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A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children, with parents having very little to say about it outside of "it's just a couple crazy kids on college campuses".
Does it? I can assure you in very Blue Tribe places that is not so. Maybe you can argue it flowed from Blue Tribe places to Blue Tribe academia to academia in general.
That protests happen on college campuses does not mean the colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. As I pointed out the kids I get in my classes are already well to the left of me in general.
Considering these "woke" ideas specifically have academic heritage, I'm not sure how this flow of ideas is plausible. Is the contention that these ideas that explicitly source themselves on stuff developed by "critical X theory" and "X studies" departments of the past 50 years actually somehow flowed into these departments through influence of people from Blue Tribe "places," who also influenced their children with these ideas? To whatever extent this is true, it just seems to be a way of describing the process by which academia developed these ideas - it's not surprising that the people in academia who developed and propagated these ideas largely came from cultures that were predisposed to such ideas.
That the protests are based around ideas that are essentially word-for-word, identical to those taught by academia is what means that colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. No one's making any claims about proximity or location.
And your students being more left of you in general doesn't say much, since having the proclivity to comment on a forum like this already makes you a highly atypical academic, but also, if you teach high schoolers or above, this is entirely consistent with the notion that academia is responsible for the flow of ideas to these students, via their exposure to academia in grade school and middle school.
That was exactly my experience as someone who grew up in Blue Tribe environments. My experience with proto-woke ideas (I was ahead of the phenomenon by about a decade, but the typical sociopolitical narratives that were hegemonic at my schools in the 00s would have been nearly indistinguishable from the typical SJW and "woke" ideas from the late 10s) was that they absolutely flowed in from academia to students, with my parents being essentially non-factors (this part is likely mostly caused by my own parents' parenting behaviors and hard to generalize), with my earliest memories of such ideas being from my 4th grade homeroom teacher.
We wouldn't normally call that academia though. And my experience right now is that these kids are getting their ideas from their parents and from Tik-Tok. So they come in already having opinions about Palestine for example. They weren't taught that in elementary school. And as I said before they are also left of most of my colleagues as well (who are yes a bit to the left of me on average).
But again you have it reversed. Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe. You're again just saying Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things. Well yes, of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't be Blue Tribe! All the concept of critical theory does is putting an academic skin on things Blue Tribe people already believed. They believed it, then they taught it in an academic way, but the Blue Tribe already HAD those beliefs. So the students are at best being taught how to express the things they already believe in an academic fashion. Because it's the very water they and their parents swim in.
Academia is downstream not upstream in other words. Academics frequently overestimate their own importance. Don't fall for it.
This is exactly what the flow of ideas from academia to to students would look like; parents and TikTok get these ideas from academia, whether it's indirectly through their peers or other TikTokers, or directly through their own experience in academia.
This is simply false, though. The concept of "White Privilege," for instance, which is a tool that can be used as needed to explain why any white person in any situation is advantaged over any black person, isn't something Blue Tribe people believed without academia. They might have a general sense of dissatisfaction at what they perceive as society-wide injustice due to how they believe that white people are treated better than black people in society, and they might go into academia in order to research and develop this dissatisfaction into grand theories about White Supremacy and Colonialism and such. You can describe it as putting an "academic skin" over things they already believed, but that'd only make sense if we took the "skin" metaphor pretty far, with how complex and active an organ the skin is on our bodies (not just a bunch of stickers to put on your car or some textures to swap on a character model, as "skin" means in other contexts).
I mean, it's both downstream and upstream. No academic endeavor happens on an island free of external influences, and the academic endeavors behind "wokeness" has clearly had extreme impact on the culture in America/the West, including the very Blue Tribe culture that had incredible input on that academia itself. That's why the chicken-and-the-egg metaphor is apt here. It's clearly both, and trying to claim that one is the actual upstream source will just lead to fallacy.
It absolutely is. It was called white guilt in the 60's and a moral blot in the 18th century and so forth. White privilege is just a fancy academic term for already existing feelings. It's not a chicken and an egg here. Feelings lead to rationalizations. Academic thought is rationalization. Ergo academic thought is ALWAYS downstream of of feelings. Feelings trump facts always. That's why you can punch holes in someone's arguments (their rationalizations) and they still will not change their mind. Because the rationalization is downstream of their internal sub-conscious feelings.
If academia did not exist, these parents and kids would still feel the same it just wouldn't be described in academic language. Academia is not as important as it thinks it is. So don't buy into it's own rhetoric.
This, too, is just false, though. White guilt, according to Wikipedia, "is a belief that white people bear a responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other ethnic groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples." This is a different concept from white privilege, which is the notion that modern society (due in large part to the legacy of overt racism) provides privileges to white people that are denied to people of other races, especially black people, in subtle, often unnoticed ways. It's a fancy academic term that builds on already existing feelings like "white guilt," but it's clearly something new that academia developed.
From what I can tell, you appear to have a near dogmatic belief in this. As long as you believe that arguments can't change someone's mind, I don't see why you would want to argue anything ever, such as in this comment thread. I think real-world evidence clearly shows that people tend to manipulate their logic and perception in order to flatter their feelings, and that whatever logic and perception they come up with also cycles back to affect their feelings. That is, even if feelings trump facts always, in the most literal sense of the word, it doesn't change the fact that beliefs about facts change feelings, and academia is and has affected people's beliefs about the facts. Especially for people who were already predisposed, via their feelings, to trust certain facts.
"Feel the same" is sufficiently vague an idea that either this statement is meaningless or wrong. Without the development of concepts like "white privilege," many modern Blue Tribe people would still feel "white guilt" or believe that white people ought to feel "white guilt." They would not feel that each and every interaction between any white person and any black person in any context is tinged with injustice due to the subtle, imperceptible patterns and biases that we practice due to growing up in a "white supremacist" society that causes us to inevitably treat black people worse than white people which thus justifies explicit, overt treatment of black people better than white people. Some might, but there's no reason to believe that everyone would just spontaneously develop these ideas on their own based on their pre-existing feelings, not without some high status institution like academia telling them that there's something Correct about these developments of ideas that build on their pre-existing feelings (in this case white guilt).
Because we don't argue to change minds or win here we argue to understand. It's right there at the top of the page.
"Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds." "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."
And I would say that the realization is probably my fundamental takeaway from being part of the political culture war for near decades. Much of what is believed about how people operate and how politics and the culture war operate is untrue. The influence of academia and the media is vastly over-stated and the influence of the society and family is vastly under-stated. That people rationalize almost all their beliefs based upon their pre-existing feelings and that this leads to the fact that people very rarely can be argued out of or into a belief set. That our societies are much more bottom up than top down, and that people complaining about politicians, academia and the like are mistaken, because as long as we are as we are, we will get the academia and politicians we deserve. Trying to get better politicians or better academics is a fools errand, because what you really need is better people in general. That much of our academics (social sciences at least) is generated from the spontaneous transmission of belief sets at the bottom up level that then gets rationalized through academic thought.
So again yes I would suggest that those ideas would in fact have spread absent academia, because race particularly is a fundamental issue within America. The tension between slavery and America's founding mythos inevitably led to the Civil War, the abolishment of slavery, white guilt, which leads to white privilege which leads to affirmative action and so on and so forth. None of that needs academia in anyway. Jefferson was able to predict it was going to be America's albatross. The idea that previous oppression leads to guilt, leads to the simple concept that interactions today can be influenced by history does not need academia. I do indeed submit that even without academia, very little would have changed as to wokism and the like.
People look at the history of slavery in the US, look at their founding mythos, look at the Civil War, look at Jim Crow and segregation and feel bad and sad that their nation, the shining city on the hill did such things. So guilt. Guilt creates an impulse to make things right, to do better, so that you can feel better. You can't undo the past so you must impact the present. So that means black people now must get something. If you're cynical that clashes with peoples own selfishness, so instead of giving up large amounts of status and money they think about it every time they interact with a black person and so on and so forth and it makes you feel more guilty. You notice that your retail workers are almost exclusively black. That your neighbors are almost exclusively white. You notice. You absolutely do not need a high status institution for this. It's noticed because it is true. Previous actions have in fact shaped the present. It doesn't require high brow thinking to realise.
Now to be sure this isn't everyone in America clearly. But it is a throughline through Blue Tribe thought, academia or no. You're correct that not everyone would develop this spontaneously. They wouldn't need to, because their neighbor would, or their parents. Social mores were transmitted and taught and punished well before we had academia. There is no reason to think it is necessary at all.
I don't think I am going to change many people's minds, if any at all. But I enjoy the back and forth and sometimes I do learn new things from new people. If people think I am wrong that is more than ok.
Understanding something that you didn't understand before means changing one's mind, though...
The rest of your comment is mostly just a just-so fictional narrative in hindsight you made up that appears to me as a rationalization for your committed belief. It's trivially easy to come up with any number of counterfactuals about how Blue Tribe's attitudes towards race would've developed with equal plausibility (and more generally, about how anything would've happened, with equal plausibility as what actually did happen), because of the nature of counterfactuals. E.g. one could respond to white guilt by just rejecting it as a concept and prioritizing individuality. Much of the Blue Tribe was on board with that in the 90s, of treating individuals as individuals who aren't tarnished with the guilt of their ancestors or people who happened to share their skin color in the case of recent immigrants. That this narrative being crushed in the Blue Tribe was destined is not proven or even supported by the fact that you can put together a narrative explaining the chain of logic.
In reality, what we do see is pretty well evidenced chain of causality of these ideas built and developed by academia spreading to society at large, often word-for-word, done with overt intent. Maybe the people intentionally doing this are mistaken. Almost certainly, they're mistaken about some of the impact they believe they have on society at large, like everyone. But to claim that they're completely mistaken and that they have zero influence in pulling Blue Tribe towards those ideas that were developed and crystalized in academia (largely based on feelings already within that Tribe), well, your arguments for such a claim seem mostly like motivated reasoning.
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