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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Let's talk the French Revolution.

There's been much hay made in the more intellectual online right talking about how young, pretty women make culture. Funnily enough I found a reference to this in a book about the French Revolution, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel.

Among the best-known antiphilosophes, the ex-Jesuit Luxembourgois, François-Xavier de Feller (1735–1802), dubbed this world conspiracy, as he saw it, “l’empire du philosophisme.” Philosophisme, he explained, was a mighty construct begun in the 1740s by a group of extraordinary writers who managed to impress sections of all classes with their wit and sarcasm, devising a whole new language and way of thinking, and by cunning dexterity and obscure use of terms made their ruinous ideas seem “sublime” to many. The “conspiracy” commenced with Diderot, who turned the Encyclopédie into an engine of subversion and impiety.

All the chief conspirators were, like Diderot and d’Alembert, atheistic “parasites” who lounged in cafés, insinuating, flattering, and mocking their way to domination of the salons and academies, and who eventually conquered positions of great power. Among their chief weapons, suggested Feller, was their appeal to women, especially young, pretty women susceptible to fine phrases, elegant turns of speech, witticisms, and subtle and less-than-subtle erotic suggestion. p. 45-46

It seems that even almost three centuries ago, the trope of 'witty and verbally savvy atheist convinces hot young ladies' was already in full force. And indeed, at least according to Israel, this capturing of culture by Enlightenment thinkers was the primary cause of all the revolutions, including the French Revolution. While it's stylish nowadays to argue for economic or social causes, like the infamous Boston Tea Party in the American Revolution, Israel argues that instead it really was the philosophically abstract notions of Enlightenment ideals that were the 'motor and sustaining force' of these revolutions.

Lots of modern right wingers seem to bemoan the fact that women having the right to vote or divorce or whatever has led to the downfall of society, yet it seems that even before all that young women tended to drive culture.

I wonder how much of our political and social history really just boils down to whoever wins the opinions of young, attractive women wins the Culture War?

Women are the dark matter of history. We know that they were always there. We can assume that they must have had opinions and motivations, and that they took actions in accordance with these motivations. But they didn't write much, so it is easy to simply whitewash them out of history, or alternatively to adopt a feminist reading of history that projects modern sensibilities centuries or millennia into the past in order to fill the gaps.

Still, I can't discount the possibility that revolutionary France was unique here. Charlotte Corday was 24 when she stabbed Jean-Paul Marat to death in the bathtub. You don't see pretty young women doing that kind of thing in other times and places.

The Women's March on Versailles is pretty much the only coherent place to start a history of feminism. There's really no other incident before that in recorded history where women are so obviously working within the concept of being a distinct (and powerful) political group.

I would question whether it's really the young and attractive in particular; if you think about the Longhouse discourse, it supposed that it's the older matriarchs who wield power.

A model I've been playing with: imagine society as a graph, with individuals as nodes that create information. Information flows through edges in the graph, with more information flowing through those edges with greater weights. The nodes are labeled with either M or F, about half and half. The F nodes are more highly connected and have edges with greater weights (in this hypothetical, at least), while the M nodes are more sparsely connected and dominated by a single strong edge to an F node.

With this structure, although M and F nodes create approximately the same amount of information, the information that actually reaches any particular node will have passed through far more F nodes than M nodes. And, if you made that graph more highly connected, it makes the ratio even more disproportionate.

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