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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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It was the largest-scale social intervention of my lifetime,

Unless you are very young, or have no exposure to any kind of religious organization this seems highly unlikely. Religion is an ancient and ongoing social intervention that directly and indirectly impacts some 5 billion (or more!) people around the planet at a conservative estimate just today. Even if we just limit it to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, the social interventions have touched possibly almost every single person on the planet over the last 50 years. Impacting behaviors and laws and more.

BLM is a mere blip in comparison. Even further limiting it to the US in my lifetime (55 years) Religion is pretty clearly the unequivocal winner in social interventions for sheer scale and the behavioral changes it encourages. Just because it's old and is the status quo does not stop it being an intervention.

I think you can even argue neo-liberalism dwarfs BLM given the impacts on the economy and social decisions to put money before the American people (in some ways) and knock on impacts on the Rust Belt through the destruction of social fabric as whole towns and cities just rot away. That's just looking at the negative social impacts. Trillions upon trillions of dollars, countless lives impacted. Then if you look at the additional wealth at the winners of neo-liberalism and the knock on impacts of spending that wealth in a positive way, I can't see any way that BLM can match it either positively or negatively.

Just to be clear I am a supporter of neo-liberalism, I think it overall was a positive thing, but I think there is no doubt that it also impacted many working class Americans in a very negative way over the past 40 years.

Unless you are very young, or have no exposure to any kind of religious organization this seems highly unlikely. Religion is an ancient and ongoing social intervention that directly and indirectly impacts some 5 billion (or more!) people around the planet at a conservative estimate just today.

This appears to be a language dispute. I would say that religions are social structures, in the same way that, say, the Police system is a structure. They shape society, but they are generally stable long-term, and so one presumes their effects are also stable long-term.

By contrast, a dramatic change in church doctrine or practice, or a dramatic change in police doctrine or practice, would be an intervention, an acute change in how we do things, usually with the goal of improving our results. The civil rights act and the end of segregation are examples of large interventions. The institution of miranda rights, banning of stop and frisk, the passing of major gun control laws and their repeal or sunsetting, the rise of home-manufactured firearms, these are interventions, changes to the system intended to or plausibly suspected of changing the trend of social outcomes.

My claim is not that BLM is the most impactful social system in existence. It was the most impactful intervention, the biggest, most abrupt change of conditions. It was absolutely a blip. If you're looking for explanations for why the murder rate has abruptly gone through the roof, a blip, an abrupt, unprecedented event, is exactly what one would expect to find.