I wonder if Social Justice missionaries will become a thing.
It seems to me that the SJ value-set/religion is growing more powerful and widely accepted, and the more this happens the more you get outliers. Either trying to pander to it in order to unscrupulously raise their social standing at the cost of others or “true believers” which take it’s dictums to the extreme.
To some extent, it must be that the heavily religious Europe of the 13th to 18th century suffered from these same issues. It also seems plausible that outliers might have been swayed to become missionaries. Since “spreading the values” can be very profitable for those with few scrupules and very appealing to the extreme moralists which want to value-maximize as much as possible.
It seems like the kind of thing that could happen without centralized intervention, it’s almost a natural conclusion that can be reached once you get enough outliers and enough people supporting the religion that to them it seems “obvious” it must be spread.
People want the outliers to leave (but can’t make this an open preference, since they couldn’t defend it within the dogma of the religion) and the incentives needed for it to happen are very easy to produce. So missionaries start being socially accepted and praised.
Granted, I can’t see any ‘good’ examples of this happening yet, so maybe I’m just speculating on an imaginary foundation.
The missionaries will not travel in geography-space, but in subculture-space.
For a mostly online movement, the important distances are not the thousands of miles, but debating on different websites, having different conferences, etc. (Well, the conferences have the geographical aspect, too.)
But what about places that are closed-off from the “global” virtual space (e.g. China, Arabia and possibly various African countries once their dictators get up to speed with technology) ?
I wonder if Social Justice missionaries will become a thing.
It seems to me that the SJ value-set/religion is growing more powerful and widely accepted, and the more this happens the more you get outliers. Either trying to pander to it in order to unscrupulously raise their social standing at the cost of others or “true believers” which take it’s dictums to the extreme.
To some extent, it must be that the heavily religious Europe of the 13th to 18th century suffered from these same issues. It also seems plausible that outliers might have been swayed to become missionaries. Since “spreading the values” can be very profitable for those with few scrupules and very appealing to the extreme moralists which want to value-maximize as much as possible.
It seems like the kind of thing that could happen without centralized intervention, it’s almost a natural conclusion that can be reached once you get enough outliers and enough people supporting the religion that to them it seems “obvious” it must be spread.
People want the outliers to leave (but can’t make this an open preference, since they couldn’t defend it within the dogma of the religion) and the incentives needed for it to happen are very easy to produce. So missionaries start being socially accepted and praised.
Granted, I can’t see any ‘good’ examples of this happening yet, so maybe I’m just speculating on an imaginary foundation.
The missionaries will not travel in geography-space, but in subculture-space.
For a mostly online movement, the important distances are not the thousands of miles, but debating on different websites, having different conferences, etc. (Well, the conferences have the geographical aspect, too.)
That’s actually a good point.
But what about places that are closed-off from the “global” virtual space (e.g. China, Arabia and possibly various African countries once their dictators get up to speed with technology) ?