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 -
This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.
Except (Protestant) Germany had the problem that since Luther, monasticism and religious life was strongly downgraded in favour of "God wants you all to get married, have kids - 'be fruitful and multiply'" (Luther did a lot of writing about how there was in fact no right to take a vow of celibacy and nobody could impose it on you or punish you for breaking it).
So if you have a lot of single women and no husbands for them, you have a problem as to what you do with them. If they get pregnant outside of marriage, then if you need the rebuilding of the population, you can't afford to shame them. Discreet (or not so discreet) abortions of future citizens in a country that lost a lot of men during the previous war is going to leave you weak, particularly if the people in charge have a shiny new ideal of being the Master Race and conquering all of Europe by right.
More options
Context Copy link
Care to explain the distinction?
"That sweet enemy France" 😀
Google AI will say that there is no specific author of that phrase, it mentions a book by that title, but I know better, having first encountered it mentioned by Chesterton:
"Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line; "Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France."
And looking up Sir Philip Sidney, it comes from a poem:
Astrophil and Stella 41 By Sir Philip Sidney
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtain'd the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.
How far they shot awry! The true cause is,
Stella look'd on, and from her heav'nly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.
So sorry, Google Gemini, but you're wrong; the book gets its title from "a direct quote from a specific individual":
More options
Context Copy link
Anglo-French relations are 1000 year hereditary bromance. If you don't get it, it can't be explained.
Rudyard Kipling tried and I'm not aware of anything better.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that it was only in that specific context (and a fair amount of things that we take for granted about the Nazi ideology was also at least partly about answering a specific context, such as their particular attempts to appeal to the working class in the specific context of a threat of Marxist working-class rebellion). The Nazis had a mission to combat traditional religious morality and advance a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.
Something that Americans also adopted the instant the birth-control pill hit the shelves (hippies were famous for this- they said free love was natural for a reason, but every "all-natural" person exhibits profound ignorance of what technological advancement lets you see as natural, like how everything you eat has been specifically bred for gigantism). Being able to not get pregnant on a whim is a massively transformative technology; so is having so much food the poor only starve if they're explicitly trying to, for that matter (and the Germans invented the chemical process that makes that possible, too).
The foundation of traditional religious morality is not meaningfully distinguishable from "sex bad" (no other intelligent examination other than "Bible says it's bad"), so it makes sense traditions holding that viewpoint get absolutely bodied by the new reality that a good chunk of why it was destructive is now obviated. Some traditionalists have tacitly accepted this, but they won't actually say it for Overton window reasons.
The more intelligent traditionalists focus on "but a woman who has a body count is spiritually degraded" for that reason- if they had any better arguments, I think they'd be making them, but they aren't. So "vibes" (and "men want virgins", when they're being more honest- and I can accept that doing things that help men would make society better, but in a general sense rather than this specifically) is obviously the best they have.
I'm sympathetic to those for whom biology meshes better with first-century sexual norms, but they're too busy thinking with their other head in this matter. So putting them in charge in a context where technology has obviated most of the previous reality they cling to is (rightly) viewed by everyone else as destructive. (The same is true when you put women doing that in charge, but rejecting that is an even more cutting-edge idea.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link