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 guess that woman debating Sam Seder is getting more attention, but it pairs well with this other guy who "shredded" Sam Seder.
https://x.com/IamSean90/status/1898979265615409509
In this clip, Sam basically fails to articulate a single moral principle beyond "Well, that's just what our society had decided is right and wrong" and when dude says society can change it's mind over time, Sam's only meek response is "Please don't".
Pair this with lady who points out this whole "melting pot" narrative undermining the Christian European roots of America, and Sam comes off as a guy who's left hand is constantly working to change society (through mass migration and media control) to match his preferences, and who's right hand just shrugs and goes "I donno man, things just happen to be the way I like them because of society or whatever man."
There was a story sold to us growing up that we can accept immigrants who want to work hard, and by working hard make America a better place, but that they will assimilate and the America we experience will not meaningfully change. People will experience diversity of shopping and dining experiences with zero externalities. This story, broadly, got widespread support. This story has also been exposed as a complete falsehood. There is little assimilation, and towns are becoming foreign countries out from under their native residents not in generations, but in election cycles. And the response from our ruling class is basically "Fuck you, you suck, your standard of living is too high and you vote wrong, so we're replacing you on purpose and there is nothing you can do about it." We get a bunch of unprincipled and self serving "America is only an idea man, and ideas can change" rhetoric. But change can cut both ways, and people are waking up to the fact that they are faced with America being changed into a completely foreign country out from under them, or being changed back into a more explicitly Christian European country.
But one way or another, the change is coming. Clinging to the status quo is no longer an option.
I'm not shocked more people are nakedly ethnonationalist. It's the gold standard for all of human history, lots of the world currently still is, and it's the only meaningful alternative being provided to "Just let infinity third worlders have your legacy because you suck". I personally don't think legacy Americans have the vitality or institutional capacity to stop it, though I sincerely hope I'm wrong. The project is going to take a lot longer than another 4 year Trump term.
Nationalism of any kind (including ethno-nationalism) can't be the gold standard for all of human history because nations don't exist until mass literacy and the printing press. Tribalism, based on loyalty to Dunbar-sized groups of actual kin and larger facsimiles thereof was the gold standard for most of human history. But the most successful large tribes - including the Roman Empire and Christian Church, and therefore Western Civilisation, were based on fictive kinship through a shared mythopoetic father-figure, not realish kinship determined by ethnicity.
Ethno-nationalism as a political idea begins as a 19th century small-l liberal project, replacing loyalty to dynastic states. Bismarck comes up with a right-wing version of it which works in the context of Protestant Germany. But in Catholic countries ethno-nationalism is directly opposed to throne-and-altar conservatism, which was the gold standard in early modern Europe.
They’re not mutually exclusive. Romulus, notably, was both a mythical father figure of the Romans and the Latins were a real ethnicity.
I was thinking of the period when the Roman Empire was explicitly multiethnic, during which the deified Emperor was the mythopoetic father figure. The growth of the Roman empire (small 'e' as the process begins under the late Republic) involves a series of extensions of increasing levels of political inclusion (socii, then Latini, then full cives Romani) to people who were increasingly obviously not ethnic Latins.
I mean, if you're going to bring up the Romans, you can't get away from the collapse of the Roman empire, and it's eventual failure to keep "Romanizing" the people it ruled, eventually collapsing into a bunch of basically ethnic nations. Debates about how much the Huns, Franks, assorted Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were distinct ethnicities, or banner bearers for tribal confederations aside.
Rome succeded in Romanizing the people it ruled beyond the wildest expectation, Gauls and Hispanics speak Latin to this very day. Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were never ruled by Rome.
Never successfully. But they were invited into the Empire with the full expectation they would be Romanized like the Gauls, Hispanics, North African peoples, Celts, etc. The Emperor would declare them friends of Rome, and expect them to cultivate the lands and pay the taxes, often of areas thoroughly depopulated by civil wars, disease and famine. They expected to be able to levy troops from these peoples. This was largely a fiction since the Empire lacked the manpower or resolve to really keep them out, so they would just decree that these tribes were being made Roman subjects. Some, like the Goths, took this pledge maybe halfway seriously?
It's just that by that point, either the Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Franks etc were a unique challenge, or the empire had lost whatever mojo it had that got the people it ruled to Romanize.
And 1500 years later, the leading Saxon polity is ruled by a Senate that meets on Capitol Hill in a building decorated in the Corinthian Order. I don't think the Saxons are entirely un-Romanized.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fair, but insofar as the republic’s expansion over the Italian peninsula is known about, Romulus as father figure to ethnic Latins dominating the peninsula is a major part of the process.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Pitiable performance indeed, and the fact that we still have such debates is even more pitiable.
Morality based on divine command is, historically, extremely late development (and it is debatable how effective it was). 2000+ years ago, if someone asked: "Why shouldn't I rob, rape and kill my fellow citizens of my city?" the answer was not "Zeus forbids it" or "After you die, Zeus will torture you forever in Tartarus".
The answer was, TL;DR: "Because good person does not do such things, and you want to be heckin' good person" and "If you are caught, you will be crucified/impaled/skinned alive/fed to wild beasts".
Putting aside whether Christianity triumphed because it was distinct in its focus on morality (Julian the Apostate certainly thought lacking this focus on charity was a weakness of traditional religion), it was often "you would be a bad member of the clan/city/people". You either insulted your worshipped ancestors or the very kin you needed to survive.
Sam Seder's ideology suffers from coming at an incredibly individualistic time and encouraging those tendencies more and more.
I don't blame him that much for speaking up, he was dealing with a debate-bro in a format ill suited for it. But it is a legitimate problem when your ideology simultaneously attacks all things that impose duties on people, push them to live their best lives and then have to turn around and try to jerry-rig some new commandments without many of the tools we've traditionally used for that and without admitting what you're doing.
In fact, if we're going to criticize people's performance, the debate-bro allowed Sam to say ludicrous things, like imposing one's beliefs being mainly a feature of theocrats. That is a ludicrous thing to grant given how the secular supposed-cosmopolitans act when they feel they have the whip hand. Ultimately, there's no escape from needing to have a set of values for a community. What you'd hopefully do is shrink the size of communities but everyone is going in the opposite direction.
More options
Context Copy link
You know, it's funny you went straight to the bronze age, cause I just wrapped up The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it was a trip. The morality on display was virtually amorality. Common stories included murdering someone in a town, and having to flee before their brothers kill you back. This was bad. If you fled to another town and found allies, who would then help you finish off the entire family of the person you killed, this was good! If you manage to steal the flocks from a town, that's awesome. If the town you stole them from hunts you down, steals them back, and burns your town down for the effort, that was bad. And all along the way, it's all as Zeus wills it. Zeus doles out success and failure, and the most common reason anyone's attempts at murder, thievery or revenge fails is insufficient piety. Even the most talented individuals must be beloved by the gods for their murder and mayhem to succeed.
The only exceptions are of course, the lands, flocks and people's that belong to the gods, those are verboten to fuck with.
Increasingly I lean into religion/morality as a social technology with consequences. Does it promote prosocial values that help your civilization flourish, or does it burn out or wither and die? Morality is not a single axis, it's a 4X custom civilization screen with lots of pluses and minuses, and it has to compete with a lot of different people's that made different choices, possibly adapted to their environment.
Whatever else you can say about Sam Seder's morality, it's clearly dying. Either because the legacy American's it seeks to rule over no longer feel like being oppressed, or because the foreign legions it imported to keep the natives oppressed don't actually have any buy in to it. But one way or another, whether Sam Seder knows it or not, his morality is an evolutionary dead end.
Agree. And it's important to remember that traditional Stoicism was one of the first sort-of-trasncendental philosophies to come into existence. And far from the "I take cold showers" bro-Stocism of today, it was more about being happy with whatever your station in life is because you were acting in accordance with Zeus' ordering of the universe ....
More options
Context Copy link
It's worth dialing in on this. They weren't amoral, they had morality - it is just alien to us.
For example SKILL was moral virtue. As opposed to unselfishness, which is often what we use these days.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete
Lots of Ancient Greek myths and cultural output make more sense if you go back and think about it this way.
Dialing in on this and its implications is a big piece of what Nietzsche is about and importantly this kinda stuff still lives with us today a little bit in other moral systems and countries (....could this explain woeness????).
However the general Judeo-Christian/Western ethical system is so baked into our lives and culture that it often results in a bit of "this is water" type problems.
And of course the word "virtue" has the Latin root of "vir", meaning "man" in the sense of "adult male displaying the classical masculine virtues" (as opposed to "homo", meaning "man" as in "person assumed male because that's the default").
The Latin word virtu translates into modern English as "manliness" if you want a literal translation, but I would translate it as "prowess" - when applied to an adult human male it is approximately synonymous with the Greek Arete. (Arete could also be applied to inanimate objects which were exceptionally fit for their purpose - when applied to a bladed weapon it gets translated as "sharpness".)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Which moral system do you have in mind that invoked the concept of hecking goodness, without at the same time invoking the divine (note: not the same thing as citing divine punishment).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What Seder says in response to the woman is completely reasonable, which is that they have incompatible views of what the country is that can’t be resolved through argument.
It just devolves into “I’m a Jewish liberal and I think I belong in this country” versus “I’m a Christian religious-and-ethnic nationalist and I don’t think you do”. There isn’t anything else to say, or to do. It just is.
Specific claims can be discussed, as we do here, as can arguments that might be used by either Seder or the woman to try to persuade or justify their viewpoints. But the disagreement itself is intractable.
If you think "We should have a dominant culture", "We should have assimilation" means "Deport Sam Seder", yeah, it's intractable. But if you hear what she's actually saying, brashly, it's that there should be no hyphenated Americans. You need to abandon your native land, your culture and your history at the door. Sam Seder needs to leave only in so far as he's incapable of dropping his distinctly Jewish identity.
And if this sounds like a horrific ask, well, that's what the White Europeans of this country have been forcefully subjected to the last 20 years with demoralization propaganda and the rewriting of our history, and the defamation of our culture.
It's not unreasonable to want born again Americans, not entriest who try to mutate the "idea" of America, or even hate the pre 1960's history and people of it.
It's not clear to me whether this is your view as well, or if you're just trying to correct the record. But if true, would you (or your interpretation of her views) welcome my immigration to the United States if I wholly identified as an American? Say I surrendered my previous citizenship, listened to the Hamilton soundtrack a couple times and passed the citizenship test? What if I weren't Christian? Or what if I weren't white? What if I supported trans children in choosing what to do with their body (which you see as sterilization and self-mutilation, I know, let's not get hung up on semantics)? Increased redistribution and welfare relative to what I expect you would want?
The above is more or less directionally true, even if I changed many details/positions. I am an immigrant, I do largely identify as American, I do love the history and origin story and culture of this country. But I also, broadly speaking at least, align with a set of values that clearly melt your brain. Yet those values are undeniably a valid set of cultural values in this country - have I assimilated, or not? Is 'abandon your native land, your culture, and your history' code for 'you need to adopt political positions that I like?'
I was correcting the record. I thought the cheap shot of "This woman doesn't want Sam Ceder, a jew, in her country" was a gross mischaracterization.
I mean, going from steel manning the woman in the video, to my own personal beliefs, I find myself nodding along with things I've heard Saagar Enjeti say. And his stance on immigration, at least at the time I heard him say this, was that America is in too much cultural turmoil for any immigration right now. He cites as the historical example that from the 20's through the 60's America had an incredibly restrictive immigration system, largely in backlash to how mass migration from other European nations was altering the make up and social contract of America. It took a solid generation or more for America to figure out who it was again, without further waves of mass migration causing even more chaos and social incohesion. It just took that long for the melting pot to melt, before American Chauvinism was destroyed by demoralization propaganda.
Like I said, I find myself nodding along to that. I think America needs 40 years to answer, for itself, what it's culture is going to be, without either side trying to import allies to tip the scales. And it needs more American Chauvinism to actually assimilate the people we already have, if that's even possible any longer. I can only imagine how much more fucked up prohibition would have been if the prohibition side began mass importing Muslims who don't drink, and the anti-prohibition side scoured the globe for alcoholics. And it's hard to imagine either approach making America better off long term, even if the short term culture war issue gets "settled".
You don't need to imagine. I can identify one very obvious example of this in US history i.e. Bleeding Kansas.
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