Infallible Sameness: the fatal wokeness of Christianity, communism, and all that crap

re: "How a Famous Harvard Professor Became a Target Over His Tweets" (The New York Times, July 15, 2020)

We would think the lessons of thousands of years of religiously devout zealots witch hunting, torturing and cancelling those who dare question the least of their articles of blindly dictated faith would have taught us the evils, the ignorance, the very real hells on Earth that must come from their slavish devotion to sincerely believed dogma.

Communism and the other non-theistic ideologies of more recent times have taught exactly the same as their true believers have striven with equally fanatical zeal to root out and cancel any sign of dissent from the dictated orthodoxies, as we see Hong Kong today. The wonder is that the ravening woke have not yet sought to cancel such earlier luminaries as Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, to name but two of many saints who had the honesty to turn a critical eye on the popular prejudices of their day backed by and backing despotic regimes of social conformity to beloved ideologies demanding ruthless adulation.

The golden rule that history teaches from the likes of despotic communism, from Christianity and its brutal siblings, and now from sincerely self-adulating wokeness, is perhaps that any ideology that denies the right to question its foundational beliefs for accuracy deserves our hearty contempt for its pretensions to infallibility, ever a fake claim of the highest order.

Mr. Pinker, like Socrates before him, that earlier enemy of the righteous protecting the children and traditional gods from newfangled ways, would be the first to review his own beliefs and admit not merely their eternal fallibility but actual wrongness when critical reason and new evidence demanded it.

Alas, human ideologies from the theistic despotisms of Christianity and its relatives to the equally despotic evils of Maoism and today's rampant wokeness know no such humility, nor honest openness.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to the New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/us/steven-pinker-harvard.html#commentsContainer&permid=108153683:108153683