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There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
@hydroacetylene said:
It's not entirely clear what's supposed to be the determining criteria of identity here. Are wokeism and the DR the same because they're both revolutionary, or are they the same because they only differ on who gets the cushy sinecures? At any rate, I'll address both points.
Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle. You can have adherents of two different ideologies who both agree on the necessity of revolution, and you can have two adherents of the same ideology who disagree on the viability of revolution as a tactic. Although Marxism is typically (and correctly) seen as a revolutionary ideology, there have been notable Marxists who denied the necessity of revolution for Marxism. They instead wanted to achieve communism through a series of gradual reforms using the existing democratic state apparatus. But does that suddenly make them into conservatives? Their tactics are different from typical Marxists, but their core underlying Marxist ideological principles are the same. I doubt that any of the Hlynkaists on this forum would look at the reformist-Marxists and say "ah, a fellow conservative-gradualist! Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
"Tradition above all" is an empty formalism at best, and incoherent at worst. If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".
As for the assertion that wokeism and the DR only differ on "who gets the cushy sinecures"; this is simply incorrect. They have multiple substantive policy disagreements on LGBT rights, traditional gender roles, immigration, foreign policy, etc.
Hlynkaism to me represents a concerning abdication of reflection and nuance, in favor of a self-assured "I know what's what, these radical Marxist-Islamo-fascists can't pull a fast one on me" attitude. This is emblematic of much that is wrong with contemporary (and historical as well) political discourse. The principle goal of philosophical reflection is to undermine the foundation of this self-assuredness. Actually, you don't know what's what. Your enemies might know things that you don't; their positions might be more complicated and nuanced than you originally thought. Undoubtedly the realm of political discourse would become more productive, or at least more pleasant, if this attitude of epistemic humility were to become more widespread.
And as a tactical choice it is itself a ideological commitment. It’s not merely ‘rapid change’- it requires an acceptance of top down impositions, rationalism, the idea of de novo societal shifts implemented by a vanguard party. I reject all of that ideologically. Western trads should seek to weaken state capacity where possible, capture institutions available for capture, and in other situations focus on building parallel institutions and weakening those institutions which cannot be captured. In so doing it is possible to build a functional society which envelopes and digests the rotting hulk of modernism.
I admit this is an exaggeration. However, there is a kernel of truth- a mere commitment to political incorrectness does not a social conservative make. I agree with much of the DR that gays are perverts who shouldn’t be allowed near kids, that women shouldn’t vote, etc. But my reasoning and therefore implementation of these ideas is very different.
You are right to point out that the distinction between tactics and principles is not as clean as I made it out to be. But I'm skeptical that recourse to revolution is always indicative of the deep ideological commitments that you portray it as having. Whatever it may entail ideologically, I don't think it's a good criteria for cleaving the global ideological space at the joints.
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution? Does it have to be denounced? Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
Or consider the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which instituted an Islamic theocracy. They certainly claim to be following a conservative tradition of some kind; it might not be your preferred tradition, but it's a tradition. Are they too committed to an Enlightenment rationalist view of human nature? Does Islamic theocracy share a deep philosophical affinity with Marxist communism that has hitherto gone unnoticed? And the American Revolution too?
The most reasonable conclusion, on my view, is not that revolutions are a result of people having a deep ideological commitment to the idea of a top down rationally organized society. Revolutions are a result of people wanting power, and having the means and opportunity to seize it. This is universal to left and right, old and new.
Would you be willing to elaborate on this? I'm just curious.
I've argued yes in the past, and would do so again. Likewise I've argued at some length that the "principles of classical liberalism" are fundamentally flawed, and they've failed in the ways we observe for clear, predictable reasons.
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
There was a strong element of this, yes. It was moderated by contrasting, competing worldviews that were absent in, say, the French Revolution, and I believe that these moderating influences explain why it worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The French Revolution provides excellent contrast, as I've argued previously.
I argued this point with Hlynka back in the day, and my recollection was that the dispute came down to semantics; IIRC we both agreed that it came down to Hobbes vs Rousseau, and what label you apply to each of them. Likewise the argument I just linked: The American and French revolutions were very, very different, such that if both were "Enlightenment" revolutions, we should be able to say which was the more "Enlightened" than the other. It doesn't really matter which a given person picks, because the point is that if the term covers both perfectly equally, the term is actually meaningless, and by choosing, one reveals one's own definition. The American Revolution did contain a heaping helping of "top-down, rationalist" thinking, and the structures that resulted have failed us badly, and failed us the worst when we approached them from a top-down rationalist mindset.
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is? The first thing that would come to my mind is HBD, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to think that the Founding Fathers didn't think that cognition could vary between races, or even between individuals. I presume that's not it then.
The short, inadequate answer would be something like "What rules are and how they work" and "what values are and how they work". The Founding Fathers had no context for Postmodernism, for the fully-developed concept of a "Living Constitution", or for the reality that human values could be incoherent at scale. They mistook local values-homogeneity for universal features of human nature, and they assumed that legible rules could meaningfully constrain human Will. They lacked a deep understanding of "manipulation of procedural outcomes" and rules-fragility.
That's my understanding, anyhow.
I remembered that post fondly, but had forgotten the key-words or who it was from! Thank ye.
Separately / concurrently- given that the American Founding Fathers didn't predict the rise of political parties, and had to amend the constitution pretty early for the vice president kerfuffle, I think the 'did not necessarily understand the procedural implication of their own rules' is a fair critique.
In some respects they did- slowing the progress of government change in some respects- but that itself just locked in various self-catalyzing changes, like the New Deal coalition leading to the rise of the imperial presidency and administrative state that would compete with the chief executive.
If you think that Presidential democracy was a mistake (I do, and the Framers' writings make it clear that they would see it as a mistake in hindsight if they saw what a modern partisan Presidential election looks like) then there is an interesting question of how it happened.
Theory 1 as I see it is that the Presidency was designed knowing that Washington would be elected unopposed as the first President, and would almost certainly remain President as long as he wanted. So even if the Framers had anticipated the rise of political parties, they assumed that national treasures like Washington would generally be available, and that the machinery of the Electoral College would help them beat partisan candidates.
Theory 2 is that the main model for the relationship between the President and Congress available to the Framers was the relationship between King and Parliament in Great Britain, and in the late 18th century that relationship was in an unstable equilibrium - that either the Crown would re-consolidate power and turn Parliament into a rubber-stamp (as Louis XIV did with the French Parlements, and as has happened in most Presidential democracies established on the US model) or Parliament would consolidate power and force the King to appoint a Prime Minister acceptable to the Parliamentary majority (as actually happened).
In both theories the Constitution was no longer working as advertised by 1796 (Adams-Jefferson was a partisan election). Under theory 2 the reason why the US was able to stay in unstable equilibrium as long as it did was the lack of party discipline.
Do you think 5 is less than?
That's not a coherent question, right? You have to have two numbers to be able to talk about whether one is less than the other. 5 is less than 6. 5 is not less than 4.
But the same applies to any question of the form "Was X a mistake?" Was Presidential democracy a mistake compared to remaining part of the British empire? Probably not - the colonists did have some legitimate grievances. Was Presidential democracy a mistake compared to a Parliamentary democracy with a Prime Minister? Maybe, but not obviously so; we can see the cracks in parliamentary democracies too, today.
Was Presidential democracy with first-past-the-post voting a mistake compared to an approval-voting system? Here I'd opine the answer is clearly "yes", but when the Constitution was ratified Condorcet had just barely started publishing on voting theory, and Arrow and Duverger were a century away from being born, so I can hardly fault the Framers for lacking the benefit of hindsight here.
They did try to leave us with a mechanism for changing the Constitution to fix their later-identified mistakes, which has been very fruitful in the case of some other mistakes, and which you'd think would be sufficient in general... but the trouble with changing a mistake in the mechanisms by which people and parties gain power is that, almost by definition, the people and parties in power have strong incentives to want that change to not be made. If you're a partisan demagogue whose route to election has been "take advantage of your polarized base, plus a few moderates who can be convinced that the opposing partisan demagogue is more awful", why would you want to make it easier for challengers within your ideology to run against you and simultaneously make it likely that you'll face less-awful opponents from other ideologies?
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