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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33302 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I don’t think that’s the issue. And if I might rant against your rant, the problem I see is that we take literally nothing seriously when discussing politics, technology or culture. I get that sometimes it’s helpful to make references to popular culture and media. But what I’ve seen, and Ukraine vs Russia is the exemplar of the moment is a complete lack of seriousness in the discourse around it. We’re pussyfooting around a situation where two nuclear powers are escalating tensions over a territory of questionable value in either direction. And we’re doing so on the basis of memes.

I can make the case for just about any possible position in response to the Russian invasion. Every one of them has serious pros and cons because war is a serious matter. A negotiation of a new border brings a hopefully stable peace, but would encourage Putin in further expansion. A proxy war with the goal of driving Russia to the 2014 borders risks a hot war between nuclear powers, but would send a strong message that we will not stand for invasion of sovereign nations. There’s a lot of history that should be a part of the discussion as well. We can’t, or won’t talk about this very very serious topic in a serious manner. Instead, Russians are uniquely evil “orcs”, and we’re talking about a potential world war in terms of movies while insisting on a new spelling for Kiev and chastising companies who still call their chicken dish “chicken Kiev” instead of “chicken Kyiv” as though Putin or anyone else gives a flying shit what we call the dish.

The rot goes deeper, and it was also quite common in discussions of COVID and the response. It wasn’t a cool rational debate about the merits of various types and levels of lockdowns. There was little discussion of the relevant risks of different activities and the risks at different ages and risk factors. We simply screamed at anyone who wanted to leave the house.

My thinking is that we are, as the Chinese observed at one point, and unserious people. We aren’t having rational debates and choosing reasonable alternatives. We aren’t discussing the facts on the ground. We’ve become the people defending Ukraine from orcs, Jewish space lasers, and freedom fries. And this is not a sign of a healthy civilization. This is a society clearly shrinking back into a deman-haunted world in which the entirety of thinking about very serious issues must be reduced to children’s movie references or image macros to be digestible by the public.

The fact we can be so unserious, yet still rule the world just shows how powerful we are. We can talk about the Avengers, then drop decades old tech in the DOD equivalent of the backyard shed and basically ruin Russia's ability to make progress.

Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power? How does a people who consider “owning the out group” to be the height of discourse solve problems that face it? How does such a society build for the future? Especially given the near scientific illiteracy and practical innumeracy, this is a serious problem. We are amusing ourselves to death, or at least to irrelevance. Everything is a joke.

I mean, considering they were nerdy guys, I'm sure more than a few people who made the atomic bomb read sci-fi stories, still looked at the original comic book, and may have enjoyed some westerns or noir films. It wasn't all Oppenheimer quotes all the time. It's just today, the line is less clear, and people are more open about their hobbies. Hell, we had people involved in the creation of the beginnings of space industry that were weird sex cultists.

It doesn't really matter how scientifically literate the median American is, as long as the coffers still go to various scientific endeavors, who turn out can invent new things and use the gender somebody prefers the same time, just like they got used to having non-white males as co-workers.

It wasn't all Oppenheimer quotes all the time.

Oppenheimer's most famous quote is actually from a story anyway, the Bhagavad Gita.

True, the inventor of actual AI might quote an anime or whatever.

As Eetan said, we have always thought in terms of memes and slogans. Memes, are, after all, the DNA of the soul. The Bible represents one of the oldest memes still-extant in civilization, and its adherents literally referred to the central narrative of the New Testament as "The Greatest Story Ever Told," IIRC. When I was growing up, we learned about the history of America practically through famous quotes and slogans: No Taxation Without Representation; Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death; Four Score And Seven Years Ago; etc.

Sure, it feels cheap that many of the narratives of the newer generation were forged by wholly human hands without even the pretense of divine revelation or the claim of being a genuine record of the ineffable acting in our world, but at least they're still narratives. Perhaps the conflict lies in the tropes (or, rather, their usage) and not the actual messages attempting to be imparted.

Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power?

Power was always about memes, and West/NATO power had never been greater.

Ancient leader motivated his troops by talking about mythical heroes, medieval would motivate his troops with inspiring pep talk about Bible and knightly romances.

The conquistadors, who managed the most brilliant feats of arms in history, were weebs living in fictional world of trash literature of their day.

"And as we saw so many cities and inhabited villages in the water, and many other large settlements on land, and the road that led to Mexico, we were stupefied ['admirados'], and we said that it all these things seemed like the enchantments recounted in the book of Amadís."

Now, NATO has Harry Potter and the Avengers. What does Russia have?

Cheburashka?

What does Russia have?

Salacious refrigerators, as it turns out. And the cult of progress in general, as the other cornerstone post-Soviet myth has now been repeated, as Marx postulated, as a farce. Soviet heritage aside, we've been worriedly looking for new memes since 1999:

"You see, let me just explain the situation to you, like the way it is," said Vovchik. "Our national business enters the international arena. And there's all kinds of dough out there - Chechen, American, Colombian, if you know what I'm saying. And if you just look at them as money, they're all the same. But behind all this money there is actually some kind of national idea. We used to have Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Then we had this communism. And now that it is all over, there is no such idea at all, except for the dough itself. But you can't just have the dough justify the dough, right? Because then it is purely incomprehensible - why are some ahead and the others behind?"

"And when our Russian dollars are circulating somewhere in the Caribbean," Vovchik went on, "you can't even really understand why they are Russian dollars. We lack national i-den-ti-ty..."

"Get it? The Chechens have it, but we don't. That's why they look at us like shit. What we need is a clear and simple Russian idea, so that we can explain to any bitch from any Harvard: rub-a-dub-dub, and don't look at us like that. And we should know where we come from, too, anyway."

"The task is simple," said Vovchik. "Write me a Russian idea, about five pages long. And a short version on one page. Make it straightforward, no smartassery. So that I could sort it out with any foreign faggot - a businessman, a singer, or anyone else. So that they wouldn't think that we here in Russia just stole the money and put up a steel door. So that they would feel such spirituality, these whores, like they did at Stalingrad in 1945, understand?"

I largely agree that that's a completely horrible and infuriating aspect of our discourse, and I really really wish we could do better. But I want to question how we could do it better. Has there been a society that has done it better? It would be good to have the people in power giving fewer shits about what the mobs on Twitter say they care about. But before it was Twitter, was there probably some other mechanism that was the completely horrible public square. I just find it hard to believe that masses of people were ever able to make good rational decisions.

We don't have to look far or deep to find indications that masses of people always acted as a bunch of complete idiots. Just look at Shakespeare's depiction of Brutus vs Mark Antony's speeches and how the crowd reacts to them in Julius Caesar.

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