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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I increasingly believe that politics, rather most people's political views, is mostly just a function of culture. It's all just a function of the cultural lens. Perspective and values don't make a distinction between the political and cultural realm. Every generation is characterized by a specific dominant cultural lens that is unique in a. what it identifies to be a problem and b. the solutions it prescribes as a response to those problems (generally just meaning the ideal state of existence, which is generally just the inverse of what the state created by the problems is, so ultimately just meaning the norms that are implied and advocated for by the cultural lens). Political views are simply just the attempt at constructing the reality that culture upholds as the ideal; culture is the architect and politics is the builder. That's why when you consume entertainment, comedy in particular, from previous generations it isn't as enjoyable: because culture, which entertainment plays a key role in (in terms of its ability to convey and construct norms), is highly contextual.

But every generation thinks they have arrived at the correct perception of things, and as a corollary they have arrived at the correct view of how things should be. But when this perspective is implemented it always falls short and its shortcomings are evidenced by the fact that the implementation doesn't achieve what its supporters expect for it to achieve. That is what moves thought: the dialectic, the implementation of the counterpoint that reveals the excesses of the counterpoint which eventually necessitates a reversion to a midpoint that seeks to preserve the merit of both the status quo and the counterpoint. It's this constant movement through the dialectic that forces thought and perception to evolve, which is itself powered by shifting perspectives which are rooted in realizing the limited merit of the previously implemented perspective but also that the world which is being perceived is constantly changing (i.e. there are two types of movement: movement within the dialectic and movement of the centerpoint of the dialectic, or what substance the dialectic framework is meant to address). I often wonder if the world had just stopped changing, would we have eventually arrived at a perspective that was objectively supreme, correct, and accepted? Would thousands of years of evolution of thought, with its ability to shape the subject of evolution slowly to be a perfect response to that which it is evolving in response to, eventually have brought us to a cultural lens that is a perfect understanding of how the world is and should be, and, further, would it have eventually brought us to a world that is objectively perfect? But I guess to get back to the point the reason I think we never arrive at that perfect solution is that the focus of this dialectic movement is changing. It's like you're constructing a car optimized to drive on roads, but the roads keep changing.

The civil rights law imposed the frankly retarded[see image, it's a page from James Burnham's book on his experiences in NYC academia in 1930s] culture of 'some' whites -in this case nominally Christian east coast new yorkers on the entirety of the United States.

Yes, politics is downstream of culture, but political power allows a culture to impose itself on others.

It's incorrect to say 'politics' is purely downstream from culture. The culture of the US was irreversibly made worse by the Civil Rights Act which allowed activists to use the political power of the federal government to change culture throught the country.

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I would argue that both are often preceded by philosophy. Why do we believe that equality is even a social good, or that the common man should ever have a voice? For tens of thousands of years prior to the enlightenment, the very idea was mocked. You were born into a social position and there you stayed. It was simply expected that if you were the child of a king that alone gave you legitimacy as the ruler of your people. If you were the child of a peasant farmer, it was a waste to teach you to read because you were destined to be a farmer on some lord’s land. Nobody ever thought about it or if they did, they came to the conclusion that this simply should be.

Likewise we understand the universe in a rational empirical way. For most of human history, it wasn’t so. The universe was run by some kind of spirits and that’s why things are as they are. That tower fell? God caused it.

And later on politics tries to enact things that philosophy has taught. We believe in equality, so we better do something because it’s not happening on its own.

You were born into a social position and there you stayed.

I believe social mobility by and large hasn't changed much, or at all between the middle ages and now.

I suspect you've been psyopped by 'the Enlightenment', the age responsible for many myths such as 'medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat', 'people didn't wash in the middle ages' etc.

The universe was run by some kind of spirits

Did Aristotle think so? I don't believe that to be true. So it's unlikely that such was a common belief among educated people in Europe in the past 2000 years.

For tens of thousands of years prior

Hunter gatherers and such were and are very egalitarian.

It was the increase in population density and states that created any inequality in status. So, at most there may have been ~6000 years of people living in agricultural societies, most of which weren't really that unequal being really primitive.

From the 1964 "Suicide of the West" by James Burnham. Which ends with this black pill:

If a decisive change comes, if the contraction of the past fifty years should cease and be reversed, then the ideology of liberalism, deprived of its primary function, will fade away, like those feverish dreams of the ill man who, passing the crisis of his disease, finds he is not dying after all. There are a few small signs, here and there, that liberalism may already have started fading. Perhaps this book is one of them.

How’s that working out for him?

I’d be interested in reading more about how that book held up.

There is a level lower than culture: material reality. Unlike less intelligent beings, humans can adapt quickly to a new ecosystem by learning traits that are advantageous in that ecosystem. We don't have to wait for multiple generations for small changes in behaviour, we can develop a culture in a company in a matter of weeks. A national culture can evolve in centuries, while the corresponding differences would take at least three orders of magnitude longer if they were genetic.

Culture changes as the ecosystem changes and new cultural adaptations arise. These changes can be due to cultural changes as well as the material reality changing. Much of the cultural change we have seen in the past decades has happened in the parts of the world that consume the most oil. The social upheaval of the past century is less grounded in cultural innovation and more grounded in the ecosystem being fundamentally altered by fossil fuels. Hyperindividualism makes sense when mortality salients are largely gone. When there is enough material excess for people not to have to rely on social networks in order to get by the selection becomes a function of standing out in the crowd.

The Afghan culture is a function of small groups of isolated people trying to survive in a resource constrained environment.

Climates change, resources become more or less scarce, pandemics, wars and other factors will change the ecosystem. I do agree with human cultural change being a major driving factor but the world around us has changed profoundly.

if you re read the second paragraph I think you’ll see we agree that it’s a combo of cultural and external change

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