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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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The '50s specifically cited as a time when degeneracy could have been resisted were themselves criticized as being degenerate by conservative observers at the time including the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood iirc.

Sayyid Qutb visited the US in the 1950s. You'd think he visited Sodom and Gomorrah the way he wrote about it.

Church youth dances were full of "seductive passion" in his view. And sometimes he would look at an American woman and she would smile at him. That struck him as deserving of condemnation.

How is either of your or Gdanning's comments proving that we haven't, in fact, degenerated since then?

The irony of using Qutb and his problem with promiscuity is that America could be argued to have degenerated below its usual critics' expectations; who probably at least thought liberal society would be numbing everyone from the problems they thought they perceived with increasing amounts of "free love".

People are apparently having less sex now.

If this wasn't likely due to rising anxiety, obesity, shrinking real life friend groups and/or pornography it might actually be a good counterpoint to the degeneracy thesis.

The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then, which suggests we've always been degenerate and degenerating, which takes away the notion's give-a-shit power.

The point is that we were apparently already degenerate then, in the 50s, so already degenerat-ing before then

This is actually an argument used by critics of the West : liberalism is always "degenerating" because you're consuming stocks of social resources (e.g. the Church, hegemonic social mores) that it doesn't replenish.

So the argument would be that "every man does what was right in his own eyes" was inherently degeneracy-facilitating back then too - but there were countervailing social and material forces.

It's possible for 50s people to be degenerates to Qutb especially and for modern society to have degenerated well past that.

I would argue there are places where the degeneration has been clear and undeniable; most obviously obesity. We're not just more degenerate than the people in the 50s, we may be so degenerate in comparison that we might have been dismissed as pushing a slippery slope fallacy and fear-mongering if we talked about it back then.

More obesity but on the other hand bodybuilders today put bodybuilders of the past to shame. Certainly the average has gotten worse.

No one says you have to give a shit, I just find it odd to deny it given the assurances about slippery slopes I heard even just within my lifetime.

Well, I think critics were wrong about the 50s being degenerate but they're not that wrong now.

Tangentially, I think San Francisco is outrageously degenerate. But it generates wealth and competence in a way you would never guess by just looking at what's going on on the street. I think America at large is similar. Wanting congruence between the kind of people who can pump out a vaccine in a year and heroin addicts is very compelling, but apparently society can live with a messier arrangement.

Does it actually generate wealth and competence or merely attract it? If you raise a middle class kid in San Francisco is he going to be better off than the same kid raised in San Diego or San Jose or San Houston? If you found Twitter in Miami, does it do better or worse than if it were founded in San Francisco?

It attracts talent and that talent generates wealth. If you found Twitter in Houston, it would absolutely do worse than Twitter founded in San Francisco (a la 2005 when San Francisco was liberal).

People who are natural out-of-the-box thinkers are going to gravitate to places where they're allowed to occasionally do out-of-the-box ("degenerate") things in public and private. And that nature is going create those economic powerhouses when they go to work.

That's an interesting question. For years conservatives have wondered why the economic powerhouses are not salt of the earth places like Iowa but degenerate coastal cities.

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