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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:
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:
Edit: ended up writing this into a more full Substack post, if anyone is interested.
I’d like to break the “retvrn question” down along two axes. One is the criteria of evaluation: truth, helpfulness, and social attainability. The other is the spectrum of ideologies under discussion: groups who agree on critiques of liberal modernity have very different ideas of the right path forward.
Truth
The criterion of truth is the most important, and it’s the only one to apply to questions of metaphysics and religious doctrine. You, I, and society should seek to believe true things. Is willingness to buck the social consensus here liberal? Not necessarily. First-century Jewish Christians stood against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin; first-century gentile Christians contrasted even more starkly with the pagan social order.
This does contradict some critics of liberalism: neoreactionaries and some rightward-inclined rationalists want to talk about religion in utilitarian terms. But they are wrong to do so. We have a duty to the truth; even if we didn’t, the cost of ignoring it is beating one’s head fruitlessly against the brick wall of reality.
Helpfulness
Helpfulness is, if not more controversial, then definitely less objective. There are always tradeoffs to be made. And the variety of liberalism’s critics becomes obvious here. You may be thinking about neoreactionaries or integralists. But I, as someone who loves American classical liberalism, share concerns with these other critics.
One is that increased social and religious diversity has exposed cracks in liberal principles that were safely papered over in a more coherent society. Much discourse and litigation over religious liberty since the middle of the twentieth century is a fight between three groups of people: people who want to pass laws and to expect those laws to be followed, people who expect freedom of religion to keep the government from making their religious duties illegal, and people who expect freedom from religion to exclude religious considerations from the regulated sphere of life.
Another is that the synthesis of progressivism and liberalism seeks state intervention to free individuals from the influences of their families, churches, and other societies of private life. No-fault divorce is now ubiquitous. Governments forbid male-only fraternal organizations. Some state universities de facto ban religious student groups by requiring them to admit as members or officers those who don’t share their convictions. After a while one begins to think that liberalism as it exists will not leave well enough alone; and if the state is to intervene, I want it intervening to support my idea of the good and not to ban it.
I think there are more people in this camp than there are neoreactionaries and integralists. We thought parts of liberalism were pretty swell, but they haven’t worked out as promised. Was that contingent on the winds of politics? Or could liberalism only support a healthy society so long as there was enough of Christendom left as a foundation? It’s difficult to say.
Social Attainability
I really don’t know what is attainable, particularly in the long run. I don’t think we Americans in 2006 could predict where the country would be in 2015, less than a decade later. Heck, I don’t think that in January 2016 we could predict where we would be in November 2016. Much is in flux.
You are right that we won’t see a return to medieval Christendom. But that’s not the only alternative to liberalism. And I worry that we’ve lost healthy classical liberalism anyway, that that option is no longer attainable.
This is a great response, and does change my mind a bit! You're right that the state has been wielded directly against local communities, families, parishes, etc. Makes it a bit more complicated.
Where do you think we might end up?
I don't know. Absent a revival, which is an act of God, I think by far the most likely outcome continues to be decadence as a state-enforced right.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
What does this look like? Be specific, and where possible, please point towards historical examples of these policies.
I’ve been thinking about the best way to answer. To be specific and even gesture at the scope of the issue would take an effortpost that I don’t have in me right now. But I can give a few examples:
I have ideas at various stages of development about how the state can make male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families a realistic option for more of those who want them; better respect parents’ rights and duties in raising their children; defend those who speak the truth on culture issues; protect the right of self-defense; and acknowledge the independence of churches. I am sure this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what comes to the tips of my fingers for now.
If by Natural law you mean law derived from natural principles (i.e the Natural world), that does not necessarily imply abortion bans. Natural abortifacients exist, and animals kill their off-spring all the time. Many animals also engage in homosexual behavior. Why does Natural law then support your beliefs? Or is Natural law merely the name for your preferred moral sensibilities, in which case its arbitrary?
This dovetails into another topic that I, like you, don't have it in me to effortpost about right now, which is: how do you guarantee that your reforms don't change, and revert back to standard liberalism? Many of your proscriptions/desires/policies, resemble those of 1950s America, and we know for a fact that those changed to align with progressive mores. Does not the fact that we did have "Government policies that respect the natural law", and those policies were changed, evidence contradicting your claim that "Government policies that respect the natural law ... have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom"? That is empirical evidence that, no, conservative laws are not naturally resistant to progressive agitation, and in fact, seem very vulnerable to them; hell, conservative customs aren't very resistant to liberalization. So how can you be sure you won't just repeat the cycle all over again?
Natural law is the moral order inherent in the order of creation, particularly human nature, as distinct from social custom or positive law such as statutes. In the ancient world it could be discussed by Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists, but in 21st-century America it is mostly a Christian idea.
This is an open question, and a vital one. I have some thoughts but not a satisfactory answer. Realistically, many of these policies couldn’t happen unless there were social change underway already, and I am not optimistic about that change happening absent a black swan event like another Great Awakening. I don’t want to pretend that wise social policy can fix things by itself.
True. I’d argue that the 1950s were kind of unstable to begin with, that the social legacies of the 1920s and of the New Deal had yet to be worked out.
Experience now gives the lie to some naïve past arguments for liberalization in a way that would make them harder to repeat. In the push for no-fault divorce, people argued (seriously!) that it wouldn’t increase divorce rates. Afterward, social psychologists said that divorce would be good for children. Those are arguments you can’t make with a straight face in 2025. If you wanted to restore no-fault divorce after a change in the status quo, you’d have to argue that no-fault divorce is worth the costs, not that there are no costs.
I can’t be sure.
Western societies were Christian before they were liberal, and liberalism benefited from the customs and ideas laid down under centuries of Christendom. One of the outstanding questions on the modern Christian right is whether classical liberalism necessarily erodes that foundation: Did it have to be that way, or was that just how it worked out? I don’t know.
I think that laws that make it easier to have healthy families and churches and so on will lead to more of them, and that having more of them will feed back into policy. That’s the virtuous cycle I mentioned. I can’t promise that it won’t be outweighed by other factors, but I still think it represents movement in the right direction. It’s just not a silver bullet.
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