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 think it's broader than just Trump. American governance generally is a disaster zone, they do bizarre costly blunders like this all the time.
They opportunistically bomb and invade random Middle Eastern countries with made-up reasons, then flail around ineffectually, failing to achieve hazy and undefined campaign objectives.
They invented DEI (and export it), a low-level Cultural Revolution.
De facto drug liberalization/opiate abuse has inflicted vast harms on the US public. A rich and powerful country shouldn't have open air drug markets and crazy homeless people shooting up in public, making public transport a fearful and disturbing experience.
They spurred the development of China with globalization and investment, the strongest competing power to the USA.
Australian governance isn't much better. My country is addicted to bungling everything too, propping up a property ponzi scheme (our biggest city is second only to Hong Kong in unaffordability) and a massive NDIS grift. We're selling iron and coal to China, that's the steel they're building warfleets out of. The EU has successfully technologically sterilized the most dynamic continent in history and is somehow struggling to overcome Russia.
Trump is only an example of a highly dysfunctional political system, late-stage democracy. It should never happen in a properly-run country, you should get dignified, wise statesmen - not demented geriatrics, incoherent drunks, reality TV stars or whatever riff-raff. There's lots of excellence in the US but it doesn't seem to filter through into highly effective government institutions and sustained policy success.
Hey man, you can't learn things unless you are willing to experiment.
Drug decriminalization seemed like a good idea at the time. Portugal had some promising early results and we saw signs of harm that the war on drugs was causing.
China was an experiment in sweet sweet capitalism inducing democracy that appears to have fairly clearly failed.
Is this specifically meant to be a reference to the incarceration rate of black men?
More options
Context Copy link
Anything can seem like a good idea at the time if you're a fool. There are videos of men sticking their hand into a lion cage, clearly they thought it was a good idea at the time.
Instead of fighting a war on drugs and losing, why not win instead? It really isn't that hard to find the drug dealers and get rid of them. If the demented drug zombies can find the drug dealers, so can well-trained and organized police. People often raise civil liberties as a defence here - civil liberties disappear anywhere near an airport, where a giant, expensive and ineffective protection theatre reigns. If the TSA can feel up or browse through the genitals of the general public, surely the police can whisk away the drug dealers and break up distribution networks. America wasn't an unfree police state back when the crazies were locked up in mental institutions.
China policy was taking a huge and unnecessary risk relying on a dubious and unproven idea. Since when has capitalism induced democracy in a large Asian dictatorship? It didn't happen in Japan, capitalist democracy transformed into a military dictatorship aiming for regional hegemony. It kind of happened in South Korea and Taiwan - small US allies. But China is a big, nuclear powered US adversary. They fought against America in the Korean War and Vietnam. They famously conducted a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students in 1989. They had another Taiwan Straits crisis in the 1990s. I can't imagine why anyone thought they were going to turn into a democracy and this would solve all the US problems faced. Even if they became a democracy they could still be rabidly nationalistic and throw their weight around.
It was total delusion. Nobody should ever need to learn not to stick their hand into a lion cage.
More options
Context Copy link
Singapore has excellent results on controlling drug usage by beating or executing people, but we didn't try that route.
Also being a city with no hinterland, in which virtually every citizen travels abroad regularly.
Singapore's policies aren't going to apply to the USA without accounting for scale.
That said, I'm pro public caning as a punishment rather than incarceration.
How does any of that matter in this respect?
No drugs will ever be produced in Singapore herself, and the borders are relatively small, densely populated, wet and easy to police.
Wealthy Singaporeans who want to sin travel to other nearby countries to do it.
Whereas in America, there's always going to be drugs coming in because you have huge borders and massive empty areas to police. And there's always going to be $$$ demand for party drugs from rich people, which will trickle down.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It’s worth noting that everyone else who’s tried Singaporean drug policies has succeeded in solving that specific problem- these countries are brutal dictatorships, but the evidence behind ‘send everyone with enough drugs to be a dealer to the chair, and enforce strong penalties against private consumption’ is very strong if your goal is to get rid of drugs.
I don’t think the U.S. is capable of doing this but if we were we wouldn’t have drugs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve been wondering for awhile how this happened. It seems our best, high quality people avoid politics as much as possible. Meanwhile some of the most cynical, power hungry sociopaths are getting elected. This doesn’t seem to be the pattern in early 20th century. What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?
Mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and Ireland) destroyed the social fabric that had previously existed, it was only a matter of time.
Say more?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Respect for property rights in liberal democracies has become a victim of its own success. Back in the day there was no guarantee that the government wouldn’t just have a communist revolution and expropriate all your capital, so becoming a capitalist was a roll of the dice: much like becoming a politician, so neither was much worse than the other of a career path for a smart young man. Today, a career in politics is still a roll of the dice - you might lose the election - whereas a career as a capitalist is a much safer proposition because the politicians have done so good of a job at ensuring property rights are sacrosanct and no-one’s gonna expropriate your business and put you up against a wall.
This means that today all the smart people go into moneymaking, leaving politics the preserve of midwits and pathological narcissists.
Bad property rights create strong politicians, strong politicians create good property rights, good property rights create weak politicians [YOU ARE HERE], weak politicians create bad property rights.
I just found out the other day that after Napoleon was captured by the British (for the second time), and exiled to an Atlantic island under heavy guard for the rest of his life, he kept his personal fortune and distributed it in his will without anyone trying to confiscate it.
I'd say politics has gotten a lot more confiscatory. Courts fining political enemies 500 billion dollars on a whim, government spending making and breaking fortunes entirely through political connections, etc
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's just the normal state of democracy, I think.
When military careers were attractive to able people, they acted as a gateway to government work in general and politics in particular. And of course in the Greatest Generation essentially every male citizen served in WW2. I think something similar happened in the 19th century - the quality of American politicians is higher when Revolutionary War veterans (and War of 1812 veteran Jackson) were in charge and then declines.
Actually only about 16 million Americans served in WW2, out of a total population of about 132 million. So the fraction of able-bodied adult male Americans who served in WW2 is probably about 50%, unless you count working in military-related factories as serving.
Also, about 60% of the Americans who served were drafted, so really less than 25% of able-bodied male Americans served willingly. Of course, that is still enormous compared to the fraction of today's able-bodied population that serves in the military willingly.
That said, in modern war having tens of millions of soldiers would probably be more of a hindrance than a help, given how highly technological it is compared to WW2 standards.
Too many enrolled early on, overwhelming induction capacity. The US actually ended voluntary enlistment at the end of 1942, to allocate manpower more rationally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The old-time political history that is common knowledge is like the old-time architecture that's still around; it's survived a hidden but powerful selection pressure for the stuff people want to look at and keep around, plus a loss of contextual knowledge about what was deemed quality at the time and what was common or rejected. All the old dross gets torn down and forgotten, and what's left gets a positive sheen on it because it's so different in appearance from the commonplace habits and styles of the present day.
Indeed, I try to keep "90% of everything is crap and always has been" in the front of my mind whenever talking about history and especially when I feel the creep of nostalgia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn’t exactly call Jackson a high-quality politician, especially in the same thread with complaints about Trump’s economic policy. He was historic for sure, but he caused economic damage by vetoing the renewal of the Bank of the United States on populist grounds against all expectations.
I consider politicians who successfully execute on agendas I oppose in the face of powerful opposition to be high quality, particularly if they remain popular while doing it and break fewer things that I expect (or would have expected ex ante in the case of Jackson). Effective/ineffective and good/evil are approximately orthogonal axes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It all started when Kennedy put on some make-up for his televised debate with Nixon (/s, sort of).
I think you might be falling prey to some sort of rose-tinted lens bias when looking into the past. Americans love to deify the founding fathers and other notable people in our national mythology, but there's not really too much evidence that they were not (and I don't say this lightly) giant pieces of shit - horrible, awful people. Especially for the most charismatic ones you can find accounts of them being duplicitous, deceitful, and all-around lacking in personal morals that betray their virtuous musings in various publications.
I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.
Coming back to the present, there's plenty of people who are now "doing something notable", but you're realizing that you have plenty of access to the information that they are not "being someone good". So something must have changed? No, my hypothesis is that notable people have always been giant pieces of shit: back to 1700AD Louis XIV, back to 750AD Charlemagne, back to 30BC Cleopatra, back to 1300BC Ramses I, etc.
I'm not sure how many people I speak for, but I've always dabbled with the thought of personally unseating my local congressperson. But there's nothing really remarkable about me as a person that people would want to rally around. I write well, I speak well, and I rise pretty quickly in whatever companies I happen to jump between. Because of that competence, I guess I would be an ideal bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy would have to exist.
I want to improve my community, but running for office seems to be even more performative than making sure to pick up litter at rush hour, rather than picking up litter for the sake of picking up litter.
The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.
I think that some moral notions are close enough to being objective that only a genuine psychopath would seriously question them. For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.
That said, I agree that history is best when it is amoral. It is interesting to study the history of morality, but high-quality history does not base itself on moral arguments. It should be the study of what happened, not whether what happened is right or wrong.
Would an aztec have agreed? Would a mongol? An Iroquois? Any random european who went to a public breaking on the wheel?
It does not matter whether they would have agreed or not. Morality is not a democracy.
I think this gets a lot easier when you use virtue ethics. In general, humans have almost always been in favour of courage, wisdom, having an appropriate attitude to one's station in life, religious devotion, and generosity to whatever sized circle is considered appropriate (family, tribe, village, ..., species, universe). They have generally been against cowardice, selfishness, stupidity, arrogance, etc.
What changes between societies is how these things manifest and how they are weighted in the case of trade-offs.
(Sorry, this should really be a much longer and more detailed post but I didn't want to let the point escape).
More options
Context Copy link
But wait, you said that "only genuine psychopaths" would question these ideas. Are you claiming that just about everyone was psychopathic back then?
Everyone who thought it was ok to torture people purely for fun certainly was. The ones who believed that it had to be done to appease the gods at least have an excuse. But anyone back then who was doing it purely because they enjoyed it was psychopathic by my standards.
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
I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history? It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".
This is pretty much explicitly what I did not mean when I said "academic history". Academic history is digging up primary texts, learning obscure languages and scripts, and doing a lot of the dirty work that others may consider unimportant because it represents a fraction of a fraction of the story of human history.
I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts (as previously mentioned). There's very little immersion. Primary texts are awful - humans were not particularly great at forming narratives before Gutenberg. Some of my shopping lists have more narrative complexity than some of the primary texts I've been exposed to.
I think Columbus would be my pet example of anti-woke overcorrection. His contemporaries found him to be a giant piece of shit. Lots of people around him were saying, "Damn, Columbus, slow the fuck down with the atrocities." But he did something notable - he dug up the funding for a moonshot project for which many sponsors doubted the ROI. So his name got slapped on everything. Pop history (grade school-level history) gave a very uncritical treatment of him for decades. But his shittiness, even for his times, is pretty obvious in the primary texts - one does not need to use critical theory or employ "whig" history to figure that out.
(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)
I appreciate your comment though, because this line did really make me give pause while writing my reply. Personally, I do think there are some universal morals that do transcend time, but at times throughout history it was simply not feasible to act in accordance with those universal morals: there's only enough food for 3 families to survive the winter but there are 4 families in the village. Should we judge people who were otherwise great, except for "universal moral" failings that were simply a product of their time?
I'm totally fine with future generations being appalled at me for continuing to consume factory-farmed meat even though I know the immense suffering that it causes near-human-level intelligence animals, so I guess I will continue judging people of the past because I have a feeling that deep down, they knew better.
You gave them the whole continent - it's named after Amerigo Vespucci. It isn't clear whether John Cabot, who was an Italian living in England, or Vespucci, who actually discovered America. But both reached the main continental landmass before Columbus did.
More options
Context Copy link
Too late. This might have been true in 1900 but it's too late for that.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know what you think; I gave a proposed definition for how to determine whether academic history is "woke" or not.
The "overcorrection" isn't happening in the academy; it's happening in public, who as I'm sure you know by and large don't really do actual history. Instead, pop history is a sort of secular cultural catechesis and mythopoetics; pulling together a narrative for the in-group to anchor its sense of identity to, and affirming the moral worth of that narrative.
The really good ones manage to piece together narratives from those primary documents. Like, no-one ever accused Ferdinand Braudel of being compulsively readible, but he manages to take all the grain prices and trader's manifests and censuses of windmills and meld all of it into fascinating insights into every day life in historical Europe. Biography can be similar, getting you in the subject's head and humanizing them across the centuries and gulfs of cultural differences.
Agreed, but it needs to be a catholic too.
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