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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41917 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.

most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy.

How far back turning the dial of time does returning to tradition mean? It's like a tradeoff between higher relative status for White males and lower standards of living, vs less status and the fruits of modernity. I think for the former category, there was more freedom compared to today. But also, I think people have a conception or idealization of a past that didn't really exist, when in reality things were pretty disorderly back then. If you read the biographies of artists and writers who grew up in the mid to early 20th century, when America was assumed to be more conservative and religious, a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances. it's like these ppl were in and out of detention and skipping school and smoking and drinking in their early teens, and no one cared that much. Nowadays, things are much more strict.

If you read the biographies of artists and writers who grew up in the mid to early 20th century, when America was assumed to be more conservative and religious, a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances. it's like these ppl were in and out of detention and skipping school and smoking and drinking in their early teens, and no one cared that much.

I think that was viable in large part because of the lower rate of serious criminality. (Particularly in white neighborhoods before desegregation.) If crime is less of a problem, if fewer people are escalating from minor offenses to murder, then you don't need to be as harsh to keep it down. It's like a thermostat, if the furnace is running more (harsher policing and sentencing), the insulation is better (older population), and yet the temperature inside (murder rate) is the same or colder then it's probably colder outside. An alternative explanation would be that the furnace doesn't work, but based on stuff like the success of 90s tough-on-crime efforts and the surge from the Ferguson/Floyd Effect it seems like policing has the expected effect, it just has more to handle. Similarly in other countries harsher policing seems effective but the countries that need to resort to it are the ones that had crime problems to begin with. Of course none of this means that "less religiosity" or the like is one of the reasons why, I just think the tradeoffs here are underappreciated. There's a tendency for people to either believe harsh policing and sentencing is intrinsically good/free (Why should we worry about the welfare of criminal scum?), or to believe that it's evil/useless (Don't you know Sweden has 18% of the U.S. incarceration rate and yet it has only 20% of the U.S. murder rate? Why can't we just use their system?). I think the better way to think about it is that it's a necessary but serious cost and the preferable situation is to avoid paying it by having less criminality to begin with.

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