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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5188 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.

Great post.

The current "best" choice for our young adults from their perspective is the continued liberalism and juvenilization of our society. They're not having to make the same sacrifices, and I understand why, but our society has now been forced to cater to 30 year old juveniles with their juvenile emotional maturity. Video game bars everywhere, bars that are pet friendly, Disney adults, etc. It's bars with games fucking everywhere. Go over to reddit and look at the popularity of subreddits like /r/malelivingspace. A lot of the places are cool looking, but as you would expect they're all clean bachelor pads and/or studios that look like a one man LAN party room. Single men with cool apartments isn't a crime. It's just the romanticization of that lifestyle that's really hard to overlook when the alternative, at least on the surface, is a way more "unnecessary" sacrifice. The dating market is a disaster: the freedom, control, and lack of accountability that society has given to women when it comes to sex, makes modern courting feel like you're walking through a minefield, blindfolded. It's all mostly high risk/low reward tradeoffs. To top it off, a large portion of guys this age have been exposed to porn and many prefer that over the real thing. One can easily understand why having a cool apartment and a terabyte of the porn you like, and being on your own schedule is a "better" option. There's no grief or jealousy that you'll almost certainly have to deal with if you have a young attractive girlfriend. It's an easy choice with consequences that don't directly present themselves until decades after the point of no return.

I wonder about the feasibility of getting people to behave in a more self-sacrificing way without forcing them to do it. My first thought (and something that had drastically impacted my own life) is for people to have and raise children. It's like bootcamp for adulthood. I knew that it would be difficult, but I didn't know in what ways it would be. The amount of daily sacrifice made by my wife and I is something I couldn't have possibly understood by someone trying to explain it, and I think this applies to so many of the things that we try to convey to people through our words and that simply cannot compare when it comes to lived experiences. Having an infant you're raising and protecting grow into a little person before your eyes is a truly wonderful experience. I've posted here before that my kids are not biologically mine, and that we adopted them after them being the foster system. One we picked up directly from the NICU as an infant. When that child was almost 1, I took a picture of them while they were on a swing, and the picture that appeared on my phone just shook me in a way that nothing else ever has. I have deep questions about god and religion, but the way that baby looked at me through that image was the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever felt. It was like God was looking at me through those eyes. So, there is all the sacrifice that comes with this life choice, and it's rough at times, but there is something on the backend of it that cannot be put into words and therefore cannot be argued to the intelligent (often leftist) Westerner who only believes in what is materially achievable.

I don't know how you marry modern living and religion on a broader scale, but the kid trick seems like the most tried and true process. I'd like to hear others, including @TitaniumButterfly's take on the potential of molding these two seemingly incompatible lifestyles into something that might be more workable. Obviously, any "taking away" of rights will bring out the wailing banshees, but even their "argument" about rights is starting to bring consequences to light that people have warned about for ages.

Self-sacrifice, I think, is born in part of the realization that nothing important is sacrificed.

If people believe the “self” is paramount, they will sacrifice everything at that altar. That’s a pretty tidy modus ponens. Reality is that the self is nothing but a heat haze. It comes, and it passes. There are other things more enduring. Duty, for instance. Then it’s easy to do things that are hard.

The other day, my father said to me: “I don’t really feel pain as deeply as other people. I think it’s because, in my youth, I had a few times when I was in really intense pain, and couldn’t do anything about it. So, I suppose, my body learned it wasn’t anything life-threatening. So it doesn’t bother me any more.” So too threats to the “self.” One lives through them. But enforcing it, I think, may just make it worse. Simply support them. Show the fruits of another life, and they may be persuaded.

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