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 -
The relevant distinction is that they made the overthrow of the Church an explicit policy goal, and won on popular acclaim. Sure, the peasants in the Vendée didn't agree, but they weren't really part of the revolution, were they?
Clearly "Militant Atheists" is the wrong term.
via wikipedia:
...Did any of the Revolutionaries approve of a religion or a system of faith that they did not themselves personally invent, based on their revolutionary principles, purely as an expression of their understanding of human reason?
Meanwhile, none of this would have been within the Overton window of the American public. To my knowledge, the American revolution spawned zero novel state religions, reason-based or otherwise.
I disagree. We can look at which factions won, and we can look at which arguments were decisive. Sure, lots of Revolutionaries wanted different things. Only a few revolutionaries got what they wanted, and they won based on a narrow set of arguments. Therein lies the true nature of the revolution, I argue.
It was a Revolution, though. France might have been centralizing power for hundreds of years, but they had kings for hundreds of years too. The revolutionaries ditched the crown and ran away with the power-centralization, and doing so was an affirmative choice, made for ideological reasons. Faced with the task of rewriting their social structure from scratch, the French deliberately chose to centralize all power and remove every check on that power's exercise. They deliberately and consciously embraced the mob.
And yet, the Americans a mere 13 years earlier did the exact opposite, and restrained that tendency better than most other places in the world. Why?
property, patriotism, and depending on definitions patriarchy I'll grant you unequivocally. Those aren't Christian in any way. Tradition, Family, Virtue, and Sexual Continence aren't Christian in the sense that other cultures have had other expressions of these ideas without any influence from Christianity. They are Christian in the sense that the western world was decisively shaped by the Christian versions of these ideas.
This seems... unlikely to me. Doesn't Buddhism have analogues to all of those concepts, for example?
It's entirely possible that this is true, but to my mind the question is not whether the Enlightenment was possible without Christianity, but rather whether the Enlightenment necessarily rejects Christianity. I think it does, and I think that is another reason why the French Revolution was the true offspring of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, properly understood, is flatly incompatible with Christianity. Further, while you may be correct that Christianity is a perpetual source of leveling arguments, I disagree that it is a perpetual source of the Enlightenment specifically. Christianity ruled a lot of terrain for a very long time, and over that time there were many abortive leveling revolutions, just as there have been leveling revolutions in previous societies far back into antiquity. There has only been one Enlightenment, because the idea of leveling is not, at the end of the day, the core concept that makes it what it is. The core of the Enlightenment is not "things should be more equal". The core is "We know how to solve all our problems." that claim, and that claim made credible by a conflux of unique historical forces, is why the Enlightenment could succeed where previous movements failed.
The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself", as the quote goes, but neither is it "every man a brother
in Christ".More options
Context Copy link
If the premise is that industrialisation causes this trend, then a country with 1/10th the population spread out over a much wider area not being as far along the path as one of the most populous and industrialised countries in Europe is no contradiction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link