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 -
You have just described a solution to a problem, not the absence of a solution. This is also "we know how to solve all our problems."
You seem to be operating off the assumption that theory necessarily matters or is meaningful. I have been arguing all along that "We know how to solve all our problems" is not a rational hypothesis on the nature of reality offered with sound mind and in good faith. It is a line. It is a pitch. It is a scam whose purpose is to secure power for the persons employing it. That's why the immediate corollary is an explanation of why the solutions aren't working and therefore more power is needed.
What breaks the pattern is a real admission of weakness, of surrender. An admission that in this case we cannot have what we want, and we must accept that. A genuine recognition and acceptance of hard limits on our ambition. A point at which we let go, lift our foot off the gas, cease escalating and make peace. And not a hypothetical point in an indefinite future, or a point that we bend all available power against in an asymptotic approach, and not some tangential point off to the side divorced from the core aims of the project. "I assume absolute control over the lives of every person within our borders, but it's not like I'm trying to control the weather..." As they say, the most important thing is sincerity; once you can fake that, you've got it made.
Hlynka was fond of the quote "thank you, but I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds." The point of that quote is that the speaker's worldview also accounts for loss, even total loss, as a realistic and significantly likely outcome. Failure and loss are common events in the human experience; ignoring them makes an ideology more superficially attractive and makes adherents more zealous, but it also makes it much easier and more likely for that ideology to go absolutely insane. As I understood it, he employed the quote as a reminder that if you want to keep your sanity, your worldview and axioms have to be capable of accommodating and accepting loss and failure. This is not a perspective to which I am naturally inclined; I much prefer "...for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." But this is yet another one of the notable areas where he was simply correct.
Does Zizek have room in his theories for loss? Does McGowan? Does Marcuse? If so, it speaks well of them. If not, what does that mean to you?
And even here, I've no doubt that you can construct some bespoke formulation that gives the appearance of limits or surrender, while retaining as much will-to-power as possible. But this, again, is in fact my point: "we know how to solve all our problems" is a lie, and lies are effective and often hard to detect. There is no substitute for shrewdness and discernment. The point is not to pencil-whip a checklist, but to recognize a predator that is actively working to conceal itself.
You seemed to be offering a summary of my argument that my argument didn't actually fit into, but it was a bit hard to tell whether that was intentional or not, whether your summary was meant to be illustrative or exclusive. I just wanted to make explicit the parts that seemed to be sticking out.
My interpretation of what you're saying here is "look, I can tell you in plain English exactly what I want. It's a very short and simple list of requests. And after I get what I want, I'll be out of your hair, you won't be hearing from me anymore. But these other guys, the communists, all they can say is that there will always be 'problems'. They can't tell me exactly what problems they intend to solve, or how they intend on solving them. So you never know what they're gonna do. Today everything could be fine, but tomorrow they could want something else, and then it's something else, and then something else, all because they found a new 'problem'. That makes them dangerous, because you don't know what they're gonna do from one minute to the next."
Do I have that right?
I will acknowledge that, yes, this is a feature of basically all the non-utopian Marxists. They think the future is fundamentally open. They don't know what's possible, what's impossible, or what will need to be done in the future. They don't claim to be capable of this kind of knowledge. (The utopian Marxists do claim to have this sort of knowledge, but we've already established that they have other problems).
I think however you can easily be a white nationalist while operating on a model that's basically like what you describe, with a more concrete list of demands. Mainly they just want to live in a country with other white people; it's really quite simple. There are many historical examples of 99% white countries. Just copy one of those, add on some extra immigration laws, and you're basically good, besides the continual ongoing maintenance that every state requires. You don't have to be Bismark with infinite will to power in order to be a white nationalist.
I'm curious what you would think of Keith Woods.
Yes! Dear God, yes!
For Lacan (one of the foundational reference points for Zizek and McGowan), the human subject is "constitutively lacking". There's a gaping hole that can never be filled, condemning us to the eternal samsara of desire. Unlike in Buddhism, he offers no escape from the wheel of desire, and unlike in Christianity, you can't fill the hole with God. The "primordial lost object which can never be found" was such an important concept for him that he invented a special name for it ("objet a") and called it "his one true contribution". This is not a mere footnote or aside. It's foundational to everything he thought.
Of course this position does not have universal assent among philosophers/leftists/Marxists/whatever. Deleuze & co. have a position that I think is much closer to the one you're criticizing. Deleuze thought that all desire was "positive" and "productive", and that we weren't fundamentally lacking anything. He thought that suicide was incoherent; "no organism kills itself of its own accord". The organism simply has a "bad encounter" with the bullet, or the ground, etc. This is a major point of disagreement between the Lacanians and Deleuzians.
It's funny that you used the word "loss" specifically, because this specific question has come up before in the canon of leftist philosophy. Derrida said that Hegel's (another one of the foundational reference points for Zizek and McGowan) dialectical system was incapable of conceiving of loss without recompense. McGowan pushed back and said Derrida was wrong, and that Hegel could conceive of loss without recompense. Any interpretation of an author or text can be challenged of course. There was a woman whose name completely escapes me now who wrote a critique of Hegel that went something like, yeah he can conceive of loss, I guess, but he can't conceive of super ultimate absolute loss, and in order to be able to accept super ultimate absolute loss we have to ditch Hegel entirely and go back to Kant. And so it goes, back and forth.
The point, regardless of who's correct in any of this, is that your enemies are already aware of all the points you raise. All of your concerns have been thought about, discussed, and debated in philosophical circles for almost a century now, and some of your enemies have even taken your concerns to heart. I mean, when Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, they had basically the same criticism of the Enlightenment that you have! It was the entire project of the book!
They too recognized that something had gone horribly wrong with the Enlightenment, but they still wanted to see what could be salvaged of Marxism.
If you've already decided that your opponents are lying, and your only job is to ferret out the lie, why even have a discussion at all?
Perhaps this is another candidate for a formulation of the actual fundamental disagreement between us.
I don't look at political ideologies as "predatory". I look at them as social and historical realities. I look at them as concrete social organizations that different people may or may not be attracted to for different reasons. And yes, I look at them as abstract intellectual systems as well, whose study gives me a certain amount of pleasure. But I don't look at them as "predators". Not even wokeism, as much as I despise it.
Why bother looking for concealed predators when you already know that there are predators surrounding you on all sides? I am acutely aware of how many people from all quadrants of the political compass despise me, for various different reasons. When everyone's a predator, no one's a predator; or at least, when everyone's a predator, there's not much point in trying to distinguish predators from non-predators. I have no tribe, I'm an outcast everywhere. I am accustomed to the notion that my allies could betray me at any time. And this affords me a certain amount of flexibility in my outlook. I'll listen to what anyone has to say, but I'll also always keep one eye open as well, even with those who are ostensibly closest to me.
If you do have a tribe, whether it is called Red or some other name, whose support you can be relatively assured of, and from whom predators can be meaningfully and consistently distinguished, then it's unsurprising that this would lead to a fundamental difference in our outlooks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link