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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I'm not sure if responding to these complaints was the goal of your post:

There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power

But if so, you haven't really addressed it aside from:

social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.

We've been picking up trash for a century, and we probably haven't had a proper famine in the west in about the same timeframe. Unless you're using the word civilization to contain an unarticulated positive vision/will to power, both of those examples conjure images of maintaining a status quo/stagnation rather than progress. Would you like to elaborate on that point?

I'm not sure if this will come across as "elaboration" or "reiteration" but I think that one of the core differences/disputes/sources of inferential distance comes from a disagreement over just how difficult and fundamental certain sorts of tasks are. You are correct in observing that we haven't had a proper famine in the west in close to a century. The difference is in what conclusions we draw from this fact. Are famines truly a thing of the past, or have we just been lucky?

The idea I'm gesturing towards is something like the old XKCD comic about "tasks", where in I would argue that many of the problems we consider "simple" are in fact "the hard part", and that many (perhaps even the majority of) people today take them for granted because they've never known anything else.

Edit to Elaborate: In case it wasn't clear, my claim is that coming up with grand theories and sophisticated parliamentary systems is the civilizational equivalent of figuring out if a picture was taken in a national park. Where as making sure that that grocery store shelves get stocked and keeping people from lynching each other is the equivalent of figuring out if the picture was of a bird.

Where as making sure that that grocery store shelves get stocked and keeping people from lynching each other is the equivalent of figuring out if the picture was of a bird.

To offer a concurrence: The Constitution observably worked quite well for a long time. Did it work well because it was a good ruleset regardless of the people it governed, or did it work well because the values and perspectives of the people it governed made its job relatively easy? I was raised to believe the former, that our system worked well because it was an excellent system. Only, it's not working so well now, and none of the formal rules have actually changed. So if it's all down to the rules as written, why should outcomes be different for one set of people than for another?

Writing a constitution or imagining a system of government is easy. Getting people to actually implement it properly and live in peace under it is very, very hard, even when the plan is as simple as "just please follow the rules, goddammit."

Writing a constitution or imagining a system of government is easy. Getting people to actually implement it properly and live in peace under it is very, very hard, even when the plan is as simple as "just please follow the rules, goddammit."

I feel like this is an underappreciated insight.

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