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 -
Australia not being majority white anymore will not be caused by aborigines, it will be caused by Asian immigrants who don’t care about the aborigines, don’t understand why they should be given more power, and don’t see them as impressive coalition partners.
I can't find solid figures showing how Asian-Australians voted - there's some evidence that Chinese-Australians intended to vote Yes at a higher-rate than Anglos, but there's also lots of grief about them not supporting it enough.
Anecdotally, when I talk to Australians of Asian background, the message I get ranges from "Why are you asking us? We didn't do anything wrong" to "Lol the Aboriginals were lucky we weren't the ones who conquered them", but I rarely hear a lot of sympathy for them.
I remember speaking to a woman from Hong Kong after we were told the usual (in my opinion inadequately-defined, meaningless) claim that Aboriginals are the world's "oldest continuous civilisation", and have "sixty thousand years of civilisation". She confessed to me afterwards that she doesn't believe that's true, because you need to have writing to be a civilisation. To be civilised, you need to be recording and reflecting on your history. In that light she had always been taught - and she continued to believe - that China was the world's oldest civilisation.
(Technically if you date by the invention of writing, well, it depends a lot on exactly what you count as 'writing' as opposed to pictures, pictographs, and so on, but it is a lot more debatable. China is running, but it's not the obvious leader.)
I mention that story just to note that the narratives that take hold among Anglo communities do not necessarily have much resonance for other people.
I wonder if this woman from Hong Kong’s opinion was straight ethnonarcisism or if she would be consistent- eg would she have been impressed with the knowledge that the cherokees are the only people who invented writing by imitation without having been taught it?
I think she'd be consistent, knowing her.
I just remember finding that conversation interesting in terms of the way we frame history and what we choose to value. She described learning history as a civilisational cycle, the narrative of unification and division that we see epitomised in the first line of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Human history goes out from and then returns to a centre, over and over. This seems like a very traditional Chinese way of thinking about it, and the influence of Marxism hasn't been able to fully change that yet.
By contrast, the way I feel I learned history as an Anglo, Western person was basically this - the story of a linear ascent, Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to Europe to Britain to America and eventually to space. Arguments about how a linear, progressive view of history is an Abrahamic innovation may be overstated but they're still at least partly true. Of the world's great civilisational or religious cultures, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have clear beginnings, middles, and conclusions in the way they perceive history. This is much less the case in pre-Western-contact China or India. It likely also shaped Hegelian and thus Marxist historical narratives.
At the time I talked to this woman, we were finishing up a several-days-long workshop on Aboriginal culture, and one of the things the first Aboriginal teacher we met tried to impress upon us was that time is not seen like this in Australian Aboriginal culture. Maybe for Westerners it's a gradual rise, and maybe for East Asians it's an oscillation, but for pre-contact Aboriginal people it's flat. Time is flat. Nothing changes. The breadth of the land swallows you up. It's not so much that the same incidents play out over and over repetitively, but that there is just one incident and it never stops happening, and any appearance of change is merely incidental.
Now I do take that with a grain of salt, not least because I am intensely skeptical that anybody in the world actually knows how pre-contact Aboriginals saw anything, and at any rate Aboriginal worldviews have been profoundly altered by colonisation anyway. A lot of them I honestly suspect that most Aboriginal advocates of Aboriginal culture learnt that culture from Western, noble savage type stereotypes. Whatever traditional culture they had would have been passed down through oral tradition and community practice, and when those communities were split up and most of the oral tradition lost, so was the culture. So even Aboriginal people are probably bullshitting a lot.
But even so, I assign some credence to his perspective, even if only a little, and it makes sense to me to say that culture and perception of time influences how people see the world and thus how they behave. For instance, it seems intuitively reasonably that you need some notion of progression and the possibility of upwards change (whether you fit that into a linear or cyclical narrative, they both have this possibility) in order for things like long-term planning and innovation to make sense. Meanwhile if you think that your actions can't really change things, then it seems like it makes a lot more sense to be impulsive and act only for short-term reward.
I'm not really sure about any of this, and I'm just spitballing, but it would not surprise me if there are some cultural effects like this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link