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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.

Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.

Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.

When it comes to "retarded" and its new acceptability it's the fallout of a longstanding, largely understated cultural intra-progressive civil war on whether anti-ableism is an equally comparable framework to racism or sexism inside progressive circles.

This affects many different themes, from the said word to the whole "antiwork" thing (with unemployed lifestyles justified by invisible mental issues) to continuing Covid masking (usually justified as "solidarity to disabled comrades") to many other things that might seem seemingly unconnected unless one's familiar with the ableism debates. More radical types often have fully adopted the idea of ableism being a societal crisis requiring urgent response and cancellations, less radical ones might have not challenged it directly but at least feel free to scoff at the effects and make fun of them.

A likely turning point was the "end of Covid" in early 2022. After that most everyone dropped masking and caring about Covid, but the minority that continues to do so has still sometimes insisted on masking at progressive events and claimed that it's literal genocide against the disabled if this doesn't happen, etc. This seems to have created eventually enough friction (since most people really, really just don't want to mask any more) that it has affected the ableism debate in general, even though it's hard to prove since it's usually not framed this way.

I'd say it is a bit more conscious and deliberate than the term "vibe shift" lets on.

I'd also blame the aftershocks of Covid both exposing people to the excesses of people who they thought were their peers and putting them shoulder to shoulder with people they hadn't met before. A lot of new institutions like American Reformer and New Discourses sprung up that have only recently matured enough to make real waves and the process will only continue.

The trend that is more concerning is the coring out of those in-between. It is becoming far less allowed to be a disaffected moderate than has been for a century.

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss this on a recent podcast, motivated by the recent example of Ibram X. Kendi’s waning influence:

  1. NYTimes: Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own
  2. Washington Examiner: Ibram X. Kendi’s intellectual implosion (up for four days then deleted, make of that what you will)

There definitely is a vibe shift and it feels safer for critics of the social justice movement to speak publicly.

Like nybbler says, people have been postulating this for years. There's a particularly good one from right at the start of 2020 saying that as a real threat covid will force leftists to put aside culture-warring to unite the country.

Waves and tide is a good metaphor. There was a pushback to PC in the 90s too, with even Bill Clinton officially disavowing it. Then look what happened.

people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo,

Never forget the magic of this man. Punchline is at about 3m20s in case link breaks

I go back and forth on how much of it was caused by Elon acquiring Twitter, but that was certainly the signal of some kind of turning point.

The Bud Light debacle happened just about a year ago, and still marks the first major culture war 'victory' for the right I can remember in a long time. Followed not too long after by Ivy League presidents getting booted out for plagiarism.

The fact that twitter was 'freed' up from the kinds of controls that allowed them to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story on the literal eve of an election is quite possibly a major reason that those two events were able to gain traction so as to get mainstream attention.

Or, perhaps, maybe they would have been relegated to Facebook or (gasp) Truth Social instead but still would have broken containment.

If I had to take a REALLY out-there guess, the combination of the Ukrainian war dragging out, the increasingly draconian measures they're taking to push the "T" onto children, and the Israel-Palestine war realigning certain incentives are the main factors that are weakening the coalition that held the elements of the lefty media-industrial complex together, and allowing the more effective elements on the right (few and far between) to score some real, if minor, wins.

Also can't ignore the heavy-handed attempts to get Trump, and how various elements of the regime are beclowning themselves in the effort.

Twitter is the schelling point for people who want to come out and dunk on the left's L's, but might not have been in the timeline where Elon got too distracted to acquire it.

It is now 'safe' to resist the Cathedral, and its becoming fun to do so as well.

Followed not too long after by Ivy League presidents getting booted out for plagiarism.

That was about Jews. Wokestupid is always blundering around the boundaries of cancellable anti-semitism, and above a certain level of prominence if you engage in cancellable anti-semitism, you get cancelled no matter how woke you are. (Wokists are constantly cancelling their own anyway.) It took longer to cancel Jeremy Corbyn than it did to cancel Claudine Gay, but Corbyn was cancelled when the Great Awokening was at its height.

I mean, it was about both.

I don't think anyone believes that they got booted for plagiarism, but it certainly gave sufficient cover for the action. And it explains why some Presidents got booted and some survived. And Rufo leveraged twitter as the platform to get eyeballs on the allegations and increase pressure on the organizations.

I mean, it was about both.

Obviously - the point I was making was that the part that wasn't about plagiarism was about a backlash against anti-Semitism that is entirely consistent with the well-understood rules of woke leopards eating woke faces, not some kind of more general backlash against wokeness.

And Rufo leveraged twitter as the platform to get eyeballs on the allegations and increase pressure on the organizations

The damage was done by a cabal of Jewish big-dollar donors (of whom Ackman was the public face), and to a lesser extent by MSM coverage of the Congressional hearings. Both the Congressional GOP and the Jewish donors were co-ordinating offline, not on Twitter. There is no way a powerful Blue Triber resigns due to a campaign by Chris Rufo's social media followers.

I go back and forth on how much of it was caused by Elon acquiring Twitter, but that was certainly the signal of some kind of turning point.

As someone raised on the Left it's just hard to believe that history turns on whether some rich asshole makes the wrong tweet and then doubles down.

And yet...

It is now 'safe' to resist the Cathedral, and its becoming fun to do so as well.

Before Elon there was an attempt at mocking the Ts on TikTok around the hashtag "SuperStraight". It died when, you guessed it, TikTok just banned it.

It's hard to know. On the surface it looks like you just can't keep the discontent down forever. It clearly flared up even in the real world over big enough issues without Elon.

But what I think control of all of the media outlets does is allow you to stall until it's entrenched as a fait accompli. How many people went along with pronouns just to not get banned, for example? Nobody wants to admit they're a coward, so then it just becomes "oh, I just want to be polite". And now the rules of etiquette have changed.

I remember us having discussions about this on a sub I modded. We decided to let people do as they willed because it was relatively new to us. But if the admins had beat on us, we'd have folded and beat on the users and they'd have likely folded too. This happened later to supposedly skeptical subs like /r/stupidpol so all of their criticisms are constrained.

I've seen this happen with many inconvenient claims. Sometimes you just get silenced outright, post removed with no reason. Sometimes you get banned for "relevance" or not dotting some I (allegedly). Sometimes you get banned not because of your point (allegedly) but because of how you put it out there. Sometimes, on reddit, mods let you have your post and then post a stickied counter or warning, chilling the whole thing. Your enemies face no such impediments. By the time you figure out enough message discipline to get the point across you at best make a neutered argument if not an outdated one. Or you simply get banned for "inciting harassment" before then.

It's hard to build up a head of steam, a movement of normies willing to side with you if you have to be worrying about all of this. And the message to any normie is "this is not a big deal" or, even worse, "this is low status".

Scott Alexander had a number of posts examining how dissent is 'quashed' and then sublimates out into other behaviors that are 'safe' yet still demonstrate one's resistance to the overculture's norms... although usually in ways that do not threaten the overculture's dominance.

I guess that is the question. Even if Twitter is the venue through which the right is able to score wins, are they actually damaging the overculture in doing so, or is the overculture hurting itself via inter-factional squabbles over control of the reins of power? Reins that the right is nowhere near reaching but can pretend to make a play for as the left's grip loosens?

Hence why I think it makes more sense that the series of events (for convenience, limiting it to Post-Covid) that has shown cracks in the Cathedral's otherwise uniform facade has both made it harder for the left to quash dissent (since so much 'dissent' is now coming from their side!) and emboldened their opponents on the right and the populace at large.

You can given an honorable mention to "Lets Go Brandon" as a watershed moment of realization 'you can mock the king and get away with it.'

Finally, Travis Corcoran's Iron Catastrophe theory makes some sense of it too. They're running out of rhetorical 'fuel' and are increasingly reverting to raw power as a means of suppression, but that fuel burns hot and doesn't last so long.

"Lets Go Brandon" as a watershed moment of realization 'you can mock the king and get away with it.'

This doesn't ring true to me at all. As bad as the culture war got, lese majeste was never much of an issue, the sacred cows were other things.

Did even the most brain-poisoned boomer in the depths of the worst of it ever feel like they couldn't freely mock Joe Biden? I don't recall any holding back before that moment, from people who weren't holding back after it. And I didn't get any impression that that played any particular part in a preference cascade freeing cowed silent people on the borderline from their bonds either.

At most, it gave already committed partisans a big single meme to regroup around and build some confidence and unity.

Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

I'm more or less where you're at. There's not enough to point to anything substantial, but too much to ignore.

As an extra datapoint, I'll add Brianna Wu, of all people, trying to pull off the "this time, the woke have gone too far!" schtick. People try to claim she's grifting, but I kind of think it's the opposite. In her case I haven't seen any indication of an honest change of opinion, unlike in similar left-wing figures like Ana Kasparian, she still seems to be the same cancel-culture women progressive she's always been. Some might see that as indication of a grift, but my interpretation is that she's seeing the change in the winds, and is trying yo minimize damage to the progressive movement.

And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter?

Lots. This is one of the reasons I hope I'm wrong about my Elon Doomerism, because if his companies start failing, Twitter might end up being swiped from under our feet, and all the Dissidents who ended up leaving their respective shelters will end up more exposed than they were before. I hope that in the worst case scenario he will implode it, so no one can have it, leaving us with the relatively friendly Substack as an alternative.

If I remember correctly, Brianna Wu has a long history of on-and-off feuding with people to the left of her.

Well, now she seems to be feuding with progressivism writ-large, mostly off the back of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but she's also trying to play the moderate regarding trans issues - criticizing WPATH, or the fetish wing (for lack of a better term) of the trans movement. It doesn't look particularly sincere to me, because she's digging her heels on some very positions like "JK Rowling is a Holocaust denier".

Yes, I meant more like that it's a part of a longer development and not (at least completely) a U-turn.

Your worst case scenario matches my certain prediction, so I'm glad we're technically in agreement.

My lived experience is that red tribe normies are much more willing to criticize anti racism and say openly homophobic things than they once were. But YMMV.

One thing I've definitely noticed out in the real world in places like bars is that guys finally feel like guys again, for the first time since 2016. It seems like I'm hearing a lot more friendly ribbing, a lot more casually thrown-around no-no words, and a lot more pushback on progressive shibboliths lately. It's not necessarily a shift rightward so much as a resurgence of 90s-style tits and beer liberalism, but even here in the very-left-wing DC area, there's clearly an ongoing vibeshift (at least among the men. Women I know seem to be continuing to slide ever further left).

I kinda expect that doing burnouts on Pride-Flag crosswalks might morph into a national pasttime of sorts.

Or spray painting ‘LEV 18:22’. I’ve seen an increasing amount of that written in the dust on the back of heavy trucks.

The waves roll in, the waves roll out, but the tide is still coming in. They have to be a bit more quiet about transing the kids after it turned out to be a bridge too far... but they're still doing it, they're just not talking about it as much. It's harder to cancel people because most have learned what not to say; this is not pushback but abject obedience. The war between the Zionist and pro-Hamas factions in progressivism is also taking up a lot of their energy at the moment. And yes, Twitter/X is a bright spot in that dissent is allowed there for now, at least until the ad boycott finally breaks them.

Major brand advertising on X has been quietly recovering. In a few minutes of scrolling, I see ads from Netflix, Microsoft, Dell, McDonald's, Chipotle.

Why would the ad boycott break them? If it's profitable to advertise on Twitter, companies will do it. Maybe not Disney, but others will.

I suppose there is a case to be made that most or all advertising is wasted money, in which case companies will choose to waste it somewhere besides Twitter.

But given that costs are down by something like 75%, it's tough to believe that an ad boycott will hurt them. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they are quite profitable already.

Why would the ad boycott break them? If it's profitable to advertise on Twitter, companies will do it. Maybe not Disney, but others will.

It's not so much the principals as the ad agencies. The top end of the advertising industry is gated through a small number of firms, and if those firms (due to ideological capture) "advise" their clients that it's poison to advertise on Twitter, they won't. And since they can, in fact, punish defectors through the press and NGOs to announce boycotts, they can even make it poison for any of the larger companies to advertise on Twitter.

Can you point to any sort of stats on the subject?

Advertising is probably more vulnerable to this particular ideology than something like the oil or fast food industries. That’s not saying much. Surely they want to make money, too?

More generally, I think it’s kind of lame to retreat to the conspiracy-theory motte. Yeah, if you draw a small enough circle, you can find someone to serve as your obscure cabal. But that excludes more and more of the money and power.

It's too late to claim the ad boycott is just a conspiracy theory.

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/06/1217513348/advertising-boycott-at-the-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter-grows-by-the-day

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-elon-musk-donald-trump-naacp-adl-ad-boycott/

https://www.engadget.com/twitter-losing-advertisers-boycott-193748977.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67460386

I’m not claiming it’s a conspiracy theory. I’m saying scale is overstated when talking about effects, but downplayed when speaking of perpetrators. Same way a hypothetical New World Order turns into grumbling about the WEF.

Boycotts don’t work and the blue tribe simply doesn’t have that level of cultural soft power. I get political advertisements, car dealer ads(English and Spanish), fast food ads(mostly Spanish), pot ads(English only), etc. These are not conservative controlled companies.

Consumer boycotts generally don't work (check the lines at Chick-Fil-A), but a lot of companies pretend they do when Blue Tribe leaders announce one. This is because of ideological capture both at the ad agencies and at the departments at their customers who deal with the ad agencies.

I'm boycotting Chick-Fil-A because I don't want to wait 20 minutes to get a damn chicken sandwich. The food is okay, but not any better than similar offerings from other fast food joints. The lines are loooong...

I have to conclude that people are going to Chick-Fil-A because of their politics, not in spite of them.

The demand for non-woke brands greatly exceeds the supply. Maybe 90% of big companies are woke, but only like 10% of people are. It's free money for companies who want to target the non-woke demographic.

Chic-Fil-A is nice because it's nice to be surrounded by normies that are like me. And I do, actually, like their food.

So I guess +1 to people going there because of their politics.

It's the only fast food place that doesn't depress me because it's actually staffed by teenagers developing skills at their first job and not a bunch of tired-looking middle-aged workers.

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The demand for non-woke brands greatly exceeds the supply. Maybe 90% of big companies are woke, but only like 10% of people are. It's free money for companies who want to target the non-woke demographic.

It's like a penny glued to the ground; it's there, but it's really difficult to pick up.

There's at least one company that built a $1bn brand off of an explicitly anti-work strategy

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It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology... Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.

In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.

On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Pretty sure I agree with you. May I request a reading list / articles / blogs that have helped you form this.

After some thought I wrote down a clearer explication of what I meant by "Enlightenment epistemology", and what I see as the problem with it. Here goes...

The motto of the Enlightenment, as famously put by Kant, is Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! (Have the courage to use your own understanding) [Kant (1784): What is enlightenment]. To elaborate a bit, this means

  • Exclusively honoring of the rules of evidence used in the physical sciences -- as opposed to other modes of persuasion including intuition, pathos, authority, and tradition, especially religious tradition.
  • For Kant, and for contemporary thinkers like Steven Pinker, this is not a balancing act, but wholesale abolition of the alternatives to make way for what they call "Reason". Kant writes that "Laziness and cowardice" are the only reasons men do not free themselves from the yoke of authority and tradition [ibid]. Pinker lists intuition, tradition, authority, and sacred texts as "Ways of going wrong" [source]. According to this view, which I call Enlightenmentism, there is no rightful place for any other mode of rhetoric, besides that used in the sciences, in the discussion of public policy and moral norms.

What's not to like?

  • The problem is not that scientific knowledge and scientific evidence are "bad". On the contrary, the body of knowledge we have acquired by those methods are a blessing to humanity, and I think we could not have acquired it any other way. Moreover, the rules of evidence in the physical sciences, before wokeness started taking academia by the throat at least, were what I think they ought to be. When scientific evidence decidedly favors one answer to a question of fact, that evidence should be what settles the question.
  • The problem is that this sort of reasoning, by itself, doesn't get you very far outside the subject matter of the academic sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, psychology, etc.). In particular, by itself, it gets you nowhere in ethics or policymaking. People who believe that it does, or even that it ought to, are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains.
  • Contrary to the claims of thinkers such as Jeremy Benthem, John Stuart Mill, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris, humanism (viz., the position that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings, perhaps along with other sentient creatures) does not close the "is-ought" gap in any useful way. Again, people who believe it does are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains, and why their conclusions differ from those of other people. (I have argued this at some length in another post).
  • The problem with subverting the actual source of our moral norms and replacing it with a feeble rationalization is this: each generation naturally (and rightly) pushes back against their inherited traditions, and pokes to see what is underneath them. If the actual source of those traditions has been forgotten, and they are presented instead as being founded on hollow arguments, then the pushback will blow the house down. Sons will live out the virtues of their fathers less with each passing generation, progressively supplanting those virtues with the unrestrained will of their own flesh. That is what we are seeing in our culture today -- and the "Enlightenment" views of thinkers like Kant, Mill, Pinker, and Harris only pour fuel on the fire.

I appreciate the effort comment. This is not only succinct (which can be hard when dealing with the very abstract ideas of very abstract ideas), but also avoids knee-jerk reactionary perspectives.

I've been a skeptic of what you might call "full abandonment enlightenment" thinking. Knowledge traditions are self-evidently important. But a lot of the anti-enlightenment (enlightenment skeptic, whatever you prefer) writing that I see does a poor job of arguing beyond, "Science is cool or whatever, but the only thing that matters is divinely revealed moral truth." I think both are important (and actually complements). Your post does an excellent job of illustrating that model. Thank you.

I think both are important (and actually complements).

Agreed. Even Abraham argued with the revealed word of God, interpreting it in the light of reason [Genesis 18]. But when God's command was clear, nothing mattered more [Genesis 22].

Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes

  • "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
  • A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
  • Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
  • this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
  • Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
  • Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
  • William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.

Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that

  1. Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
  2. All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
  3. As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
  4. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
  5. Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
  6. The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.

I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:

  1. Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
  2. People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
  3. None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
  4. We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
  5. The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
  6. Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears? Honestly, one reason I can never stomach reaction is because it doesn't just want to drop the torch, it wants to piss on the ashes. It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

On Pinker and Harris, I have an example of both on my shelf (never read them).

Random paragraph from Better Angels of Our Nature:

Russett and Oneal, the number crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, and were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before WW1, it was still a fraction of the level, relative to GDP, that countries would see after WW2 (figure 5-24).

More than half (certainly more than half a percent) of this looks like objective information to me.

From The Moral Landscape (the concept of which I find asinine):

There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same. For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as "the endowment effect": people demand more money in exchange for an object than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place.

The paragraph goes on to summarize sone consequences of these findings.

Both cases are a lot more objective and fact based than you imply, dedicating most of their words to explaining and summarizing data-based academic papers. Pinker even includes a graph of the data. Presumably these observations are eventually used to make an argument.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Absolutely not.

It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

The Jacobins are the most central example of Enlightenment ideology possible. Bolsheviks are the grandchildren of the Jacobins, and the Nazis are close cousins, both being founded on hard Materialism and totalizing authoritarianism which founds its credibility on Enlightenment assumptions.

Enlightenment has evidently produced several very different worldviews. The system we have in Anglosphere has been much more benign than the aforementioned.

But rejecting Enlightenment, as I understand it, would require tearing down our institutions and repudiating common values. It's so established - even traditional - that to undo it you have to destroy our entire system and start over from theory. That has not been a successful method historically. Hence the comparison to revolutionary groups.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Let me say more succinctly what I think is wrong with Enlightenment worldview: It asserts that there are right ways to reason about propositions of fact (viz., generally speaking, the methods used in science and mathematics), but also holds that this "way" is the only honored method of assessing merit of any kind. On the other hand, it yields no actual basis for actually adjudicating between different worldviews (or, what Thomas Sowell called visions), and, in particular, between different value systems. The latter is a controversial assertion, but I believe it firmly and I think the attempts to argue against it (e.g., Harris's The Moral Landscape and Pinker's Enlightenment Now) are terribly weak, as I argued in this post.

This particular aspect of Enlightenment worldview -- and the aesthetic and moral nihilism that it actually entails (even when its adherents claim otherwise) -- had its seeds in the period we call the Enlightenment, but has grown to dominate Western thought only in the second half of the twentieth century, accelerating (in my opinion) when the right abdicated conservatism and embraced Fusionism. This aspect of "Enlightenment" yields tendencies toward radical progressivism and moral and aesthetic relativism, which are antithetical to the Anglo-Christian tradition and indeed to all viable traditions. The part of the Enlightenment that applied scientific materialism and objective reason to science was an improvement consistent with, and emergent from, the Western Christian tradition. On the other hand, the aesthetic and moral nihilism that come from applying that view "outside of its lane" are a dragon eating at the roots of the tree of our civilization. Yes, they have always been around in some form, but they were poison to our ancestors, and they are poison now. By analogy, if my grandfather was an alcoholic, I can carry on the tradition of his identity values without embracing that particular tradition which was always detrimental to the whole.

I withdraw the claim about Pinker generally; he writes like a scientist because he is a scientist -- though the percentage in his popular books is still no more than half (and Better Angels of our Nature is probably a data-heavy outlier), which leaves 50% sermonizing.

For The Moral Landscape, I submit that the paragraph you chose is cherry-picked from the 1%. Here is a link to the full text of The Moral Landscape. What do you think the percentage is there?

Have you read any of Alasdair MacIntyre?

I'm particularly reminded of his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. I haven't read all of it, but the point you highlighted about different visions of morality and rationality coheres rather nicely with what I understand to be his views.

Truth, in the sense of material factuality is indeed sacred, but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism.

I can't put my finger on it, but this just seems wrong somehow. It feels to me like moral uprightness and artistic beauty are sacred because they cohere with truth -- not necessarily bare "material factuality" but "reality as it really is," "existence as it really is," "humans as they really are." The strongest claims for moral uprightness are always undergirded by an appeal to things being in line with what they really are. It was decidedly not the enlightenment thinkers who synthesized the concept of natural law, nor was it them who developed a teleological approach to ethics.

I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.

I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:

  1. The denotation of "truth", most strongly suggested by the use of the word, is material factuality.
  2. "Truth", whatever it is, is irreducibly sacred, if not the fountainhead of sanctity itself (as when Jesus said "I am the truth, the way and the life).

In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.

In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone".

Or perhaps more to the point, "taking the lowly position of this child". That's a bit archaic, though; the translation into 4chanese is "being autistically honest" (having to couch communications in layers of defense is something neither children nor the autistic have the ability or the desire to do; that's why doing this is a mark of immaturity), and in Mottese it's "communicating using purely mistake theory" (paraphrasing how you described #2 above).

Which is why that part of Enlightenment philosophy is that way, why it works as well as it does (inb4 "surprise, schools of thought closer to God's global maximum make the people who accept that as the room temperature prosper, even though a local maximum of corruption may dominate them for a time"), and as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).

This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything.

There's a love in it. I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying Science truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love; the entire point of valuing truthfulness is to serve others, and permit/enable others to do the same, because that is (as far as I can tell) what God intends you to use His creation for.

as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).

I can't tell what you are trying to say, or how it relates to what you are responding to. Can you elaborate and/or clarify?

I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying [struck through: Science] truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love;

My position is not that we should deny truth, but that the Enlightenment overreaches on the exclusive sanctity of factual truth and objective methods for determining it. In particular, this leaves no honored way of adjudicating questions of morality or beauty, or of promulgating values and visions (that is, visions in the sense of Sowell's A Conflict of Visions).

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The English word for this is 'honesty'.

I agree that "Honesty" is closer than "truth" as a translation, though I don't think it catches the whole thing. Someone can be honest even when they forget something important, or forget everything (as the dead do, in Virgil's Aeneid, when they drink from the river Lethe). Aletheia connotes being able to give a clear picture of the subject you are talking about, and then actually giving it.

Note that truth is a property of sentences while honesty is a property of a person or his conduct on a given occasion -- whose presence is a virtue and whose absence is a sin. So the Greek concept of aletheia is more like "honesty" in that it is more ethically weighted, and carries that ethical weight into more contexts, than the English conception of truth. But it is stronger than honesty because it also suggests knowing what you are talking about.

Aletheia also just means 'truth'.

People have been doing translation and Biblical criticism for some time now.

I'd be hesitant about the use of etymologies there. That's just the normal Greek word for truth. Sure, that's the etymology, but it's been used like that for centuries; surely most of the sense of the etymological sense has been flattened out by that point.

That said, I don't have a well-defined way to read that middle term in that passage, so ignore me.

What I am citing isn't an etymology (that is, word history); it is the literal meaning of the word in Greek, that long existed, and continues to exist, contemporaneously with the meanings of its constituents (a-lethia: non-forgetting, non-concealment). It is translated as "truth" only because there is not a better English word to translate it into, but a lot of important content and connotation is lost in that translation. A word can become an idiom (that is, cease to have its literal meaning) over time, especially if the constituents become obsolete, but this was not the case with aletheia in Classical Greece, and I doubt it is even the case in Modern Greek. The root lethes, is still a word in Greek to this day, meaning "forgetting" or "oblivion" (not "materially false"). The English word "True" has no root in English, of which it is the opposite, but its opposite is "false".

In its earliest and most influential uses (Homer, for example), aletheia is used differently from the modern English word "true". Here is a brief discussion of how word aletheia is used in Homer. After Homer, the biggest influence on Classical Greek use of the word is probably the poem Aletheia by Parmenides, in which it has a broad and mystical meaning -- even farther from the modern notion of truth as material factuality -- perhaps akin to the Stoical notion of logos.

I also think that even if the word becomes idiomatic over time, it loses its literal meaning only by a matter of degree, and that these things affect us more than most people think.

I would not actually renounce that material factuality is part of truth, nor would I hold that material factuality lacks sanctity. But rather, by describing "bare material factuality," I was describing facts without reference to what we're actually supposed to do with them. You need both, or there is no sanctity.

While material factuality taken too far leads to nihilism (because it separates facts from values), truth-as-non-concealment taken too far leads to relativism (because it separates values from facts). My view would be that material factuality is sacred when tied in with the proper disposition towards factuality and with the larger ontological questions of what reality is. It is sacred to seek the truth, and it is even more sacred to find it. But moreover, the sacredness is applied to the sum total of things and experiences; it's reality that is sacred, sanity that is sacred.

Jesus was indeed describing himself as the full and unconcealed revelation of God, but it is only because that revelation points to something really real, factually real, actually real, that this matters. It would mean precious little for Jesus to be the unconcealed revelation of something that does not correspond to reality. That's not Christianity as the New Testament understands it. It is precisely that his audience believed in the factual existence of God that his claim to be the revelation of God meant anything to them, whether for good or for ill.

Put simply, I think the dichotomy between truth-as-factual-correspondance and truth-as-disposition is a false one, and frankly I see it as a means to smuggle in the epistemological nihilism of Postmodernism. Every discussion I read about the topic sounds like a thousand words saying nothing. There is a reality, and there is a means of humans reaching closer correspondence to it; this is not an enlightenment theory but one that is necessary for human existence in general, anything else also leads to nihilism. It beggars belief to state that when Plato or Aristotle wrote long discourses about the nature of justice or logical deduction, that they did not intend their views to approach material factuality. Whence else cometh the metaphor of the cave?

My disagreements with the Enlightenment have precious little to do with such a dichotomy, and everything to do with their intellectual overconfidence (the "self-evident" phrasing you cited) and limitation of the means of reaching an understanding of material factuality ("according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics"). That doesn't mean the tools of science and mathematics are useless in reaching truth, just that they're limited, and cannot at times approach the value of a good story or a compelling narrative in stating and revealing the truth of things within their purview, like human social relations.

This is what I am talking about when I am referring to the religious "gish gallop" style of operation. This whole screed could have been done in 3 sentences.

  • -17

If it's any consolation to you, I had already seen your post on religious "gish gallops" but didn't think much of it. As soon as I had noticed Nelson's long post (and I admit I did recognize his name) and the long reply, and skimming the posts showed certain words, I immediately thought, "hey this is like one of those religious posts that guy was talking about."

(Personally I think I got bored of the CW thread because all that's been said has been said, to a first approximation)

Actually, could you do that (Do the comment in three sentences)? I'd be impressed. It doesn't need to get quite everything, but the gist.

I don't think it's really a gish-gallop, as those make too many points to reasonably address. You're saying it's not dense, so that's just making a few points repeatedly or slowly. That's not a gish-gallop.

Anyway, here's a (brief) case for Christianity, that might even seem rational from a secular, moral-free perspective, at least if you're motivated sufficiently highly by reason and argumentation:

  1. Pascal's wager seems to require that we give up everything to avoid infinite harms and seek infinite goods, if we are to do what is in our own interest. That is, it is instrumentally rational to do so.
  2. It's hard to get infinites accessible to you assuming that atheistic, supernatural-free, no-other-big-surprises model of the world is right.
  3. So you're best off if you bet everything on that being wrong, regardless of how unlikely you think it is.
  4. We need some way to know what's beneficial with regard to infinites, if we are to act.
  5. We don't have any more likely way to know things about infinite rewards accessible to humans than through purported supernatural revelation.
  6. Religions are the most likely sources of revelation of that variety.
  7. Large religions are more likely to be an authentic divine revelation, if God has an interest in giving humans knowledge (which, given that we're assuming divine revelation already, is probably fairly likely). So large religions are the most likely.
  8. Abrahamic religions are the only large religions offering infinite rewards, or escape from infinite torment.
  9. Judaism, in its prescriptions for gentiles, requires fairly little, so you get that one nearly for free, so the main consideration is Christianity vs. Islam. At least, if the rabbis got that right.
  10. And then, Christianity is more likely, as it seems more likely likely to be genuinely new revelation (e.g. attestation of a resurrection from the dead by 500 witnesses seems kind of new) whereas Islam seems to be cribbing off of and trusting Christianity, and grants that Jesus is a prophet, so then, if you were Muslim, you'd have to justify, why Christianity is actually false when the Quran seems to say it's not.
  11. You should be a Christian, if you want what's best for you.

Step 10 is what currently seem sketchiest to me; I'm not too familiar with Islam, unfortunately.

I don't expect you to care about arguments enough to do this (but not doing so is a really low expected value move on your part, if I'm right), but I do think this is fairly defensible, and I think you're irrational insofar as you don't act accordingly.

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What exactly have you contributed to the discussion here?

We have Nazis and Holocaust Deniers and white nationalists and pedophiles and Repeal the 19th (and the 13th and 14th...) party members here, and people who really really fucking do not like them manage to refrain from posting "You suck and your arguments are bad" every time they post.

So far, this is not the "mind-blowing" politeness you promised, and this is about your last warning because I'm sick of seeing these low-effort potshots in the queue just because you can't control yourself.

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I'll accept a ban for this if need be, but this type of comment from this specific user is getting really old. It's near-constant, disdainful, antagonistic, and never changes, and never gets punished. We get that you don't like religious people, but nothing in your above characterization is remotely reasonable, fair, or calculated to lead to any useful discussion of the topic.

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You ask me, the more relevant psych study is the Asch Conformity Experiments.

Those have also held up better to replication.

Check out how the results change when you add in a fellow dissenter.

Hence, Elon being a very visible source of open dissent could trigger a lot of others to cease conforming.

Hence, Elon being a very visible source of open dissent

More visible than the fricking President of the United States? Not only did Trump have a bigger bully pulpit than Musk, his being elected was a very public single that tens of millions of normies liked what he was saying. DorseyTwitter didn't ban Trump until after Jan 6th.

Even if you ignore Trump, right-wing views that the NYT considered cancellable (e.g. "Blacks do most of the crime", "Transwomen are men" or "Hunter Biden is selling out America") were mainstream on Fox, in the WSJ and NY Post, on talk radio and on Boomer Facebook. The idea that the right was operating by samizdat until Elon bought Twitter is silly. (HBD was beyond the pale in those right-wing venues, but unobfuscated HBD still doesn't fly on ElonTwitter).

Twitter wasn't important because the masses were on Twitter. Twitter was important because aspirant elites who needed to publicly push the party line used Twitter to work out what the party line was in real time. These people . That the sort of person who had a bluecheck on DorseyTwitter hasn't changed their political views is convincing evidence that Elon buying Twitter isn't what is changing the discourse.

The simplest explanation (not necessarily the most correct one) for woke losing ground is that the elites are much more equivocal in supporting it after 10/7 when it became clear that wokestupid can turn anti-Semitic at the drop of a paraglider.

More visible than the fricking President of the United States?

...Yes.

The president's "visibility" was limited in every possible way by the leftist media apparatus. I mean, cmon - he was banned from twitter.

When CNN couldn't avoid covering him at all, they showed spliced single-digit-second clips sandwiched in between minutes of talking-head diatribes.

Fox's power as a sympathetic outlet is minimal. It's been unpalatable to anyone in the moderate space forever. Even if you agree with some of the points, it's not any better. The diatribes are far rougher around the edges - they feel simultaneously more hateful and pandering. And when you're done with those you have to sit through ads for adult diapers.

The bully pulpit became far less bully in those Unprecedented Times.

Paying attention to "Faux News" or the New York Post puts you outside the bounds of respectability the way browsing Twitter/X does not. And of course Twitter/X is a two-way medium, at least in theory.

Trump has been a double-edged sword in terms of being a symbol of resistance to the blue tribe's dominance.

I guess if you want to break it down some, Trump is the totem around which Red tribe can coordinate, Musk is a similar totem for the Grey tribe that lean red or are just anti-blue.

Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms.

It probably helps that tweets take a few seconds to read. You can scan through several hundred tweets in an hour and pick out some things to retweet or subtweet, while watching a video or reading a long blog post to decide whether to praise or shame takes much longer.

Funny, I just asked a similar thing. I think there is a vibe shift in progress but I hadn't considered the Twitter angle. I think you're right, it's important. There seems to be three main factors: it's (maybe) a Too Big To Fail platform, so a lot of people stayed on there due to network effects, Community Notes make it easy for dissenters to counter The Narrative right where normies can see it, and even pre-Elon there was a subculture of poasters who enjoyed messing with the establishment. So I can totally buy that it was highly effective for Elon to take and that it might have started a preference cascade, and I suspect that's why there's much news trying to make him look bad.

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