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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26101 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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To what degree and type of values-coherence do you require?

Have you read Conservatives as Moral Mutants?

And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

So it goes.

That's an example of what not enough overlap for society to function looks like.

Zunger was straightforwardly correct:

No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.

i am indeed a Christian. I don't require people to also be Christians to live in peace with them. I don't require the laws to be Christian laws to live in peace under them, since there is very little the law can do to secure Christian ends. I am happy to cooperate with people who disagree with me on some things to achieve the other things that we do agree on. I am willing to extend liberty to others to the extent that they are willing to extend liberty back.

On the other hand, the more cohesive my community and the more fringe the demand of tolerance from those at its fringes, the more it seems to me that people who are incapable of fitting in should simply go somewhere else. This principle works the other way: I and mine should not casually intrude into the lives and communities of those alien to us. We should interact with those we can tolerate, and those we cannot tolerate we should separate from and avoid. This is not out of any high-minded principle, but only the practical wisdom of circles of concern. People far away are not generally as much of a problem as those close by; you are never going to conquer the whole world and institute global utopia, so the best thing is to make your bit as good as possible, and let those far away do as they will.

There is no definable "line". Either people are willing to cooperate or they are not. Either you can tolerate others or you cannot. Both maximizing and minimizing tolerance have serious downsides; you need a happy medium, and there is no way to rigorously define where that medium is. There is no way to codify it into a set of legible rules. If you have too much tolerance, values drift and society collapses. If you have too little tolerance, you fall into purity spirals and infighting and society collapses. There's no substitute for prudence and sound judgement.

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