site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29028 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology. I’ve been feeling the same way but didn’t and still don’t necessarily have enough evidence to really prove the claim. There are small bits here and there, like Shane Gillis hosting SNL again, camera men once again zooming in on attractive women in the crowd during the Euro 2024 matches, people being less afraid to say “retarded” which was approaching “faggot” levels of taboo, BLM withering into almost nothingness, Supreme Court affirmative action decision, etc.

Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

And more importantly, how much of this is driven by Elon’s takeover of twitter? Twitter in retrospect was clearly the cancellation platform par excellence, it doesn’t seem like TikTok or Instagram hold the same “weight” as image and video platforms. There was something about Twitter which had both a radical cancellation faction but still retained gravitas as a place for news and other serious topics to be discussed or announced. This meant that both boomer PMC types and terminally online radicals could congregate and the latter could influence the former. And by virtue of the fact that it was on twitter, it was more “believable” an had more gravitas. And maybe even the text-based nature of the platform prevented us from assessing the accuser in the physical realm. TikTok and IG still have commissars ready to cancel, but no gravitas and you can see who is attempting to be the canceller, they will often look crazy and we can sense their mental illness through their appearance (people like to say women have “crazy” eyes, I think this is probably a reasonable evolutionary heuristic) or how they are talking, gesturing, etc.

Was this the most well-placed takedown in history? Elon clearly did this as a way to knock woke ideology down a peg, even if it wasn’t his primary aim it sure looks to be the most successful aspect of that acquisition.

It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology... Firstly, do you agree with the claim?

My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.

In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.

On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Pretty sure I agree with you. May I request a reading list / articles / blogs that have helped you form this.

Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes

  • "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
  • A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
  • Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
  • this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
  • Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
  • Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
  • William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.

Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that

  1. Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
  2. All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
  3. As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
  4. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
  5. Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
  6. The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.

I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:

  1. Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
  2. People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
  3. None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
  4. We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
  5. The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
  6. Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears? Honestly, one reason I can never stomach reaction is because it doesn't just want to drop the torch, it wants to piss on the ashes. It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

On Pinker and Harris, I have an example of both on my shelf (never read them).

Random paragraph from Better Angels of Our Nature:

Russett and Oneal, the number crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, and were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before WW1, it was still a fraction of the level, relative to GDP, that countries would see after WW2 (figure 5-24).

More than half (certainly more than half a percent) of this looks like objective information to me.

From The Moral Landscape (the concept of which I find asinine):

There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same. For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as "the endowment effect": people demand more money in exchange for an object than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place.

The paragraph goes on to summarize sone consequences of these findings.

Both cases are a lot more objective and fact based than you imply, dedicating most of their words to explaining and summarizing data-based academic papers. Pinker even includes a graph of the data. Presumably these observations are eventually used to make an argument.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Absolutely not.

It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

The Jacobins are the most central example of Enlightenment ideology possible. Bolsheviks are the grandchildren of the Jacobins, and the Nazis are close cousins, both being founded on hard Materialism and totalizing authoritarianism which founds its credibility on Enlightenment assumptions.

Enlightenment has evidently produced several very different worldviews. The system we have in Anglosphere has been much more benign than the aforementioned.

But rejecting Enlightenment, as I understand it, would require tearing down our institutions and repudiating common values. It's so established - even traditional - that to undo it you have to destroy our entire system and start over from theory. That has not been a successful method historically. Hence the comparison to revolutionary groups.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats