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 -
Critiques by Cofnas are particularly valid, in my opinion, particularly Cofnas's contentions that there's really not much there in TCoC proving that the particular "Jewish-dominated" movements under study in the book are the ones most important for the social developments MacDonald presumably opposes, and that even in those movements MacDonald tends to exaggerate the influence of the Jewish actors and underrate the influence of the gentile actors. I've seen some contend that MacDonald's second reply debunks those criticisms, but to me it just reads like MacDonald getting Big Mad at Cofnas and leaving particularly the first claim largely unaddressed.
You can endlessly debate whether or not MacDonald over-exaggerated the influence. It is very easy to argue until the cows come home whether or not that influence is over-exaggerated or under-exaggerated given any particular perspective.
The point is MacDonald establishes directionality of that influence and the motive for that directionality. Arguing that the impacts of MacDonald's argument are overstated is a lot easier than disputing those two things, which are the main focus of the book.
But when it comes to things like The Authoritarian Personality, which is a big part of MacDonald's book, you can say that he overstated the impact of that intellectual body of work. But that body of work is still regarded as hugely influential. So saying that his case against that body of work is overstated is just splitting hairs.
The important question, as far as I'm concerned is: is the idea of Jewish influence necessary for the changes mentioned (and opposed) by MacDonald to happen? ie. if there were no Jews at all, would something like these developments still take place? Or is it just a sequence of events that would, in some form, have happened anyway, and it just happens that for various reasons there was a larger-than-expected number of Jews visible in the process of those developments? (Chiefly, I think, that the developments are just mostly the results of secularization and globalization, and Jews just happened to secularize and globalize earlier than most other Western peoples and thus got a head start at populating the social positions opened up and made more important by those trends).
For this question, things like the particular influence of Jewish actors vis-a-vis gentile actors (ie. is Mead or Boas more influential for anthropology?) and the existence of other contributing movements with less Jewish influence (liberal Protestantism, French Revolution and everything downsteam, the various esoteric movements etc.) take on an important role, and it's not really a question that MacDonald answers in any coherent way, beyond what's largely a circular logic (Why be concerned with the Jews? Because they're influencing these movements! So why are those movements important? Well, who cares, that's just what I chose to study! Why did you choose to study them? Because there's a lot of Jews in them, and that's the theme of my study! Why be concerned with the Jews? etc.)
MacDonald demonstrates the obvious double-standard that you are appealing to here. You are placing on MacDonald an isolated demand for rigor, demanding that he debunks some Alternative History that was absent these Jewish influences but led to similar outcomes. He doesn't venture to do that, nor should he.
Creating Alternative History is so insanely arbitrary. You could just say that Protestantism without Jewish influence would have led to Wokeism x 10 and the Jews have reigned them in! You could also say that without Jews the Grantians would have won the immigration question and America today would be 95% Nordic and America would have fought on Germany's side in the Second World War. It's not MacDonald's job to debunk your alternative history, it's his job to establish the motivations behind intellectual movements which are universally regarded as influential in the cultural developments of the past century. He's not supposed to speculate on intellectual movements on some alternative historical timeline, which is completely impossible. Obviously his opponents are motivated to try to place that burden on him because then that becomes the arena of pure speculation, rather than simply observing the evidence for what has actually transpired in this historical timeline.
When it comes to building models to explain anti-Semitism, one thing MacDonald points out is that academics never even consider the behavior of Jews to be in the hypothesis space for explaining anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism question from their perspective always revolves around trying to explain the pathologies of Gentiles. Your criticism of MacDonald is another example of that. If we want to accept that Jews were influential in twentieth century intellectual movements, and in significant part motivated by their Jewish identities, it's not enough to prove that, you also have to disprove some alternative historical timeline that would have similar outcomes without Jews. It's an absurd demand for rigor, and to me it basically shows that there's not a great argument against MacDonald's core observations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link