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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   27208 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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From The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

The culture war is permanent, because there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them. That is baked into human nature. In one decade the censorious will use Christianity, in the next, they will fight it, but it is the same impulse and the same people. One generation's scolds will enforce patriotism, the next will condemn it, but the underlying impulse is the same. The church lady is the schoolmarm is the SJW.

We will always fight, and the technology of the day will determine who has the advantage. Movable type empowered the free, a centralized Hollywood and three TV networks gave power to the conformist.

There was a brief moment where the internet was simultaneously difficult enough to require the ability to set up a router, but easy enough that there were lots of people doing it. This enabled the free. Just a few years ago the largest subreddit was The_Donald. A few years before that the most popular politician was Ron Paul, and the Republicans had a lock all three branches and the majority of the governorships.

2014 is Haidt's year that changed everything. Facebook, and then Instagram, as apps on phones removed all the technical and logistical barriers of a computer in a physical location. Now we are as centralized as the days of three TV stations, and once again the joyless scolds and censors have the advantage.

Sooner or later some free people somewhere will develop a way to fight back, and we will bring the 90s back, and soon after that the censorious and conformist will find a way to defeat us again.

The culture war is permanent, because there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them. That is baked into human nature. In one decade the censorious will use Christianity, in the next, they will fight it, but it is the same impulse and the same people. One generation's scolds will enforce patriotism, the next will condemn it, but the underlying impulse is the same. The church lady is the schoolmarm is the SJW.

The Culture War isn't fought between free speakers and censorious arsehats. It is fought between the Red Tribe (the white South and its allies) and the Blue Tribe (New England Yankeedom and its allies), and dates back via Albion's Seed to before the English civil war (with notable lulls during the Era of Good Feelings and the New Deal era). There have been multiple episodes during that period when one side or the other (more often the Reds) had a bout of censorious arsehattery. Right now, the Blues are quite exceptionally censorious in a way which is biting them in the arse when they suddenly can't work out how many intersectional Pokemon points a Jewish cis woman rape victim has. But that doesn't make the Reds pro-free speech, except accidentally. Right now, Elon the Boer is being hailed as the saviour of free speech by the Reds at the same time as he is calling for criminal prosecution of Media Matters for putting a potentially-misleading spin on accurate coverage of how he runs X.

For the Framers, the 1st amendment wasn't a statement of an important free speech principle - it was a part of a negotiated settlement of how the different States could live together in a More Perfect Union. It was quite intentionally not enforceable against the States, several of which had State-level censorship regimes that would never pass muster in the current year. There have always been principled supporters of free speech (notably Jefferson in the Founding era, and the pre-Great Awokening ACLU in my lifetime) but they have always been in the minority.

I fundamentally disagree with you, but I like your writing style and the way you presented your argument. Reported for AAQC

I'm usually a fan of this viewpoint, but in this case I'm not entirely sure if it's true. If you have a scientist and a christian, for example, and both subscribe to the sentences you picked for them, but they are also both fine with letting the other one be then you don't have a culture war on your hand; you merely have a disagreement.

A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted. In which case @satirizedoor's dichotomy holds. Though you may argue that often enough both sides actually want to control the other side, so it's rarely a conflict between pure freedom and pure control and instead a conflict with different preferences for what to control and what should be free. But the basic fact would remain that culture wars may be about any topics in the first order, but they are always ultimately about controlling people with other viewpoints.

Hey now, you can't stop there - what is it actually?

I agree KnotGodel is near the right track but not exactly, and GP had a point. In Culture Wars of the way way past, we have stuff like 30 Years' War, or iconoclasts, or Akhenaten's cult. What is the common thread?

My theory: in culture wars, culture is the fuel, war is the process, but the engine is the mass media technology. Each form of technology comes with its particular equilibrium where the locus of control is. (To torture the metaphor, it is a twin-engine aircraft and the other engine is the technology for waging war, but that is no longer the culture war, just the regular war.)

Outcome is likely to be Cuius regio, eius religio once again.

There is certainly precedent for it

Hence the name?

It's not everyday I get to use so appropriately so I couldn't help but comment.

It's led to the most hilarious accusations though.

Turns out that if you say "maybe follow a norm where you don't interfere in the internal affairs of another country and they agree to do to same to you" you'll find yourself accused of being both ultra far left and ultra right wing

I guess something like the social activity related to emotionally-charged dichotomies?

I've grown more partial to describing it as bike-shedding at a societal level, and I think this make sense: the entire concept is that organizations spend disproportionate time on relatively minor but easy-to-trivially-understand issues because people think their opinion matters more than it probably should. I doubt there are many, if any, people out there without an opinion on gender (although those opinions vary drastically), sex, skin color, and all those times they were treated unfairly. Because everyone thinks they understand the big picture, arguments get exceptionally heated.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century. Amusingly, we seem mostly content to trust bureaucrats on those, probably far more than we should: see gain-of-function research funding, or any number of fraught defense procurements.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century.

These are matters you can afford to concern yourself with when your immediate existence and position does not seem threatened. The Culture War is caused by and causes such feelings of imminent threat, and so more ambitious concerns are drowned out by what at least appears to be acute crisis.

Not that I disagree with your general sentiment, but

the most popular politician was Ron Paul

I don’t think he ever polled that well. This one has him ahead of the other Republicans, but I have no idea what a “net favorability rating” really means. He certainly didn’t manage to turn it into any primary wins.

net favorability is (depending on pollster) either Strongly Approve - Strongly Disapprove, or (Strongly Approve + Approve) - (Strongly Disapprove + Disapprove)

So it'd make sense for a more niche like Paul to have a high net favorability, because more people would reply "don't know" and thus not make it in to the equation.

Sooner or later some free people somewhere will develop a way to fight back, and we will bring the 90s back, and soon after that the censorious and conformist will find a way to defeat us again.

Or they won't, technology will continue to further enable central control, and we'll have a boot stomping on a human face forever.

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