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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Good morning! Hope your week is off to a good start fellow Mottizens. I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently, and I strongly agree with nara that this place is one of the best, if not the best, places to find genuinely open political discourse on the internet.

Anyway, I want to talk about religion & modernity. The so-called 'RETVRN traditionalists' and neo-reactionaries, and how some insights from them play into the broader culture war. I was reading a post from a friend of mine on Substack, and he makes a great point with regard to religious folks trying to turn back the clock, so to speak:

The traditionalist response (reaction, more properly) is simply to deny that modernity ever happened, to summon us back to a world where we believe “what the church teaches” (whatever church the given traditionalist may have decided to adhere to), where we simply accept late ancient (or medieval) metaphysics and morals and social structures, where we simply pretend that we can exist as a beseiged outpost of this kind of religious revanchism, a faithful remnant, and make a little world for ourselves.

It’s a lie. We don’t believe it. I certainly don’t, and I don’t think anyone else really does either. We are all still moderns. Our instincts are modern. Our instincts are, by any reasonable description, liberal. The effort to force ourselves into the thoroughly pre-modern mindset is just like my hopeless attempt to inwardly resuscitate a Ptolemaic cosmology. It can’t finally work. We are who we are, in the context we are, and very fundamental elements of our understanding of and feeling of the world are inescapably at odds with the past we say we want to reanimate and reinhabit.

I am sorry to be the bearer of these bad tidings to the young people coming in droves into the traditional churches, desperately seeking some kind of firm foundation that’s been stolen from them. They feel cheated and abused, because they have been.

However, our inescapably modern and liberal instincts, are, in many cases, actually very good. I think my fundamental regard for the mystery of the human person and human liberty is indeed very good. I will die on this hill.

I strongly agree that we live in a liberal time, and have deeply liberal instincts. We can't just pretend that we don't live our lives in a liberal way, and I suspect most people talking about a return to traditionalism are, as @2rafa has (perhaps uncharitably) opined on before, simply LARPers.

This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.

In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.

Going off that last bit - once you get some years under your belt, it becomes clear from a personal standpoint that a more controlled lifestyle is just better. That saying that you have no head if you aren't a conservative in your 30s rings true in large part, in my humble opinion, because of this personal understanding. If you drink all the time, eat unhealthy food, smoke constantly, etc, you will very quickly find that your 'personal freedom' isn't worth much when you constantly feel terrible.

While convincing people may be much harder, I am convinced (heh) that it's the best way forward. As someone who changed my mind on the more traditional lifestyle largely through argumentation and personal experience, I am living proof that changing hearts and minds is possible on this front. Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.

I won't deny that modern liberalism has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to the religious context. However, as I've argued, going back seems foolish and not that desirable even if we could. I'll end this with a further quote from the article I quoted above, as I think it ends better than I could:

And here I am: a post-traditionalist, in the sense that, although my heart burns when I enter into the depths of traditional religion, I also see that traditionalism as a movement is ultimately false and bankrupt, it is a hopeless and deceptive rearguard action, a denial of reality and a denial of so much concrete, theoretical, and mystical good that people have created when they have striven as moderns to free themselves from tradition, from what has been merely handed down. As the early Quaker Margaret Fell said, “You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say?”

Indeed — what canst thou say? This is what I want to hear, what I want to discover, both in freedom, and in the deepest love and gratitude for our forebears in the faith. Because above all, I want to do this for the sake of cleaving to Jesus. What is the anchor, what is the center, when criticism turns everything upside down, when a mere formal, outward return to ancient faith is impossible, and where inwardly and existentially conforming myself to that ancient faith is also impossible? Where a thoroughgoing modernity, on the other hand, leaves us lost in a land barren and untrodden and unwatered?

Edit: ended up writing this into a more full Substack post, if anyone is interested.

Then how did Muslims conquere the UK?

Ok, maybe I advanced past the sell there. But hang with me.

This whole post is basically defeatism. Declaring as psychologically, culturally and metaphysically impossible any sort of return to tradition. "Liberalism" has destroyed the old ways so thoroughly and completely, and habituated everyone against them so innately, that even attempting to go back is just LARPing.

Then how do you explain Islam in Europe? How were they not just swallowed up by the overculture of liberalism they migrated into? How did they not end up as islands of backwards LARPers constantly getting worn away by the relentless tide of liberalism against their shores?

Go back further, how did Islam reclaim the entire region? How did it turn Lebenon, "Paris of the Middle East", a model of a secular liberal society in the heart of the Middle East, back into an Islamic stronghold, with it's own Islamic paramilitary?

There are examples near and far that this model of "Liberal Supremacy", where no other sincere modes of thought are even possible in the face of the overwhelming dominance of liberalism are clearly shown to be false everywhere you look around the globe. I begin to suspect this whole line of thought is just another demoralization psyop.

They have by no means conquered the UK, as evidenced by the healthy and explosive pushback that has occurred recently. Besides that, they have been "liberalized" in a way. They smoke, they drink, and they fuck before marriage. They steal, rob and rape. They present as ultra-conservatives, and then engage in the most degenerate shit. Effectively, they've been converted into the homogenous globalized underclass, which Liberalism creates. Their present dysfunction is proof of Liberalism's power.

Lebanon's Islamisation occurred due to an influx of Palestinian refugee's, sectarian infighting, and a much larger state sponsoring said Islamic paramilitary. And besides, Lebanon was by no means a secular Liberal Society. The Lebanese Christian, Suni, and Shia, themselves, not the Sunni Palestinians, engaged in all manner of war crimes; these groups did not believe in Liberalism as you understand it. In the Middle East, ethnic and religious conflict is usually solved by appeals to overriding authoritarian nationalism, not by principled Liberalism. When that authoritarian nationalism falls apart, as in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, then sectarian conflict occurs.

Hezbollah was not a genuine Lebanese reaction towards Liberalism. It was a foreign paramilitary force, funded, armed and supported by Syria and Iran, that took advantage of the Lebanese state's weakness; it was never indigenous to Lebanon, or had a broad base of support. In fact, due to Israel's war, they've been neutered as an effective force in Lebanon, so ironically, they are an example of Liberalism (or whatever the fuck Israel is) triumphing over Islam.

Part of it seems to be an insane blindspot amidst the Left with underdog fetishism where it's gauche to consider what the current underdogs actually believe and how they'd hypothetically behave if handed the reins of power.

Maybe it's follow-on from the 'Left social values are simply correct and will naturally win over the foreigners if given a chance' kinda mindset but there's unspoken assumption of human cultural fungibility that leads to the whole 'Muslim Democrat Local Leaders cancel Pride Week' headline that's cropping up fairly frequently now. Even most Left thinking on Israel v Palestine seems to be of the 'Israel are currently being mean but if they stopped the situation would instantly resolve into kumbayah'

Britain is sending cops at God knows how many people for their tweets but we're supposed to draw the twin conclusions that:

  1. The state is just neutrally defending "liberty"
  2. The current status quo is unassailable.

how did Muslims conquere the UK?

Canada is a great model to understand this dynamic. Despite being 2% of the population, Sikhs have outsized influence on Canadian political discourse.

If a group is transactional, ghettoized and votes together, then it can single handed swing elections in a divided nation. If 2% of the population can swing elections, then imagine what 7% Muslims can achieve in a significantly more divided nation.

A few factors put UK in a worse position than Canada or Europe.

  1. UK whites are more divided than European whites. Divided majority = powerful minority.
  2. Britain (and anglo countries in general) struggles to integrate immigrants into the culture, because Anglo culture is generally under-defined. Having exported its values globally, there is little it can claim exclusive ownership of. Suffering from success. In contrast, the French convert immigrants into french people first and foremost.
  3. Worse Muslims. Not all Muslims are created equal. UK's Muslims are ultra conservative Pahadis (from Pakistan) and rural Bangladeshis. These groups were ghettoized and under-integrated in their already conservative home countries. Integrating them into UK, is like playing on hard mode. Germany's Turks and France's north-Africans are much easier to deal with. Sweden has been dealt a similarly bad hand, and we can already see how that's going.
  4. Bad economy. The UK has been going downhill since the global financial crisis. Countries on the up have good optics. The US does this well. Because the American dream pays off, all sorts of misaligned cultures buy into the American dream. Winning is contagious. The UK ain't winning.

Part of the reason the US assimilates well is that the ‘red’ inscrutable cultural package lifestyle is very appealing to working people the world over- bbq, pickups, guns, etc. The UK doesn’t have any equivalent for non-elites.

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