site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Philosophy especially seems to be really bad about spending hours debating the meaning of every word used

Do you have any examples of published philosophical works that do this? (I'll grant that you might be able to find something - some published philosophy is just bad, after all. But, I can easily point you to works that don't do this as well.)

Some amount of discussion about the definitions of terms is necessary. Think about how often we debate the appropriate definition of terms like "left" and "right" on TheMotte. We just had multiple sub-threads last week about what "cultural Marxism" means. Do you think the posters here are just being irrational or intentionally obscurantist when they engage in discussions like that? I don't think they are. I think it makes sense that we would debate what those terms mean, because they're contentious terms that get used in different ways by different people, so we need to get clear on what they actually mean in order to have a productive conversation.

When I redefine common English words in philosophy

Again, what sorts of examples are you thinking of? I really don't think this happens often at all in philosophy. There's jargon, certainly, but much of this jargon ("epistemic", "qualia", "a priori") is unique to philosophy and wouldn't be confused for ordinary English terms. If anything, philosophers like to invent new words and phrases to use in place of ordinary words if the ordinary words are too ambiguous (see for example the use of terms like "error theory" and "expressivism" to describe more precise sub-variants of what non-philosophers would call "moral relativism").

the point is quite often to make a simple argument sound profound.

How much academic analytic philosophy have you read? They really do go out of their way to make the writing as straightforward (and, frankly, dry) as possible.

Writers in the "continental" tradition are known for writing with more of a poetic flourish, but, so what? They're having fun and it makes their works more fun to read, so, good for them.

Yeah, that post puzzled me too. I'm not saying the tendency he describes doesn't exist but philosophy, or at least the analytic tradition that is dominant in English-language departments, is one of the fields least guilty of it outside the hard sciences.

So it's weird the way he gives "philosophy" as his main exemplar. Like, say there was a flaw in a lot of recent American vehicles' onboard computers, and it was found to affect 17 Ford models, 14 GM ones, and 2 Chrysler ones (and an overall share of their respective sales roughly proportionate to those numbers). It's as though someone went on a big rant about that, and got a lot right, except they explicitly claimed it was mainly a Chrysler problem.

Absent the concrete examples you very reasonably asked for, I suppose the maximally charitable interpretation is that he thinks the continental tradition is all that exists.

(EDIT: First sentence of the second paragraph wasn't very accurate previously, toned it down.)