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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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There was a time in the not-so-distant past that the country was effectively 100% Christian and weekly church attendance was the norm. Where did that lead us?

To many good things. Where did the abandonment of such practices lead us? Who started that abandonment rolling: the most committed Christians or the least?

Obviously God is not such a bulwark after all and doesn’t automatically eternally guarantee based tradwives until the end of time.

"My wife kicked me out, that bitch."

"Found out you were fuckin' strippers, huh?"

"Yeah, but I bought her a nice diamond bracelet to make up for it. Crazy skank threw it at me, and slammed the door in my face. Crazy, huh?"

...Which is to say, only the very foolish treat meaningful, intimate relationships as transactional. To dumb it down to the level of chanspeak, Trad wives are best pursued via Trad lives. God is a bulwark in many ways, but the fact that I am committed to him in a durable way, and so are those I surround myself with, is certainly not the least of them. You are looking at the people who chose to abandon Christianity, and then suffered serious consequences, as evidence that Christianity does not help. You might as well argue that, having been shot after leaving your body armor at home, the armor is what failed you.

Or to put it even more simply, mankind cannot build things that other men can't tear down, if they choose. Understanding this, we still have a responsibility to build good things and tear down bad ones. The pleasantness of our lives greatly depends on the degree to which we take this responsibility seriously and execute it well.

Why will it turn out differently this time?

Because the Enlightenment is dying, and the historical and social conditions it relied on to sustain and grow its power no longer obtain. I think that if you understand how and why the Enlightenment operates, you'll likewise understand why it's breaking down, and why there is little hope that breakdown can be reversed.

In short, it's a movement that claims very smart people can solve all our problems, when in fact they cannot actually do that. People bought in when science and tech were hitting a growth spurt, which the Enlightenment itself did not actually generate, but which it very effectively took credit for. That credit was then spent advocating an endless series of insane policies that wreaked havoc on societies world-wide. The Enlightenment is not, centrally, Newton and Einstein, but Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Dewey and so on.

Now, science and tech are stagnating or collapsing, with few hopes for a breakthrough on the scale of the industrial revolution*, and the Enlightenment's modern standard-bearers find themselves suffering policy starvation. The runaway blaze of the Culture War post-2014 is a symptom of that policy starvation and it will continue to get worse until the existing system breaks down. Whatever comes out of that, long-term, won't be the Enlightenment or Progressivism in its currently-popular forms.

*The best counter-argument being, obviously, AI. It's one of the reasons it's such an interesting time to be alive, though I doubt most Blues would have expected Christianity to be one of the last ideologies standing at the cusp of the hypothesized Singularity.

What the heck does "policy starvation" mean? I've seen it a few times here and I can only sort-of guess at what it means.

Also, from my point of view, I suspect that any breakdown of Enlightenment power will only lead to a return to massive, bloody war, and less so any re-discovery of God. The conditions under which the Enlightenment was born were, if I'm not mistaken, near-constant sectarian conflict.

What the heck does "policy starvation" mean?

An explanation can be found here.

Also, from my point of view, I suspect that any breakdown of Enlightenment power will only lead to a return to massive, bloody war, and less so any re-discovery of God.

The Enlightenment seems to have led to some pretty big wars of its own, likewise based on fairly close analogues of sectarian conflict, until nukes and the Pax Americana put the lid on. ...And by "put the lid on", let's be clear that we're talking about Enlightenment Ideology only motivating mass slaughter in half the world rather than the whole of it. It does seem pretty likely that significant political unravelling will result in a lot of dead people. Look around you: do you honestly believe such unravelling can be postponed indefinitely?

The point is that, for all the bodycounts post-Martin Luther, things could get so, so much worse.

Do you think there's a golden path available that precludes significant future hardship?

In short, it's a movement that claims very smart people can solve all our problems, when in fact they cannot actually do that.

But it can tell us it had, or would have if not for those Red Tribe wreckers, and the vast majority will believe it. (COVID being the textbook example)

And thus what comes out long-term is not a religious revival, nor a rollback to 18th century Enlightenment, nor a return to feudal or Roman systems. Instead, it's either Orwell's boot stomping on a human face forever, or a true collapse of civilization with the megadeaths that entails.

And thus what comes out long-term is not a religious revival, nor a rollback to 18th century Enlightenment, nor a return to feudal or Roman systems. Instead, it's either Orwell's boot stomping on a human face forever, or a true collapse of civilization with the megadeaths that entails.

I disagree. I see little evidence that attempted dystopias are any more stable long-term than attempted utopias. Social science doesn't actually work that well, and so sooner or later, human nature regresses to the mean. Collapse of civilization is certainly a thing that can and has happened, and then new structures rise from the ashes. This is certainly inconvenient for us individually, but life is about significantly more than individual convenience, or even individual or group survival. I'm comfortable betting on my faith long-term, regardless of the circumstances.

My wife and I actually had a conversation about this a year or two after we got married. Looking at the increasing craziness of the world, the question arose of whether it was worth having children, given what a mess the world was in. My answer was that it was obviously worth it; the world is always a mess, and children are good regardless. Everyone experiences hardship and suffering in this life, and they also experience delight, joy, love, and many other good things besides. The idea that comfort or pleasure determines the value of life is a pernicious falsehood.

If the boot stomping on a human face isn't stable, we get gored by the other horn of the dilemma -- collapse of civilization and megadeaths. Yes, new structures arise from the ashes, and they probably will even if we get a collapse accompanied by a major nuclear exchange. That perhaps humanity will eventually rebuild a non-dystopic system is not much of a consolation. And while it is likely the structures arising from the collapse of civilization will include religion, it is quite possible Christianity will not survive in any recognizable form.

The new society will indeed be "red tribe" for a time; the unconstrained vision cannot survive easily visible and always-struggled-against constraints. Again, not much consolation.

You are looking at the people who chose to abandon Christianity, and then suffered serious consequences, as evidence that Christianity does not help. You might as well argue that, having been shot after leaving your body armor at home, the armor is what failed you.

It would be fair to conclude the armor is no good if it has some flaw that causes us to repeatedly leave it at home. Perhaps it is too bulky or too uncomfortable to wear.

Also you are just responding to Christianity’s failure by saying that we just didn’t Christianity hard enough. Which is not very persuasive to say the least

Also you are just responding to Christianity’s failure by saying that we just didn’t Christianity hard enough.

That isn't what he's saying. He's saying that if you don't do Christianity at all, your problems can't be reasonably laid at the feet of Christianity.

But that's still not answering the question of why, in the past, more people did Christianity than today and why Christianity could not prevent this.

To draw the obvious parallel: we know that CICO sufficiently explains the weight gain in the general population since the 50s on a mechanistic level: the amount of extra calories that people have started to consume since then lines up perfectly with the extra amount of weight the standard model predicts they would and that they actually have put on. If you don't want to be fat, eat less calories. But none of this answers the much more interesting question of why, as a society, we consume so much more and why large swaths of it are unable to self-regulate, despite obvious consequences in terms of aesthetics and health.