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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   35964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I’d like to bring up a comment by @ResoluteRaven from last week’s thread:

Classical liberalism emerged out of centuries of vicious religious conflict as a truce between warring parties that had just beaten each other to a bloody pulp and were too tired to continue, and functioned so long as a cultural memory of that struggle endured that was strong enough to put down any would-be challengers. Now that those lessons have been forgotten (because [the other side] violated the truce first, everyone says) they will have to be re-learned the hard way.

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.

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