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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Funny thing is, a mixture of the "city on a hill" myth and the "original sin" myth would come pretty close to the reality. Historically, America has been both a radically successful experiment in liberty which has been a light to other countries, and a genocidal, slave-holding, hypocritical empire that has committed horrible atrocities against many people all over the world.
These myths almost seem to originate when the light of truth gets filtered into two separate beams by the prism of ideological delusion.
What if the real delusion is choosing such a moralistic framework for interpreting history in the first place? Perhaps if your worldview has got you thinking in terms of “horrible atrocities” and “radical experiments in liberty”, you’ve already lost the plot, and the answer is to stop viewing the United States - or any other country! - as a moral/ideological project.
But what else is there to ground the idea of America? You can't really rely on "descent from a special peoples/place" or what-have-you, because the US was founded explicitly on jettisoning ties to, and control by, the British Empire (and also the French and Spanish Empires) that laid the foundation of the 13 Colonies. We can admit that "the Great American Experiment" is maybe overblown/overrated, but the US was explicitly founded in reference to the Roman Republic, no?
I think that coming to terms with the failure of the “American idea” - the realization that it was a house of cards from the very beginning - entails a sort of “death of the author” interpretation of the Founding; these men, to the extent that they had any coherent idea of what they were creating, were basically super-fallible autists who were LARPing as Enlightenment-flavored Platonic philosopher-kings. Their project should not be taken seriously as a credible long-term basis for a functional society.
Whatever we have now looks nothing remotely like what they had in mind. While part of that is due to a failure of stewardship on the part of the intervening generations, the bulk of the failure rests on the guys who actually thought you could found a whole-ass country around some academic theories and poster-board slogans. That the country succeeded for as long as it did is a testament not to “the founding documents”, but to the very high level of human capital of the founding ethnic stock of the country, and to some incredibly favorable geographic factors.
That none of this allows us to project forward a coherent vision for how future generations, unrelated in any way to the founding stock of the country, can achieve buy-in to this interpretation of events… well, that’s why, as I’ve made clear in previous posts, I’m not “patriotic”. There’s no “there” there at this point. The story was too full of plot-holes, and the authors barely understood their own motivations for writing it in the first place.
This sort of reinterpretation is already near-universal. There are a few libertarian weirdoes who think you can have a country of 330 million yeoman-farmers in the 21st century; everyone else invoking the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, etc., is already straying far from the original meaning.
When MLK said:
Do you think he didn't know that a large portion of those "architects", maybe even a majority, were slave-owners at the time they "wrote the magnificent words"? He was clearly already doing a "death of the author"-type interpretation.
That’s fair, but I think that most people do the MLK thing, which is to say, “Yes, the real Founders were hypocrites and not particularly impressive, but the idea of the Founders - the most positive and charitable interpretation of their own words - is a great and morally significant mythos.” Whereas I’m saying, “No, even if those men genuinely believed every word they said and lived their lives as exemplars of those Enlightenment values, those values are bad and not something on which we should try to build a society. In fact, to the extent that the Founders were hypocrites, this is actually a point in their favor, because it implies that on some level they understood that their lofty ideals were not a reliable guide to actual living.”
Which enlightenment values are you in favor of throwing away?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link