site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The value of free speech is not allowing people to live in peace, it is enabling peaceful change.

Enabling peaceful change is part of living in peace. The problem is that not all changes can be made peacefully, nor should be. Some possible changes can only be peaceful to the extent that people submit themselves to victimization without complaint. Some changes may seem innocent from one perspective, but from another are an unacceptable threat to people's ability to secure themselves and their future, even if no immediate harm is visible: If I kindly insist that you step into my van and point on a pair of handcuffs, I haven't actually threatened you, but you would be wise to perceive the situation as threatening. The simple fact is that some conversations undermine peace simply by spreading common knowledge of what the people saying them actually believe and value.

This is what is valuable. And while not allowing people to say "twindlefrumst" is unlikely to get in the way of things, it sets a precedent that somebody is allowed to decide what you can or cannot say. If this is left unchecked then probability approaches 1 that eventually some other speech will be banned.

In the first place, again, I must point out that there have been significant speech restrictions in every society I'm aware of, including American society. If toleration of any speech restriction leads inevitably to despotism, then despotism is our future because we always have tolerated restrictions, and likewise always will.

In the second place, your argument that free speech absoluteism protects from runaway speech restrictions cannot explain our own recent history. Our civilization embraced free-speech absolutism to a degree never before matched in scope or scale by any previous, even approximately comparable society. The result was that free speech absolutism gave birth to a new crop of virulient censorship which has now metastasized across our society. Free speech absolutism did not protect us from censorship; it simply allowed Progressives to achieve a commanding position from which their prefered censorship could be enacted.

No mob ever burned just one book. The slope is in fact demonstrably slippery, and every single despotic regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime.

The slope is slippery, but not infinitely so, and more to the point your anti-slip cleats don't actually work. There are going to be speech restrictions. There are speech restrictions right now, and you and your fellow absolutists have done nothing I can see to arrest their ambitions. You don't actually have a method for enforcing free speech absolutism even in a unified society, much less a fracturing one.

Nearly every country on earth has some form of speech restrictions in place. I don't think the speech restrictions actually drive the despotism. I think the despotism comes from despotic ideologies, and the speech restrictions are just one of the mechanisms of government used badly by those governments. Every government has taxes. Not every government has 99% taxes levied against despised minorities. What would you think if I claimed that taxation was likewise a slippery slope that led inevitably to despotism?

We pay the cost of people sometimes misbehaving to guarantee we are still able to change. No other option exists. Either you bite the bullet of "bad speech" happening, or you risk the very concept of peaceful societal change - arguably humanity's second or third greatest achievement.

And again, you still ignore the fact that bad speech has in fact been restricted, in numerous places and in numerous ways, without compromising peaceful societal change. Every modernized country on earth has some form of speech restrictions. Your claims are simply incompatible with observable reality.

[EDIT] - I'm not trying to hit you with a gotcha here. As I've said previously, I don't think censorship is a silver bullet, or even preferable to other workable solutions. I do think some level of censorship is probably necessary for a society to function, and I base this theory on the observation that no society I'm aware of successfully avoids it.

Some possible changes can only be peaceful to the extent that people submit themselves to victimization without complaint.

Then I think we should enable free speech, so the would-be victims can complain.

That's the flipside: Censorship can be weaponized as well, and the only real protection is free speech. And censorship is less likely to protect the victims, because the group that has the power to enforce societal change against them likely also can apply censorship against them.

Then I think we should enable free speech, so the would-be victims can complain.

Apologies; "complaint" in that sentence is a euphemism for resistance, presumably violent.

Censorship can be weaponized as well, and the only real protection is free speech.

Censorship can absolutely be weaponized. We had much freer speech, probably the freest speech ever, and the general group of people who fought the hardest for that acme of free speech then turned around and weaponized censorship, rolling back all their principles as soon as it was convinient to do so. The free speech principles we all agreed to didn't help at all when they did this.

And censorship is less likely to protect the victims, because the group that has the power to enforce societal change against them likely also can apply censorship against them.

Let me put it this way: there's no actual substitute for maintaining a healthy ecology of memes in your society. If you let bad memes take root, free speech ideals won't actually fix the problem. Letting Nazis march in Skokie and defending Larry Flint didn't actually do what it was supposed to do. The idea was that we defend scoundrels to keep good people from being attacked. But what actually happened was that, having defended scoundrels to the benefit of one side, that side gained enough power to impose its own values, changed the definition of scoundrel, and banned defense of those so labeled.

Defending scoundrels was a waste of time. The principles in question failed to achieve their stated purpose. Rather than defending the indefensible in pursuit of an impossibly paradoxical ideal, we should use power to preserve the good as best as we, as a society, can understand it. We should recognize that simply punting on the question of who gets toleration is no longer practical, and we should develop answers that lead to a livable society.