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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?
Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...
Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?
The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.
Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.
Are you completely certain that the government was doing most of the work of locking people down? From my perspective. It all started as a grassroots sort of thing, the most vocal people decided that they wanted to be locked down and didn't want to be exposed to the virus, or expose people they thought didn't want to be exposed. It became very clear, very early on, that any company or government institution that didn't fall in line with this policy would face massive social sanctions, callouts on social media, accusations of violence and racism ("you're literally killing people and people of color are the most vulnerable"), etc from these most vocal proponents of lockdown. That was my perspective from leftist-city USA, that the government and everyone else was just doing what they were pressured to do. I don't know if that's true everywhere, though.
Speaking for my own locale, yes, I am 100% certain that most of the work was done by the government. On March 20, 2020, I was out for a fish fry with friends and literally no one gave a shit about Covid. The restaurant was packed. This was after the United States had implemented international flight restrictions, there were already tens of thousands of confirmed cases in the United States (meaning there were obviously many more) and there was no obvious evidence that anyone cared at all. Nonetheless, by Monday, our governor had issued a stay-at-home order.
I don't think lockdownism was organic at all.
What was the enforcement for the stay at home order? Where I was, I still drove around, took walks outside on roads and in public parks, went to the supermarket, etc. No one was threatening to stop me from doing these things, and I could have easily just gone and gotten together with people if I wanted to, gone to people's houses, met them outside in public places. Idk, maybe I was just lucky and the police never stopped me to give me a ticket for breaking lockdown, but I don't think that was the case. No one seemed worried about such things at all.
I got thrown out of parks, by armed police officers, twice, in Essex County, NJ.
This "lockdown didn't happen" revisionism is tiresome.
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All restaurants and most businesses were fully closed. I am not aware of any that attempted to test legal enforcement
(https://evers.wi.gov/Documents/COVID19/EMO12-SaferAtHome.pdf):
I'm getting incredibly angry as I read back through what these fuckers deigned to be the legitimate purview of government regulation. That I could probably get away with the sin of standing close to someone outside my home because the government doesn't quite the resources to stop me is some small comfort, but on the whole I think @Tophattingson is absolutely correct that Western governments obliterated the normal understanding of the social contract with these sorts of orders.
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This was also my experience.
Edit: in Colorado. I think we were pretty chill about the whole ordeal. I just went about my life normally and I don’t think anything that I did was even ever against any certain new rule. There was a mask mandate I guess and restrictions on the number of people in an establishment, but other than that really not much changed.
We were encouraged to get out and get fresh air, for example. To go to parks, go hiking, things like this. There were never any outdoor mask requirements either.
Colorado very much mandated closure of so-called non-essential businesses which killed more than a few smaller ones. Mostly entertainment type venues since the order carved out basically every job that had any sort of political constituency. For the most part though the Governor left the political liability of lockdowns to county governments. The mayor of Denver initially wanted to shutdown liquor stores but quickly reversed course after panic buying caused some trouble.
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Were where you places that you visited as crowded as before the corona?
If they were, then for at least your locale, you are correct.
If they weren't, however, the question arises why? Is it due to people being afraid of punishment, or due to them independently coming to the same conclusion as the lawmakers.
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