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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35138 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Well, you're certainly in the right place, since this is a subject we've discussed here at some length over the years.

Have you read Zunger's Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept, or Ozy's Conservatives as Moral Mutants? If you're looking to understand the breakdown of liberalism, those two would be my pick for the best place to start.

People act according to their values. When people share coherent values, they are able to live together and cooperate. Liberalism axiomatically assumes that at least a supermajority of humans share coherent values by nature. This is not actually the case; Liberalism evolved in a highly homogenous environment, and mistook the homogeneity of its specific host population for a universal constant of human nature. The truth is that human values drift over time, and can easily reach mutually-incoherent states. By claiming tolerance as a terminal value, Liberalism greatly accelerates this drift, and when values become broadly incoherent, it simply breaks down.

The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.

The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.

This is the key point I find myself harping upon, again and again. It probably makes up a substantial part of my current political views. "Process and procedure" can never fully substitute for virtue; there is no perfect system to make even a society of "rational devils" good; and what the focus on procedure does is either empower people skilled in "manipulation of procedural outcomes" to exercise power without responsibility, or build toward Machine Rule. I'm not sure which is worse, the Dolores Umbridges, or the "distributed non-human intelligences" (as IIRC Benjamin Boyce put it).

Either way:

"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."

Liberalism evolved in a highly homogenous environment,

No it did not. Liberalism is an outgrowth of religious warfare. It’s true that everyone was white in the liberal urheimat, but pre-Proto-liberalism would have seen this as less important than religious differences. ‘Better Turk than pope’ was a popular slogan during this era.

Indeed, during liberalism’s yamnaya expansion in the French Revolution the relevant distinction would have been between liberalism and Catholicism, with the liberal/conservative distinction mostly arising later, after Protestant powers defeated Napoleon for geopolitical reasons.

Religious warfare between Christians. Christianity has many sects but they’re relatively homogenous compared to all the other religions out there

Homogeneity is relative, and does not preclude warfare; see the Civil War for a pertinent example.

"Freedom of Religion" seems like a good idea between Christians, with some Jews and vanishingly few Muslims and American Indians thrown in. It does not seem like a good idea if half the population are Aztec Blood Cultists. And indeed, we see the principle decay along these very lines, because the values that endorsed the principle are not in fact universally applicable. People are not in fact willing to tolerate anything other humans are willing to call a "religion". Those who coined the phrase did so in reference to their own, highly homogenous context, on the assumption that their present conditions would obtain in the future. They were wrong, and so the internal contradictions come to the fore until the principle has entirely self-destructed.

My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.

No true Scotsman?

I think you’d have to draw a really strange category to exclude all the deeply ethnic conflicts. There was plenty of Slav- or Jew- or Walloon- or Catalonian-hating going on.

Non-WEIRD populations fall hard for universalist religions- Islam and Communism are historically recent examples- all the time. The kind of western European identity in which the liberal urheimat can be called homogenous did exist in the high middle ages, with the identity of 'Latins'- but that idea disappeared into sectarian violence in the sixteenth century. The English king's marriage to a French Catholic during the beginning of the enlightenment was hugely controversial and hated by the people to the point of subsequently being made illegal and France withdrew the edict of toleration in the same period. These countries were ground zero for liberalism.

'Religious tolerance among Christians' is itself a liberal idea, although perhaps rooted in the protestant tendency to see themselves as on the same team despite their gigantic theological differences. Perhaps that's why you don't see serious intellectual reactionism coming without Catholic roots; the protestant classical conservatives who aligned against Napoleon put no effort into ideology and even the moderate English version of classical conservatism tends to be aligned with high church Anglicanism when it isn't outright Catholic.

Islam and Communism

That’s seriously stretching the definition of universalist. Both of those ideologies/religions draw pretty sharp distinctions between groups of people, with fairly extreme hostility

My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.

The most important intra-European religious conflicts in my lifetime have been in former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. In both cases religion was very obviously a proxy for tribal identity, not a religious thing. Unfortunately this doesn't answer the question, because they both happened in transHajnal Europe.

It is, of course, the whole point that religious conflict in cisHajnal Europe is unheard of, except in so far as it involves immigrants from transHajnal places.

I did read Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept last time you linked it in reply to me. That's actually what set off some of this disturbed line of thinking for me. I'll read the other blog post later. Yes, your past posts are quite illustrative to me, but I was hoping someone else would swing by and change my mind. I don't think it will happen.

How do you cope?

I think I have a pretty good understanding of both the spread of likely outcomes and the prudent path forward, and have made my peace with them. Also, sincere Christianity.

Considering the track that the nation is going down, I was doing some more thinking. The approach that seemed to be the best to me is that the federal government must be weakened until it is no longer present, and let states spend their incomes how they choose and enact policies that they want, rather than viciously fighting over the same federal institutions every 4 or so years.

But upon my trying to dig up arguments against Marxism (probably the most dangerous philosophy I think has a chance of doing anything right now), I found that Karl Marx didn't really outline how socialist countries should make the transition into communism and, in fact, such a thing is probably not even possible. Institutions will try to perpetuate themselves in any way they can. Given this fact, I think DOGE is doomed to ultimately fail, especially if the next administration comes in and undoes the damage it is doing. So what is the prudent path forward?

Furthermore, this episode of history has revealed the weaknesses of liberalism: if you give people their own individual rights, including the ability to speak and convince each other of values detrimental to the state, eventually this kind of split will happen. If the federal government dissolves, and each state becomes its own nation, should they still embrace liberalism as the least bad of every option? Or should countries reserve full authority to do as they please, and there are no inherent rights?

Considering the track that the nation is going down, I was doing some more thinking. The approach that seemed to be the best to me is that the federal government must be weakened until it is no longer present, and let states spend their incomes how they choose and enact policies that they want, rather than viciously fighting over the same federal institutions every 4 or so years.

This is my understanding of the best likely outcome as well. Picture the federal government as a fencepost set firmly in the ground. The left and right yank it right and left over and over, and each pull loosens the earth around it until eventually it is ripped loose entirely. That is the process we are currently witnessing: a breakdown in the credibility of the federal government, as each escalation converges both sides on "valid only if we control it". The optimistic view is that such a convergence rounds down to "not valid at all", as simply rejecting validity is simpler and easier to enforce than absolute tribal control. Finding a way to leave each other alone is, I hope, simply easier than exercising tyranny over half the nation.

So what is the prudent path forward?

What we're currently seeing, more or less. Blue-Tribe has dominated the institutions and used them to secure unaccountable power. Those institutions must be un-dominated and accountability restored, or they must be destroyed. There isn't really any other option available. The mistake is viewing this as fundamentally about DOGE, or Trump for that matter. If DOGE and Trump fail, the proper course is to escalate again.

If the federal government dissolves, and each state becomes its own nation, should they still embrace liberalism as the least bad of every option? Or should countries reserve full authority to do as they please, and there are no inherent rights?

In my view, they should retain as much liberalism as they can without compromising society. It seems to me that being clear-headed about liberalism's inherent flaws makes it easier to retain more of it than one can otherwise manage. In the end, though, there are no "inherent rights" in any sort of objective sense. There are values, and some of those values are compatible. Power does what it will, and constraining its abuse is a never-ending responsibility incumbent on each individual human; no system will ever do this job for us, and if we don't do it, it won't be done.

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