site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".

This is a very strange thing to say, because whatever else "wokeism" might be, it's not relativist. Wokeism has a very strong, dogmatic view of the world, and judges everyone and everything by its exacting standards. There's a reason people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are cancelled by woke puritans - they judge these complicated men by modern, woke standards and find them wanting.

I mean, as much as the stereotype is that wokeism treats Islam with kiddie gloves, or is happy to excuse anti-woke practices if they come from a minority culture or religious group, I actually think that's only a practical constraint for coalition building. If the woke have their way, then the only permissible forms of Islam will be those that have been reformed from the inside to be woke-friendly, and every indigenous culture will be turned into a hollow shell of their former selves that woke totally-not-colonialist propaganda forces them to be.

I think this can only be said to be due to the incoherence of wokeism and the impossibility of pinning such people down to making defensible claims rather than argument-by-protest. All I can offer is my own experience trying to determine if there was any substantive 'there there'. Goes all the way back to grad school, from the time before wokeness had taken over. I was starting to see the beginnings of something happening in the space and couldn't quite understand what was underpinning it. I had previously had the experience of looking at subjects like the Supreme Court's docket and SIGINT through the prism of popular reporting, wondering how any of it could make any sense at all, then digging in and learning that there was at least some level of coherence underlying the whole shebang, even if I didn't agree with all of it. So I thought maybe I'd do the same here, and I took use of our University's ability to audit courses. I wanted to go straight to the horse's mouth.

Whelp, best I could tell, there was very little there there. Maybe a little, but not nearly enough to support the whole edifice. Regardless, one thing that was very clear from my experiences was that they were utterly committed to the idea of relativism if you even tried poking at their philosophical underpinnings. It seemed like nearly a reflex to just deflect having to worry about it. Like, just go read Foucault if you want to know more about why relativism, but relativism means we don't have to give objective reasons for our moral positions, and oh by the way, you're a bigot if you disagree with our moral positions. They hide the contradictions just well enough and the masses are now just blinded enough to noticing broken philosophical underpinnings that they can mostly skate along without accounting for it.

It's a strategic relativism. They use relativist arguments to "deconstruct" and undermine opposing views and "structures". Relativism is a weapon, and you use weapons against the enemy, not yourself.

I don't doubt there are parts of academic "wokeism" that are relativist, but to the extent that those ideas have trickled down to the Tumblr and Twitter masses, I think they lose a lot of of their relativist character. Ask the average Twitter user with pronouns in their bio what Foucault thought, and you'll get a blank stare. Ask them what "stand-point epistemology" is, and it's probably the same. But you could probably get them to go on a thousand mini-rants about "micro-aggressions", and what media is "problematic", and who from history was good and bad in absolute terms.

I don't disagree at all. I would be curious to see where the current balance lies if we actually just asked them, "Is there an objective morality?" We might be so far along that we'll get blank stares to that, too.

To the extent woke people purport to disagree with objective morality, I think it's a combination of two things:

  1. They interpret the phrase "objective morality" to mean western/Christian morality.

  2. They interpret "objective morality" as supporting the idea that the powerful should be able to impose their morality on the oppressed.

So even though they do believe in "an" objective morality, they associate the phrase "objective morality" with views they disagree with and therefore claim to not believe in it.

If I'm being flippant, I'd say that my observations of the internet wars were that both sides had major problems, but probably the biggest area that atheists felt like they were constantly getting crushed on was the argument from morality. They tried lots of things to try to fix this. Ultimately, I think they were so unsuccessful that they just did everything they could to bury the topic and ridicule anyone who even thought about morality as a thing.

...directly leading to exactly the phenomenon that you describe.

This is like reading a dispatch from a completely different timeline. Are you talking about atheists like Sam Harris, who literally wrote an entire book, The Moral Landscape, explicating a sophisticated defense of his non-theistic conception of morality? You can say, as I’m sure you would, that this book was a colossal failure and that its arguments are bad, but it is just verifiably false that atheists attempted to “bury questions of morality”. It’s also especially incoherent to then try and link the New Atheists to “the woke” - whom you fail to identify” - when the vast majority of “woke” people I knew during the height of the atheism wars either hated the New Atheists, or, far more often, had no interest in atheism whatsoever and formed their worldview in a way that was totally orthogonal to questions about the existence of God(s).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats