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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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I struggle a lot with whether I think “Western values” even refers to any real and reliably identifiable category at all - and, if so, what jettisoning such values would mean for the societies who supposedly believe in them today. Would I actually want to live in a society where the concept of “inalienable human rights” was abandoned? Sure, it’d certainly mean less homeless people in my neighborhood. Probably less disorder. Certainly less refugees and welfare recipients. What would be its other knock-on effects? To what extent are the soft-headed liberal values you’re decrying actually load-bearing cultural infrastructure underpinning the best parts of our society, versus simply luxury beliefs that could easily be discarded or de-emphasized without impacting the parts of my society that I care about? Certainly I personally don’t believe that every individual human life has significant intrinsic moral value. But do I want to live in a society where everyone in power agrees with me? I’m not actually certain.

This section to me is particularly dangerous. You can't untangle "western values" from the societies that have been created by them and the benefits conferred to billions through that process. Many times when you pull on a few seemingly unrelated threads in a system it turns out that they were actually load bearing threads and the whole thing unravels. There is certainly a secret to western success, and a large part of it has been trust and cooperation beyond clan and family; if you abandon those values you're right back to it. It is all fun and games until you're the one up against the wall with no due process. Everyone always imagines they'll be the boot instead of the human face, most people don't end up being the boot.

When England led the world in coal and textile production, we proselytised for Free Trade. It became one of our great societal convictions, and as a country we became very rich.

Then the coal started running out and we didn’t have oil. Factories in other countries could take advantage of cheap labour and generous subsidies. And suddenly Free Trade meant globalisation hollowing out our economy.

Because the West is in many ways an ideological concept, and the US is an explicitly ideological state (reflected in the constitution), and because western countries have historically been rich and pleasant places to live, we have avoided asking ourselves if our ideologies caused our success or were contingent on it.

I don’t think we can assume that due process causes high trust societies (rather than vice versa), and that free markets produce prosperity. They may! But I’m not currently willing to take it as an axiom in the way that I was 20 years ago.

England was a trading empire long before coal and textiles. It was already very rich by Euro standards before the industrial revolution. It wasn't the coal and the textiles. It was the people and the culture that developed in a place that could only be reached and lived in with some expeditiousness.

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