Lifted from the comments, a difference of worldview:
From subsequent rumblings in the linked threads,
This is why it’s so important to always be aware of your privilege!!
Some replies bemoan patriotism and a sense of affinity with one’s country, while others denounce “supremacist systems and the myth of meritocracy.” At which point, readers may object that being born in a relatively congenial part of the world is not a “privilege,” or by implication a basis for guilt, or a Gotcha! to be exploited by others. Any more than being born somewhere less congenial is a sin, a thing for which to atone.
Readers may also note how an alleged randomness, in which differences in outcome can only be explained by pillage and oppression, and in which nothing has ever been earned, can, for some, be ideologically convenient. And a habit of mind.
“I think they know they ‘got lucky’ but don’t really care,” chides one of the subsequent commenters. “Everything is luck and random chance,” insists another. Note the implication that the comfort and agreeableness of a society is merely a matter of chance, of luck. As if the preceding cultivation of values and behaviour played no part whatsoever. As if culture and civilisation didn’t matter.
You can of course say that a newborn played no part in preceding events and cannot take credit for them. But those preceding events were in large part a product of collective effort, of a preference for one kind of society over another, and of people, including one’s ancestors, behaving accordingly. The “relative safety” of the country in which one is born is not some arbitrary, unrelated thing. It doesn’t arise simply by “random chance.” A person doesn’t just happen to be born into a context that their parents also just happened to be born into.
I could not have been born to Mr and Mrs Jeong in South Korea, any more than I could have been born to a Yemeni peasant couple, or a Californian billionaire. Much as I – the person talking to you now – could not have been born in 1652. The newborn me was a result of a particular lineage, of choices made by specific individuals and the genes of those individuals – who can of course say the same thing about themselves. To imply that anyone’s birth is a random thing, as if it could have happened anywhere, at any time, as if the particulars were immaterial, is, it seems to me, a little odd. Indeed, arse-backwards. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some random occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events. I’d imagine it wouldn’t seem random at all.
Or, as Mr Burkett puts in in the thread linked above,
The fact that your individual consciousness feels randomly situated from the point of view of that consciousness is a demonstration of the limits of consciousness, not an actual description of what’s happening. That your subjective feeling is of having appeared randomly does not suggest, well, anything about the world, and the fact is that you didn’t.
Unless you imagine a queue of souls waiting to spawn in some small but arbitrary body on a continent chosen by the spin of a wheel. Or cosmic bingo balls.
Update, via the comments:
Ian adds,
How the hell do they think civilisations come about?
In one of the threads or sub-threads on X, Geoffrey Miller and others point out that civilisations are built by, among other things, lineage, ancestry, and no small effort over vast stretches of time. Often with a view to posterity and giving one’s offspring a better life. This prompts someone to reply, rather sniffily, “It’s only by chance you were born to said ancestors.”
As if one could have entirely different ancestors who are entirely unconnected to the ancestors one does actually have. As if, while having entirely different ancestors, you could somehow be exactly the same person you are now, and not someone else. A hypothetical being. The assertion – that a specific person being born in a functional society was some random, meaningless occurrence and somehow unfair – is often deployed by people whose goals are rather questionable.
One commenter, a “pansexual she/her,” insists that civilisations are built by “stealing and oppressing other people.” Other, more edifying variables are not deemed interesting. I’m guessing that our “pansexual she/her,” the one who doesn’t think that lineage and genetic continuity play a role of any importance, isn’t herself a parent. And therefore hasn’t had the strange pleasure of seeing her children develop the features and attributes of various relatives. A sister, an uncle, a grandfather.
Regarding which, commenter Uma Thurman’s Feet adds,
The biggest change in my life was when I realised I love my kids and I wish we had had more.
Which is sort of why the Rawlsian tosh mouthed above, and mouthed so triumphantly, with such self-satisfaction, is ultimately unconvincing. Not only is it glib and arse-backwards, it also rather jars with the imperatives and experience of parenting.
Update 2:
As seen above, a common use of this conceit is to dissolve normal boundaries and bonds. To undermine and demoralise. By people who want you to believe that your children aren’t really yours, that your attributes and intelligence aren’t really yours, and that your earnings and belongings, your territory, aren’t really yours – that’s it’s all somehow random, and unfair, and should therefore be taken away.
Presumably, by the kinds of people who choose to believe such things. Selflessly, of course.
Given the replies quoted above, and many others that could have been included, it doesn’t seem unfair to suppose that the objective is to diminish the target’s sense of meaning and territory, to make them feel undeserving, disidentified, and to leave them emotionally vulnerable to policies that may diminish them further. Hence the conceit’s popularity among those driven by spite.
As the cornerstone of a worldview, it’s also quite literally stupefying. As noted in the comments:
If one society is preferable to another, or if one individual does better in life than another, and if it’s all just “luck and random chance,” then presumably there are no lessons to be learned. Nothing to emulate or to try, nothing to avoid. No experience to pass on, or wisdom, possibly wisdom earned at some cost.
Bad medicine.
Consider this an open thread.
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