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 -
Yes. Yes it is. I 100% believe this and have vaguely gestured at it before. It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.
No idea why though. What went wrong?
From a young-ish urban-ish perspective, and adding a little more cynicism than usual, can you see why a lot of this sounds like a trap? Especially when you hear it from an older person? The specific examples given - solving the birthrate crisis and the military recruitment crisis - require young people to take on significant costs for very dubious long-term benefit. Likewise I bet Musk is underpaying his engineers. I agree with you in many ways but also young people are responding rationally to shifted risk & reward incentives.
More options
Context Copy link
Because life is meaningless now. In the past, kin and religion- real religion, the sort of thing people actually believed- dominated life. You had a role and a part to play dictated mostly by those two things; even if you weren't a subsistence farmer because you were the son of a subsistence farmer, there were pretty good odds that your parents picked your future for you- you were an apprentice blacksmith or whatever because that's who they knew. There was a heft to things, and it's easy to commit to heft. Most parents don't abandon their children to foster care and they'll fight like mad to avoid it, even if they technically have the right. People today don't believe in anything real and they've stopped believing in anything real. Every generation, the blood memory of why you have to pick something to carry through at whatever the cost gets weaker and weaker, and this is the cause of great chaos. Nowadays it takes genuine belief to make that kind of heft exist without already having your bridges burned.
'Men have forgotten God. That is why all this has happened.'
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's just because people have much more to lose now. Your normal standard of living is big enough so you don't have to diverge from a safe railroded life path to live well. Why would you commit if by doing so you limiting your own options and open up yourself to failure?
More options
Context Copy link
Theory: daycare from infancy.
I think a lot of the problems stem from how we’ve outsourced raising kids almost entirely to caregivers. This has tge obvious effect of essentially destroying the attachment process between family members, and it’s devastating for kids. Kids who grow up in daycares are one of 8-10 kids in a room in which adults ignore them unless they’re getting in trouble or need care. Parents, assuming an 8pm bedtime might get an hour or two on weekdays and whatever time they can squeeze around household chores on weekends to spend time with the kids. Achieving something in a daycare doesn’t mean much, the care giver is simply too busy with other kids to notice them getting good at something. Parents are too busy to celebrate them doing something. And this is for everything they do. The kids don’t matter, and their attempts to do things don’t matter. Eventually they don’t bother..
It's very rare no? Don't most people stay with their kids at home until maybe age 4-5? IRL I know of one person who was in early daycare, and my entire family sometimes (but rarely) talks that she's a little odd bc of that. She herself has said that. Her parents were careerist high flyers and very much in love. 1930s kids, so they considered their parental duties done when kids were fed, clothed and attending school.
More options
Context Copy link
Except parents spend much more time with kids now than they did in the sixties.
Can you double check your link?
Not the stupid hat thing again. Replaced.
Thanks I was really confused why it was linking to a deleted reddit comment or whatever.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Except that I’d guess 100 years ago parents spent way less personal ‘emotional’ time with kids, kids were much more independent, were raised by neighborhood older figures in informal crèches until they were old enough to play by themselves, whereupon they did so until they went to school, which they did until they had to work and/or get married. The sentimental, schmaltzy suburban model of parenting where mom actually spends hours every day with her kids above the age of 3 or 4 is the new thing. I think there are a lot of big failure modes when parents spend too much time with their children; they should love them, but not be too close.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What went wrong is that Western society lost its commitment to its founding religion and deepest set of moral principles.
Not only that, but we decided Christianity was uncool and needed to be remade in our image. No wonder we can’t commit to anything.
I'm sorry, but Western society was founded on Greek paganism. Christianity almost destroyed it once, and we only squeezed through after a thousand-year rut by deciding that Christianity as it was is uncool and remaking it in a different image. In fact, we to then continued to tweak away at it further to great effect for some 500 years more. No wonder that, having been left with such a strong cultural memory of this serving us well, we would eventually slip up and remake it again in a way that is bad without even realising how we screwed up.
What do you actually mean by 'Western society'?
Because yes, Greek influence is the substrate for west Eurasian civilization post-Alexander. But that includes Islamic societies and Indian Societies as well. That is, to say the least, a non-standard use of the term 'western society'.
What is typically meant by western society is societies founded on old Rome and Christianity. I assume you're referring to Rome's fall as the fault of Christianity(a very debatable and not supported by the evidence take; I presume you don't believe Roman mythology was literally true and ancient Rome fell because they didn't stay in the good graces of Iupiter, so I'm curious as to the mechanism for Christianity causing the fall of the Roman empire and the evidence for that mechanism because to all appearances Christianity actually briefly strengthened the Roman empire before it resumed its previous rate of decline), which BTW left a dark age of 300 years at most, not a thousand. But Christian institutions are the reason Roman knowledge was preserved. Christian institutions spread technological advances that lead into the industrial revolution quite directly. Christian institutions were the only thing that kept literacy alive in big parts of Europe.
Roman paganism(and you do know that Roman and Greek paganism were different religions despite the similarities, right?) was a dead man walking at the edict of Milan. An impartial observer in 300 AD probably would have expected Manichaeism or some kind of mystery cult to supplant it as well as Christianity. The fusion between Christianity and Roman culture built the greatest civilization the world has ever, or will ever have, known. Constantine's conversion came at a time when the crisis of the third century had essentially discredited Roman paganism and dealt a mortal blow to the empire. It was Christianity that brought the Germanic tribes into Roman culture; the early scientific texts weren't written in Latin as a tribute to Iupiter, but because of the influence of the Christian church. There's Christian stampings all over this stuff; even timekeeping is due to the Christian church needing to hold religious services at a particular time.
Without Christianity the Germanic tribes would have settled into their conquered Roman territory and acted like Arabs today(and indeed the Arabic golden age had outsize contribution from Christians and a decline in the Christian percentage is at least a reasonable contributing factor).
More options
Context Copy link
There was no thousand-year rut. Christian Europe in the High Middle Ages had already overtaken Rome in terms of technological sophistication, with notable inventions in the period including spectacles, the windmill, mechanical clocks cheap enough to be installed in every village church, sandglasses which keep accurate enough time to be useful, and the architectural techniques needed to build the Gothic cathedrals. (Neither the Romans nor the Chinese could build anything like that). The translation of the key Greek and Arabic works into Latin had been completed by 1200, and at that point Western science and maths started to move ahead (most obviously in astronomy with Oresme). The fall of the Baghdad caliphate and Song China to Genghis Khan allow the West to move into first place, but we never look back and continue to forge ahead through the Renaissance, Commercial Revolution, Age of Exploration, Industrial Revolution, and American Hegemony. If we are not the same civilisation that built Notre-Dame, it is because of some loss of faith in the last hundred years, not because the Renaissance was a RETVRN to an older continuity. (And in any case, the implausibly effective rebuilding of Notre-Dame is strong evidence that we are the same civilisation that built it.)
I am less confident, but on balance believe based on Tom Holland's work, that the key ingredients of the thing that grows into Western Civilisation come together during the Ottonian Renaissance (950-1030), the Cluniac Reforms of Christian monasticism and worship (910-c.1130), the Gregorian Reform of the Church which grew out of Cluny (1050-1080), and the Peace of God movement (989 onwards). Those ingredients are Christianity, the example of Rome, and some kind of customary law or oligarchic cultural trait of the ascendant Germani that counteracts the worst aspects of Romanism. Greek paganism is only essential to the extent that Roman paganism is an offshoot of it (a point of great controversy among classicists).
More options
Context Copy link
@hydroacetylene curious for your response?
See above.
Well yeah I saw but you’re not responding to the pagan accusations. :(
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I really don't think this is true. To the extent that Greek paganism contributed to Western society (that is, the actual society of people living in Europe and America) it is primarily by allowing us to regain lost scientific and engineering knowledge. The only reason that the Iliad is relevant to us is in the West that upper-class elites thought it was a pretty neat story. Democracy is nice but I don't think you can really call it foundational when most people in the West have only had the franchise for a hundred years at best.
To be provocative in my turn, Western society was founded on God, landowning aristocracy, and weirdoes (landlors or clergy) tinkering in their backyard.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link