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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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You know what, fair. Thank you.

I'll pivot and, then, say that liberalism is a fantastic moral and political system for speedrunning towards the destruction of human integrity and the destruction of individual dignity. If such a path leads to such desolation, of what use is the path?

Liberalism has been around a few centuries and hasn't led to desolation yet. I'd rather not get off the path or take doommongering too seriously.

Wouldn't the counter-argument be that, prior to the invention of liberalism, Europe was constantly tearing itself apart in holy wars? I doubt many of the people whose lives were constantly being disrupted as a result felt terribly dignified about the whole matter.

I'm not saying that "I'd rather be dead than compromise my integrity and dignity" is an incoherent or obviously ridiculous statement - there really are certain principles I hold which I would rather die than violate, or certain experiences which I find the idea of going through so humiliating that I would rather die than experience them. But I would like to be reassured that whatever you're proposing as an alternative to liberalism wouldn't immediately lead to hundreds of years of civil war and the immediate cessation of all meaningful human progress and economic development.

Wouldn't the counter-argument be that, prior to the invention of liberalism, Europe was constantly tearing itself apart in holy wars?

Other than the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), what other "holy wars" do you have in mind, such that "Europe was constantly tearing itself apart"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion

So, the smaller post-Reformation conflicts leading up to the Thirty Years War?

What about the many, many centuries before the Reformation? Europe wasn't exactly "tearing itself apart in holy wars" then, now was it? It still looks to me like Europe has spent a minority of the last couple millennia in "holy wars" — certainly not enough time to deserve the term "constantly."

Well, obviously there were no holy wars (in the sense of intra-Christian wars) prior to the Reformation. Why would you start a holy war with someone who believes in the same creed you do? It's tautological.

Then Europe wasn't constantly "tearing itself apart in holy wars," but only doing so part of the time.

There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade

I'm sure we both have better things to do then get into pedantic debates like this.

judeo-roman wars, islamic conquests and ongoing jihad, ridda wars, shia-sunni wars, crusades in the levant, fourth crusade against constantinople, albigensian crusade, northern crusades, hussite wars.

Before the catholic-protestant wars, the best one for folamh3’s argument is the islam-christianity war, as a constant, religiously motivated conflict which never really ended and kept eastern europe and the mediterranean bloody for a thousand years.

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