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’d like to bring up a comment by @ResoluteRaven from last week’s thread:
It's not the first time I see this line of reasoning getting brought up, usually in the narrower context of the terrible destruction of the 30 Years’ War which @Capital_Room brought up in the same comment chain.
I’m not much of a historian but still this doesn’t appear to hold water in my view. As far as I can tell, the era of European sectarian wars (mainly) between Catholics and Protestants wasn’t ended by classical liberalism but by monarchist absolutism i.e. a new order where sovereign authority is centralized and unrestrained, feudalism is gradually dismantled and the state supersedes the church in terms of power and influence. Local lords and religious leaders no longer had the means to start sectarian wars in the first place. There were no more peasant rebellions fueled by sectarian grievances (among other things). This doesn’t mean that the Catholic church wasn’t in a hegemonic position in various states or that Protestants weren’t in effect treated as second-class subjects, but that’s another issue.
Now I suppose one can argue that this all actually represented the birth of classical liberalism because reasons, but I find that rather far-fetched.
Tangentially, this is why the occasional narrative that Islam needs a reformation is insane; it's currently going through a reformation, that's why it's gotten so violent (like the 30 years war etc.)
I had a discussion last year with a rather elderly person who'd spent most of their career in the middle east, and one of the points that stuck out to me was the point made about how not regionally explosive the Gaza War had been amongst the Arabs, or even the Palestinians. Not only was there not a pan-Arab coalition, there wasn't even a pan-Palestinian intifada, despite the efforts of some.
There was debate about whether that was more due to a change of political Islam or the death of pan-arabism in the middle east, but I loosely recall an opinion poll survey from the early 2010s (right before / as ISIS was getting started) that showed how support for suicide bombing had dropped over time, corresponding loosely for when religious suicide bombings shifted from being a 'resistance against the outsider' to 'domestic civil war tactic' in Iraq.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Absolutism was well underway before the thirty years war started, and Protestantism was the main reason it failed in the HRE.
This is a federalism issue, not a citizens' rights issue. The individual "princely" states in the post-Westphalia HRE were pretty absolutist. (Although the Peace of Westphalia included limited protection for religious minorities.)
The way I was taught about it was that there is an ongoing trend from a "medieval" model (strong territorial magnates, levy armies raised locally by said magnates, weak kings, self-governing towns with considerable privileges) to an "early modern" model (strong states, territorial nobility as a rent-drawing fossil, a royal government not run by the territorial nobility but whose members get ennobled and form a new court nobility, standing armies paid out of taxes, general drift towards centralisation and absolutism). The driving force is improvements in siege artillery, which changes the nature of warfare in a way which favours centralisation and professionalism in the military.
This process starts in the second half of the C15, with Edward IV and Henry VII renormalising England after the Wars of the Roses (roughly 1471-1509), Louis XI renormalising France after the French civil war that Henry V of England famously took advantage of to restart the Hundred Years' War, including bringing Burgundy and Brittany under royal control (1461-1483), and Ferdinand and Isabella unifying Spain (1474-1504). There is then a gradual process of consolidation (setting up increasingly bureaucratised royal governments, weeding out remaining territorial magnates who were strong enough in their areas to pose a threat, reforms to military and taxation systems). This process is interrupted by religious conflict during the Reformation (except in Spain which remains unified and Catholic, which is why Spain under the early Habsburgs is dominant despite being, well, Spain - they had higher state capacity) but continues afterwards. The first monarchs to complete this process are Louis XIII after he appoints Richelieu in 1624, Charles I during the personal rule after 1629 (and also Cromwell and his major-generals, after which the English decide to do something else which is not that, with long-term consequences for world history).
When you apply this logic to German-speaking Europe, the key point is that the weakening of the HRE (to the benefit of the major German "princes") is an orthogonal process to this kind of state-formation. The tl;dr is that the key points in the decine of the centralised HRE are the fall of the Hohenstauffen in 1254 and the Golden Bull in 1356 - well before the state-formation process we are talking about. The Henry VII/Louis XI style consolidation happens in the 1400s at the level of individual German states like Austria, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg. After the 30 Years' War, the second stage development of early modern absolutist states happens at that level as well - mostly in Brandenburg and Austria.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It appears to me that the death of "classical liberalism" has been greatly exaggerated.
It was legal to own slaves in the US up until the 1860s. Has the US been a classically liberal society since its inception? If no, then we have to establish the start and end dates we have in mind for "classical liberalism". If yes, then classical liberalism is compatible with slavery -- and if it's compatible with slavery, then it's surely compatible with SJWs and Trump and whatever else people are worried about now.
Let's also not forget that up until the early 20th century, many western nations took a much dimmer view of homosexuality, blasphemy, obscenity, etc. -- freedoms that would now be considered hallmarks of any "liberal" society.
I'm just really not sure what people are afraid of, or what they think has "ended". Do people think we're headed for another civil war? We already had one, and yet it's typical to say that the US was a "classically liberal" society both before and after. Do people think Trump is going to establish a dictatorship / one party rule? That's not going to happen, but even if he did, it's not clear to me that even that would be incompatible with classical liberalism, given how nebulous the term is.
The "peace treaty liberalism" of OP is compatible with all sorts of things, but that depends on the balance of power. A good example here is different understandings of religous freedom. Here in Austria, theres a bureaucratic process for becoming various levels of recognised as a religion, and it crucially involves the number of members. The rights you can claim soley based on your personal conscience are very limited - conversely, recognised religions have rights that in the US would immediately explode from satanic temple trolling. Our version is the peace treaty, the US is motivated by an abstract right.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, of course. I don't see how one could seriously argue that the US have been founded on anything else.
The thing is, it isn't. Which in part caused the Civil War after long and hard attempts to maintain a precarious pragmatic compromise. Because living up to those principles was incompatible with the survival of the original US but so was not doing so.
Yes.
I don't think that's likely, but yes, of course despotism is totally compatible with classical liberalism. So long as the despot is a classical liberal. Catherine the Great being the most well known example of this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In your version of events, the relationship between the monarchs still follows the classical liberalism narrative.
More options
Context Copy link
The argument, AIUI, isn't that classical liberalism brought this about — as you note, that's ahistorical — but that it's the other way around: it was this that brought about classical liberalism later. Because, as you note, a new political order rose due to material, non-ideological reasons. Liberalism, the argument goes, was a later rationalization created post hoc to retroactively justify these, and other subsequent changes, ideologically.
Not to say I entirely buy that argument myself. But it's the one I see held forth most often. And if it's not post hoc rationalization of religious tolerance being argued as the source of liberalism, then the next most common position I see argued is that it was a post hoc rationalization for the rise of a mercantile/capitalist "bourgeoise" middle class ("middle" because they're somewhere between the traditional "noble" and "peasant" divisions) to increasing prominence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link