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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?
Back in the good old days when stuff like race and gender didn't matter, was it just coincidence that things always ended up in one group's favor? Has the game really been changed, or is it a change from unipolarity to multipolarity? If the naysayers didn't protest so much about the black little mermaid, would you consider it non-political? And why should losers of the previous status quo care about your ten commandments? To them, it probably sounds as convincing as a trust fund baby waxing about how his work ethic got him to where he is.
Who wrote the stories, and for whom?
Why are you entitled to their work?
We are all, to some extent, entitled to draw upon the cultural richness of the entire world.
There are caveats, here. If you're drawing on something sacred, or something that has a specific meaning, then part of respecting the culture you're working with can be not diluting that sacredness or meaning by repurposing it for other, more frivolous ends. And in general, especially if you're drawing on people less well known than you, I think there is a moral duty to give credit to the people you are drawing from. Both of these caveats are based on my view of the morality of the situation and you are entitled to reject them if you choose.
There is also the caveat that if the thing you are using is more recent, then it may be subject to copyright or trademark law.
Beyond that, though, I think it's good to use each other's stories. In the specific case of Ariel, I think (a) pretty much everyone is entitled to Hans Christian Andersen's work at this point, and, (b) Disney get to do what they want with their own IP, although I'm unimpressed by the cash-grabbing aspects of their recent spate of live-action remakes.
Disney is, at the very least, legally entitled to the work that they pay people to produce. They may not be morally entitled to do whatever they want with it, however. I, for one, would certainly hope that they would feel some duty to respect their employees' creative work, and would be open to arguments that cash-grabbing remakes fail in this duty.
I do not think that changing a white character to a black one in the course of those remakes is in any way outrageous, however, and it is certainly not more outrageous than the existence of the remake in the first place.
Who gets to decide what's sacred? There are Native Americans who approve of calling a sports team the Redskins or the Braves, and Japanese people who approve of Americans wearing kimonos, yet both those things were opposed because of "cultural appropriation".
I probably wouldn't apply "cultural appropriation" to either of those things. As I understand it, a kimono is not sacred and has no strong restrictions on when it can be worn, and people should go ahead and wear one if they want to. I'm less sanguine about "Redskins" but that's because the term is sometimes considered offensive, not because of appropriation. Different issue entirely.
In Japan, probably yes. But some Asian Americans believe other norms apply in Boston, Massachusetts, the place of their protest.
I do not believe "Braves", the other example, is a slur.
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So where does it stop? Will we get Chinese Ariel, Hispanic Ariel, Indigenous Person Ariel? All those are remakes which could be justified on the basis of Representation.
How about Snow White (isn't the very name problematic?) and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast? No reason not to have remakes with race-swapped princesses who are already much too white!
"The Princess and the Frog" was already race-swapped, but at least there they swapped all the characters and moved the action to New Orleans and updated it to the 1920s. Do that with "The Little Mermaid" and you take away any reasonable grounds for objection.
I will watch all of those movies with my kid if they're not total flaming pieces of crap on a stick due to studios forgetting how to write good movies because they make more money stoking the culture war. And with how fast AI is moving, there may be a brief period where we can have all of those tailor made to our own ridiculous preferences on demand, just before we're all turned into paperclips. The real question is what the academy will think of Paperclip Ariel.
And if they made more films like "Moana", based on region-appropriate legends and native heroes and heroines, nobody would object. But if you must have black Ariel but you cannot have white Moana, then there is something more than merely 'making stories with the best actors' going on.
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