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 -
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Earlier you said:
Is this it?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
I of course want to represent Hlynka's arguments as clearly and accurately as possible. I just reread the three "Inferential Distance" posts. The most relevant section seems to be this from the first post:
But this ignores the diversity of views about human nature you find on both the far right and the far left. The dissident right already has an essentially Hobbesian view of human nature, as far as I understand it. And even on the far left, things are not so clear. Followers of the more psychoanalytically-inflected strains of Marxism stress that there can be no final end to history, no ultimate reconciliation of the individual with the collective.
Further quoting Hlynka:
This is straightforwardly false. The dissident right does not believe this.
And finally:
I suspect that what he wanted to say, but shied away from, is that there are ultimately two camps: those who believe in the Christian God, and those who don't. This is undoubtedly the conclusion that one should draw if one starts from Christian priors. But since I reject Christian priors, I unsurprisingly reject the conclusion as well.
As @FCfromSSC explains masterfully, this isn't it. I also agree with him that Hlynkism is compatible with Christianity, but I would like to expand on how the Christian position is in a sense prior to and in a sense more specific. That is, the Christian position goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden; it goes back to man choosing to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Before man could decide "We know how to solve all our problems,", he had to claim the right to determine "Our Problems". Claim the right to determine what is good and evil for himself, thus defining the problems to be solved. Of course, the Christian does not think that the Enlightenment is unique in doing this, and the not-necessarily-Christian claim can be that the Enlightenment is the first time that the entire formulation took hold in widespread fashion.
I would be remiss if I didn't remark that the rationalist perspective is still somewhat reeling from utter failure to conceptualize Our Problems or The Good in a philosophically-coherent way. It's resulted in all sorts of fallbacks, but most commonly, a sort of naive anti-realism. Even this vein still possesses the Enlightenment spirit, though. They hold a moral chauvanism, often paired with a bare appeal to game theory1, as though the only impediment to We being Able To Solve All Our Problems is simply a matter of Strategic Mechanism Design, that if done 'properly' (often involving simply eliminating the Bad Guys (TM)), will vaguely result in Solving All Our Problems. This is, of course, where the Hlynka "multi-agent environment" critique sort of lives, in that you do not get to be the omniscient, omnipotent Mechanism Designer.
1 - As @FCfromSSC puts it:
What I have reiterated over and over in these discussions for a year at this point is that believing in a "master plan" is not a necessary criteria of any of the political ideologies under discussion. You can be a Marxist and still believe that there is no plan, we are not in control of the world, etc. This is basically Zizek's whole schtick, if you listen to his lectures. It basically goes: "Yeah, Marxist revolutionaries at one point did believe that they were impersonal agents of history, simply carrying out what was rationally required, etc. We know now that was a mistake, a failure mode. That's how you get Stalinism. So that's been discredited. But we're still communists, we still believe in the communist project."
But does that make Zizek and his fellow travelers into allies of traditionalists? I don't think the traditionalists would agree. Which means that your belief in a master plan is not what fundamentally determines your political orientation.
It is always frustrating when people are trying to retreat to a social theory motte. Unlike physical mottes, which took many years to physically build, usually in a specific physical location that is focused on a particular geographical feature, right there for all to see with their own eyes, social theory mottes are often built around hiding the ball, burying the underlying premises under overt expressions of having rid themselves of all sorts of things. I have only very casually engaged with Zizek, so I would probably just have to ask you what you think the "Zizekian communist project" still is. What's the there there? What does it actually keep? What's it built on? My initial intuition is that it may take a few rounds of interrogation, but if/when we do discover what remains of it, we can begin to answer your questions, and I have a feeling about how it'll go.
Intentionally left somewhat vague, but my impression from listening to him and his close collaborators is that it’s something like: nationalization of industries, central economic planning, aggressive state action on issues like global warming, workplace democracy and employee co-ops, etc. The sorts of ultra-left economic policies that you’ve heard of before.
There’s still the hope that with enough fumbling about we’ll someday “transcend the social relations of capital”, although everyone has failed at specifying what this means concretely just as much as Marx himself did.
And yes, it could involve the use of revolution too. Although as I’ve already argued, revolution is a tactic that can be utilized or rejected by any ideology.
Yup. Rereading @FCfromSSC's dump of links/quotes, it's kinda hard to see how it doesn't count.
Can you please elaborate?
FC has repeated multiple times that the principle criteria is “we know how to solve all our problems”. Zizek denies that we know how to solve all our problems. But you are claiming that his project still “counts”. Why?
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
Consolidating responses to a couple comments here.
From your post above:
I would strongly disagree with all three of these statements. I think we can agree that "left" or "right" are essentially meaningless, but whether human beings are naturally good or evil and the locus of control seem to me to be extremely important questions. Likewise, where you see Hlynka latching on to something to put all his enemies onto one side, if his method allows him to sort friends from enemies in a consistent fashion, that is straightforwardly and obviously useful to him and to anyone who shares his values. I use similar logic to sort friend and enemy, and to make predictions about where current ideology will lead people, and this seems like an obviously useful and relatively uncontroversial method of reasoning.
At a minimum, you should consider that a categorization system that you don't find useful for your purposes and values might still be useful to people with different purposes and values.
Would you concede that, under the framing you're employing here, Eugenics was straightforwardly an attempt to reshape "human nature" through the mechanism of social institutions? Do the DR types believe that Eugenics was a bad idea or doomed to failure? Like, there's obviously a serious miscommunication happening here, because you are conflating "bad genes will always produce bad people" with "regardless of nature, regardless of nurture, the line between good and evil will always run through every human heart." These are not remotely equivalent statements.
I have and will argue that intelligence is orthogonal to morality, and that there is no reason at all to believe that even highly intelligent people are in any way more moral than dullards. Arguments to the contrary, from what I have seen, rely on a model of "morality" that rounds off to crime statistics, as though a person who never commits a crime, much less never gets caught committing a crime, is therefore morally perfect. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that those who commit crimes are necessarily less moral than those who do not, and that is even ignoring the part where immoral people can give their immorality the force and imprimatur of law. The logic that would argue otherwise is absurd for a whole host of reasons, but near as I can tell it is actually what a number of HBD enthusiasts I've encountered seem to be explicitly arguing.
Likewise, is Walt Bismark a reasonably representative example of a DR thinker? When he says:
...what part of that passage would you describe as a recognition that human nature is immutable and immune to manipulation by social institutions? Would you argue that subjugating people wholesale is not a form of manipulation by social institutions? Do you understand that, completely separate from any charged keywords or references to specific identity groups, the core logic evident in that passage marks the author, to me, as the most mortal sort of ideological enemy? Someone with whom no cooperation is or likely ever will be possible?
And Yarvin's Hobbits and Dark Elves essay is much the same, though he maintains a far more diplomatic approach; his core logic marks him firmly as an enemy.
You might as easily quote Bismark above, who clearly argues that not all whites make the cut. But as I understand it, the core objection isn't that the DR believes "white people inherintly good, everyone else inherintly bad", even though I have seen plenty of examples of exactly that sort of logic from what I thought were adherents to the DR here. It seems to me that one of the actual core objection is that they believe they can sort people into the good and bad bins by population-level metrics, when in fact they absolutely cannot do that.
Diversity is infinitely fractal. Focusing on specific commonalities that seem of primary relevance to one's own model is not "ignoring diversity". Relevance to the model at hand is the whole question.
As above, I think of Bismark and Yarvin as examples of Dissident Right thinkers. Both seem to share a view of human nature that fits much better with Progressive ideology than with my own. Likewise, when we've discussed psychoanalytically-inflected strains of marxism, it seemed that the examples you offered argued for no final end in the sense that an asymptote has no final end.
I do not think Bismark, Yarvin, or the the psychoanalytically-inflected marxists could engage with the fundamental truth of "the poor you will always have with you."
How would you characterize Bismark's call for a "thousand year Reich", aiming for "divine creation"? But let's say you're correct, and the DR doesn't argue that Utopia will be achieved if all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down. Would it be fair to say that they believe things will get a whole lot better, if they can simply remove most of the silly barriers keeping them from exercising unrestrained power to reshape and organize society?
Maybe they don't. Yarvin seems to, and Bismark definately seems to. Maybe they're not representative?
I can say that I personally am very confident that this formulation is incorrect; belief in the Christian God is not required in any way. What is required is an understanding that we are not in control, that we are inside the box looking out, not standing in the lab looking in at the world in a box. Such a worldview is compatible with Christianity, in the sense that cooperation and productive coexistence between the two are possible, and the opposite worldview is incompatible with Christianity. That's the connection I think you are twigging to. The hubris required to assume that one is fundamentally in control is the same hubris necessary to believe that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron, and so the two correlate strongly; there is a reason Bismark claims that building his hoped-for society is a spiritual, even divine act of creation. Further, I find that one can argue persuasively against this hubris from entirely within a rational, materialist framework, provided one is sufficiently rigorous in their materialism.
Noted atheist Sargon of Akaad just put out a video more or less on this subject. For fictional/vibes examples, I thought Glen Cook's The Silver Spike and Shadowline were interesting attempts within the bounds of genre fiction. Kipling himself seems most of the way there.
I'd like to thank you for this post, because it very much sums up neatly a lot of my own disagreements with the sort of "Dissident Right" thinkers you mention. (I also thought of that same Sargon video you linked when I was reading it.)
(It also helped clarify, by showing points of agreement, where both of my differences with you, and those with Hlynka, lie.)
Happy to be of service!
If you want to write up your conclusions some time, I'd love to see them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I want to try to achieve an understanding of what the root of this disagreement is, on a deeper level. The Christianity hypothesis was one attempt at that. If you have an alternative read on the situation that's fine. I encourage you to share your own interpretation. Although I would point out that Hlynka said, directly, that belief or non-belief in God is part of "the core of what positions we hold".
If it's ultimately just about distinguishing "my friends" from "my enemies", then that's fine. I would have nothing further to add. But you should just say that, instead of arguing that vastly heterogeneous groups of people are committed to a complex web of philosophical assertions that they are not, in fact, committed to.
Well, through technology and biology. Not social institutions.
Unsurprisingly, materialists believe that human nature is grounded in some combination of biological/physical properties and environmental factors, because that's all there is. Humans are what they are because of what their made of. If you change what they're made of then you could (potentially) change what they're like. If this fundamental metaphysical commitment makes all materialists ideologically "the same" in some sense, then that lends further credence to the assertion that the fundamental divide for you is really about materialists vs non-materialists.
It should be noted though that materialists are not necessarily committed to the idea of an infinitely malleable human nature. There could be logical/physical constraints on the "space of all possible minds". The psychoanalysts believe that the necessary preconditions of subjectivity itself put certain constraints on any conscious mind that look a bit like the fall of man and original sin if you squint at it (Lacan, despite being an atheist, had a complex relationship with Christianity).
At any rate, there are non-materialist Christians among both the communists and the dissident right, rendering the whole line of questioning somewhat moot.
I will ask directly: are all your enemies "the same" in some sense, just because they are your enemies? If not, then why is it relevant that Bismark sees you as an enemy? Why did you bring it up?
Is this the assertion of a new criteria for determining identity among ideologies? How is it related to the other proposed criteria ("humans as naturally good vs evil", "knowing how to solve all our problems vs not knowing", etc). Are they all equivalent formulations of each other? Is one of the formulations at the root, and the others are derived from it?
Is there any set of circumstances that's better than any other set of circumstances for anyone, ever? Or is everything just all the same?
You have expressed a great deal of anger on this forum previously about what you see as Blue Tribe overreach and abuse of power. Would your life be better, in any way, even a little bit, if Blue Tribe had less power over you and the things you care about?
Because if you can imagine specific changes to society that would make your life even a little better, then we're just haggling over numbers at that point. Your proposed changes would only improve life by a modest 50 utils, so you're on the Red Tribe side, traditionalist, anti-Enlightenment, etc. But Yarvin thinks he can improve life by 300 utils, which is over the cutoff of 250, so he's on the Enlightenment side with all the Nazis and communists etc.
This is not tenable.
Then this is a point that I disagree with him on and would love to debate him on the subject.
Absolutely not. Radical Islamists are very clearly not running on Enlightenment ideology. Organized Crime is very clearly not running on Enlightenment ideology.
Because he's demonstrating a specific ideological pattern, and I believe that pattern matters deeply and should not be tolerated. I talk about him being very clearly an enemy to note that this does not seem to be a borderline case; the way he chooses to describe his own thinking and philosophy puts him very far on the other side of a very clear line.
My understanding is that ideology is useful because it provides a structured, reasoned framework to help me understand the world around me, the better to effectively pursue my values. Further, it is useful in providing a structured, reasoned framework to help me effectively understand and predict the behavior of other people, the better to coordinate cooperation with those possessing compatible values and meanness against those sharing incompatible values.
I am claiming that there are specific, identifiable ideological markers that are quite useful to me for this purpose. You appear to be claiming that these specific, ideological markers are an illusion, and that the people I mark with them are essentially being marked at random. But it seems to me that you are perceiving randomness because you ignore or discard all the non-random data-bits.
Eugenicists used large-scale social institutions to engage in large-scale social engineering in an effort to directly manipulate "human nature" on a global level. Communists likewise used "technology and biology" in a variety of ways to try to achieve New Soviet Man. I continue to have no idea why you see this as a meaningful distinction.
No, I've been asserting it for years now in these discussions. You can find a ton of examples by searching "author:fcfromssc we know how to solve problems" and then searching through the results; the two are often paired, because my argument is the latter follows directly from the former. See here, for instance:
...Or here.
...And now I'm worried that you'll start providing examples of "this problem is the fault of these people" to claim that this isn't a meaningful category, but the point is that this is a chain of logic. Claim to offer expansive, open-ended solutions to problems you can't actually solve, and then then claim that certain people are the obstacle that needs to be removed, even when those people have no rigorously-determined connection to the problem beyond being in your way. There is a fundamental difference between "people committing crimes are a problem, we should set up a system to punish crime" and "low-IQ people are a problem, we should stop them from breeding/encourage them to abort their children/enact state policies of sterilization or euthenization."
It is the corollary to "we know how to solve all our problems", which explains why problems aren't being solved and what to do about it: remove the bad people who are in the way.
If humans are naturally good, it's evidently tempting to conclude that humans who aren't good, or humans who are getting in the way of your efforts to make other humans good, aren't actually human.
It is clear to me that there is a fundamental difference between "I think this specific problem would be solved by making this individual change to our society" and "An unbounded set of problems would be made unboundedly better if we fundamentally reshaped our entire society, with that reshaping being controlled by me or someone very like me." Or in more specific terms, there is a fundamental difference between "I think we should add/remove tariffs with an aim to improve these economic factors" and "We should solve poverty".
No such change has ever been demonstrated. In the case of IQ, I think I have solid evidence that it absolutely doesn't work. If it did work, that would not be a good thing, because "changing what they're like" necessarily involves making them controllable. Either the humans remain as they are despite your changes, ie they have free will and thus the full capacity for evil, or they are actually changed by constraining their will and making them your slaves.
Again, I assert the distinction is between rigorous materialists and non-rigorous materialists. "There is zero significant proof that a God or Gods exist" is not an obstacle. "I do not believe that God exists, and I organize my life and choices around this axiom" is not an obstacle. "Material is all that exists, free will is an illusion, humans are machines that we can engineer to our liking" is an obstacle, and also very clearly a statement of faith that requires discarding vast amounts of contrary evidence[*]. And note the connection back to the concept of choice.
And I note that whether an ideology explicitly asserts explicit infinite malleability is far less important than whether they recognize an actual limit to malleability that impinges on their desires. "Man is infinitely malleable, we can make him as we wish" ~= "Man is malleable to a very high degree, we can make him as we wish" != "Man may be somewhat malleable in some ways, but we have no idea how to change these parts and are just going to have to accept them for the foreseeable future."
Materialism is not the dividing line, so it is indeed moot.
Absolutely. But this doesn't require me to have power over them, or to eliminate all Blues forever, or to establish a thousand year Red Reich. There's a set of simple actions with obvious limits that can achieve the far more modest goal of "don't be ruled by people who hate you". And notably, I'm committed to not taking some of those actions, because they're morally wrong, even though I hate Blues and believe that things would be much better if I and people like me were free of their power. Even having an actual, bounded solution isn't enough, the solution has to be sufficiently cheap in terms of power and moral cost. And so I not only have abandoned "plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem", but have expended some effort to deter others from finding or pursuing those specific solutions.
[*] Assuming "Material" is defined as "stuff we can directly observe and interact with", this is pretty clearly false under Materialism's own assumptions; effects follow causes, and we have directly observed at least one effect, the Big Bang, that leads back to no cause observable even in principle. Consequently we can be confident that something exists that we cannot observe or interact with, hence is not "Material" in the rigorous sense. Taking it as an axiom that this something is just more elaborate material of the sort we can observe is a reasonable approach. Asserting that it has to be this and any other axiom must be rejected is very clearly a statement of faith. We likewise have abundant observations of another effect, human will, which has no apparent material cause, but which very clearly "exists" in all useful senses of the word; we build much of our world off the assumption it exists, for instance, and doing otherwise is wildly impractical. Materialists often argue that Determinism must be true and all our observations of Free Will must be discarded, because they contradict Materialism. To the extent that these observations contradict Materialism, they are also evidence against Materialism.
If you can agree that the principle political distinction for you is between people who accept this statement and those who reject it, and your other formulations are (in your view) in some sense equivalent to or derived from this one, then I am content to let it be. I can at least understand how you would arrive at such a position.
You recognize the two previous statements of increasingly strong materialism in that paragraph which I explicitly stated do not fit the pattern, right? You understand that the distinction is not actually about Materialism in any way, but is about an understanding of what power is, how it works, what it can and should be used for? You understand that this same category can easily fit a non-materialist, and indeed could perfectly fit someone claiming to be a Christian whose entire ideological program is drawn from their interpretation of the Bible? For example, a "Christian" who believes that Christianity should be enforced by law, and children who don't seem likely to properly adhere to Christianity should be put to death before they reach the age of accountability to ensure their souls are not lost? Such a person also believes that "We know how to solve all our problems", and for bonus points might not even have any intellectual connection to the Enlightenment itself.
With those caveats clearly stated, sure, fair enough.
No, he doesn't. Not necessarily.
"We're going to enforce Christianity by law in order to build as spiritually pure a society as possible, but of course the battle against Satan and his works is never over and sin is impossible to entirely eliminate, people are going to keep sinning no matter what, so we must maintain constant vigilance lest we slip into a state of totally unconstrained decadence and chaos". Boom. Done. He still believes in problems. It's right there. And of course you can perform similar constructions with Marxists, white nationalists, etc.
For the record, what you listed are not caveats, but another position entirely.
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
But the distinction between those who believe in God and those who don't, and the consequences of those beliefs, are trivial to make. I think its axiomatic to say that non-belief in God fundamentally shapes the ideology and worldview that you adopt, and the inverse if you do believe in God; whether you specify if the God is Christian or not is irrelevant. You don't believe in God, so that puts in the non-God-believing camp, which is currently, as described, going though a civil war.
The diversity of views about human nature is reflected in the utter and complete factionalism that we see in the culture war today. That's why Hlynka's specifies "core". I'd even argue that even if people don't see or acknowledge similarities in belief between themselves and their ideological opponents, those similarities still exist. Even in your example Marxists, they still focus on the irreconcilability of the self and the collective, which is an external loci of control.
To use an example, fascism and communism are as opposite as they can be, but they are still, fundamentally, illiberal; both in practice and ideologically. Likewise, while the modern culture war might be filled with people who hold seemingly contradictorily views, they might still have common ground ideologically and in practice.
More options
Context Copy link
I always thought that take was largely a response to a very specific 'moment' when a lot of pro-HBD people were making the claim (when asked, what policy outcomes they'd want to see if HBD was finally inside the Overton window) that what they wanted to achieve by getting HBD taken seriously was the removal of affirmative action that was preventing whites (and Asians) from getting all the top spots at top universities, all the top jobs, and so on.
Of course now you can just HBD post all you want on Twitter and so it feels like the question is no longer being asked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link