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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.
That's a lot of cynical questions followed up with a tired class-struggle talking point. I'm not claiming that race and gender didn't used to matter, and in fact I cited how surprised I was when I learned about the Bechdel test. My claim is that we should oppose art being a unipolar or multi-polar game at all, and especially a zero-sum or negative-sum game where one coalition or another uses movies as a pulpit to preach to its choir.
Are you surprised the other side is punching back in a cultural fistfight, or disputing it was ever a fight, or surprised that there hasn't been a detente after the tides started turning?
Japan's first forced cultural exchange with the Americans started with Perry putting on a minstrel show. Hasn't entertainment always served dual purposes?
You seem quite drawn to the conflict-theory view on this. In your view is it just a question of whose boot is on whose skull, forever? Or is there a way for our society to have nice things like literature that isn't insufferably preachy and full of actors chosen for their culture war value?
Does ignoring my questions by accusing me of cynicism make you the mistake theorist? Forget I asked, I thought you were interested in honing your thesis.
Were your questions sincere? What are your answers to your questions?
I suppose I dispute that it was ever a fight, in the sense that original Little Mermaid wasn't as racially/politically motivated as the current release. That is, I think there was a default-white assumption that people didn't think about much, plus it was a European tale, whereas now there's explicit racial programming. In the era when I was telling others about the Bechdel test, I hoped that we would stop excluding women and minorities and start getting more variety in movies. And I think we got some of that: to stick with Disney, I think Moana and Mulan and Encanto were all pretty great. Encanto is interesting because it's the most recent, and it feels tryhard in ways that the earlier ones didn't, because now they're explicitly trying to be super race sensitive in ways that are eerily similar to the ways people look down on conservatives for. Whereas with the new Little Mermaid, I strongly suspect they're leaning into the culture war aspects because it drives buzz, and I think we shouldn't reward them for that.
Has entertainment always served dual purposes? Sometimes, I guess? I think I pretty consistently oppose that stuff, though: I don't like that the military trades access to gear for editorial control of movies. Old movies like Sergeant York or It's a Wonderful Life seem like they were pushing viewpoints in the same ways that I dislike in modern woke preachy shows. I do have a couple of super preachy things I like anyway, because I'm specifically into the thing they're preaching: Gandhi and Mendelssohn's Elijah are both in that camp for me.
But most of the literature I consider really great is because it's saying insightful things we don't normally hear elsewhere and that don't map to normal culture war battlefields. Citizen Kane, for example, or Kurt Vonnegut.
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