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Yes- the people who drove "the right" are being transformed into corpses daily at a rate far in excess of people converting to progressivism. If their subsociety's memes are going to be allowed to survive (because the progressives will stamp them out given the opportunity, and to a large degree already have), they would be wise to throw their support behind the people who are going to treat them as a relatively benign curiosity rather than an existential threat.
Yes, but the problem is that there's only room for one traditional-type worldview, and the one that now fills that niche is dead-set on the destruction of the traditionalist worldview. Narcissism of small differences, and all that.
So now his side's only hope are the liberals. Because while the liberals of old did contribute to the rise of progressivism (in the sense that liberal mockery weakened traditionalism- which is why religious countries have anti-blasphemy laws), they're also by definition more likely to tolerate/get along with/not try to actively destroy less-orthodox family configurations, of which traditionalism now finds itself.
Yes, this has been a traditionalist/progressive vs. liberals tension for a long, long time. Traditionalists argue that good behavior and virtue (i.e. cultural aesthetics) are terminal values, liberals argue the only terminal value are results, and the world turns.
I don’t know that it’s a transformation of values. Political parties are alliances, and you are trying to take the government or some other institution by force, and you can’t do that without numbers. As such, you’ll take anyone you can get who will sign onto as many of your values as you can. At this juncture, the conservatives don’t control the means of cultural production (they have conservative media and explicitly Christian media, but this is fairly niche and doesn’t really set the cultural tone), don’t control any of education, nor do they control the deep state.
This is obviously a problem, and it’s going to take a pretty big alliance to move the needle here. Purity tests only make sense after the victory, not before. It’s actually the biggest tell that a group is a hegemon — it has the luxury of purging itself of those who do not agree with them. If you can maintain control without heresy, you’re in firm control of the cultural battlefield. Conservatives cannot make this mistake— if they start purging heresy before they get control over culture, education, and the government (and not just the elected government, the deep state is probably more important here) they’ll slide back into irrelevance and the left will go right back to preaching socialism and LGBT stuff and enforcing their agenda.
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I'm not quite following - is your suggestion that progressives are the new 'traditional-type worldview'?
Thus you would see traditional conservatives like Schmitz as a declining minority whose only hope of survival rests on finding an accord with other dominant factions, which at the moment include the progressives (who hate the traditionalists), the liberals (who are prepared to live and let live), and I suppose the new right? The libertarians, technologists, transhumanists, and utopians?
I think Schmitz would argue that the libertarian/technologist position is fundamentally unstable, and will collapse back into progressivism if it continues to follow its own (supposedly) nihilistic creed to its logical conclusion.
Yes, yes, and yes. Though I hesitate to call them "the new right" because they don't have anything to conserve yet, no entrenched interests to inflate; they're still on the upswing so that hasn't come out yet.
Traditional conservatives have a problem where 2000+ years of sociobiological truth was upended basically overnight 100 years ago- that men and women are a lot closer in socioeconomic standing than the Bible had anything to say about. So you have a pivot away from a civil religion that had no answer for that to one that could- and predictably, the one that won out almost immediately was "women good man bad".
Christianity has had no productive answer to that ever since. It's not something they're equipped to handle proceeding forward as they have been, and since these are traditionalists we're talking about they're going to be even slower on the uptake.
The liberal position is fundamentally unstable because the type of people it privileges cannot be entrenched in the same way a religious or identarian movement can. "Correct" is not an identity, though genetics have a non-trivial role to play in who is more often to be correct, and who is less- hence the movement's emphasis on making sure people who have genes that predict correctness are pushed so that they are correct more often and more productively.
And yes, this means that if there are differences here between subpopulations, they're going to get magnified. This will offend progressives, who are statistically more likely to be on the losing end of this (as part of why they're progressives). But if you can at least create and keep that cultural standard you'll at least be back at the point where you have enough seed corn that eating it becomes a possibility again.
I like this framing. What do you think makes this predictable though?
Yeah unfortunately I agree... Christianity is still working through the implications of birth control but I on the whole think it's good for the Christian worldview. There was definitely a problem with sexism towards women, something that Christ explicitly warned against.
Honestly, maybe I'm reaching a bit outside of the standard reactionary "fuck you men, reeee" (though I definitely think this is a major part of it, and understandably so), since that's the only mechanism of action I can come up with.
The problem with sexism in the Church is that on plain reading the Bible outright justifies it. So, the wicked can point to any number of verses that says "women exist for the benefit of men"- like, say, Genesis 1- and have a solid argument that takes words words words to defeat. "Lean not on your own understanding" is fucking catnip to a traditionalist because it means you can do nothing and call it devotion (which the progressives have their own carbon copies of re: "alternate ways of knowing").
It's like the whole point is to grow together, where the interests of one converge into the interests of the other like some sort of... marriage or something. Not sure why the Church would know anything about that, though.
Nothing whatsoever in Genesis 1 says or even implies that women exist for the benefit of men.
I'd guess you're thinking of Genesis 2:20, and the idea of the woman as a 'helper' or 'support' for the man? I'd argue that it's quite a tendentious and implausible reading of that verse to simply interpret it as suggesting female inferiority or servitude, but at any rate, it is not in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 only mentions gender once, in 1:27 ("male and female he created them"), and that verse does not suggest any superiority or inferiority.
This is still suggesting inferiority on plain reading. It doesn't have to be, of course... but then we read a little further and we see "your desire shall be for your husband, and he will rule over you". Sure, the context is describing a curse, but that doesn't make it any less pre-ordained to occur.
So this is a real viewpoint, it's backed up relatively well by the text (both testaments), and even Jesus himself backs it up (by the way he addresses the woman at the fountain). Which means that the wicked, and wicked men in particular, will latch onto it and abuse it even in societal conditions that don't obey that fundamental curse as strictly as they once did.
The Church has to find a way to deal with those wicked men in a way that won't drive off the wise or damage the life script for the simple (they're running closer to biology, and traditionalist ways are objectively best for those people). Their success is mixed.
You mean in John 4? I don't see where that passage implies female inferiority? He asks the woman for a drink of water, and the text immediately indicates that he's asking her because the (male) disciples have gone into town to buy food, so it seems like he's comfortable asking people of either sex for nourishment. The woman's response does not mention sex either - she's surprised because he's a Jew and she's a Samaritan. The operative categories are ethnoreligious, not sex.
There is a subsequent discussion of the woman's husband, but again I don't see anything that implies that he considers her the inferior of men?
If I were looking for a gotcha passage showing Jesus giving priority to men or being demeaning of women, I feel like I could do better.
That was the impression I had from the exchange (though even if it was 100% true, which I honestly don't believe it is, I'm expecting a first-century Jesus to act in a way common to a first-century people where it isn't conflicting with the job He is doing; that's just the way it works). I'm not bothering to discuss the latter half of the NT because we both know they contain a bunch of this (or at least, the excuse to justify a bunch of this; there's still a lot of 'male should lead and be household's head' too with the implication that it's not a job suitable for women, which gets used as an excuse to underperform or fail to delegate then make that failure the woman's problem).
Interestingly, I find that if you read those letters in a slightly more sophisticated/charitable manner it contains a lot of relatively standard group dynamics stuff. Everyone is aware of, or at least able to conceptualize, someone not being able to shut up during the sermon, and odds are you conceptualize this person as female even if you're a woman. So that + cultural outlook = "women should be silent in church"; it's applying the cultural meme in brain-dead fashion to people for whom it isn't true that creates the issue, but t'was ever thus.
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‘Still working through’ is mostly not true- the RCC has articulated its reasons for condemnation and other sects have made their peace with it.
I am not a Roman Catholic. The Church is broader than the Patriarchate of Rome.
What sect hasn’t figured out what their stance on birth control is? Most conservative Protestants make some well defined allowances, orthodoxy allows most contraception while pretending not to, and other groups generally allow any use of contraception. The church fathers are pretty clear that the answer to not wanting a baby is ‘don’t have sex’(and indeed condemn contraceptive methods by name), but the groups considering the church fathers binding have decided what to do about that.
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Interestingly, if you look at other domains, the sides reverse. Liberals/Progressives attack the Trump administration on the grounds that they are not displaying the proper "good behavior and virtue" (i.e. "subverting our democracy," "norms", "rule of law", etc.) where Trumpist-rightists are arguing that, e.g. in the recent immigration kerfuffles, "the only terminal value [is] results" such that any district court which purports to order Tren de Aragua gangmembers brought back into the country after their deportation flight had already left US airspace cannot be legitimate on a fundamental level.
Even on family-planning issues, there's a similar dynamic between a progressive left that views upholding an ideal of women's role in society as the primary goal (virtue primacy), whereas the natalist right points at crashing TFR and marriage rates (material primacy).
Additional evidence that the mainstream left increasingly takes over the role of the status-quo conservative; If you're in control of the arbiters of good behaviour and virtue, critiquing it in your enemies is essentially free. This has been a conservative strategy for basically as long as humanity exists. This is especially obvious here in germany, where the churches increasingly openly align with the left (the Katholikentag [catholic day] barely even bothers inviting CDU politicians anymore, and the catholics are the less progressive wing of german christianity).
For this reason, "traditional conservatives" like Schmitz are in reality impotent regressives, harkening back to an old order nobody really believes in anymore.
People like Musk make much more sense in this framework; Obviously a shitposting technofuturist who wants to smash the status-quo has absolutely nothing to do with conservatism. And on the other side, Biden; A senile old nominal leader who not only doesn't, but simply can't, change anything is the archetype of (dysfunctional) conservatism.
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