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've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.
What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.
There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.
Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!
The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?
So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.
Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?
Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.
I see these rants about instituting a muscular system of top-down control over the american economy and culture and think--
Have you considered communism?
No, seriously. What you are proposing is just globohomo minus the globo and the homo. And I don't mean that as a joke-- you are speaking to the exact same complaints that motivate the world's marxists and socialists. In particular, I could imagine the words "incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated," being a pointed critique of capitalists out of another person's mouth.
I don't say this as a rebuttal of your comment, exactly-- because there isn't much to rebut. Your line-level proposals are mostly things I like, and I firmly believe that the vast majority of all humans would prefer for things to get better rather than worse. But in response to proposals about how we should all push toward a particular unifying cultural norm, I'm always thinking... well, why doesn't the speaker just capitulate first? And the answer is always that their individual ideological quibbles really are more important to them (and everyone else) than linking arms with their ideological opponents.
More options
Context Copy link
Great! You start. What do you like about America as it now exists?
There's something a little funny about this depressing rant about how negatively-biased navel-gazing intellectuals have demoralized America with their depressing rants. "The Root Cause of all the bad things happening is our demoralization, and the Root Cause of our demoralization is everyone going around pointing out the Root Causes of how bad things are!"
To this list I would add earlier examples: the War on Drugs. They won, and there was never any serious chance of any other outcome. No serious effort was ever made to achieve victory, or even to define victory in a way that was achievable. Enforcement was always somewhere between haphazard and hopelessly arbitrary. At no point, even at the height of mass incarceration, did upper class degenerates succeed in giving everyone the impression that they didn't want or couldn't get drugs. Spreading Democracy, I grew up with it understood that this was part of America's mission in the world, then at some point we just kind of gave up on it. Iraq was part of the problem, but worse than that was coming to accept China's totalitarianism wasn't going anywhere. We just kinda gave up on these goals, like the War on Poverty, the effort to spread capitalist prosperity, environmentalism, space exploration. They seemed to just fizzle out.
As for solutions? I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job:
Americans need a hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being brings comfort to all. Who you want to put at the top, and who at the bottom, is less important than that everyone needs to feel that their status can be raised above someone else's through their efforts. In my mind, the problem of so many NEETs is that when hitting on a girl, one is almost better off being unemployed and a charming slacker or daring criminal, than saying one works an entry level job at Amazon or McDonald's or wheeling dirt around a construction site. Work doesn't seem like it will significantly increase one's status. This is why things like exercise are such red-pilling experiences for so many men: they combine natural and inevitable hierarchy (someone is faster than you and someone is slower), and change in that status from one's own efforts (you move up or down in the hierarchy). We have to eliminate the sense of learned helplessness.
Totally unrelated, but it is always great to find a fellow Christopher Moore fan. He is probably the best comedic author after Pratchett and is criminally underappreciated.
No kidding! I LOVED him as a teenager, I actually drove to a college in New Jersey with my mother when Fool came out to watch him stage a live reading with the college Shakespeare company, they'd do scenes from Fool juxtaposed with King Lear. I keep meaning to do reread Lamb to do a write up here.
Lamb is his masterpiece. To make a die hard atheist like me to think "This is the jesus I would like to know better" is quite an achievement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As @MaiqTheTrue says, the rot goes back much longer and, I would add, across many different domains.
This is at the root of anti-enlightenment / anti-modernist thinking (a position I seemingly become more comfortable with daily). Humans used to have a much more humble and limited opinion of their ability to understand the complexity of the universe and capital-T "Truth." Much of that was left to religion, theology, or, sometimes, applied ethics and morality. In fact, even the best thinkers of the enlightenment period had a totally different conception of religion and faith in terms of epistemic systems.
Whereas today, in purely rational terms, it is fashionable to draw a box around theology and religion as a kind of esoteric study of the human spirit or heart, classically, religion and theology was seen as a bedrock component of any knowledge system in much the same way we might think of arithmetic, basic grammar, or ... geography? (you take your pick).
And I think it's taken 300 or so years for the compounding effects of that loss to be felt. Your post highlights demoralization as a key issue. Many other places I've seen the term "crisis of meaning" thrown around. The figures for male suicides, drug overdose, and chornic alcoholism are often lumped together as "deaths of despair." The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal. That is, information processors. But that alone does not make life livable, nor does it do anything to orient us towards useful application of information processing. One thing I know for sure about Scott from SSC - he is a world class thinker. Another thing I know for sure - sometimes he chooses the goofiest things to think about.
The various more developed religions do a lot to remedy this. The more purely "spiritual" ones (Buddhism etc.) I think aren't as great because they fail in engaging with the world in the opposite direction of rationalism. Instead of overthinking, they actively cultivate a profound detachment from things that may subjectively feel serene and peacful but is just a different method of undermining prosocial activities. If people find themselves adverse to organized religion, I see the most effective systems being some of the classic virtue ethics regimes -- stoicism etc.
There's going to (always) be a temptation to secularize the religious in order to try to split the baby and get the maximum amount of "meaning" without all of that pesky sin-and-metaphysics. This is the primary critique of Kant's categorical imperative. And I think it's a valid critique - secularizing something that is inherently not isn't possible and you're more likely engaging in some elaborate self-deception. Play the tape forward and you end up with wokeism - which has all of the anthropological trappings of a religious belief system yet is rife with internal contradictions and has zero rigorous epistemic construction.
In a nutshell, people need to cultivate a sense of faith - deeply held belief something transcendent and beyond themselves that they can orient a life towards. And there needs to be an accompanying practice of it. Just like physical fitness or general mental acuity, if you aren't doing "it" everyday, you're getting worse at it.
That’s absurd. Believing in something really hard doesn’t make it true, nor does it make it good. You’re opening the door to a lot more than the classic deontologies. New Age woo, personality cults, ultranationalism—they’re a lot harder to discount once you throw out rationality.
I think it’s also ridiculous to accuse the Buddhists of being “less developed” than, presumably, Christians. Doubly so if you’re considering the initial Protestants, the Second Great Awakening sects, any of the charismatic branches. Criticizing the parent church for being too materialist was like half their reason for splitting.
Oh, and of course you trot out the old punching bag. I don’t exactly disagree that “wokeism” is missing key traits of a religion, so I have to ask: do you think it would work any better as a movement if it abandoned all pretense of materialism? Would the practitioners be happier, would they resolve their internal contradictions?
Because it sounds like a lot of double standards. They should stop overthinking, but also be logically consistent. Oh, and they can’t underthink, either, or they’ll undermine their prosocial activities. Those get measured in material terms, so that subjective serenity must be worthless. Also, material terms don’t matter, and the real failing is allowing a “crisis of meaning.” Everyone should develop their own faith, except where it contradicts with your values, in which case they can get bent.
I don’t think your position is consistent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the “rot” goes back much farther than people think. The biggest difference between modern society and much more ancient ones is that we have lost the idea of purpose, or to be more precise a purpose other than selfish hedonism. Why are we here, and what is our society actually supposed to accomplish and how every person fits into that great plan for society. Most traditional societies have that, usually connected to religion. You fit into the world created by God or the gods to do something either great or small to bring about whatever the will of the universe. Sometimes it’s secular, bringing about freedom for everyone, civilizing a frontier, colonizing a place (even mars). But it’s something all of society is striving for. We have “money and bitches” more or less. That’s the grand narrative— you exist as an atomized human in a society and your job is to get what you can for yourself and to have fun in any way you choose. Anyone getting in the way of your hedonistic desires or your wealth is bad.
This is no way to build anything. A society of atomized humans is not a society, just like a herd of cats — it’s not a cohesive unit coordinating to do things, it’s a bunch of cats who happen to be in the same place at the same time. And they cannot possibly trust any other cat to not steal their Fancy Feast, or not scratch them, or to let them use the scratching post. A herd of atomized humans is the same. You don’t form a community, you just exist around each other. And as such you don’t expect that anyone will not try to take advantage of you, or let you have things you need, or just simply leave you alone if need be.
Absent a purpose, at least the existence of the "other" can substitute for it. But these days, with globalism, mass media erasing cultural distinctions and the internet carving communities crossing national lines as if they were nothing, we are denied a clear "other". If there is no "them", then "us" is meaningless. This is how the last vestiges of unity and brotherhood in humanity are being wiped out. Blaming nationalism for the evils of the previous centuries, Western intelligentia cheered globalism on, thinking it would unite all of humanity, but a united humanity is impossible without something to contrast it against, and without the large entities we used to unite as, humans just fall back into basic individualism.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that Elon gives an idea for a shared vision - to colonize the galaxy. And I don't know why so few people are actually interested of moving beyond Earth.
Because a) Elon and b) the vast majority of people do not know how to contribute or cannot. It'd be different if you could jump on a colony ship but what is the average person to do here?
This is the problem with many legitimately impressive secular achievements: lots of people have nothing to offer or nothing to gain. We don't want to be building pyramids and we can't all be at Los Alamos.
More options
Context Copy link
The people who get invested into moving beyond Earth seem to generally not be the kind of people who trust Elon to do anything about that. Anymore, at least.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is not how traditional societies by and large saw the world. People in traditional societies did not see themselves as individuals with a purpose, they saw themselves as members of a community- kind of the way we see ants or bees- and that community had obligations to God or the gods. An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.
This doesn't even pass the smell test, because why then did it quickly become notable - and criminal - that Christians wouldn't sacrifice?
And yes, I'm sure the Senate liked to believe that they managed the relationship between Gods and the people. And, because of the slack in the polytheist system, they eventually could slide Emperors in there (and those sorts of proclamations are obviously more likely to reach us compared to a random freedman's sacrifices). But people probably still worshiped their tribal gods. In fact, when Constantine finally got tolerance for the Christians it was justified on the grounds of good politics: each group would cause its patron deity to be favorable to the Empire. That seems like the opposite relationship.
You can't look at the trouble a far more concerned Christian clergy had with enforcing uniform doctrine on the laity and imagine that the Senate alone managed religion
More options
Context Copy link
This is simply incorrect, individuals routinely made offerings to gods, both minor and major, to try and influence events in their life. IE, a Roman sailor might give an offering to Neptune to protect him on his next voyage, or a soldier might do the same to Mars to protect him before a battle. Also you don't seem to grasp the primarily transactional nature of a lot of (most? all??) polytheistic ancient religions, you offer things to the gods because you want them to intercede on your behalf, in the same way that you might try to bribe a judge or a prominent politician. You worship and flatter the gods because they are powerful and can do things for you, not because they are paragons of morality.
I would also add that trying to reduce the worldviews of all the members of "traditional societies" into less than a paragraph is nonsensical, there were major differences in worldview between a Roman alive during the reign of Augustus and a Roman that was alive during the reign of Diocletian, let alone between an Assyrian labourer and a Gothic chieftain. The omnipresent threat of bandits and pirates puts paid to the idea that ancient societies were a monolith, before we even talk about the various historical\mythical figures who were very much just in it for themselves (Odysseus being a personal favourite of mine).
I think this has become a growing pet peeve of mine, listening to people try and make political points by referring to a funhouse mirror version of history that they have in their heads. It happens right across the political spectrum and I understand that by the nature of things no one will ever have a truly accurate understanding of the way things were (in fact I think nobody will ever truly have an accurate understanding of the way things are at any point in time), but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.
Worth remembering that some or all of those kinds of posters are secretly women (allegedly).
I thought they were Indian engagement farms?
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
This is something I have been thinking about recently too and made an account just to respond to this. It's like the modern Western leftist memeplex is one of the worst things you could want if you were trying to create an ideology that would lead to the success and health of a nation. Although I have to admit that MAGA is just as bad in many ways, so the main alternative we have isn't any better (which itself is even more concerning because wokeness may actually be preferable to its alternative).
If you were trying to create an ideology for success, it would value strength, honor, intellectual curiosity, optimism for the future, pride in your country and people, and most importantly, not venerate weakness. This is of course the complete opposite of what modern day wokeness is, so it's not really a surprise that people are demoralized and depressed.
I also don't know how to fix this, and it feels like we are destined to just decline and everything will become worse for the foreseeable future. It's very depressing and I try not to think about it. I just try to have positive values for myself and those around me, and maybe that small amount can spread. But I've been pretty depressed myself the last week from these tariffs and market volatility. It makes it seem pointless to even try when even your safe investments absolutely tank and you see the money you were trying to put towards a house absolutely tank.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link