Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Let me describe some of my beliefs and the very tentative conclusion they've led me to, and you can decide how many of these beliefs you share and thus how seriously you should take my conclusion. I frame this as a description rather than an argument because I don't think I can capably advocate for any of these views, at least not succinctly the way someone with more talent could, and thus I must simply hope you already share them.
Suffering is bad, but, lacking a good word to describe this, [failure to reach potential / absence of joy] is far worse. The worst suffering is caused when a source of joy disappears. Some of the worst pain you can experience is losing a loved one or getting divorced, with physical pain a very distant runner-up. I'd rather have a child, experience a few years getting to know them, and then lose them, than never have them at all. Same with marriage etc. The worst position you can be in, I think, is to squander great potential and end up living a bare-minimum life without having tried hard to better your situation.
So, all else being equal, I think the life of a paraplegic with a good attitude is more valuable than the life of an able-bodied person with a bad attitude. Second-order effects and other caveats aside, I think it's pretty easy for anyone to squander all of their gifts, and I also think it's doable for someone with no gifts to live an extremely meaningful and joyful life pretty much unrelated to their material circumstances.
In the long run, I think culture beats charity. As Zero HP Lovecraft says:
I think this is true, but culture, and human belief, are in the end what determine human wellbeing along multiple dimensions. Optimistically: everything is downstream from culture in the sense that if you fix culture, literally everything else will be fixed in short order. Culture is downstream of everything else in the sense that there are actual actions you can take which will meaningfully affect culture.
Fund a woke charity, and you may save 3 bazillion lives, but you're also subsidizing the status and reach of some of the most woke people in the world. In the long run I think this may actually matter more--the poor people will survive, which is great, but they or their descendants will be forced to bend the knee to ideologies which will ultimately destroy them, spiritually if not physically.
So I think the best sorts of charities do one or more of the following:
I think #3 is probably the lowest-hanging fruit, and usually leads to #2, so that's where most money should go. Find someone who makes good art, but isn't crazy enough to pursue that rather than support their family. Pay for a year of their work and see what happens. Maybe if a few thousand people do this we'll get an excruciatingly beautiful work of art which we wouldn't have otherwise, valuable both in its own right and as a cultural cudgel against competing ideologies. I'm not sure what all of Lars Doucet's beliefs are, but he strikes me as a good writer, and were it not for his obligations to his family he would be producing art right now (at least if you count indie games as art). Instead he's working in real estate on something lucrative but ultimately meaningless. I'm sure there are plenty of people like him, both skilled and with their priorities straight, who could be unleashed by those of us with the same priorities but considerably less artistic talent.
I'm also interested in #1, but tbh I think capitalism is probably the best way to accomplish that, so if your talents lie in that direction it's probably better to create/fund a startup than to create some ridiculous scientific institution aimed at promoting conservative values.
Do you have any recommendations of artist like this? I share your line of thinking but I haven't discovered many. I'm a fan of Daniel Mitsui but he's about the only one I know.
Thanks for the reference, he's pretty cool. The only way I can think of to find such people would be to look for people who already produce good work while managing full-time jobs. Resident Contrarian is a Christian with good writing skills, but recently got a good job so I don't think he would (or maybe even should) take a year off of that. A. Trae McMaken is a Christian who already writes pretty good fiction without a huge following. We're talking about such a rare strain of people--those who share our uncommon values and seem to have exceptional artistic talent--that I think finding the right candidate is probably 95% of the battle.
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That’s a strange way to value a life.
On the capitalist side, it’s hard to imagine funding some guy to not work a standard job is more efficient than funding a bunch of people to not be starved or blind or diseased. $50,000 is supposed to save, what, 10 to 15 lives?
Evaluating cultural impact is even weirder. The right side of the scale gets one man’s cultural output. The left, whatever cachet is gained by allocating an extra 0.012% to bed nets, scaled down by how much that reflects on distantly correlated progressive projects. These both feel like laughably small quantities.
Why is it that $50,000 can save 10 to 15 lives? That's such a laughably small amount of money. We abhor slavery in the States (as we should) but there are probably hundreds of millions of people whose temporal circumstances would be immediately and meaningfully improved if they became slaves. Not to advocate for that, I think a poor free life is much better than a slightly less poor enslaved one, but where did things go so wrong?
I have a very successful African friend. He came to America with the explicit goal of getting rich, returning to Africa, and lifting his countrymen out of poverty. He did get rich, he did return to Africa, he started an array of businesses designed to help the people more than to earn money, and corruption sank all of them. Employees, customers, and government officials all stole from his business. At one point he essentially had an entire company stolen and had to steal it back, which is when he gave up on the project entirely and returned to America.
$5000 apiece is a steal to save a human life, and anyone who donates is absolutely making a good decision, but more than saving those lives I want to fix whatever problem made those lives so cheap in the first place. The AMF does great work, but should be, and as far as I know is not, dwarfed by our efforts to fix the underlying system. From what I can tell the issue lies not in physical technology but in social technology--if they could build a more high-trust society most of their problems would evaporate instantly.
They don't do so because culture is nigh-impossible to change. We could help--we could, and have, forced better social technology upon them via colonies, which seems to have produced meaningful and lasting benefits to the affected countries. We have also given up on that due to culture.
Culture created Africa's problems, culture can fix its problems, and culture prevents us from fixing its problems. Organizations like the AMF do great work treating the disease but ultimately do very little to cure it.
"One man's cultural output" is on a power law distribution depending entirely on the man. I happen to believe that the sort of person I have in mind--one who is inclined to put their family above their personal artistic dreams--is 2-3 standard deviations better at art than those who will sacrifice everything for an artistic pursuit. Art benefits from real life experience, and so the most passionate artists (relative to their passion for more grounded things, not relative to a baseline of apathy) may paradoxically be the worst at actually creating good art. This is why I think a cultural patronage movement has a chance to succeed big and create at least one major artist, though on its face "pay someone for a year to write that novel they've always talked about" sounds like a terrible idea.
Maybe focus on fixing African culture, then, instead of US culture? (unless you also suggest opening immigration way up, which would help the people on its own)
My perspective is that all culture is incredibly flawed. Africa might look bad in comparison to America but we're all hives of scum and villainy compared to what we could be, so Africa is less of a low-hanging fruit than it appears to be at first glance. $5,000 is, again, an extremely low price to pay to save a life, and the fact that that need isn't completely and easily met by Americans reflects extremely poorly on us.
Also, I'm not African, and have a much better chance to (directly or indirectly) affect American culture than African.
Immigration is sort of related to what I was saying about colonialism, but with colonialism you don't cause nearly so much brain drain, one of many reasons to prefer it.
Nah... I don't think anybody has an obligation to help people who won't help themselves. There might be an obligation to teach a man to fish, but a positive obligation to give a man a fish just encourages helplessness.
I think we do have a positive obligation to help others, which when taken seriously also leads to considerations like encouraging self-sufficiency. There's no contradiction there. I don't think we should really ever let people die from easily preventable causes. Either we should step in and forcibly change their culture if it's that bad, or we should feed them if it's not that bad (and thus their issues are caused by external factors outside of their control).
It depends what you mean by "help". I know a woman who "helps" her stoner grandson by covering his rent and living costs, while dude does absolutely nothing with his life. I don't think she has any obligation to do that, and I think she's making thing worse, in fact.
Not strictly speaking, but these are forces pulling in opposite directions.
You do you, but I disagree, and again would argue that people have no obligation to help those that won't help themselves, no matter how preventable their causes are.
This has been deemed taboo by the powers that be, and until that taboo is abolished you have no right to wag your finger at people who won't shell out $5K to save the life of someone on the other side of the planet.
Nowadays this is only true on an individual level (talented people born into corrupt societies), or as an immediate result of a natural disaster.
I think compassion and charity naturally lead to "I want this person to have a better life" which naturally leads to "I want this person to be self-sufficient." It is good and ennobling to not have to rely on charity your whole life, so those who provide charity should naturally want that for their beneficiaries. These forces pull in the same direction unless you have been suckered by the prevailing counter-narrative, which is that any expectation or desire for self-sufficiency is uncharitable. That counter-narrative couldn't be more wrong.
I agree that at some point charity becomes harmful, but if you're talking about extremely powerful organizations like the US, there are alternatives besides giving up. Your friend can't ground her grandson, but if she could (say, if he was much younger), she should continue covering his rent and living costs and also confiscate the drugs. We have the power to do that on a national level.
If the man refuses to learn how to fish then at some point maybe it's better to let him starve to death, but not until we've put in a lot more effort than we are currently putting in.
If a nation's culture turns people into lackadaisical troublemakers who deserve to die, then allowing children to be raised in such a culture is if anything worse than allowing them to die--one involves an innocent child's death, the other an innocent child's corruption into a moral mutant.
If the difference is entirely biological, and thus the children are already latent moral mutants, then sure, leave them be, but I don't think it is biological. Africans are people after all, and people are generally capable of self-reflection and change.
Well that's why I'm talking about abolishing that taboo. In the meantime I can certainly wag my finger at those who both uphold the taboo and won't shell out $5k to save a life. There are more than enough of those in America to save every $5k life in Africa.
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Sure, I was just addressing:
What I meant by that last part is that our culture prevents us from fixing its problems, though I suppose its culture does as well, to a lesser extent.
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This is beautifully written and encapsulates a lot of my beliefs. I also believe that capitalism >>> charity for improving the world. So even if a charity is doing very good work, if its increases the power of socialism, it could be a net negative to society.
On the other hand, when a charitable intervention is so powerful that just a few hundred dollars could radically alter a person's life for the better, I'm inclined to cut the charity a little slack.
There is another thing that gives me pause. If a charity like Deworm the World is so effective, and is in need of funding, why hasn't some billionaire just fully funded them? Is the market for charity so inefficient that million dolllar bills are just lying around waiting to be grabbed?
Have you seen the recent ACX article, wherein he regrets that he doesn't see an easy way to directly support capitalism in the third world? It was interesting.
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I would be interested to hear you expand on this.
Are you talking about ascetic artists practicing those things? Storytelling media about them? Usually that ends up going poorly, comes off very cheesy, and the actually brilliant works are things like Dostoyevsky just showing all these different people (and Ivan is convincing, but everyone in-world loves Zosima. In my own experience we much more need to produce more people like Zosima, I've known approximately one, which is more than many people have known).
Have you ever heard of this working? How would this work? What would you expect them to produce?
I guess someone might say: look at the Inklings. They were sponsored by the British University system (somewhat contra #1), with enough slack to produce excellent conservative friendly stories. Which sounds like an argument for more slack at work. It isn't necessarily an argument that they would have produced something even better had they been freed of their day jobs -- their teaching jobs (and even war experience) were probably important to their development as storytellers. Meanwhile, people like Dickens or George MacDonald or Dostoyevsky had to keep writing to pay the bills, and this contributed quite a bit to how much they wrote, which is good to the extent their work is worthwhile. Faulkner is maybe not so conservative (I'm not actually sure I care about artists being "conservative, vs being true and beautiful), but he also seems like an argument for "jobs with slack;" stories brew slowly. The current Substack arrangement seems worse, because writers are expected to produce thoughts way too fast (though Chesterton thrived in a Substack adjacent editorial culture), drowning out their good work with a sea of trite nonsense. But this can also be accomplished with patronage (c.f. Rod Dreher -- talented enough, some good content, but just churning out 8 things a day under patronage; he might be better off having to also teach school or something).
Commissions are great. Hire someone to paint a mural or cast a sculpture. This is the Renaissance method, still in use, not at all the same as just paying them to potentially create something, everyone hopes, and very good for their interest in continuing artistic pursuits. I know churches that bring over iconographers to cover the insides of their churches with icons, and it would probably be beneficial to offer scholarships for them to take on an American apprentice or something, but I think this is more of an issue of people liking some people's work more than others, rather than otherwise capable people lacking time and money.
Storytelling about them. My view is that a good traditional fantasy book is pretty good at promoting traditional values, and a big part of this is because of how Tolkien defined the genre. The point is to watch impressive people overcome adversity.
I've never heard of anyone trying it with conservative authors. The only one who comes to mind for progressives is Marx, who is either a perfect example or counterexample depending on how you look at it. I'd expect the majority of the beneficiaries to produce little of consequence, a sizeable fraction to pick up a talent which eventually leads somewhere, a small fraction to create valuable works of art sufficient to support them, and a tiny fraction (optimistically 1 in 10,000) to create something truly significant.
It's worth considering the downsides--these people would be giving up a year of career development for a chance at great success. If they succeed they still lose the real-life career experience and maybe their art is actually worse than it would be otherwise. If they fail they lose that experience, their careers are hurt, and maybe they are at risk of becoming dissatisfied with regular life. I would hope the upside, being better at art, would make up for some of that. I have many family members who have successful regular jobs and quasi-careers as artists on the side; they'd appreciate having an extra year of experience in their fields of passion.
I love the idea of jobs with slack. If anything that's much better, because they get life experience, have the time to create, and don't have to worry about their livelihoods once the year is up. The Inklings seem like quite an outlier, but you are changing my mind somewhat towards supporting institutional support.
I strongly agree with this, but what I'd consider true and beautiful is seen as pretty far-right. The point isn't to wage the culture war but to promote values good for self-betterment rather than entertainment, which incidentally leads to better entertainment. Still thinking of Tolkien here.
There just isn't as much inherent demand (or economies of scale) for this as there is for other forms of art. Books, movies, videogames all have way broader reach. The idea would be to start a virtuous cycle where the artist makes money doing what they love, and consumers get more of what they love.
I'm an extremely shallow consumer myself, and read all sorts of litRPGs, fantasies, and prog fantasies, wasting easily hundreds of hours per year. I can think of only one which even slightly scratched the itch I have for "person gets powerful and then protects others." Books like that exist, I'm sure, but all that I've found have been super low-quality. There's a big market for these stories, but the people who would write them are too busy with safer ventures.
(I want to write that story myself, but at my current trajectory I might be able to retire in about 5 years if I work hard, leaving me with another ~45 to find and pursue whatever I determine to be the best use of my time. So it's not happening for 5 years.)
I see what you mean better now, thanks. I was partly confused by your use of "artist," which is more often used for visual arts and a bit musicians, where it seems like you mean something more like storytellers, for the most part.
It would be interesting to try, though I'm pretty skeptical. The way you describe it, it sounds sort of like offering sabbatical opportunities to non-academics, in exchange of some expectation that the person will create stories, and then like you say, that isn't necessarily compatible with many people's career paths. Would it be somewhat like Scott's grants projects, where it's posted somewhere that interested people are likely to see the opportunity and apply? Or maybe someone knows a person who has something in mind, and offers it personally? I could see Brandon Sanderson organizing something like that, but just for fun storytelling, rather than Culturally Important Art.
Movies and video games are quite different industries, as far as I can tell, and way more expensive (especially movies), but maybe they'll be getting cheaper with the new AI technology? At least in a decade or two? Could offer some interesting opportunities for smaller operations to try to enter the field.
I used to read a lot of low brow fantasy (spent a whole winter alone in Alaska with Edgar Rice Burroughs novels). The morality seemed... fine, I think? Lots of emphasis on courage, anyway, which is fine.
Interesting. Have you written stories before?
I kind of liked the subplot in That Hideous Strength where Jane is on birth control, and is super bored alone in her flat, trying to work on her dissertation. And then later Merlin says that they could have had a child who would have been super important and amazing, but the time for that is past, idiots! My guess would be that the book reading population (or at least the population willing to read a book written by a Mottizen) is significantly more likely to be in that kind of situation than the (more numerically common, but unlikely to be affected by this meme space) "never married 19-year-old with three children, below the poverty line" mentioned by an article I just looked up on the statistics. Or the young underclass women Theodore dalrymple is known for writing about.
I'd include the visual arts if I thought they were likely to be impactful at all. IDK if our culture has moved on, or if it's always been this way, but visual art doesn't seem to have the same reach or emotional impact as other forms of art. I do include musicians, but know much more about writing than music, so writing is what I've been talking about.
Yeah, I'd do it on a personal level, but honestly it's not well thought-out yet.
I'm not super impressed with low-brow fantasy books (despite them being essentially all I read nowadays, lacking better alternatives), but Tolkien for example had:
and so on.
Not really, but I'm excited to try. I started writing/posting short stories this year with the goal of improving that skill. Currently I'm not a good writer at all, but I still think with some practice I can do better than the drivel that's popular on Royal Road these days.
I like that, though it's probably too on-the-nose to work the way I'd like it to. That story won't reach mainstream audiences nowadays.
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Eh, I would require a lot more evidence for how effective art is at producing conservative values.
My default assumption would be that it would be more effective to try to affect policy and institutions, or promote ideas directly.
I suppose Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was very effective at what it was aiming at, but that's an extreme outlier, I think.
It isn't only HPMOR, but it is Atlas Shrugged, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Émile Zola ...
It is difficult to evaluate the magnitude of the effect, but there is anecdotal evidence that art acts as (firstly) a Schelling point for like-minded people to meet and network and (secondly) as cultural growth medium for their activities. Consider how many of the left-wing activists are college students enrolled or teaching in literature and humanities programmes or writers or artists. The activist is a person who is willing to spend their time at activism (promoting ideals) full-time instead of starting a career in banking or engineering. A person who does that is most often an idealist, and idealists need something to be idealistic about. When you have it going, you have started a perpetual machine that provides steady supply of idealists to promote your ideas for generations to come. Instead of giving man a fish, set up an aquaculture farm. Sometimes political manifestos seem work (if they are romantic and fiery and engaging), but fine art has often wider appeal. (And sometimes it is good thing on it's own. Victor Hugo saved Notre Dome of Paris by writing a popular novel.)
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Harry Potter itself was pretty effective. The books themselves weren't all that conservative, but they gave Rowling a ton of influence. I think without her Britain would be significantly more crazy than it currently is.
Tolkien's works were conservative imo on many different levels. They directly promote values like humility, courage, and mercy, rather than sassiness, dysfunction, and unabashed hedonism. Even today the new adaptation, while somewhat woke, didn't have any sex scenes, and had a much more somber tone than any comparable media.
Cathedrals, and the art within them, have been keeping people coming to church for hundreds of years.
I like the idea of fighting at the institutional level too, and don't mean to downplay it. I think the patronage method is probably best there too, or at least underutilized--we're a lot more strapped for talent than we are for money. Somewhere out there is an amazing lawyer, one with the skill to credibly challenge the Civil Rights act or Wickard v. Filburn, who is instead going into business to ensure he can feed his family. Still, probably 99% of art nowadays is produced by far leftists, and that has to have an effect on our culture.
If I had the talent--or if, in the future, I have the time and attention to build the talent--I'd start with good fiction, build a following, then slowly make my works more and more explicitly political. They'd never reach Ayn Rand levels, but maybe a book would be centered around a poor mother and the child she refused to terminate or something. Build a good story like that, build a narrative people can apply to their own lives, and you may save thousands from abortion, and make them heroes in their own minds too. It's impossible to objectively evaluate the impact of either route though.
To be clear, I meant Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I'm led to understand had a substantial effect towards drawing people into the Rationalist community.
Frankly, it's going to be really hard to convince people on abortion when it's such a tribal issue (and judging by frequent election results, something that's less popular). Any such book would have to be something written with an intended audience that is on the right, unless it's very skillfully done.
I know.
It would be a single brick in the cultural wall. At the level I have in mind, there's not really any convincing going on, or even reading for that matter. The book becomes a movie, a teenage girl watches it, then later when contemplating abortion she feels like she knows someone who didn't get an abortion and made it work well.
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I posted the other reply before seeing this, and I think this answers some of my questions. My own community is chock full of artistically inclined people, it has way more talent than money, but especially more of both talent and money than organizational capacity.
That does not sound like a good idea. I'm on the same side of the issue, I don't even dislike all preachy novels (I liked Pollyanna, actually), and my first thought was "ugh". And unless you're absolutely brilliant, ugh is enough for nobody to ever see your work, no matter how much their pastor pushes it on them at the Christian bookstore. I would have to think longer about why I have this reaction, but it's related to reading "Christian girls novels" in my youth, and pattern matching to that.
Talent as in artistic talent? My point was that conservative artists are far more likely to turn their skills towards safe, reliable careers than progressive artists are. To be honest, unless you have some truly exceptional people in your community, the fact that they're artistically talented and poor to me means they're either not that talented or not that conservative. The people I'd want to fund are those who put their families before their passions.
As far as organizational capacity, again, that's because the good organizers went into business rather than activism (as they should).
I think you're imagining something much more extreme than what I had in mind. The story would star those two, and that would be that; it would otherwise just be a story about some other thing. I just wrote a short story along those lines (actually far more obvious imo) and nobody on Reddit caught on so I'm pretty confident this is doable. It's not rocket science, it's just stories that don't celebrate evil. Tolkien's works would more than qualify if written today.
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Have you considered finding a church?
A good one would hit items 2 and 3 on you list quite well. Nearly every church does a pastoral visit when they get a visitor, make a good pot of coffee and buy a pastry and ask the pastor questions about how their church does those. Then you can get a short list to sit under the pastor's teaching as well as a bible study, to learn more about the goals you share. You won't have to make a conversion, though I'm sure they would welcome and celebrate jt.
When you find one you like start giving, the nice thing is you can dole out the funds slowly and hopefully in a way that you can seem them being used to fulfill your goal. Can a donor advised fund, be used for grants to private individuals not affiliated with the fund? If so, after you've been there a while you could mention to the pastor or a deacon that you have a heart and source of funds for benevolence and they might have some opportunities to directly support parents or people working directly to fullfil their potential. It can be done through the church if you prefer to remain anonymous.
I'm pretty sure @Meriadoc is LDS?
Yep, I'm pretty sure that side of things is already taken care of, at least for every American congregation I've seen. The church will pretty much give you all the food, cleaning supplies, and other household goods you need, and help pay for your rent / medical bills, at the discretion of the bishop (the congregation leader, at about the same level as a pastor). Often this support is conditional, you have to appear to be making some effort to improve your station in life, which can mean a requirement to attend weekly personal finance seminars, but that's pretty much it. If anything, as far as I can tell it errs towards generosity, though the extremely online subsection of ex-mormons seems to disagree.
I do have some weak qualms with the church's finances--I have no idea why we have so much money saved up, as our numbers dwindle--but they seem to be managing it well and I have faith it will eventually be used for the right purposes.
I hope to eventually help people a lot, but for now I'm just grinding and working on being able to afford kids myself. In the meantime I'll keep paying tithing and trying to serve people in person, and hope to build a greater capacity to serve in the future.
It's a good suggestion though @atelier, sponsoring people on a more personal level like that has a ton of advantages, not to mention the institutional structure and experience that churches have to offer. This is perhaps a bit cliche, but I have a theory that welfare is uniquely harmful for people because they do not have to ask for it. There is no sense of "humbling oneself and recognizing you need help", there's not even a sense of "that specific person made a sacrifice to help me, and thought that I deserved help," instead it's just "Papa Government gave me some cash because I fall into X income category and have Y kids." In many cases it's obfuscated even further--there's no check from the government; instead things, especially medical bills, are just mysteriously cheaper. I can't imagine the human psyche is helped by such diffuse, sourceless aid. The least people can do as they're given food and shelter is recognize that such support is charity, not something they are owed.
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Then I'd recommend getting more involved with his stake and when someone senior notices express an interest in benevolence or Personal and Youth or whatever the LDS calls their scouting replacement program.
For sure, I don't mean to write off personal direct charity, but I think one can do both.
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