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 -
So just so I'm understanding this correctly, the KKK, George Wallace, and David Duke are/were essentially woke leftists and Marxists? And the people running the Jim Crow South and supporting the KKK were more or less motivated by the same ideology as The Black Bloc and Antifa? Is this what you are saying?
Yes.
I'm saying that the dipshits donning white hoods to smash windows in minority neighborhoods back in 1920 are largely indistinguishable from the dipshits donning black hoodies to smash windows in minority neighborhoods in 2020. They're the same picture.
Okay so when did the KKK officially become part of the Left in your view? When it was founded by Confederate veterans or did it become woke left later? Or were Confederate soldiers also woke leftists and this predates the Civil War?
From the founding.
As I have argued on numerous priors occasions the split between left and right is best understood as a religious schism between the followers of Rousseau and Hobbes. Hobbes may have won the war, but that doesn't necessarily translate into winning the site.
Rousseau was born significantly after slavery in the US started. Columbus discovered North America pretty close to the conclusion of the War of the Roses so that is how far back we are talking here with race based slavery/colonialism. France passed racial hierarchy laws under the Sun King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Noir way before Rousseau was born. The English did as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_Slave_Code
It is significantly more likely they were influenced by that legacy than anything Rousseau wrote, who these Confederate veterans had probably never heard of or read. Or were the Sun King and the British Empire proto woke left Marxist as well?
Yes, and the New Klu Klux Klan (IE the group most people think of when they hear "KKK" today) was founded over a century after Rousseau's death, so there is no contradiction. We don't need to speculate about their motivations or political sympathies because they were quite open about them. One of those things that you won't read on Wikipedia because it's inconvenient to the narrative but is readily apparent when you consume media from the period was that the KKK was; A) considered very progressive and left-wing by their contemporaries, B) much more influential in the north (Indiania, Ohio, Illinois) than they were in the south, and C) closely aligned with the Democratic Party.
Like I said above, the sort of Rousseauean son of a plantation owner who would have called themselves a "Social Democrat" or "National Socialist" and donned a white hood to engage in a spot of sectarian violence back in the 1920s, is largely indistinguishable (both ideologically and demographically) from the Rousseauean sons and daughters of Wall Street and .com billionaires who don black hoodies to engage in sectarian violence today.
Do you think you and I could have a top level disagreement? I think it would be fun to hash this out at the top level with our best arguments. You are obviously very educated in philosophy and history yet you and I have completely different views, I think you are wrong straight up and I couldn't disagree more but you have been nothing but respectful and I have been sarcastic and in bad faith. Can we debate this and let everyone decide? We can keep our arguments to what we debated so far.
Edit: From what I see, we agree on everything just disagree on how we got here.
More options
Context Copy link
I apologize for that sarcastic remark below. You have engaged respectfully and and in good faith so I shouldn't have said that. I would have deleted it but someone replied to it. But I do regret saying that and I normally don't do that. You just were frustrating me because you and I disagree so much. What's funny though is you and I probably agree on most things too, but I hyper focused on this one disagreement. So let us agree to disagree on this. I'm not trying to have an antagonistic and personal internet conflict with someone (completely one-sided on my part by the way).
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sorry but I'm done engaging with you. I don't even understand what you are trying to say or actually believe. From what I can gather, you think every person is either influenced by Rousseau or Hobbes. And every single bad thing that ever happened in the West was done by these Rousseau influenced people who are also left wing and Marxist and woke (and also supported slavery in the South, ran the Jim Crow South, and somehow are also now Antifa). And the right wing people influenced by Hobbes have never done anything wrong and are constantly stopping these dastardly Rousseau influenced people from doing bad things.
"Scientific" racism isn't an odd offshoot of racism, but rather the central root, the prototypical example. Racism achieved the social position it enjoyed in its heyday because it was novel, new, modern, scientific, "rational", driven by the latest Studies Showing the innate inferiority of different races, with the differences highlighted by the advances of Science itself as technology rapidly reshaped society in the runup to the industrial revolution. All this in marked contrast with the old, religion-based methods of determining ingroup and outgroup, of pagans and heretics. Slavery had existed for a long time without racial character; it acquired its racial character at the frontiers, the far colonies, where the old systems of tradition and religion had minimal reach. When it spread back to developed society, it did so at the same time that the old systems of tradition and religion were radically weakening, and it was the old traditions and religions that formed the backbone of resistance against it.
Racism as we know it is fundamentally Modern, a product rather than an adversary of rationalistic materialism. To the extent that this description is too simplistic, it is because everything we know has been touched by modernity to a greater or lesser extent; for a time, the inevitable divergence between the ideologies @HlynkaCG summarizes as "Hobbes" and "Rousseau" was not so obvious as it is now, and people searched for a middle way. But still, Abolition was overwhelmingly driven by Christian zealots motivated by personal faith, and concern over the proliferation of inferior breeds of man was overwhelmingly driven by people appealing to scientific materialism and the supremacy of human reason over all. This pedigree is ignored and downplayed for exactly the reasons that Progressive championing of eugenics and lobotomies and so on are ignored and downplayed; the fact that science produced world-class, entirely novel forms of bigotry fatally complicates Progressives' conception of their own history.
The South was also very Christian. It's not like the South in the Civil War was this bastion of rationality and inquiry compared to the North, and many were very Christian such as Stonewall Jackson. I agree with much of what you are saying, but I don't think it is a binary like OP was making it. For example, I do know that much of the "Scientific" racism came from the Enlightenment (hence why I stressed that the Founding Fathers were also scientifically racist in an earlier comment). But I just refuse to believe that the average racist White Southerner was meaningfully influenced by Rousseau in any way. I think it was just this is always how we have done it so this is what I believe.
That being said, @HlynkaCG is correct that Progressives downplay their role in racism and many bad things that happened because of "Trusting The Science". And I do understand why they would get annoyed by this and default to pushing back against that narrative because for a true Red Triber this must get annoying. And I would even say that "Scientific" racism was initially pushed and "discovered" because it was very useful to what the regimes in Europe wanted to be true. This is probably a very Foucault type argument on my end though.
So my disagreement with @HlynkaCG isn't that he is 100% wrong but instead they are massively simplifying complex historical forces that would have probably happened even if Rousseau or Hobbes were never born.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link