalization about some group-- women are emotional, say, or Japanese are nerds-- denies their humanity. And while someone might do better by appreciating someone's individually, we have to use generalizations to navigate the world.
Do you have any scriptural basis for this notion that Christian love is somehow incompatible with assigning roles based on categories? Christian societies have done plenty of that, of course: gender roles, aristocracies, hereditary monarchs, etc. There's no particular discontinuity in human history from Greco-Roman paganism to Christendom, as far as I can tell. My knee-jerk reaction is that this is more than half projection of modern fallacies onto Christian theological concepts that don't really imply it.
Nothing about Christian love is in tension with loving the peasant as a peasant and the king as a king.
"No one who buys into a lazy generalization about some group-- women are emotional, say, or Japanese are nerds-- denies their humanity."
That was generally true of pagans also. Or virulent racists. Nazis exterminating Jews. They didn't deny they were humans; they just thought they were inferior humans. Less excellent and entitled to less. And Christians fall into that too, quite often. Again, it is in principle possible for the aristocrat to say to the peasant (and believe), "I'm sorry, I see you admire my daughter, and you are no less morally precious than her or than a man of my own class, but it would be too socially disruptive to allow you to marry her." But people tend to fall back on "you're not good enough for her." You could try to cash that out in a way that doesn't imply moral inferiority... but don't people of rank often, perhaps usually, view the peasant as morally inferior? Sometimes Christian societies create mechanisms to try to diffuse that, noblesse oblige and chivalry and so forth, but it's so natural for our minds to fall into that.
Stereotypes are so diverse in their variety and motivation that it's hard to make general statements about them. Some are extremely benign, just generalizations that hold most of the time but occasionally not. ("Kids aged 4-7 just love playgrounds.") Others are very very far from benign, basically functioning as social myths that prop up demagogues or tyrannical and unjust social arrangements. ("Jews are devious and untrustworthy, which is why the World Jewry are quietly taking over the world.") There are a lot of different reasons people come to believe things about groups generally, and those reasons are emphatically not all on a level.
I do think though that one reason it’s been very hard for social conservatives to “put Humpty Dumpty back together again” (that meaning “traditional social arrangements they favor and would like to recover”) is because those arrangements leaned too heavily on social stereotypes that in the end didn’t hold up very well. Too much “social myth” in those social stereotypes, and eventually the evidence made them unsustainable. In principle Christianity allows for social differentiation, separate classes etc, but it doesn’t allow for intentionally perpetuating untruths, and insofar social acceptance of those arrangements depended on widely accepted untruth, they fell apart. Nor should honest Christians try to recover them if the restoration of social myths is the only effective mechanism.
Your "kids aged 4-7 just love playgrounds" as an example of a stereotype is interesting because I think people wouldn't usually call that a stereotype because it isn't bad.
Basically I think "stereotype" means:
(a) a generalization
(b) treated pejoratively.
The implicit philosophy of the word is that you shouldn't generalize about people because everyone is different and unique. That's wrong: we have to generalize about people for mental economy and efficiency, even if it's sometimes inconvenient for people, and often leads to false conclusions in particular cases. That's why the word "stereotype" isn't part of my active vocabulary. It's stained with moral fallacy from the beginning. It drags the baggage of a false philosophy into any conversation it enters.
"Dehumanizing" is another word that's not really part of my active vocabulary, for the reasons you say. Taken in the most straightforward sense, it is nearly always a false accusation; and if it means anything else, such as "insufficiently loving," it's a rhetorical nuclear option that's never warranted. I think the Nazis actually *did* deny the humanity of some of their racial enemies (maybe blacks rather than Jews... but never mind) but in less extreme cases, that hardly ever happens. What's wrong with the Nazis isn't that they "dehumanized" Jews but that they hated them and violated their rights, especially their right to life.
You could derive from Christian theology a conclusion that nearly all of us, all the time, "dehumanize" each other by not sufficiently loving and appreciating the full humanity of our fellows in all its wonderful richness and variety, divinely created glory, and eternal potential and significance. That's a very important truth... and a very bad word choice! :)
It seems to me that you’re sort of systematically depriving yourself of language that is necessary to describe and respond to the reality of hate and contempt as applied to groups. But that’s a very significant reality! Just because it’s misdiagnosed sometimes doesn’t mean it’s not a thing or that it’s no big deal.
You said that the Nazis’ real crimes involved violations of rights, not “dehumanization.” But before they got to mass murder they perpetuated terrible stereotypes, what I would call “dehumanizing narratives,” about Jews that precipitated other lesser forms of mistreatment but also made the unthinkable (genocide) start to be thinkable. These evils are related! If you aren’t willing to talk about things like stereotyping and dehumanization it’s extremely hard to explain what happened there. But also, it’s wrong to spread hate and contempt for a group even if it doesn’t lead to mass murder. We’re supposed to be trying to love people here; that’s what Jesus told us to do. Is spreading noxious stereotypes about Jews being greedy, sneaky manipulators, consistent with that command (as long as I’m not actively curtailing their rights)? Of course not!
Dehumanization is clearly bad; I don’t actually think stereotyping necessarily has to be. It doesn’t have a super-positive connotation but “broadly true generalizations” can be described as stereotypes, and often are, and not necessarily with disapproval. “Girls like dolls better but boys tend to prefer trucks” is broadly true, though not in every case, and it’s clearly a stereotype but sensible people don’t take umbrage. It’s broadly true. Just not in every case.
But sometimes stereotypes lead us to see people as less than they are. Even if we nominally see them as human, we may refuse to see dimensions of their humanity that are displeasing or threatening to us in light of our own status, ambitions, or perhaps social or political views. So that’s bad. And potentially a serious barrier to loving people, as Jesus told us to do.
I don't think dropping words like "stereotype" and "dehumanization" runs any risk of depriving us of language needed to describe how hate accelerates. Hatred is bad, love is good. Lying is bad, truth is good. Scripture supplies a lot more. The word "slander" comes in handy. "Human rights" is an invaluable phrase; "scapegoating" is useful in describing the Nazis and in many other situations. "Generalization" can do the legitimate work of "stereotype."
People who say that it's a "stereotype" that boys like trucks and girls like dolls often have an agenda of stigmatizing such gender differentiated socialization. They might not. They might have just picked up the word somewhere and borrowed the denotation while losing the connotation. But it's confusing. It's just not a helpful word.
The Nazi scapegoated the Jews and slandered them with lying generalizations, thereby fostering hatred, which ultimately paved the way for their campaign of mass murder. No need to throw in a notion of "stereotyping" that somehow links anti-Semitic conspiratorial hate-mongering with a daddy buying his son a toy truck for his birthday. It's a bogus concept that impedes thought.
OK. I mean, it's not worth fighting all day over the terms, and credit to you for coming up with some. Though I think "lying generalization" and "ugly/noxious stereotype" are basically synonyms except the second one will normally communicate the point more effectively, because more familiar. And more familiar because it taps into a somewhat familiar concern about "hate for groups, expressed and perpetuated through social myths and false generalizations." A phrase like "lying generalizations" is sort of reinventing that wheel.
You obviously have particular associations with that word that irritate you, based presumably in "false diagnosis" or "over-diagnosis" concerns. But "expressing hatred or contempt for groups for bad reasons" is a real and potentially very malevolent thing, so having terms mostly associated with that seems to me to be basically good for communication. Also one point of this Christendom Reborn project is to explore ways in which errors of modern society are sometimes helpfully understood as "misfires" or "unsuccessful or less-than-fully-successful efforts to address what nevertheless is a real concern." To see where culture war angst can be constructively redirected towards the solving of real problems. And insofar as that's true, I think it's worth seeing how there is something right in modern concerns about stereotyping, dehumanizing, "discrimination" etc, though certainly many of those "inclusion" efforts have gone off the rails in ways that we should also try to understand.
So I think you're a bit off track here. Christianity doesn't raise any principled objections to assigning jobs based on stereotypes. Of course, that's a practical necessity. Christianity emphatically teaches humility, and teaches a lot of obedience. It also teaches that God loves every human soul and wants an intimate relationship with them, but that does not at all mean that everyone needs to be a poet laureate. On the contrary, it means that God loves the bricklayer, too, and probably has no preference for the poet. poet laureate, perhaps the reverse. And we should emulate that.
Christian love is indeed a Pandora's box, but for a different reason. It's not that it elevates anyone above menial labor. it's that it forces us to enlarge our circle of concern as far as we can, and accept no convenient stopping point.
This was beautifully displayed in the Pope's smackdown of JD Vance for his misapplication of "ordo amoris." Modern Westerners really want a warrant to blindfold themselves to the dire poverty of a billion people abroad, and justify using Force to keep them out of our field of vision. The pope says no. The Bible says no. Christianity is not classist, not nationalist, not conformable to any of our attempts to limit our moral liabilities to some manageable subset of the human race.
Christianity does not as such forbid social assignments *although* it did from the beginning raise, very actively, the possibility that people might have personal callings that transcended those social assignments. (Virgin martyrs refusing to marry at their fathers' command, rich men giving up their wealth and position in ways that Roman society deemed impious etc.) So actually I think social assignments are actively called into question from the start.
Also though, I think you're missing a key piece of this, which I do touch on in the piece. In principle it's possible to have social assignments not rooted in categorical claims about natures, e.g. you're in this class because your bloodline is less noble than that guy's over there. In practice people find this very hard to believe or maintain. We want the "assignment" to be more richly justified by nature; it just feels more fair. Perhaps a very humble and holy man can accept, "Though I have the capacity to be a poet laureate or a top-notch engineer, it is fine for me to spend my life sweeping streets, because that is my socially assigned place." There aren't many such men.
And so in practice, we *do* continually go about making claims about natures, to justify cultural and conventional practices. And while those statements aren't always or necessarily false, they're often overdrawn. And when they are overdrawn, it's often in ways that are reductive and dehumanizing to the ones stereotyped. This can happen in all sorts of ways, to all sorts of groups.
Of course one trademark of modern sensibilities is a strong belief that this *ought not to happen.* But without it it turns out that it's very hard to instill any order on the world! So, we often find ourselves trending *back* into noxious stereotypes just to reinvent some scripts, some guardrails, some instruction manuals that would stem the chaos.
I think Christianity can do better, but let's not kid ourselves: It's very hard.
Interesting! I enjoyed reading this!
So yes, Christians disrupted social expectations by *converting to Christianity* and by monastic vocations. That has nothing to do with Christianity being a warrant for professional addition beyond one's social station. If anything, it's the opposite: virgin martyr or monastic are a step down in worldly terms. Christianity is distinctive in often favoring renunciation rather than ambition, though some Christians may have a vocation to high social rank.
I think calling "stereotypes" (it's a word that should always have scare quotes) "dehumanizing" is a very dangerous exaggeration. No one who buys into a lazy generalization about some group-- women are emotional, say, or Japanese are nerds-- denies their humanity. And while someone might do better by appreciating someone's individually, we have to use generalizations to navigate the world.
Do you have any scriptural basis for this notion that Christian love is somehow incompatible with assigning roles based on categories? Christian societies have done plenty of that, of course: gender roles, aristocracies, hereditary monarchs, etc. There's no particular discontinuity in human history from Greco-Roman paganism to Christendom, as far as I can tell. My knee-jerk reaction is that this is more than half projection of modern fallacies onto Christian theological concepts that don't really imply it.
Nothing about Christian love is in tension with loving the peasant as a peasant and the king as a king.
"No one who buys into a lazy generalization about some group-- women are emotional, say, or Japanese are nerds-- denies their humanity."
That was generally true of pagans also. Or virulent racists. Nazis exterminating Jews. They didn't deny they were humans; they just thought they were inferior humans. Less excellent and entitled to less. And Christians fall into that too, quite often. Again, it is in principle possible for the aristocrat to say to the peasant (and believe), "I'm sorry, I see you admire my daughter, and you are no less morally precious than her or than a man of my own class, but it would be too socially disruptive to allow you to marry her." But people tend to fall back on "you're not good enough for her." You could try to cash that out in a way that doesn't imply moral inferiority... but don't people of rank often, perhaps usually, view the peasant as morally inferior? Sometimes Christian societies create mechanisms to try to diffuse that, noblesse oblige and chivalry and so forth, but it's so natural for our minds to fall into that.
Stereotypes are so diverse in their variety and motivation that it's hard to make general statements about them. Some are extremely benign, just generalizations that hold most of the time but occasionally not. ("Kids aged 4-7 just love playgrounds.") Others are very very far from benign, basically functioning as social myths that prop up demagogues or tyrannical and unjust social arrangements. ("Jews are devious and untrustworthy, which is why the World Jewry are quietly taking over the world.") There are a lot of different reasons people come to believe things about groups generally, and those reasons are emphatically not all on a level.
I do think though that one reason it’s been very hard for social conservatives to “put Humpty Dumpty back together again” (that meaning “traditional social arrangements they favor and would like to recover”) is because those arrangements leaned too heavily on social stereotypes that in the end didn’t hold up very well. Too much “social myth” in those social stereotypes, and eventually the evidence made them unsustainable. In principle Christianity allows for social differentiation, separate classes etc, but it doesn’t allow for intentionally perpetuating untruths, and insofar social acceptance of those arrangements depended on widely accepted untruth, they fell apart. Nor should honest Christians try to recover them if the restoration of social myths is the only effective mechanism.
Your "kids aged 4-7 just love playgrounds" as an example of a stereotype is interesting because I think people wouldn't usually call that a stereotype because it isn't bad.
Basically I think "stereotype" means:
(a) a generalization
(b) treated pejoratively.
The implicit philosophy of the word is that you shouldn't generalize about people because everyone is different and unique. That's wrong: we have to generalize about people for mental economy and efficiency, even if it's sometimes inconvenient for people, and often leads to false conclusions in particular cases. That's why the word "stereotype" isn't part of my active vocabulary. It's stained with moral fallacy from the beginning. It drags the baggage of a false philosophy into any conversation it enters.
"Dehumanizing" is another word that's not really part of my active vocabulary, for the reasons you say. Taken in the most straightforward sense, it is nearly always a false accusation; and if it means anything else, such as "insufficiently loving," it's a rhetorical nuclear option that's never warranted. I think the Nazis actually *did* deny the humanity of some of their racial enemies (maybe blacks rather than Jews... but never mind) but in less extreme cases, that hardly ever happens. What's wrong with the Nazis isn't that they "dehumanized" Jews but that they hated them and violated their rights, especially their right to life.
You could derive from Christian theology a conclusion that nearly all of us, all the time, "dehumanize" each other by not sufficiently loving and appreciating the full humanity of our fellows in all its wonderful richness and variety, divinely created glory, and eternal potential and significance. That's a very important truth... and a very bad word choice! :)
It seems to me that you’re sort of systematically depriving yourself of language that is necessary to describe and respond to the reality of hate and contempt as applied to groups. But that’s a very significant reality! Just because it’s misdiagnosed sometimes doesn’t mean it’s not a thing or that it’s no big deal.
You said that the Nazis’ real crimes involved violations of rights, not “dehumanization.” But before they got to mass murder they perpetuated terrible stereotypes, what I would call “dehumanizing narratives,” about Jews that precipitated other lesser forms of mistreatment but also made the unthinkable (genocide) start to be thinkable. These evils are related! If you aren’t willing to talk about things like stereotyping and dehumanization it’s extremely hard to explain what happened there. But also, it’s wrong to spread hate and contempt for a group even if it doesn’t lead to mass murder. We’re supposed to be trying to love people here; that’s what Jesus told us to do. Is spreading noxious stereotypes about Jews being greedy, sneaky manipulators, consistent with that command (as long as I’m not actively curtailing their rights)? Of course not!
Dehumanization is clearly bad; I don’t actually think stereotyping necessarily has to be. It doesn’t have a super-positive connotation but “broadly true generalizations” can be described as stereotypes, and often are, and not necessarily with disapproval. “Girls like dolls better but boys tend to prefer trucks” is broadly true, though not in every case, and it’s clearly a stereotype but sensible people don’t take umbrage. It’s broadly true. Just not in every case.
But sometimes stereotypes lead us to see people as less than they are. Even if we nominally see them as human, we may refuse to see dimensions of their humanity that are displeasing or threatening to us in light of our own status, ambitions, or perhaps social or political views. So that’s bad. And potentially a serious barrier to loving people, as Jesus told us to do.
I don't think dropping words like "stereotype" and "dehumanization" runs any risk of depriving us of language needed to describe how hate accelerates. Hatred is bad, love is good. Lying is bad, truth is good. Scripture supplies a lot more. The word "slander" comes in handy. "Human rights" is an invaluable phrase; "scapegoating" is useful in describing the Nazis and in many other situations. "Generalization" can do the legitimate work of "stereotype."
People who say that it's a "stereotype" that boys like trucks and girls like dolls often have an agenda of stigmatizing such gender differentiated socialization. They might not. They might have just picked up the word somewhere and borrowed the denotation while losing the connotation. But it's confusing. It's just not a helpful word.
The Nazi scapegoated the Jews and slandered them with lying generalizations, thereby fostering hatred, which ultimately paved the way for their campaign of mass murder. No need to throw in a notion of "stereotyping" that somehow links anti-Semitic conspiratorial hate-mongering with a daddy buying his son a toy truck for his birthday. It's a bogus concept that impedes thought.
OK. I mean, it's not worth fighting all day over the terms, and credit to you for coming up with some. Though I think "lying generalization" and "ugly/noxious stereotype" are basically synonyms except the second one will normally communicate the point more effectively, because more familiar. And more familiar because it taps into a somewhat familiar concern about "hate for groups, expressed and perpetuated through social myths and false generalizations." A phrase like "lying generalizations" is sort of reinventing that wheel.
You obviously have particular associations with that word that irritate you, based presumably in "false diagnosis" or "over-diagnosis" concerns. But "expressing hatred or contempt for groups for bad reasons" is a real and potentially very malevolent thing, so having terms mostly associated with that seems to me to be basically good for communication. Also one point of this Christendom Reborn project is to explore ways in which errors of modern society are sometimes helpfully understood as "misfires" or "unsuccessful or less-than-fully-successful efforts to address what nevertheless is a real concern." To see where culture war angst can be constructively redirected towards the solving of real problems. And insofar as that's true, I think it's worth seeing how there is something right in modern concerns about stereotyping, dehumanizing, "discrimination" etc, though certainly many of those "inclusion" efforts have gone off the rails in ways that we should also try to understand.
So I think you're a bit off track here. Christianity doesn't raise any principled objections to assigning jobs based on stereotypes. Of course, that's a practical necessity. Christianity emphatically teaches humility, and teaches a lot of obedience. It also teaches that God loves every human soul and wants an intimate relationship with them, but that does not at all mean that everyone needs to be a poet laureate. On the contrary, it means that God loves the bricklayer, too, and probably has no preference for the poet. poet laureate, perhaps the reverse. And we should emulate that.
Christian love is indeed a Pandora's box, but for a different reason. It's not that it elevates anyone above menial labor. it's that it forces us to enlarge our circle of concern as far as we can, and accept no convenient stopping point.
This was beautifully displayed in the Pope's smackdown of JD Vance for his misapplication of "ordo amoris." Modern Westerners really want a warrant to blindfold themselves to the dire poverty of a billion people abroad, and justify using Force to keep them out of our field of vision. The pope says no. The Bible says no. Christianity is not classist, not nationalist, not conformable to any of our attempts to limit our moral liabilities to some manageable subset of the human race.
Christianity does not as such forbid social assignments *although* it did from the beginning raise, very actively, the possibility that people might have personal callings that transcended those social assignments. (Virgin martyrs refusing to marry at their fathers' command, rich men giving up their wealth and position in ways that Roman society deemed impious etc.) So actually I think social assignments are actively called into question from the start.
Also though, I think you're missing a key piece of this, which I do touch on in the piece. In principle it's possible to have social assignments not rooted in categorical claims about natures, e.g. you're in this class because your bloodline is less noble than that guy's over there. In practice people find this very hard to believe or maintain. We want the "assignment" to be more richly justified by nature; it just feels more fair. Perhaps a very humble and holy man can accept, "Though I have the capacity to be a poet laureate or a top-notch engineer, it is fine for me to spend my life sweeping streets, because that is my socially assigned place." There aren't many such men.
And so in practice, we *do* continually go about making claims about natures, to justify cultural and conventional practices. And while those statements aren't always or necessarily false, they're often overdrawn. And when they are overdrawn, it's often in ways that are reductive and dehumanizing to the ones stereotyped. This can happen in all sorts of ways, to all sorts of groups.
Of course one trademark of modern sensibilities is a strong belief that this *ought not to happen.* But without it it turns out that it's very hard to instill any order on the world! So, we often find ourselves trending *back* into noxious stereotypes just to reinvent some scripts, some guardrails, some instruction manuals that would stem the chaos.
I think Christianity can do better, but let's not kid ourselves: It's very hard.
This does lead into my next essay though.