This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've been reading Charles Murray book, Coming Apart and watched the interview he had with Reason TV. In the book and interview, Murray discusses white America, and the pulling away of social classes. Giving two towns for the reader to take into consideration: Belmont, MA. and Fishtown PA. In Belmont, people are college educated, get and stay married, lead healthier lives, and pass all of these things onto their children. Fishtown is the opposite: people have the typical jerry springer family filled with baby mama/daddys, they likely only graduated high school or less than that and they are unhealthy with a lower life expectancy. Another thing that i found fascinating is that apparently, Many men are simply not working at all, and this is seemingly concentrated amongst the less educated as well.The effects of this on the marriage market is well documented. '
One thing that has been on my personal mind lately is how to actually fix or help fish towns residents? A bit of personal background here: I am a child of immigrants who is a year away from a bachelors degree, I have a help desk job at a nice company, in my major (IT), with hopes of working in software development. (I will be the first in my family to obtain a BAS, I've been flirting with perusing a masters degree). I'm currently dating a women who's family is the typical Fishtown resident Murray describes (She herself is a lovely girl). Her family behaves poorly. Her sisters constantly engage in borderline prostitution. They have no work. No money outside of that which they receive from men. One has multiple children, none of them regularly attend school. They are beaten regularly by their frustrated mother. Their fathers are no where to be found or worse, are actively harmful (ie, taking the son to a drug house). Ive been blessed that both my parents are married and educated. (My mother studied nursing, My father actually had a degree in his home country that did not carry over to the US, and began studying real estate instead, he now has a real estate license, and CDL, we were actually upper-middle class until 2008 hit). She is attempting to make it out herself by studying finance, however one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree. Which is even more frustrating: even if a Fishtown resident somehow makes it out: they will not have as much of the funds as they had hoped. Perhaps this may because of the types of degrees they obtain (ie. someone from the hood obtains a degree in education, hoping to help and educate others who are in her same position.) Given that education correlates pretty highly with income, ive always felt as if fostering values around education and its importance would be a crucial first step and the environment many are in seems to make this highly difficult, even after obtaining such education. She herself has told me how awfully stubborn her mother is with her bad health habits. I want to preference this by saying im no elitist who wants to look down on such people: My heart is quite heavy with sorrow for them.
Murray sites an array of causes he believes are to blame: IQ, changing social norms, and the welfare state. Im not personally a fan of taking away welfare from those who may have fallen on hard times, even if that means that some one may potentially abuse it, and the cat seems to be out of the bag with many of the social norms, many of which changed due to technology (contraceptives changing sexual norms for example). I know many working class men personally who couldnt even bother with condoms, despite their mass availability, and who'd scoff at the idea of passing up a potential encounter or partner. I dont have deep enough knowledge of IQ to even begin to think of a solution, assuming this is a possible cause.
There is one thing ive personally have planned on: Being responsible. Ive always used condoms with my current partner. I do not want to have my children out of wedlock. I want to marry my wife and have children with her and only her. I want my kids to go to school, (a school in a high income neighborhood, where they can learn and thrive). And in-still hard work ethic in them to excel academically. Continue building my projects and studying leet code so that i can be a better programmer and get the software job that will pay for the house in said neighborhood. Which i suppose is all i can do. Control my own actions and hope that others see and follow my example.
Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America. In almost every way, our society is less equal than it was in 1962. Across domains that don't seem like they should be related:
Fitness Hobbyist athletes of today would largely stomp on the professionals of 1962 in fitness metrics. Nobody in 1962 ran marathons as a hobby, now it is common, no PMC office lacks a marathon guy. Lifting weights was weird, and maybe kinda gay. Now it is common. The lifts and PR times of your average Crossfit box would be jaw-dropping at any of the few existing gyms in 1962. The fitness obsessed are stronger, faster, better than their 1962 equivalents. And yet in 1962 the average person was in better shape than the average person in 2024. They weren't overweight or obese, they could walk ten miles if asked to do so. A randomly selected man of 1962 could join a touch football game or help you move furniture in a way that your randomly selected man of 2024 often cannot.
Sex 1962 society was more monogamous, and because of the drive to achieve pair bonding, most people could get one long term partner and marry them and stay together. More men had sex with one woman in the past year compared to today, but more men had sex with anyone. In 2024, it is vastly easier for some men to get laid, your top percentage of men can get vastly more sex with vastly more partners. But there are also vast numbers of men who never have sex, have no long term partners, and few prospects of getting them.
Cooking Imagine I took 100 mothers from my local high school today, and 100 mothers from my local high school in 1962, and Iron-Chef'd them with scratch ingredients and told them to bake me a cake. I posit that the 1962 mothers would all make more or less the same mediocre American cakes, with some ethnic-white flourishes or particular talents, but mostly pretty similar stuff. But virtually all would know how to make a cake given flour, butter, eggs, sugar. The 2024 mothers, a large percentage would simply have no idea how to make a cake from scratch without premade ingredients, only a vague concept of what to do with the ingredients, and we'd get some truly sad attempts. But among the 2024 mothers, there are also some percentage of hobbyists, Great British Baking Show and youtube obsessives, who will make a ridiculously good cake, vastly better than anything that the 1962 mothers would even know how to attempt. All one has to do to figure this out is look at old cookbooks and new cookbooks.
Physical appearance Paul Newman vs Chris Evans. Or just compare Superman to Superman, or even Hugh Jackman in different Wolverine roles. The earlier physiques are easy for a man with good genetics if they don't screw it up or attainable for most men with a bit of effort, the current physiques are impossible without at least two of good genetics, extreme effort, and pharmaceuticals.
Education More Americans than ever have completed college degrees, the value and difficulty of which we can debate but there is no question that completing years of education highly correlates with intelligence. Fewer books are read every year in America. Authors lack the popular celebrity impact they once had. Literary prizes lack the credibility and punch they once did. PhD Theses of 1962 and earlier are often pretty readable, covering a basic or normal topic. PhD theses of 2024 are often whacko, out there, unreadable to anyone without a master's in the topic already, citing obscure theories unknown to anyone outside deep academia.
Gun Ownership Gun ownership has declined from a narrow majority of households in the 70s to a third as of 2014. At the same time, many gun owners today have an absolute arsenal compared to the men of the 60s and 70s. A lot of Old Timer Fudds at my small town gun club think it's insane that the young guys want to own anything other than a shotgun, a deer rifle, a .22, and a revolver. A small percentage of gun owners in America own a vast number of firearms. This simply wasn't a normal middle-class pursuit in the 1960s.
There are other places it feels like there's something there, but I don't know how to parse them with any rigor. Religiosity, racial tolerance, "handyman" skills, foreign travel, military service, automobile driving. It feels intuitive that in the past, a base level of each was expected in every middle class man and variation was rare; and today extremes at both ends are more common while the middle is shrinking.
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution. There's something deeper there.
All of your examples have this pattern: $[skill] used to be not only desirable but also broadly necessary; as $[skill] became generally unnecessary, a large portion of the population has mostly abandoned it, while those who remained devoted to maintaining $[skill] became much more proficient.
E.g.: back in 1962 every home-maker was expected to bake, and a large proportion of women were home-makers. Now, fewer women are home-makers, social norms about desirability of cakes and cookies have largely changed, and there are lots of options for buying baked goods. Thus, most women have mostly abandoned baking (or never developed the skill), while the few that do have vastly improved that skill.
E.g.: back in 1962, the alternatives to books (for entertainment or information) were either expensive (movies or plays in the theater), or inferior in quality or quantity (newspapers), or were on a schedule (TV and radio). Now, the alternatives to books are superior, cheap, and instantly available. So most people mostly abandoned reading books, while a smaller proportion still reads for pleasure. (Though for this example, I don't know of any metrics by which those that read books have become more proficient, except maybe a brief increase in popularity of speed-reading a decade ago in my circle.)
Let's call these the coming-apart pattern examples, and let's consider whether there are any examples with a flipped coming-together pattern: $[skill] used to be desirable but broadly unnecessary; as $[skill] became generally necessary, a large portion of the population has developed at least some competency in it. As a result, if we compare the $[skill]-ed populations now and back-in-the-day, the back-in-the-day group was much more $[skill]-ed.
E.g.: typing. Back in 1962, most professionals didn't type much themselves because they could hire a typist for a fairly low wage (mostly because that was one of the careers for young women that was generally acceptable for decades by then). That is, a professional could, instead of learning the skill himself, use some reasonable portion of his income to outsource the typing tasks. Now, every white-collar worker and many blue-collar workers are expected to do their own typing, and the typing tasks have only increased. As a result, at least 2/3rd of the population has some typing skill, and if we compare the group whose job included typing in 1962 to similar group now, the average 1962 typist would be much faster and make fewer spelling errors.
(The skill of spelling is another coming-apart pattern example, mostly courtesy of ubiquitous spell-checkers.)
Another coming-together pattern example: figuring out how to make a new electronic device work. Back in 1962, besides the small number of professionals who needed to work with bespoke electronic devices--and hobbyists who chose to do so--most people would only need to figure out how to make their TV and their radio work, and those were fairly straightforward. Now, most people regularly get electronic gadgets that either didn't exist a decade ago or whose user interface changed substantially, and they keep having to figure out how they work. (The joke among us olds is that the instructions are so complicated that only a child can do it.) So a broader proportion of the population has acquired the skill of figuring out how to make new electronic device work, but the professionals and hobbyists of yore were much better on average, because they had to understand quite a bit about the underlying electronics. (My husband salvaged many a cheap Chinese-import doo-dad with a multimeter and a soldering iron.)
To summarize:
When a desirable skill becomes more broadly necessary, more people acquire some level of proficiency in it, and the average level of the skill (among those that have some proficiency in the skill) drops.
When a desirable skill becomes less broadly necessary, fewer people acquire some level of proficiency in it, and the average level of the skill (among those that have some proficiency in the skill) rises.
I think the absurd level of skill in a lot of those things do tend to serve as effective barriers to entry as well. I’ll use youth sports as an example. We have a system in youth sports that’s absolutely insane. If you want to play sports, you have to put in an insane amount of time, energy and effort to make the team — and select teams often begin at 8 years old. If you make it to the place where you can expect to play high school sports, you’ve likely been playing on select and traveling teams from second grade onward. And aside from the games, tournaments, and team practices, you’ve likely been taking lessons as well. Which means that you have to have the time and money to put 20 hours a week into that one sport.
But suppose you’re a kid of middling talent. Well, basically, 99% of team sports are closed off to you. Sorry champ, too bad you’re not super talented. And the predictable result of this is… either you’re a stand out superstar player of your chosen sport, or you might as well quit. Did they stop desiring to play baseball, or is it so insanely difficult for kids to make the team that they end up playing baseball on their Xbox One instead of with friends outdoors. And then you end up with the twin crises of obesity (because only the top 10% of kids actually get to play any team sports) and loneliness (because team sports turns out to be an easy way for boys to make friends) and can’t quite understand why.
I think even for other things, participation goes down when people are led to believe that they need to be good at something or do it seriously if you want to participate. You feel pressure to find deeper meanings for the books you read, or the shows you watch. You have to read tge stuff on booktok or some other curated list. If you happen to like a nerd-coded show or movie series, you have to learn the lore and follow fan theories and there are often things to collect or whatever. I think for me I almost don’t want to get into those kinds of series because of the absurd competition to know all the stuff to feel comfortable talking to other fans because they’ll have learned all the lore. It’s almost like all hobbies have become competitive in a sense, you can’t just do the thing you have to do it to a social media friendly level.
I think honestly that the standards of 1962 were better for the country because at some point, good enough is good enough and you gain more social health by letting average people participate in those kinds of activities instead of limiting those social opportunities t9 just the hyper competitive people.
I read this paragraph, and immediately the analogy to online dating (which, AIUI, has increasingly taken over dating as a whole) comes to mind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link