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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Tradition is acknowledgement of eternal truths and their practical, moral, social and metaphysical requirements

@hydroacetylene recently wrote:

every society in history has figured out that harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society. You can have the public and public institutions be unfair to people- indeed, it's impossible for them to be perfectly fair- they just need to work.

What other eternal truths build and uphold society?

  1. men and women are different and sexism is load bearing to society.

  2. shit work has to be done, and a lot of it is sufficiently crappy that coercion is necessary for anyone to do it. You can use economic coercion or you can use actual slavery, your choice.

  3. people are lazy and conformist and they like their pleasures and comforts. 9/10 of them will pick whatever option looks like the easiest way to get a fun, comfortable life.

  4. never bet on a student before his studies start to pan out- too high a failure rate.

  5. there is a developmental window for learning a society’s set of ‘basic adult skills’- for us, things like driving, communicating electronically, managing and keeping a schedule, etc- and if you blow past that window, pretty good chance of being screwed.

  6. girls grow up faster than boys do and are ready for adult roles earlier. They also have a harder time recovering from early mistakes later on. Of course, after a certain age, guys can’t either.

  7. most people need to believe in the supernatural or they won’t do things right.

  8. listen to your elders, they probably know more than you.

harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society.

Disagree. Actually a lot of societies have a good understanding that if someone is 'merely' unfortunate they deserve a second chance. What the harsh views are about is the reality that it's almost never 'mere' misfortune.

I think the reference to metaphysics opens your question up a great deal. So I will offer one option unusual in rationalist-adjacent spaces: true religion. I don't just mean religion as a social technology for building group cohesion and teaching pro-social values. I mean religion which offers the truth about God, human nature, and the human condition. (Yes, Romans 1 came up in church today.) When you know what men are and what they are for, you have a workable foundation for wisdom and virtue.

But if you can't swing true religion for whatever reason, your next best bet is the natural law. Among the ancients, it was possible for Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists to discuss it productively. In the modern age it seems to be unique to Christians, so it doesn't have a lot of practical independant value. This may be because the others have rejected metaphysics.

Edit to make the implicit explicit: I doubt that this is the place for me to convince all of you to convert. The folks here who are old enough and interested in that debate have probably had it at a higher level than I can offer anyway. But religion on the Motte is often discussed in instrumental ways, and I want to say that the truth matters. Focus on the verity in eternal verities.

What other eternal truths build and uphold society?

(1) given changing circumstances there are no truly eternal social truths; the meaning and effect of social moves changes with time and circumstance, so repeating previous social moves will not always produce the same results.

(2) humans, in general, are pretty crap at figuring out what they want out of society, and how to achieve it. Their judgment about which social moves are appropriate is not to be trusted.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings contains a few.

"Stick to the Devil you know" -- this Devil is war, compared to surrendering your weapons in hope of peace, which just gets you enslaved.

"The Wages of Sin is Death." -- the particular sin appears to be sexual licentiousness, the punishment being something discussed often enough here: "Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith"

"If you don't work you die." -- about prosperity through redistribution ("robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul")

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