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 -
Zunger said it better, and like six years ago. Policy starvation's a bitch, ain't it?
What's policy starvation?
One of the observable mechanisms of social decay.
Long ago, I promised to write an effort post about this, but then I kinda lost the ability to write effort-posts. Here's the short version:
People want a thing. People clamor for the thing they want. Lots of different would-be leaders step forward offering to help organize the getting of the thing. These would-be leaders each have a different plan for how they'll get the thing. The plans tend to differ a lot their projections of how much effort and extremity will be required to get the thing.
As a rule, people don't want effort or extremity, so they tend to go with the plans that promise the easiest solutions first. When those don't work, they grudgingly accept the plans involving a little more pain and effort, and so on. Ideally, they reach a plan that gets them at least an approximation of what they want without too much pain and hardship. The people get what they want, the successful leaders are lauded for their excellent work, and everyone goes home happy.
But suppose people decide they want something that can't actually be gotten? The process above is carried out, starting with the easy plans, then the moderate plans, then the serious, hard-nosed plans. One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded, but the people are still unsatisfied. Failed plans might be tweaked, but after a number of attempts grow discredited, and people stop backing them. If the thing people want isn't achievable by the means available, and people won't stop wanting it, you get policy starvation: people gravitate to to solutions and the leaders proposing them that under better circumstances would never be given the time of day, but now amass credibility as the only people offering solutions that haven't already obviously failed, if only because they haven't been tried yet. In the same way that physical starvation drives people to the extremity of eating spoiled food, and ultimately grass, shoe-leather or human flesh in an attempt to satiate their physical need for sustenance, starvation of policy drives people to extreme political acts: insurrection, revolution, civil war, democide.
Look around you, and you'll see it everywhere, on both sides. In this case, troll or no, Liberalism's promise was that once we adopted its norms, everyone would just sorta chill out, everything would work out, reason would carry the day, mumble mumble you get the Federation from Star Trek. It hasn't worked out like that. His generation did not, in fact, get it right, and they were, in fact, making promises, promises they were powerless to fulfill. And so they gifted us a world where people have lost confidence in the moderate Skokie solutions, and turn to Zunger's extremist zealotry instead.
What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though? You say people haven’t chilled out but then again we haven’t had a major war or civil unrest for decades.
Also we have done a decently good job of living together in a diverse society. It’s not perfect, but I doubt it ever was. Dissidents were just silenced in the past or didn’t make it into the history books. Now we’re letting that frustration out, which is on balance a good thing if we can figure out how to address it.
Don't mistake eloquence and verbosity for truth and just roll over and abandon your point because people posted 15 links to their extensive post histories from the last three years. There's a steelman to be had for things aren't as bad as the terminally online make them out to be, that liberalism has been remarkably successful and is worth fighting for, and that this is still the best time and place to be alive bar none.
It's easy to paint a grim picture of liberalism and the West when it's failures are trumpeted to the heavens while it's successes are the water we swim in.
This is extremely good advice, and I entirely endorse it.
On the other hand, would you agree that Liberalism has in fact made promises? If so, what specific promises do you recognize being made, and how do you think they've turned out? Is education a reasonable area to start with?
Sure, although it's probably changed some over the centuries and depending who you ask.
If you let me take credit for everything since the enlightenment and French/American revolutions, it seems like an easy answer; look at literacy rates, STEM knowledge in the populace (what fraction of 19th century mill workers could tell you the Pythagorean theorem or that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, I wonder?), and, at the risk of Goodharting myself, High school/college/doctoral diplomas. If you're slightly more stringent, you could control for general 'progress' by comparing these metrics with 'illiberal' countries, and I expect we'd outperform them over the last several hundred years. If you insist on controlling for disparities in wealth, well, aren't you conceding to some degree that liberalism has some comparative advantage?
At the risk of sounding high-school-essay-level trite, liberalism promises self-determination; the right to choose one's spouse, one's religion, one's vocation. It promises political self-determination, free speech, so on and so forth.
Much of the criticism put forth below is less about the ideals and goals of liberalism, and rather instances of failed execution. Freedom of X is important, but people didn't really believe in it. You could be handed stone tablets laying out God's flawless ideology for humanity, and if Jimbo down the street decides to covet his neighbor's wife, we're still out of luck. If you'd argue that theory is all well and good but we're consequentialists damnit, much like Winston Churchill on democracy, it still seems like western liberal democracies are getting better results.
I think this is probably about the best steel-man one could reasonably expect.
Are liberalism/the Enlightenment the same thing, in your view? Connected things? Entirely separate things?
Is the US a liberal democracy? Was it one prior to the civil rights act? Prior to suffrage? Prior to the abolition of slavery? If we reversed some or all of these policies tomorrow, would we still be a "liberal democracy"? Is "liberal democracy" applied based on objective criteria, or do we judge a nation relative to its contemporaries?
More to the point, do we label based on the ideological approach to policy, or do we judge based on the policies chosen and their outcomes?
I'm certainly willing to let you take credit for everything since the enlightenment and French/American revolutions, but shouldn't that credit be for the bad things that sprang from the ideology, not merely the good? And shouldn't we be rigorous in questioning whether any thing, good or bad, is actually attributable to the ideology, not merely coincident? Take Literacy, for example.
...And of course that was only the continuation of previous policies among protestants, going back to the Reformation itself, if I'm not mistaken. Is Christianity part of the Enlightenment/Liberal Vangaurd? Does its centuries-old drive for universal literacy, valuing of education, philosophy and science get some credit for the water we swim in as well?
The Soviets promised most of the things on that list, claimed to be motivated by Enlightenment principles while doing it, and insisted strenuously that they were delivering. Of course, we know they were "illiberal" thanks to hindsight, despite the fact that most of their unimpeachably liberal contemporaries completely failed to recognize that fact for a generation or two. Do you see the problem?
...I fear this is not cohering into a legible argument, only a series of disconnected gripes.
I think the term "liberal", by itself, doesn't actually mean much. I think the way people typically use it is as a synonym for Enlightenment ideology. The problem with this is that Enlightenment ideology has repeatedly resulted in wildly illiberal outcomes, and the most successful "liberal" societies have not actually hued very closely to Enlightenment ideology in a number of very important ways, among them a deep and abiding connection to the Christian faith. I note that societies that lacked or removed this connection in favor of pure Enlightenment ideology did very, very badly indeed, and I note that as Christian faith has passed the tipping point into serious decline, even anglosphere countries have found themselves in a protracted crisis of rising illiberalism.
I think the general argument you're sketching the outlines of papers over these realities in ways that are easy to miss if one simply goes with the cultural zeitgeist. Enlightenment ideology takes credit for outcomes it did not solely or sometimes even mainly create, and it ditches all responsibility for harms it very clearly causes. The Enlightenment is certainly one of the sources American Culture has drawn from, but it has drawn even more heavily from others; when it comes time to tally benefits and harms, all the benefits are tallied to the Enlightenment, whether it caused them or not, and all the harms are tallied to the others, whether they were responsible for them or not. Then too, one can simply ignore or define away harms in the present, and likewise for benefits in the past; history is just writing, after all, and statistics are famously malleable.
I think the above is how the liberal triumphalism you're describing is generated, and I think it's a fair start at describing why it is doomed to collapse.
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
More options
Context Copy link