site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Menorahs on Public Lands

The Windows OS has a new feature that displays a small icon in the Desktop search bar. The icon rotates every few days based on the calendar, similar to Google's tradition of customizing their search page. I never paid attention to it until I noticed a Menorah displayed on my Desktop. Presumably subsequent icons would show presents or a Christmas Tree. Certainly, though, it will never display a Nativity or Christian Cross.

I learned recently that Allegheny v. ACLU ruled that a Nativity on public land, as a religious symbol, violates the Establishment Clause but a Menorah on public land does not. According to the logic of the ruling, the Menorah and Christmas Tree are secular symbols of the winter holidays and do not constitute the endorsement of a religion while the Nativity does so. The logic is on its face patently absurd as the Menorah is not a secular symbol in any sense. It is a sacred symbol honoring a miracle upon the successful Jewish revolt against the Hellenists. Reading various opinions from Jewish publications, it is clear that many Jews continue to interpret the public lighting of the Menorah from an adversarial perspective:

The policy argument against public menorah lightings is that we, as Jews, are a tiny minority, surrounded by a dominant religion with a missionary agenda. If the majority religion were given free reign to display its symbols publicly, the results could be disastrous. At best, we would be made to feel like outsiders, a tolerated minority. At worst, we would find ourselves victims of overt proselytization or even anti-semitic attacks...

The dominant religion surrounds us with its symbols anyway. Our children see it and are inevitably affected. The gentile "holiday spirit" touches almost every Jew's life.

We, as Jews, can react one of two ways. We can ignore it, hoping that this yearly bombardment goes away. Or we can affirmatively counter in a positive, Jewish manner. Public menorahs are the Jewish answer to the gap felt by many Jews during the holiday season. The dominant religion will display its decorations anyway, whether we light our menorahs or not. Why not give a Jewish child the opportunity to feel some pride about his or her holiday, when his Gentile friends are doing the same?

The Establishment of Religion Takes Many Forms

The concept of the Establishment of Religion is tenuous and arbitrary. What is religion except for a unique collection of symbols, rituals, and myths that have an, often consciously-designed, psychological effect on intended flocks? That psychological effect influences our behavior: it affects our loyalties and our behavior towards the ingroup/outgroup, our code of conduct in society, our mate selection and reproductive behaviors, our politics, our community rituals, and much more.

Myth, Religion, art, politics, and culture all belong under the same umbrella. Religion is everywhere and most people today do not consume their religious messaging through a church but through mass media. Many here have interpreted the BLM movement and protests as a Religious movement, often with the intent to dismiss it or ridicule it. This power of mass media was envisioned by Richard Wagner:

The text is fed into the throat of a singer; the output of this throat is fed into an amplifier named orchestra, the output of this orchestra is fed into a light show, and the whole thing, finally, is fed into the nervous system of the audience.

In other words, Wagner's acoustics is posited as a media invention that employed a large, yet hidden orchestra to produce "acoustic hallucinations" and immerse the audience in a reverberant sound. This account thus determines a "total world" of hearing in the vocal and musical content of Wagnerian music-drama... its sensory overwhelming created an aesthetic experience that we may now see as a "prehistory" for present-day cinema.

Wagner's conception of proto mass-media as Gesamtkunstwerk was preempted by Plato, who two thousand years earlier envisioned the psychological power of the cinematic projection of light. Today, our consumption of Myth: those projections which intelligently orient our view of the world in understanding right and wrong, heroes and villain, are increasingly delivered through mass media rather than traditional religious institutions.

Earlier this week at the lighting of the Menorah inside the White House, not to be confused with the giant Menorah on the White House Lawn, President Biden remarked "Together, we must stand up against the disturbing rise in antisemitism" while touting the December 12th formation of the Inter-Agency Group to Counter Antisemitism, which will be "led by Domestic Policy Council staff and National Security Council staff to increase and better coordinate U.S. Government efforts to counter antisemitism":

The President has tasked the inter-agency group, as its first order of business, to develop a national strategy to counter antisemitism. This strategy will raise understanding about antisemitism and the threat it poses to the Jewish community and all Americans, address antisemitic harassment and abuse both online and offline, seek to prevent antisemitic attacks and incidents, and encourage whole-of-society efforts to counter antisemitism and build a more inclusive nation.

At the ceremony, also emphasized was "securing the largest-ever increase in federal funding for the physical security of nonprofits, including synagogues and Jewish Community Centers".

Likewise, in the recently passed 2023 budget, in addition to at least $4 billion for Israel, over $65 million in federal funds was allocated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which, combined with the abundant support from private funds, amounted to a whopping $245 million in support for that museum in 2022. That makes it apparently, and by far, the most well-funded museum in the Nation's capital with well over 3x the funding of the National WWII Museum.

In contrast, the National Museum of American History had a 2018 budget of $40 million despite the fact it received 3.8M visitors in 2016, in comparison to the Holocaust Museum's 1.6 million for that year.

Which of the above should be considered the establishment of religion? All of it.

Christmas is Never Secular

In the same vein, Christmas is fundamentally a Religious festival even in its most non-Christian expression. It's the time of year where the masses practice a form of religious observance that is more comparable to a pagan, pre-Christian form of worship.

We ritualistically build our household lararium next to the hearth. We set out milk and cookies as an offering to a benevolent god who lives in a mystical Hyperborean realm, judges our behavior, and leaves us gifts. We honor his image in our films, songs, and Myth, especially to the delight of women and children. We carry on quirky household traditions which are transmitted ancestrally. Our celebration of Christmas and observance of Santa Claus would be more similar to the way the Romans, for example, worshipped their ancestral or household gods.

In this sense a "secular Christmas symbol" is an oxymoron. There is no such thing, which is acknowledged by the Jewish perspective which remarked on the foreignness and inescapability of the gentile "Holiday Spirit". The reality is that both the Menorah and Christmas Tree are religious symbols, and the government is constructively establishing religion with its display of both.

The "War on Christmas"

The Christians, in a way, get the short end of the stick for not being allowed to display their sacred symbols on public land. But who do they have to blame for that? They have allowed, without much protest, the designation of their own religion as second-class to the financial and legal privileges granted to Judaism. Christians tilt at windmills while sacred symbols of Jewish Victory tower over them during the Christmas holiday at the White House and Central Park, while their own sacred symbols are outlawed on the same land.

To reverse course, Christians would need to adopt the adversarial perspective that motivates Jews to light the Menorahs in these spaces. But given Christian doctrine it is not clear that the religion is capable of asserting itself in that way.

Yes, certain parts of the legal establishment have a blatant double standard against Christianity. I’m not exactly philosemitic, but it certainly to me doesn’t seem to be an example of Jewish domination and victory over Christianity or whatever. No doubt a Diwali or Ramadan display would be allowed to, because the relevant variable is certain parts of the blue tribe having a distaste for public expressions of Christian faith, not Jewish privilege.

I’m not exactly philosemitic, but it certainly to me doesn’t seem to be an example of Jewish domination and victory over Christianity or whatever.

If the Christian cross were permitted to be displayed on public land but Jewish religious symbols were banned, would you interpret that as symbolically meaningful? If so, how?

There’s really three possible explanations for that scenario- the people making the decisions have an animus against jews or Judaism, the people making that decision want to promote Christianity over other religions, and some combination thereof(eg the people making that decision want to promote Christianity over Judaism because they have an animus against Judaism). And you’d need to think about which explanation is likely correct based on the available evidence.

Well, we know that large portions of the blue tribe seem incredibly uncomfortable with the religious aspects of Christianity, and don’t share that discomfort with other religions(eg, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism). So banning nativity sets in public fits with that pattern, and forcing blue tribe preferences on people who seem like they might be red tribe sympathetic, while ignoring similar behavior that doesn’t have the same connotations, is fairly common and normal.

The "red tribe" and "blue tribe" heuristic is way overused, there are other types of tribes. The "Blue Tribe" dislike of Christianity has little to do with the driving forces behind the emergence of Public Menorah lightings. Joe Biden has now done two separate Menorah lightings at the White House where he's promised the Jewish People major financial handouts to Israel, Jewish causes, synagogues and Jewish community centers, as well as only this month created a task force to use the National Security apparatus to organize a government response against anti-Semitism.

Does any of this strike you as symbolically demonstrating the political and cultural power of Judaism in the United States government? You think it really reduces to a "blue tribe" dislike of Christianity?

I think that Jews as a group have lots of power in the US and that they're generally not interested in using this power to promote the Jewish religion, for the simple reason that they mostly don't believe in it themselves.

I also think that 'dislike of the religious aspects of christianity' is a real thing that really explains a lot of blue tribe behavior and hypocritical-seeming behavior of institutions under substantial blue tribe sway, and that rounding it all off to Judaism or whatever is dumb because almost none of these people are themselves religious Jews, and that even if a disproportionate number of them are ethnically Jewish it's still a very large majority of them that are gentiles.

I think that Jews as a group have lots of power in the US and that they're generally not interested in using this power to promote the Jewish religion, for the simple reason that they mostly don't believe in it themselves.

Their religion is themselves, and they are their religion. Their religion is a matrilieanly-inherited status to the Chosen people, and that membership is often extremely important even to "non-religious" Jews. Their influence to give themselves special financial and legal privileges as members of that group, handouts of federal funds to their synagogues and community centers, billions of dollars of taxpayer money to their ethnostate, and now a "task force" which will use the national security apparatus to "counter" people who dare to criticize them... That is all promoting their religion, even if "promoting their religion" does not involve great effort to convert gentiles.

You don't necessarily promote a religion by trying to convert others. You can promote it by giving it special status and privileges and protections, or by lighting giant menorahs in symbolically important spaces where Christians are denied a Nativity during the Christian's own very import holiday.

You think it really reduces to a "blue tribe" dislike of Christianity?

I'm not @hydroacetylene, but stated bluntly, yes. I really do think it reduces down to that.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats