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 -
No, thank you for engaging earnestly - I was admittedly bristling somewhat after getting the sense that people were overly quick to jump to the defense of their ingroup, and your question was more than fair.
Well, to be clear, the alternative we're comparing to would not be saying nothing at all but more something like clinical statement along the lines of "the speech mannerisms and conventions of black people often register as threatening by members of other cultures", which would arguably convey the same information only at the expense of conveying directly some of what it would be like for the reader to actually be in that hypothetical situation. You could have a separate argument about whether it is better or worse to have the emotional reaction as an elderly guy who just had someone turn up at the door - that is, would a mandatory speech-mannerism babelfish that filters out emotionally salient cultural differences be beneficial or detrimental on average? - but here we are not actually trying to deal with interlopers who may or may not threaten us, nor even give personal recommendations to people who are, but instead trying to foster an environment in which we can discuss societal effects and abstract principles in a detached manner.
When I say the anecdote makes us irrational, I mean that it's hard to "shut up and multiply" the magnitude of one's emotional response to something; and for many people including myself emotions seem to come with a builtin self-reinforcement drive where they also motivate us to seek out more emotional stimulus that reinforces them and shun input that induces emotions in conflict. This complicates the "shutting up and multiplying" of a rational weighing process even further, as now we find ourselves actively trying to increase the first term we found and avoiding exploration of others. That (/whether) this is a problem worth fixing is a separate debate that is largely orthogonal to the circumstance that this is a problem that exists; susceptibility to drug addiction would also be nice to overcome but "start by binging on some drugs and then see if you can avoid getting addicted" is rarely good advice for the individual.
To illustrate the problem of calculating with emotions further, in this particular case, what would even be a counterweight that would allow us to weigh the potential emotional terror of the old man (conditioned on the interaction actually having occurred as OP hypothesized) in the context of the correct consequences to draw as a society? Shouldn't we also take into the account the potential emotional consequences for everyone else - such as the putative addition to the terror a black youth may experience about the prospect of accidentally going to the wrong porch? I don't see anecdotes conveying each of the emotions coexisting and being traded off against each other in a discussion without their respective proponents just getting angered and trying to shoot the other messenger.
More options
Context Copy link