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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?
That's what grinds my gears; the smug assumption that the only reason anyone could possibly object to such race-swapping is because they're a horrible racist. (Payne and McKay are playing that card, too, in their most recent interview; "no, people aren't objecting because we are ten-time losers who can't write for shit, it's because they're racists!")
And would your Facebook friend who is so eager to change things up for the sake of diversity be happy to recast Mulan so that a Black woman could get the lead role? And if that's different, how is it different? "The Little Mermaid" is a story by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, however it was adapted by Disney. If they're going to recast Ariel, then every cast member should be Black for internal consistency and coherence.
Can your Facebook friend explain to me why new Black Ariel is still a redhead, and not having her own ordinary beautiful natural hair?
Nobody is objecting to "let's do a new movie about a black mermaid" if they can write a good story and hey, maybe there are even folk tales and legends about black mermaids, who knows? But this isn't about 'let's give little Black girls a character they can identify with, so they can dress up as Ariel for Hallowe'en', it's about wringing every last penny out of their property by re-tooling it to get another extension of marketability.
That wasn't atheism winning, that was Christianity no longer being a sufficient cultural force to stop people saying "fuck the sky-fairy". So long, of course, as it was the Christian sky-fairy you were mocking; the Jewish, Muslim, or other indigenous traditions sky-fairies were out of bounds.
When it lost you money to support gay rights, companies didn't support gay rights. When it lost you money not to support gay rights, companies slapped rainbows and photos of same-sex couples on everything.
Good question! I'm glad it's my friend who I know a little about and not a rando on twitter. Her quote surprised me because it seemed to imply that a black person happened to try out for the role and was picked on merit, just as when somebody applies for a random office job. I look at the situation and see politics in movie casting, she's assuming some poor actress did her best and is getting attacked by people looking to disqualify her on ostensibly artistic but actually racist grounds.
She's what I call a social-justice Mormon: very Mormon, but also posts lots of SJW stuff. If she sat down and thought about it, I don't think she'd be on board with the extremist smash-the-patriarchy stuff. And one of my criticisms of a lot of SJW stuff is that it obfuscates things like this -- it's happy to let her believe that the role was based on artistic and acting merit. But I think she'd be sympathetic to my white friend who's a children's book author and keeps getting discriminated against for being white.
That's why I think it's more productive to focus on the deeper principles than the pre-drawn battle lines. She could probably have a productive conversation with us about the hazards of putting politics where it doesn't belong, because she remembers at some level that her grandparents were wary of that. But when people say "artistically it's just not appropriate for Ariel the mermaid to be black" while BLM is telling her they're secretly white supremacists, well, that's a much harder sell, and we'll have to have the argument all over again when it's trans Joan of Arc.
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I was raised in a religious community and I marvel at how many of today's social justice advocates are literally the same people who were the nosy church ladies in decades past. Not just the same sorts of people--the same specific people. Some of them are still church ladies, too--but those who have stopped being church ladies did not ride out on a wave a new atheism. Instead they rode out on a wave of righteous indignation concerning gay marriage or some other social issue they saw their church as being "out of touch" on. Thinking through my extended family, this category covers about a third of the women, but not one man in ten.
Actually, now that I'm drawing up tallies, I'm realizing with a dull non-surprise that none of the formerly-religious men in my extended family who took up atheism in the last, oh, three decades or so have adopted any "social justice" views as a result, while far more than half of the women (a smaller absolute number) who severed ties with their churches are now extremely vocal leftists. This harmonizes with demographic reports I've seen but I'd never before sat down and really thought about it.
It's hard for me to model such a complete lack of principles without referencing the NPC meme. But the best I can manage is just that these are people who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to enforce social expectations to the best of their ability. One day they woke up and saw that the social expectation that they go to pride parades was stronger than the social expectation that they go to church potlucks, so they stopped making casseroles and started making rainbow flags. Charitably, social cohesion is just the point for them; less charitably (but maybe more accurately from an evopsych perspective), the opportunity to snub others while raising one's own status in the most powerful in-group may also be an attractive position.
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