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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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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.

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