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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.

I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:

Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien -and alienating- nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard's famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown's shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried.

The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly--until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.

I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.

Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.

Thanks for sharing it – I'd probably never have bothered to check it myself, due to my (low )prior for value for such literature. This is of course ironic.

The generally applicable logic of his parable, I take it, is that the target of one's proselytism can have arbitrarily strong resistance to your message, either because it relies on extra elements absent in the target's knowledge, or because (more problematically) s/he has received inoculation, to the point of becoming cognitively closed to the message, elements required to parse it, or both.

When inoculated, the target's prior for messengers of your kind, or messages of this type, or both, is such that critical bits (in the clown's case, the truth value of fire, perhaps its early signs) will not be inspected with the scrutiny they deserve, and the rest (desperate gestures, repeating the same thing over and over, enumerating reasons not to doubt a clown, prophesying increasingly extreme costs of disbelief) will be shoehorned into a pattern that allows to react as usual – as if it's a clown show.

I believe the Pope was being too charitable to his side, but certainly I know that feel. There's nuance, of course. Believers complain they aren't taken seriously, because atheists are very sure of being above the clown's game. In the case of hot button topics in the realm of purely secular politics, one can encounter the exact opposite. Perhaps the most frustrating pattern, and one that seems monopolized by the Left, is to assume that the opponent is a rhetorical superintelligence. Sometimes it's phrased the way @2rafa does with regard to Holocaust revisionists, with the focus on experience and cherrypicked trivia (to be clear: sometimes this pattern is valid, which gives it plausibility in the general case, and I think it is valid on this issue; although this still wouldn't justify having strong opinions without object-level knowledge).

Sometimes, the alleged rhetorical superiority of a right-winger is explained by him just being unscrupulous plus very skillful. Therefore, him being persuasive and dissecting your every counterpoint is no more evidence for him being correct than a grizzly bear's ability to rip your head off is evidence of bears being morally above humans; no more than the fact of evil AI being good at pleading to let it out of the box is a cause to oblige.

Oh, speaking of Contrapoints. Here's something from December 2019:

First stop – an interview where Wynn explains her tactics:

...to see her smiling and nodding at Richard Spencer I kind of went crazy on Twitter, saying, What are you doing? This is unconscionable to give him this kind of platform ... In general, I do think having a debate is good. But when you have very disingenuous opponents and when they are rhetorically skilled, to show up to that debate is potentially to lose a debate to a Nazi, which is very bad, so it’s something I’m afraid of....

«If Cockbane debated Fritz nothing productive would happen but at least she wouldn't be bullied. She'd interrupt, accuse, get real ugly. ... So if there's a "lesson" I guess it's that we have to work on not being Saul. Maybe that means walking out of rooms like that. Or maybe it means developing anti-Fritz rhetorical strategies. But I honestly don't yet know what those are. I can't say I've ever seen someone in debate with a Pepe-grinning fascist come out on top. But if it could be done it'd be worth doing.»

.. Second, you'll never pin them down on the issues, but you can try to get them off their game... If they make a mistake point it out don't let it go. Derail the conversation and keep them on the defensive. Finally, interrupt and filibuster. Whenever they pause, interject. Talk as much as possible. The less they say, the less effective they are.

It's a closed memetic surface.

Digging through «The Motte postmortem», I've found a good example of its topology on TheSchism:

... Among leftists, there are many patterns of behavior that have been observed repeatedly in alt-right spaces - mostly used because they, on some level, work. Things like controlling the conversation or never playing defense. When lefty folks tend to see something that they pattern-match onto that, alarm bells start ringing.

One such commonly-noted pattern is this: "never, ever, ever let a claim go unchallenged, no matter how trivial or generally agreed upon".

[...] Hey, maybe you don't know why people would see this as kinda suspicious. Well, here's the thing: this is exactly the pitch that cryptofascists make. It should be discussed. Debated. There's no harm in hearing an argument out, right? Never mind that, for the most part, these are ideas that were consigned to the dustbin of history quite rightfully for being badly wrong and extremely dangerous. Never mind that "debate" is a format that favors flair over fact much of the time.

I am not interested in racist arguments for the same reason I am not interested in patent submissions for perpetual motion machines or the weekly Flat Earth Society newsletter - there's nothing there. It's always been a long list of horrific made-up justifications for cruelty and exploitation, and it's always been downright awful science. [...] Look, pal, there may be a gray area on "is X racist", but when someone disingenuously argues that statistics showing the average IQ of an entire country as 70 or lower, we're several miles on the wrong side of that line.

And of course our dearly departed Impassionata:

You haven't seen me wrangle with fact-based argument because fact-based argument only works when people actually want to hear what you have to say. HBD fuckers only wanted to spread HBD because the argument is the point.

Playing with facts is easy mode: it's high school essays and if you write a good fact-based essay you get a good grade and people like you and you are Obviously GoodRight.

[...] TheMotte is truly an evaporative cooling rocket that has placed it in true lunacy: a bunch of people have convinced themselves that what they say is discourse when in fact it is outright madness.

I mean look at what this Ilforte has to say.

Can you see the ridiculous self delusion!? 'It's not our fault if a great historian decides we aren't worth the time! It's _his_fault!'

Playing with facts is easy mode so it doesn't matter if you get rekt; appeal to authority is hard and disagreeing with it is the sign of madness.

(So I guess that's what Sartre meant about Anti-Semites assuming the privilege to «play with discourse» while the polite folk are restricted to serious facts and are thus at a disadvantage. Can't say I'm convinced, but then again, they're trying to convince «the audience», and if it's inoculated enough, that'll work. By the way. 895158 also has attributed his condemnation of The Motte to activities of yours truly. Sorry guys for ruining your community.)

A well-formed conflict theory absorbs unlimited epistemic and moral double standard, because there's no standard sans power. It develops scholarship on how the other side allegedly does attack of some type A, to delegitimize arguments that can be shoehorned into A, and check A if it actually takes place, and it teaches on how to do A yourself, and it separately teaches the subtle art of denying friendly As. It's pretty much the same thing as normal military theory.

The question is what is left to the losing side, except surrender.

... Among leftists, there are many patterns of behavior that have been observed repeatedly in alt-right spaces - mostly used because they, on some level, work. Things like controlling the conversation or never playing defense. When lefty folks tend to see something that they pattern-match onto that, alarm bells start ringing.

Has anyone actually seen any examples of what is being talked about? I keep hearing about fascist infiltration or alt-right infiltration into spaces, including themotte, but no one seems to actually be showing examples. I doubt I'll get too many example here, but someone must surely have been shown or heard about these infiltrations.

The closest I think I've heard is the story of mlpol, a 4chan board that combined MLP and /pol into one, which may have converted some MLP fans into /pol-style bigots.

As an original /co/mlp poster, trust me, they were already there before that April Fools prank.

That right? So, what, they just kept their /pol posting to a minimum until the prank?

Since everyone is anonymous by default on 4chan and sticks to only the topics of the board they’re on, there’s no way to tell who’s “from” /pol/ or not, though the site has always been joking-not-joking edgy. I don’t know if the Aryenne The Nazi Pony threads started before or after April Fools, but an ironic “unicorns are the master race” attitude emerged by the fourth episode of season 1.

Suffice it to say there emerged two cultures, the pony fans (“ponyfags”) with a machismo “Friendship is magic, bitches!” attitude, and the stereotype of the sissy bronies with a “love and tolerate” attitude - a phrase never uttered on the show. I got a sense the the brony side that stayed on 4chan (instead of migrating to ponychan and other sites) was ironic for a couple of years, but grew genuine after that.

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