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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   28671 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 don't think the tension between living in a liberal society and holding liberal values (classically defined) while living conservative lives is quite as large a gap as is often suggested. Most religious denominations are quite comfortable with liberal values – for example today the Catholic Church's official position is that religious freedom is good, and I think most religious people (in the USA) are quite comfortable with liberalism as classically defined.

Liberalism, it seems to me, is a problem for a small subset of intellectuals who say "if the rule that you followed led to this, of what use was the rule?" I wouldn't necessarily say this is a bad question to ask, but I think a lot of times it results (or stems from) a sort of terminal thinking, the idea that because a democracy led to bad things, it will lead to more bad things in the future. But of course it's quite possible that (classical) liberalism will snap back – the Americans of the 1760s were liberals, it's entirely possible for classical liberalism to accommodate extremely conservative sentiments.

My point here isn't that I think RETVRN TO THE 1790s is going to happen at the voter box, exactly. But societies evolve in unpredictable ways. And because we know that classical liberalism worked quite effectively (arguably much more effectively) with conservative social mores in the past, if liberal social mores are unsustainable – as they now in many ways seem to be – it's quite reasonable to be optimistic about conservative social mores within the framework of classical liberalism in the future. That's not a RETVRN in my mind – the only way out is through. Likely we will not see a return to 1790. We shouldn't want to! What we should want is a 2040 that is better than a 2024, better even than a 1790. And if conservative social mores are good, then although they might be to some degree different in the age of AI and automobiles, building a better future means building one with conservative social mores.

Perhaps I'm missing your point here – feel free to correct me if so!

My point here isn't that I think RETVRN TO THE 1790s is going to happen at the voter box, exactly.

It is not going to happen at gun point either.

Look at most serious attempt (so far) of RETVRN of (partly) modernized society back to trad life.

Yes, I mean Iran.

It is total failure on all terms, and especially trad religious ones. And it was not due to ayatollah's softness, due to excessive devotion to "human rights" or "due process". I am not aware of any "trad" engaging with this example, honestly trying to find out "what went wrong" or "who betrayed the revolution".

Nobody betrayed it the elite keep trucking trying to keep people trad and traditional even as society slips further and further from their grasp particularly in the cities. They all the political power but lack the cultural cache to keep the populace in line with their values and have had to basically abandon the democracy with trad guardrails Khomeini created because the vote is just going to go to the most liberal candidate.

A study would be interesting as the Gulf despite also having a conservative government had a population that remains conservative despite wealth and constant contact with more liberal foreigners. I suspect deep reasons of culture and status and maybe because they never had that liberal core. Once you do it seems it's pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle. The Europeans tried for a hundred years after the French revolution and never managed it.

The Gulf's government (monarchy) is not conservative. It is an open secret that the Gulf monarchies drink alcohol, and fuck prostitutes. The reason that the Gulf populace is conservative, is because social conservatism is part of their founding national myth; khaleejis (gulf Arabs) literally define themselves as the originators of, protectors of, and most devout followers of Islam.

Islam is incredible intertwined with how Gulf Arabs see themselves, and is the reason for the population's continued conservative. Although, I do have to note that even that is changing. In 2022, Saudi Arabia formally cutoff its association with the Islamic clergy. The population is quickly becoming westernized.

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