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'm a liberal who's been here for a while but doesn't post very frequently. I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum. Specifically, whether this disagreement is real or just against a strawman, and if it is real, what are the best reasons why the disagreement is not serious enough to justify conclusions like "despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".
I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms
Individualism means people should be judged based on their own personal qualities and actions instead of based on groups that people assign them membership to. Since the groups someone belongs to often give you information about their personal qualities, this needs to be made more precise as a conditional independence statement: conditional on someone's personal qualities and choices, judgements about them, their obligations, what they deserve, etc. should be independent of the groups they belong to.
Meritocracy means that positions of influence and power should be given to those best able to wield them in service of society's goals. While you can get into a lot of arguments about what society's goals should be in corner cases, for most practical decisions---who should become a doctor/lawyer, who should get research funding, who should run a company---this rounds off to two soft consideration: competence, that when someone wants to do something related to their position, they actually can, and personal virtue, that people don't use their position in ways that help themselves at the the expense of others.
The first point of argument is whether these definitions are reasonable and deserve the good connotations that "meritocracy" and "individualism" have. Therefore we should discuss what the point of these terms is and why they're considered good things:
Individualism is important for motivation---if people know that they're life outcomes are dependent only on them and their choices, then they have the strongest possible motivation for improving themselves as much as possible. Secondly, most people are happiest when they have a sense of agency and control over their lives. Individualism maximizes this control.
Meritocracy is important to make society as effective as possible in achieving its goals---this is the standard "if a surgeon is operating on you, you want to surgeon to be as competent as possible" argument.
Note that neither of these justifications are about "fairness" or anything like that (even though they line up with a many widely-held intuitions about fairness); they're both just very powerful instruments for achieving whatever terminal values society actually has at the bottom.
Now as for why I think this place does not follow these values, it might be most productive to focus on a very specific example instead of a billion arguments about racism, skilled immigration etc. A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies. Now, in the quote the the alternative is judging based on if "you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025" for rhetorical punch, but the way it's framed, he likely would also be against the alternative of e.g, "whether you agree with 1995 tolerance and colorblindness"---otherwise the entire frame of the argument wouldn't be against deciding belonging based on personal choices.
So now the specific questions:
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
First, the immediately preceding paragraphs to the quote, might be relevant context I will put below. This is at risk of drifting too much from your prompt, but I feel like they are pretty important and the excerpt doesn’t stand alone. (Also I am an avowed moderate so might not be the intended audience)
I think Vance is using a straw man here. He even kind of acknowledges it (charitably it’s a rhetorical device at best). Are there really many influential political people who think this is the sole criteria for immigration? Don't think so.
I think it’s fair to say the far left has a disdain for America that’s a more caustic than hopeful, and that’s bad. But I think the regular left, yes even their leaders, tend to be more aspirational to American principles than Vance gives credit for. It’s also wrong what he says about them on the first place: I’m not aware of many even on the far left who advocate to kick people out of America if they don’t share the principles? At worst they display schadenfreude or want to put you into eternal lecture-detention.
And does a disdain for America, where it exists, also directly translate to weaker social bonds, his original concern? No, there’s no real link, really he just thinks the number of immigrants is too high and too ‘other’. It’s also a bad argument because he’s saying that too many immigrants worsens anti-nationalist pride… but at the same time alleging that the leftists deliberately want to import people based on agreement with American ideas or principles? Pick a lane, man. Weirdly he suddenly makes a U-turn and now describes this American creed as a progressive leftist thing, despite literally just talking about it as a good, general, national pride thing. Again, pick a lane man.
I think your read of this attitude as anti-meritocratic is accurate. He’s underestimating, ironically, America’s own extremely strong assimilation forces. He’s not considering immigration as a potential strength. I don’t really see too much of a statement on individualism. My main critique is that this vision is confused and intellectually incoherent. Ironically, he is great and even accurate about identifying some big problems with the left, but not so great at building something in its place (the same accusation levied at far leftists w/r/t America)
More broadly however I think the distinction between individual advice and public policy choices is the biggest issue of our age and most of the left-right divide generally. Right wingers preach personal responsibility which is good, but on a public policy level this means they ignore real suffering and policy can be weak. Left wingers preach social responsibility which is good, but on a personal level this means they fall into a cult of victimhood and their happiness and effectiveness goes down. Good policy and good individualism both require a degree of what to many feels like cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy, even though it isn’t. So they often default to one or the other exclusively and engage in tribal debates, trying to hammer home their strong points while being blind to the weaknesses.
A bit slippery and perhaps deliberate on Vance's part, I'd read at they want to deny right of representation to people that don't share their principles. They won't send Vance (for example) or people like him to a prison in El Salvador, but they would do everything in their power to deny that he's a "true American" and prevent him from ever having a position of influence.
I want to say citation needed but I don't know what evidence I'd accept here. I do think that's a pretty fair correlation but other things occurred over the last few decades that also affected social bonds.
Historically speaking, with a 70 year pause and a few wars between big waves.
His wife is an immigrant and he explicitly says the country is better with her in it.
Right wing complaints of voter suppression? Realistically this just looks like scolding. Not the scariest of threats even if annoying.
He frames social bonds as something that happens naturally with time within locales. The argument that social bonds are weaker because new people showed up seems weak and weird. Why I say he’s trying to have it both ways and it doesn’t appear to be a coherent worldview, not as presented.
I mean theoretically there’s a tipping point when it comes to immigration, where the new drowns out the old, or even “pollutes” it like Trump once said (gross language if you ask me). Maybe the point is subjective for many voters. At least when I lived in Miami a decade back, assimilation seemed to be doing just fine. Tons of kids refusing to speak Spanish even at home, for example. Historically I think we’re on the highish side but within norms (a backlash isn’t too surprising either at this point in time).
However we don’t really see this show up in the rhetoric is my point I suppose. It was my understanding that Republicans wanted any legal immigrants to be super woohoo about America, so it feels weird to see Vance say effectively the opposite. Unless I am misreading him here. The fact that the administration has done worse than nothing to make legal immigration work better, putting it off until later, also makes me feel like the pro-immigration stuff is lip service, and the speech more a stump speech to a smarter audience rather than a real attempt to lay out a coherent view of what America needs or should be.
Maybe not direct voter suppression - at least I don't have a definite proof of it yet - but we have multiple and very well verified instances of speech suppression, economic suppression, access suppression etc. And this happened both on governmental level and on the level of various non-governmental gatekeepers, such as academia, media industry, entertainment industry, big corporations, etc. - every level that defines how the society is managed has multiple examples of people being suppressed for being on the Right.
How it's weird? Who am I likely to bond with - the person I (and my ancestors) lived next to for three generations, or with somebody who showed up around yesterday, doesn't speak my language, has totally different culture and beliefs, wears something I can't even name, and can't answer positively to any of my "remember when" questions? I'm not saying the latter is impossible, but claiming it's less likely than the former - if anything is ever "weird" is claiming something like that, and without any justification, just dropping it like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Of course it's not.
I mean you’re citing the maximalist case, that I don’t deny happens occasionally, but sure. What I mean is that obviously bonds are relative. Bonds with whom? Is the bond of a neighbor with their longtime neighbor diminished because they have a third new neighbor? Not really (that’s how I initially parsed it). If we’re talking some kind of ambient social identity or affiliation, that’s more culture than sociality.
And I think there’s an excellent argument to be made that mere locality is a weaker bond than it used to be, with the decline of community institutions and our new media age, independent of who exactly is moving in. Plus, although I totally get where you’re coming from about ‘oh we might have less to chat about’ I think that’s not necessarily the case. If both newcomer and old timer have an interest and/or motivation to connect, it will still happen! Maybe you chat about football and they chat about soccer, to mutual interest, your Christmas invite is responded to with an Eid invite, etc. No need to be rosy here - maybe statistically there are fewer connections overall. Is that enough to matter? ‘Avoid the Polish kid Grzegorz with a weird name’ is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy just like ‘Don’t even hang out at a food place that isn’t halal’ is too, attitude matters on both sides of the coin.
No, but if I have N neighbors, then if those neighbors are all from "common ancestry" set, the number of bonds I'm likely to form would be larger than if they would be in "alien ancestry" set. Thus, the expected number of bonds, statistically, would decrease for the same N neighbors, if ancestry heterogeneity would increase. Note that it's not the same case as adding one neighbor to existing set of N - that's not likely to decrease the number of bonds. But replacing one set of N with another set of N would. Note that this is of course very theoretical and generic statement. But my point is it's not weird and novel thing, it's very much expected and natural to conclude that. It might be that after careful empirical study it turns out the common sense does not work in this particular area - non-intuitive empirical results happened in the past - but until it happened, it's not "weird" at all to think that.
Yes, it is, but that's a different dimension, which is orthogonal to the one we're discussing there. And yes, if there's a will there's a way - I am not saying this is some kind of universal impossibility and individuals are not bound by statistics, they can do whatever the heck they want. But on the societal level, statistics will assert itself.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link