site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Martha Nussbaum writes about wild animal suffering in the New York Review of Books.

Sort of. That exact wording is not used, and the utilitarian discourse on the subject not referenced, but it clearly is the same general thought. And it is very cathedralised. We have:

The "everything is political":

In the US, “wild horses” and other “wild” creatures live under the jurisdiction of our nation and its states. To the extent that they have limited rights of nonintervention, free movement, and even a type of property rights, that is because human law has seen fit to give them these rights. Humans are in control everywhere. Humans decide what habitats to protect for animals, and leave the animals only what they decide not to use.

One might grant that the current status quo is that humans dominate everywhere, while still recommending that humans simply back off and leave all the “wild” animals in all of these spaces to do the best they can for themselves. Even that proposal would require active human intervention to stop human practices that interfere with animal lives: poaching, hunting, whaling. And it would be, it seems, a gross abnegation of responsibility: we have caused all these problems, and we turn our backs on them, saying, “Well, you are wild animals, so live with it as best you can.” It is not clear what would be accomplished by this pretense of a hands-off policy.

The critical theorising:

There are also some very bad reasons for not moving against predation. Part of the Romantic idea of “the wild” is a yearning for violence. Blake’s Tyger and Shelley’s West Wind are emblems of what some humans feel they have lost by becoming hypercivilized. A longing for (putatively) lost aggression lies behind a lot of people’s fascination with large predatory animals and indeed with the spectacle of predation itself.

(And much more in this direction. That is most of the article.)

And just enough mention of the exterminationist angle to stay deniable:

Moreover, the animal reservation is geared as a whole to this exercise: the wild dogs are highly endangered, and much effort is made to preserve them. I am agnostic about the desirability of preserving that species, but I think here the central concern prompting preservation is a bad one: money from sado-tourism.

I find this interesting in light of an ongoing debate about cthulhu theory: Whether new leftist causes are relatively obvious consequences of general principles that have already been driving the movement for a long time, or have more short-term cynical explanations. I lean towards the former and think this example supports that:

I think that today, its easy to see the Singer&Co rationale in an article like this. But if the Motte-equivalent of 2100 is arguing about that, and everyone has heard stuff like the link in public school, and then someone tries explain how this was anticipated by the obscure philosoper Singer, I can imagine that going quite a lot worse.

This line of thought actually scares me because it can be used as propaganda against making humans and animals healthier. This will be propaganda to destroy more nature in the guise of protecting nature. In particular

Even the time-honored idea of the “balance of nature” has by now been decisively refuted by modern ecological thinking

Is pants on head dim. The death and competition of wild animals serves to purify their health. When the birds are healthy they produce more offspring, only a few of which will be healthy and produce more; and the birds that eat the most nutritious seeds will distribute these widely. The principle is baked into all living things. When you take, eg, humans out of nature’s filter, you see autoimmune diseases increase, dysgenics increase, etc — this is what the urbanite neo-philosopher fears, that people realize their “people” are slowly being corrupted. I would call this fear a little culturally Jewish, and it does seem Nussbaum converted — because Jews have been divorced from agriculture for so long, were oppressed by Darwinian thinking, and (although I can’t find it) but Jewish groups have warned about eco-fascism in the past.

Yes, when the weakest animals die they suffer, but consider the happiness gained by:

  • Future generations, who are healthier

  • The healthier animals, who procreate and have more resources

  • The predator, whose enjoyment of predation is his entire life

  • All who enjoy more and healthier foliage and trees

You cannot “save” the weak animals in nature without a worse cost. If you feed them, that is feed taken from those who deserve it. If you allow them to procreate, those are weaker animals that are destined to die anyway. Anything that substantively saves them longterm makes the whole of the community unhealthier.

I stand by my ethical principle that I do not care if 100 trillions dolphins die, the only thing I care about is if the dolphin “community” is healthy and thriving in its niche, balanced with the needs of the ecosystem

I wouldn't worry about it. You have to be really far up your own ass to take "wild animal suffering" seriously and it's the kind of topic that vaporizes in a cloud of laughter anywhere with an atmosphere comprised of less than 50% farts. Seriously imagine trying to describe this "problem" to anyone with a job that involves being responsible for anything real.

Oh god, we're doomed, aren't we?

In case what I'm saying isn't clear - you are aware this was said about the entire currently dominant progressive memeplex?