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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17984 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.

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.

I think this is a very shallow definition of what is going on. In fact at least since Rousseau it was modernists of various stripes who were preaching about the RETVRN - Rousseau was preaching how we should channel our prehistoric inner noble savage but in "modern world". Libertarians are basing their arguments on how tribal way of property is supposed to work absent government, looking with fondness at medieval Iceland or some such. Marx was calling for return of values of Primitive Communism, where humans lived as true social beings. Nationalists and romantics were literally romanticizing the past looking with fondness at era of medieval chivalry and heroism or maybe Roman republic.

This argument of yours reminds me of a discussion with my mother about Progressivism with her circular logic - progressivism is about progress and progress is what progressives achieve. If so called progressives fuck something up - like for instance tankies - then it was not a progress and thus by definition they were not progressives. Something like how modern progressives hate Woodrow Wilson for his racism and eugenics - despite the fact that he was a prominent progressive of the time. So since eugenics was fucked up, we can throw it into the trash and RETVRN to pre-eugenics era - it was not a true progress anyways. You do the same with conservatives - conservatives can only conserve or regress, otherwise they are not true conservatives. Who knows, maybe even Amish are no true conservatives, as even they improve on their baking or construction methods. Which is BTW exactly the gist of your next argument:

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.

This is argument from technology and false dichotomy. First, "conservatives" were on the forefront of technological advances for centuries. But this is also besides the point, the argument is stupid on its face - if you want to have modern technology such as tablets and videogames - then somehow it is inevitable to let your child chop his dick off, or at least let him coom on furry sex online, because that is progress and liberty and modernity and it is the basis of our technology? It does not make sense - you can have all the vaccines and airplanes and railroads, and you can land people on the moon even in highly religious societies. How do I know it? Because it already happened historically.

I don't think free access to furry porn is the basis of technology. But will a society that limits their sons' access to the newest technology (and especially if it requires either a blanket ban or the parents' active involvement) reach the heights that are equivalent of going to the moon?

If you did not notice, we already went to the moon in an era where sodomy was a criminal offense, porn was almost nonexistent. Again, this is false choice - you can have technologically advanced society without "freedoms".

In fact, we live in such a society right now. Progressive puritans are the ones who promote their religious ideas such as original sin also known as a privilege based on your race, sex or sexual orientation. We have blasphemy laws with their very own taboo words that cannot be spoken - such as a faggot or nigger or tranny and many more. They have their own structure of sins in their broad istophobic categories such as racist, sexist, homophobe and transphobe around which they have requirements for everybody. Is this not a threat to technological advancement, or is it just a protection of progress, liberty and modernity - or is it a RETVRN to religous dogma in a new skin?

I am not talking about freedoms as a broad social system of things being acceptable or not. I'm talking about parents denying their kids access to smartphones or Internet as one of the measures for upholding lacks of freedoms. In order to assuredly safeguard your kid from porn today, to my knowledge, you have to not buy him a smartphone, not connect his computer to the Internet, keep him away from friends who could provide him with theirs and prevent him from saving up enough of his own money through allowance/summer jobs. I do not believe that's how you raise an above-average innovator today. In the past helicopter parenting was merely stifling; now you'd have to go half-Amish to achieve the same result. And Amishes do not launch rockets.

Sure, let's move it from individual action - although even there I can have many arguments, such as that tech execs and innovators actually do not give smarthpones to their children and send them to schools that ban the technology and stick to older methods of education. But that is besides the point.

What if a conservative government just nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub and other similar websites from orbit tomorrow, similarly to how government recently acted against disinformation channels that they deemed as dangerous - such as Russia Today or what they did to TikTok citing nebulous national security reasons. In your eyes would it mean it represents a dangerous RETVRN ideology, a threat to progress and liberty and modernity and technology and all that, meaning we are now on a slippery slope toward energy blackouts and airplanes falling from the sky?

You could argue that the rich, smart and highly-engaged parents' children are really the only ones who are needed for progress, while the rest can either brainrot themselves or live in digital hothouse conditions until independence, yes. How many schools are there that can prepare children for a life amidst technology while banning it within their walls?

If government simply nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub, then no, I wouldn't say it is damning to progress. On the other hand, if they started cracking down on VPNs, proxies, mirrors, torrents and all other less-easy ways to access wrongthink/wrongfun, that seems like it would negatively affect flourishing, through sheer friction introduced to the infoscape. Not to mention political resentment. I hear the recent riots in Nepal correlated with a crackdown on social media.

If government simply nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub, then no, I wouldn't say it is damning to progress. On the other hand, if they started cracking down on VPNs, proxies, mirrors, torrents and all other less-easy ways to access wrongthink/wrongfun, that seems like it would negatively affect flourishing, through sheer friction introduced to the infoscape. Not to mention political resentment. I hear the recent riots in Nepal correlated with a crackdown on social media.

I don't think so. There is illegal porn content already, which is heavily prosecuted and punished by the government absent bans on VPNs or torrents. We can just expand that no problem. But for me this was just an example and a thought exercise for the test of logic. It definitely is possible to have RETVRN to some semblance of normalcy without sacrificing technology to some magic of absence of abstract liberty to coom.

The government enjoys massive political will among all strata of society to prosecute CP with great prejudice, just a bit less than actual child molestation. I think expanding that to arbitrary definitions of coomery will be a bit harder than "no problem".

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