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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm only now just reading this post, but I think you misinterpret the Nietzchean pole of the Online Right, which is dedicated toward reforming Morality in a eugenic direction. This does manifest as a glorification of paganism, Aryan conquerors and the like, which (correctly) regard that thumos as fundamentally eugenic in nature. It was violent, and it was eugenic.
And there's a big difference between pirates and barbarian warlords! With the latter representing an undeniably violent but Civilizing force of nature, and the former actually representing a slave morality, or slave revolt in opposition to Civilization. I can't say I've ever seen the Online Right glorify pirates, as much as relate them to a force, if anything, Semitic in nature- in contest against civilized behavior. This dynamic is exuded by any Hollywood production which is careful to contrast, i.e. the Pirate culture with that of the British Empire. There's a conflict there, and Nietzsche is not on the side of the pirates. Nietzsche is on the side of the British Empire, and Hollywood is on the side of the Pirates.
So I think you misinterpret the Nietzchean perspective. The Nietzchean perspective is- how do we reform Morality to orient Civilization in a eugenic direction? And you seem pretty aligned with that being the operative question of the day. You say you don't want to live under the Ubermensch, but the Ubermensch is the man/men who accomplish that task of reforming Morality, or as you acknowledge, casting off the slave morality that rules over us.
Nietzsche also directly compares Merchant Morality to Pirate Morality, calling the former a refinement of the latter:
I just found that part of your comment interesting because in my experience the Nietzschean Right are the only ones who interpret pirates in popular culture as a symbolic glorification of counter-civilizational slave morality.
I think this difference is absolutely fake. Both are anti-civilization.
This is also nonsense. Mercantile trade is a vital part of actual civilization.
Ultimately this comes down to the fact that I do not believe that our society had become so rotten and degenerate that we need violent men to conquer and remake it. I believe that the current institutions we have are quite sufficiently well-equipped to accomplish eugenic ends without extreme violence and predation - hallmarks of all barbarian warlords - being necessary at all.
I'm really curious as to what exactly you think the Roman Empire was except tribal warlords that conquered the Italian Peninsula and then put pen to paper formalizing their rule? Ditto for literally any Empire you would regard as civilization? Especially the United States of America?
Certainly that is the primordial beginning of Rome. The Roman conquest of most of Italy took place several centuries before the blossoming of Rome into a proper empire, though. So yes, one can point to any empire as having its roots in barbarian warlords, if one chooses an arbitrarily long time frame. The Anglo-Saxons who conquered the post-Roman Britons were textbook barbarians, but that doesn’t mean that the refined and mature imperial civilization of Britain was equally barbaric.
I think Nietzsche and the Online Right are correct to point to a profound difference, a moral and even genealogical difference between the Anglo-Saxons who conquered a continent and Pirates who harrassed the forces of civilization out of bitterness and desperation owing to their low status. Nietzsche is correct to identify the former, as it percolates into Civilization, as a Master Morality and rote piracy as a Slave morality.
As a Nietzschean I find it abhorrent to compare the Anglo-Saxons to Pirates. One was building civilization, the other was trying to undermine it.
What aspects of pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon culture do you find particularly impressive or admirable? They strike me as no better or more civilized than any of the other mystery-meat Germanic tribes who kicked around the ruins of post-Roman Europe for a few hundred years before they figured out how to do Civilization again. The Normans were at least a more refined and literary people given their great level of integration with the continent.
And the Lombards and Ostrogoths didn’t? I mean, what are we talking about here? The armies of illiterate savages who sacked Rome were actually a civilizing force, but the pirate captains and their crew who harried the Caribbean were anti-civilization? What is the difference between these classes of people, other than the boats?
King Alfred passed a law for universal (free male) literacy in about 800: https://cpercy.artsci.utoronto.ca/courses/1001Guthrie.htm and Old English was the second vulgar (of the common people) European language used in widespread writing after the fall of Rome (the first was Old Irish).
More options
Context Copy link
The fundamental disconnect is that you don't see what Nietzsche interprets as a continuity between the ancient barbarian conquerors and noble classes of civilization. You play the game of "oh I love the United States but I disavow the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Indians, sorry we were sooo barbaric for doing that!" Nietzsche related the future aristocracy with barbarian conquerors. The Pirates were not a "future aristocracy" they were a bitter underclass! The Romans, the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, they were Noble and the pirates were not Noble. Simple as.
The word "Aryan" denoted and was synonymous with "Noble", pointing towards an ethnic self-conception of these barbarian conquerors as Noble. The point being, the "barbarian conquerors" should be viewed as proto-Aristocrats, because they were across everything we regard as Civilization: the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Aryans, etc. They actually became the upper and ruling classes of the civilization you hold in high regard.
Not so much a civilizing force as a cleansing force of a civilization that decayed under dysgenic forces. And yes, those barbarians warlords did become the future aristocracy, particularly in Northern Italy.
The entire idea of a Pirate is as an inversion or ressentiment towards The Aristocract. The Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Greek, Roman, etc. is the aspirational aristocrat. Their genealogy actually composed the forces of civilization.
I absolutely do not say this, and in fact I have said the opposite numerous times on this very website. The society which conquered the Indians was at a significantly higher level of development than the tribes it subjugated. Thats the opposite of barbarism. More importantly though, it would be nonsensical for me to say such a thing anyway, because the Anglo-Saxons didn’t conquer the Indians. The English did! The Anglo-Saxons were a bunch of disunited, barely-literate savages. I note that you did not answer my question about which elements of their society you find impressive.
It took many intervening centuries of savagery before the English were anything like a real Civilization. The Wars of the Roses are every bit as pointlessly brutish and uncivilized as anything we see in war-torn Africa today. The “continuity” between the 6th-century dirt-farming tribespeople whom we call “the Anglo-Saxons” and the British who created the first globe-spanning Empire is so tenuous as to be entirely a matter of academic debate. Duke Wellington is as far away from the Anglo-Saxons as the Anglo-Saxons were from the early Iron Age.
Yeah, certainly there was an ethnogenesis resulting from the subsumption of and conflict with other barbarian tribes, especially the Vikings, etc... and that's kind of the point. You have a genetic substrate- those barbarians you hate. You have eugenic pressures due to war and disease and Medieval Law- itself undoubtedly influenced by Germanic ancestral legacy... It's all part of the formula. Why are you so adamant about disavowing the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings when you treasure the legacy they created- the civilization bearers and colonizers that created global empire? The point being what you identify as Civilization and Aristocracy is directly descended from these tribal warlords and these conquests. Unless you subscribe to Jared Diamond's hypothesis or otherwise HBD denial, that the British Empire has nothing to do with the genetic ancestry of the British and this all just sprung from the ground due to geographical features of the English continent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link