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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5184 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.

I'd agree that for better or worse the 'capital T' Traditional world is dying. I think an important factor that's often overlooked is that the ubiquitous preindustrial peasant sustenance economies that dominated almost the entire globe 200 years ago are gone entirely or radically diminished today in Europe, America, East Asia and increasingly the developing world as well. Most old religious and cultural traditions were made by and for people who lived in in societies that were arranged very differently from ours, and these traditions served the needs and aspirations of the people who lived in these types of societies.

Obviously there are differences; Rome isn't Babylon, which isn't the kingdom of Mercia, which isn't the Delhi Sultanate etc. However, there are some very broad comonalities in premodern agricultural societies that dont apply to today. We aren't as subject to the seasons or time of day for our livelihoods anymore. Our lives arent determined by the will of a military aristocracy. Corvee labor isnt really a thing. I feel that if the spirit of our traditions is to continue into the future, it will need to confront and interact with the world we have, not the one our ancestors did.

For a tradition to survive it needs to retain its core foundational ideas, while simultaneously adapting its teachings and doctrine to the industrial world and really decide what they want to integrate vs discard. Are vtubers haram? Maybe. Is launching a nuclear war moral in X or Y circumstance? Maybe not. But I think that having these sorts of ready made answers would be a massive boon for most religions, even if the rulings are arbitrary or rely on esoteric theology.

I'd agree that for better or worse the 'capital T' Traditional world is dying. I think an important factor that's often overlooked is that the ubiquitous preindustrial peasant sustenance economies that dominated almost the entire globe 200 years ago are gone entirely or radically diminished today in Europe, America, East Asia and increasingly the developing world as well.

This. How would modern "trad" society look like? How would modern industrial infrastructure, both hard and soft, run on traditional feudal principles? I am not aware of any trad engaging with this question at all.

How would modern industrial infrastructure, both hard and soft, run on traditional feudal principles?

I'd say, start with looking at the UAE and at Imperial Japan — the latter in particular shows combining rapid industrialization with predominantly feudal social structures. (I'll also remind people that the majority of marriages in Japan were arranged — either by families or through the traditional omiai matchmaking system — all the way until the late 1960s. I also recall at least one author comparing the lifetime employment, and loyalty to the company, of the 1980s Japanese salaryman to the feudal fealty of their ancestors a century or so prior.)

Now, I know people will argue that the UAE only works because of oil — I've encountered proponents of strict "deterministic" correlations of political forms and technological abilities who've baldly asserted that "the moment the oil runs out" every single modern building in Dubai will literally crumble into dust and the population will be "back to riding camels and living in 1800s conditions the very next day."

As for the criticisms I get on Japan as model, I must once again note that there is a huge difference between "you can't mix feudal social norms with industrial technology because social and technological determinism make them fundamentally incompatible and doom the attempt to collapse from the internal contradictions" and "you can't mix feudal social norms with industrial technology because the US will bomb you into submission if you try."

(Also, I might add that you're just not reading the right sci-fi.)

Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary both went through phases of industrializing without that much added social liberalism; of course they lost a war so we can’t see how the experiment would’ve turned out.

It's worth noting Dubai isn't that dependent on oil and has successfully diversified according to Wikipedia only 5% of Dubai's revenue comes from oil.

I'd agree that for better or worse the 'capital T' Traditional world is dying. I think an important factor that's often overlooked is that the ubiquitous preindustrial peasant sustenance economies that dominated almost the entire globe 200 years ago are gone entirely or radically diminished today in Europe, America, East Asia and increasingly the developing world as well. Most old religious and cultural traditions were made by and for people who lived in in societies that were arranged very differently from ours, and these traditions served the needs and aspirations of the people who lived in these types of societies.

Extremely good points! Yeah even the metaphors and language in the Bible is very focused on those types of cultures. Having to answer all these complex questions certainly seems to have overwhelmed church hierarchies.

The rapid pace of technological advancement also seems quite difficult to keep up with when trying to promote a careful solution that fits with centuries of dogma and other teachings.

I have no idea what lends credence to his argument. The exact opposite has been shown to be true since the end of the 20th century. Fukuyama's 'End of History' thesis was laudably ambitious but most societies that were wrapped up in his prediction went the other direction by almost 180 degrees. They greatly retain and drew their ideas for economic and technological development from their historical traditions. Japanese manufacturing for instance did that with Zen Buddhism in the 20th century at the same time people were declaring the triumph over tradition. Technology has hardly supplanted tradition and I think it's unlikely it will in the near future either.

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