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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27845 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I don't understand the appeal of social conservatism. To me it seems boring and limiting. The men I've known who grew up in socially conservative households and never rebelled tend to be meek, intellectually stagnant personalities who have daddy issues. And the ones who did rebel seem damaged by their upbringings. What is the draw? To be fair, I have a very small sample size for the above!

I mean, I don't like progressives either, but one of the main reasons why I don't like progressives is that psychologically speaking to me they seem much the same as conservatives. Repressive, intellectually stagnant personalities who want to impose their limited worldviews on other people.

"Social conservativism" isn't something that IMO can reasonably be separated from its religious roots. What you said is like saying "I don't understand the appeal of Zen meditation, it's boring and pointless, you just stare in silence at a spot on a blank wall without thinking about anything." If you don't hold any of the metaphysical and supernatural beliefs associated with Zen Buddhism, then yes, staring at a wall doesn't seem like a very fun or useful way to spend your time. If you believe that, as C. S. lewis put it,

All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.

then sure, any limitation on behavior is just needlessly robbing someone of pleasure and would have no appeal at all.

I think you need to try harder to put yourself into the shoes of people who have different beliefs than you. If you don't get the appeal of social conservativism in a world where there exist good and evil, where the Holy Family is the role model for behavior, where sex is treated as humanity's participation in divine creation, awful and sacred and ineffably beautiful, then I'm not sure what I could say to help you get into the headspace and imagine what it would be like. Maybe I'm being too harsh, and you've never been exposed to these ideas.

Re. people from socially conservative families being weird and maladjusted, I think that's probably very overstated. The evil, abusive, hypocritical Christian family is a trope in American culture. I think a good analogy would be "American southerners are dumb, loud, toothless rednecks." If you grow up outside the South, your impression of Southerners will be informed by jokes, stock characters, and Hollywood media, and will thus be very negative. If you travel to the South as a tourist, you might be surprised at how similar to the rest of the country it is, how everyone knows how to read and wears shoes outside and is more or less polite and amiable. And then you might pull up at a gas station and see a two guys in a beat up pickup truck, blasting country, one with a half empty beer can in his hand, arm lazily hanging out the window, while his buddy, sporting a confederate flag jacket, loudly carries on a conversation with him that would make any NPR anchor spit out their coffee. And your subconscious would think "Aha! So they're like that after all" and you'd return to where your from with a ready-at-hand story about how this one time at a gas station in Alabama, you saw living proof of how They Really Are Like That and your mind would conveniently blot out all the perfectly normal people you'd met up to that point.

You've probably met a lot of social conservatives, and an even greater number of people who were raised in socially conservative households. But you wouldn't know it, because most of us are normal ordinary people. The weirdos stand out, but they're not just weird to you, they're weird to us, too.

"Social conservativism" isn't something that IMO can reasonably be separated from its religious roots.

Not sure about that. David Stove was a socially conservative philosopher. Many of the sharper defenders of social conservativism, e.g. Fitzgerald-Stephen and de Maistre, did so using arguments that weren't religious; Fitzgerald-Stephen's criticism of Mill's social liberalism was brilliant exactly because they were both utilitarians. One of the most successful books in the US culture war, The Closing of the American Mind, was written by Allan Bloom, a secular Jew, and the book's critique of liberal academia does not rely on a single religious premise. (You might say that Bloom was not conservative in his own life, but he'd probably joke that he was so reactionary that he'd gone past Christianity and all the way to Classical Athenian homosexuality.)

You've come across one of the many weak spots in my knowledge. I've read "The Closing of the American Mind" though I have read Fitzgerald-Stephen and de Maistre. I've always dismissed non-religious proponents of social conservativism as head-in-the-clouds idealists.

That said, what I meant by the above is that I don't think attempts to completely separate them succeed. They seem to want people to behave according to rules that only makes sense if there is a God so that society can reap the benefits of a pious populace. They run into a similar problem as did 20th century communists -- they ignored the inherent selfishness in the heart of every man. Traditional morality has to be underwritten by God to be taken seriously, or at least by a God-Like totalitarian state, in the Bolshevik case. They were part the laughing, jeering crowd confronted by Nietzsche's Madman, and are now having second thoughts and are frantically trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there are particular works that address the paragraph above. I'd be very interested in reading them since as I mentioned I am not terribly familiar with the work around this perspective.

Traditional morality has to be underwritten by God to be taken seriously, or at least by a God-Like totalitarian state, in the Bolshevik case.

Asia is full of nations that didn't have God underwriting their traditional morality and they're actually in many cases more traditional than the West. Amaterasu, the Dao and ancestor worship are just as capable of underwriting traditional morality, and if you go back in history it looks like Jove and Zeus can do the job too.

They were part the laughing, jeering crowd confronted by Nietzsche's Madman, and are now having second thoughts and are frantically trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The communists were extremely wrong in a lot of ways and I'm sure Nietzsche would have torn them to shreds, but I don't think he has particularly nice things to say about those who are still praying to god's shadow in all the little caves and shrines that shadow is still being propped up. I personally agree with Nietzsche that god is dead, but once you admit that you have to also admit that he's not going to be able to underwrite any new morality or worldview either.

they ignored the inherent selfishness in the heart of every man

I don't follow. Are you saying that social liberalism/progessivism is more successful with secular people because it is better at appealing to their selfishness? I.e. that it lacks a "pie in the sky when you die" incentive to be socially conservative?

Because it's not clear to me that social liberalism/progressivism have success by appealing to people's selfish wants. If they only appeal to gay people, drug dealers, or psychopaths, then sure, but they don't. The average straight white American male liberal does not stand to benefit from DEI, gay marriage, drug liberalisation etc. (Maybe a little from the latter.) You could argue that it appeals to people based on the idea that societies that are socially liberal/progressive are happier, but I doubt that you think that this is true, so the issue would be people's ignorance rather than their selfishness.

If anything, the success of social liberalism/progressivism often seems to come from (a) appealing to people's benevolence and (b) elevating benevolence to the status of the sole moral virtue. It's a kind of moral appeal, albeit one to a monomaniacal system in which universal compassion is the sole moral criterion.

Are you saying that social liberalism/progessivism is more successful with secular people because it is better at appealing to their selfishness?

I suppose that that's one way to put it. But I don't think there's much of an active appeal to selfish, it's more that very few demands are made of people at all. You can live the life of a pig and demand the same respect given to a Socrates, because who are you to judge? Ad aren't we all owed a certain level of dignity simply by being born human?

The average straight white American male liberal does not stand to benefit from DEI, gay marriage, drug liberalisation etc.

Subscribing to the dominant creed has always brought advantages. You will not be harassed by the ruling class or their lackeys, you will be allowed into polite society, you will potentially have access to good jobs, you will be thought of as an upright and morally good person. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the power and status that you stand to receive are valued highly by certain personalities.

If anything, the success of social liberalism/progressivism often seems to come from (a) appealing to people's benevolence and (b) elevating benevolence to the status of the sole moral virtue.

Partially, but also a lot of fear and control of the narrative. I remember hearing people openly discussing how homosexuality was immoral and how gay marriage was an unconscionable oxymoron in the 90s and early 2000s. Now those conversations rarely ever happen, not because the anti-gay marriage side was discredited, but because the war for the feelings of America was won by the pro-gay marriage side through propaganda and shaming. Many of the people who opposed gay marriage 20 years ago still oppose it, only they now no longer dare express their opinion to anyone other than close confidants because it's unfashionable and it carries the risk of social ostracization or worse. And so, the younger generations grow up not knowing that an anti-gay marriage position exists and simply believes that the way things are now is "normal," and Social Progressivism wins another victory.

I suppose that that's one way to put it. But I don't think there's much of an active appeal to selfish, it's more that very few demands are made of people at all. You can live the life of a pig and demand the same respect given to a Socrates, because who are you to judge? Ad aren't we all owed a certain level of dignity simply by being born human?

So you think that modern liberalism/progressivism isn't demanding and judgemental? It seems the opposite to me.

Subscribing to the dominant creed has always brought advantages. You will not be harassed by the ruling class or their lackeys, you will be allowed into polite society, you will potentially have access to good jobs, you will be thought of as an upright and morally good person. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the power and status that you stand to receive are valued highly by certain personalities...

Partially, but also a lot of fear and control of the narrative

So even selfish people can follow moral constraints out of fear, a desire for social approval, and social incentives?

So you think that modern liberalism/progressivism isn't demanding and judgemental? It seems the opposite to me.

It "coerces to freedom" as Ryzard Legutko put it. You can live how you like, as long as it's not "discriminatory" and doesn't imply that some ways of living are better than others. You can choose any color of Model T you want, as long as it's black. You will not be judged for your choice of indulgence, but you will be judged harshly for questioning whether it is right to indulge.

So even selfish people can follow moral constraints out of fear, a desire for social approval, and social incentives?

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Why would not be possible to simultaneously be selfish and do something out of fear? Can you speak more plainly?

It "coerces to freedom" as Ryzard Legutko put it. You can live how you like, as long as it's not "discriminatory" and doesn't imply that some ways of living are better than others. You can choose any color of Model T you want, as long as it's black. You will not be judged for your choice of indulgence, but you will be judged harshly for questioning whether it is right to indulge.

That's one of the norms in modern liberalism/progressivism, but there are others, e.g. equity and compassion. The more someone tends towards "progressivism" in my sense, the more that these other norms dominate over liberty.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Why would not be possible to simultaneously be selfish and do something out of fear? Can you speak more plainly?

Sure, I just wanted to go step by step in constructing my argument.

If selfish people can act out of fear, including secular fear (i.e. not just the threat of divine punishment or the promise of rewards in heaven) then the secular conservative can think that a secular conservative society is possible in principle, despite people being selfish.

In practice, many of them have had a tragic vision and thought that it wasn't possible. In the case of David Stove, for instance, I think it was he thought that a society made up of people who think like him is impossible because people tend too strongly towards irrationality:

Unlike Muggeridge, however, I do not believe that rational thought is a danger to humanity, in the long or even in the medium run. Whether a society of atheists could endure, was a question often discussed during the Enlightenment, though never decided. If the question is generalized a little, however, from 'atheists' to 'Positivists,' then it seems obvious enough that the answer to it is 'no.' Genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win. You could as reasonably expect a thousand unbiased dice, all tossed at once, all to come down 'five,' say. There are simply far too many ways, and easy ways, in which human thought can go wrong. Or, put it the other way round: anthropocentrism cannot lose. The jungle will reclaim the clearing (even without heavy infestations of conservationists), darkness will beat the light, not quite always on the local scale, but absolutely always on the large scale.

(From "What's Wrong with Our Thoughts?")

It seems your objection is to the parenting style of “here are the rules, do not question them” rather than the content of the rules.

You can certainly raise children Catholic while also raising them to be intellectually curious. There’s a near inexhaustible amount of material to digest from thousands of years of tradition. Christianity does not demand completely blind faith, though it does find it praiseworthy. My own faith rests on historical evidence and teachings from church fathers.

I think few parents encourage any depth of thinking, regardless of their political alignment. They don’t engage in it themselves and would not have any interest or ability to push their kids to interrogate their own beliefs.

The social liberals kind of get a facade of intellectual curiosity for free by being antagonistic to tradition, but this antagonism itself is not interrogated.

You can certainly raise children Catholic while also raising them to be intellectually curious

Yeah, not so much. That's a great way to raise an atheist. (eg. sample size of 1: me). Learning the ins and outs of the history of the bible and enough theology is just enough to show you how much of a bullshit fake it till you make it the various holly texts incorporated in the bible are. The absolute revulsion it causes you as a naive believer to realise the entire edifice of "the church" is just years and years of the priestly/ruling class making shit up as they go along to benefit themselves or their kings. Seeing how the various commandments and moral demands of the dogma are entirely based on the worldly, fallen needs, wants and prejudices of mere humans is enough to turn anyone an atheist.

Trust me, the less you know about religion the better.

The absolute revulsion it causes you as a naive believer to realise the entire edifice of "the church" is just years and years of the priestly/ruling class making shit up as they go along to benefit themselves or their kings.

As as an ex-New-Atheist (well, still an atheist, just out of the whole Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., mindset), this is true, but then you realize this is true for every other human-constructed edifice, including (and perhaps especially) the ones that were supposed to be our salvation from religion, like The Science. At that point it's just a question of picking your poison, and there's a case to be made that religion is the least harmful.

The benefit of a cynical worldly framework is that when it is inevitably exploited in a cynical and worldly way, it is still working exactly as advertised.

Not really. The current framework advertises itself as scientific, while demanding obedience through distinctly non-scientific means. Also, a lot of the ideas it pushes are rather metaphysical in nature ("gender", various form of "privilege", etc.).

Christianity does not demand completely blind faith, though it does find it praiseworthy.

Not to nitpick, but my understanding is that even this has to be qualified. Blind faith is praiseworthy if you are not capable of understanding the foundations of scripture and tradition, but St. Peter wrote

If anyone asks you to give an account of the hope which you cherish, be ready at all times to answer for it, but courteously and with due reverence.

Children and those less mentally gifted should be praised for faith, but for those adults with the capability, they have a duty to understand what it is they believe and why. Sadly, many adults neglect this duty, but that doesn't change the reality.

Thanks for the edification. Though I was thinking of the praise Jesus had for those who can believe without seeing, in the context of doubting Thomas.

Ah, that is considered praiseworthy, yes. Though I've always considered it less of a "blind" faith and more of a "courageous" faith. The ability to believe without signs and miracles, or in the face of suffering and despair. I admit I don't have any source for that.

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