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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the culture wars to me is that I repeatedly see attacks on principles so fundamental we don't even have explicit definitions for them, and then the battle lines that get drawn up are nowhere near that critical issue. Examples:

  • Censorship: in every HN thread people immediately start arguing about whether tech companies should be regulated to allow all speech, or whether private companies can do whatever they want and only the government is prevented from infringing on freedom of speech. Admittedly there is a "freedom of speech" principle at play here that does have a name, but everyone seems to have forgotten that it meant we were supposed to be tolerant of opinions that we don't agree with, which has almost nothing at all to do with terms of service on huge tech platforms. I think Scott is one of the few people I've ever seen address that directly (both in tolerating the outgroup and another article more directly about free speech). But there's a second issue even more central to censorship by big tech platforms: they all claimed to be huge proponents of free speech, gave soaring speeches during the Arab Spring about their high minded principles. Abandoning that is something that should cause us to withdraw a lot of trust and goodwill, even if we agree with their new policies. (Also, suspiciously, the two options people argue about both involve giving government and corporations more power: regulate big tech, or give up on free speech as a general principle. Don't get me started on astroturfing.)

  • Downthread there's a discussion about diversity casting in TV and movies. The most common argument I hear against it is that it's not appropriate for the setting, and the most common argument I see in favor is that people should be able to see characters that look like them. Those both sound fine to me, as far as they go. The deeper issue here only clicked for me when my facebook friend said to a Mermaid-traditionalist "if you're arguing that a Black little mermaid doesn't seem to fit the role, are you going to say the same thing when a Black woman applies to a job?" And I realized, right, the original claim was that Hollywood (mostly implicitly or systemically, less-so explicitly) racistly excluded people who weren't white and pretty. Which sure looks true - I was blown away when I started noticing how many things failed the Bechdel Test. But now we've replaced that with explicit, proudly-advertised activism, yet the battle lines are drawn such that we've just flip-flopped on who's wearing the fig-leaf of "[white/black/gay/trans] Ariel seemed like the appropriate artistic choice". Meanwhile we've damaged two deeper principles: keeping politics out of where it doesn't belong, and actually meaning it when we said that we wanted race not to matter.

  • Also downthread is a debate about whether it's okay to spell out racial slurs here. And I remember the wave of renamings that started with what seemed like a ridiculous objection to "master/slave" used in the context of IDE hard drives, and ended a few years later with those terms actually being renamed in a lot of technical contexts. In both cases the battle lines are drawn along "these words hurt people / replacing them causes more harm than gain". But the deeper issues to me are about injecting politics into places it shouldn't be (same with fast food joints becoming politically loaded), and the notion that we shouldn't taboo words at all. There was a brief period a few years ago when atheism was winning and we were all proud of the fact that we could say curse-words and anything else we wanted without the sky-fairy torturing us forever. Now we've flipped sides on that too.

Ultimately this boils down to two problems I worry a lot about. One is that the whole idea of having principles at all seems to have much less support than it should; people simply don't notice or care as much as they should about flip-flops or even expecting anyone to state or stand by a consistent set of principles at all. And while this isn't a place with obvious battle lines, I've noticed people quietly excusing it here and there. It's not immediately obvious why it matters to have principles! And I think this is why it's easy for people to discard. But it's really important! Principles are what let us be predictable agents, able to work with others who aren't part of our tribe and don't share all our values. That seems, like, utterly critical to any kind of functioning society, but I had to re-derive it for myself because nobody seems to talk about it.

The other is that the principles that people are discarding are so fundamental, so dyed in the wool for civilization, that we don't have explicit names for them or standard answers as to why they should be preserved. I noticed this when I saw JBP proclaim "tell the truth" as one of his 12 rules for life -- it was like, oh, right, that's really important, isn't it? How did I lose sight of that? Things like "words shouldn't be redefined by political fiat", "leaders should be held to high standards of personal integrity", "you should be prepared to explain yourself and lose status when you abandon a principle you endorsed", "don't inject politics into non-political contexts". All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.

To end on a positive note, I do think this is an addressable problem. But we have to be quicker to look past the officially endorsed battle lines, find the valuable nameless things that are being sacrificed, contemplate them long enough to describe why they're important, and then defend them directly. That's actually been a silver lining for me: now there are a bunch of load-bearing pillars of civilization I've actually noticed and contemplated. I just wish it wasn't because someone was trying to burn them down.

What are under-appreciated values you see that routinely get sacrificed to Moloch in the culture war?

It occurred to me after I posted that a good collection of bedrock yet underappreciated principles is found right at the top of this thread. I think it was /u/TraceWoodgrains who wrote it originally? Like, where in the censorship/misinformation debate do people ever call for speaking plainly, or the hazards of shaming, consensus building or sweeping generalizations? Yet I don't think we'd be here in this forum today if the mods hadn't been able to point at this as our shared set of principles for years now. Mostly the world has given up on public forums, or is pretending like fact-checkers and public authorities are somehow going to be able to save Facebook and Twitter. But we have an existence proof right here that with a small group of dedicated mods, you can have a forum open to the world where people deal with the hottest of hot button issues without resorting to impositions of draconian ideological conformity. And those pillars up in the banner are what hold it up.

I wrote it.

Mind you, I had help -- most of the wording that you're praising here is either directly borrowed from, or somewhat downstream of, this post from /u/Obsidian and this post from reddit user Bakkot. Which is to say that much of what I was articulating was developed by the original moderators of /r/slatestarcodex, back when the Motte was the Culture War Thread. Their achievement is indeed impressive.

For my part, I've got a long standing interest in discussion norms that includes a couple of blog posts that are relevant to your comments above. My post on pluralist civility grew out of me trying to justify to myself as to why this community is worth engaging with. And my much more recent post on ideological diversity and nonreciprocated virtue is quite relevant to your discussion of the value of having principles -- I approach it from a virtue ethical perspective rather than from the perspective of articulated principles, but it's covering the same sort of ground.

On the whole, I find the virtue ethical perspective on tolerance and civility to be a particularly useful one. I think pretty much all people have speech that they would respond to punitively in one way or another, whether by vociferous denunciation or shaming, or ceasing contact with that person, or stronger varieties of cancellation. You can't actually ask everyone to outlaw all of this on principle without infringing on rights of speech or of freedom to choose who to associate with.

Productive discussion with people whose views are different to yours will always be something of an art. Rules can help, but rules will never be the heart of it. Ultimately, tolerance is not adherence to a simple rule. It's a learned virtue.

From your post on pluralist civility, linked above:

Here, then, is my (local) pluralist manifesto.

  • Respect that discussion norms are local. Don't try to make them universal.
  • Be part of the overlap. Belong to more than one community.
  • Encourage other people to recognise that discussion norms can and should differ from place to place.
  • Encourage other people to recognise that broad discussion norms are incredibly valuable and should be nurtured wherever they are compatible with community aims.

I endorse this unreservedly. Thank you for your contributions.