This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm writing this off the cuff after sitting through a particularly tedious lunch conversation and having the feeling that there's a culture war angle here.
The conversation was basically dominated by two people excitedly trading drawn out and inane stories from their personal lives while the rest of the group occasionally tried making little interjections. If one person told a story the other related to, the other person had to quickly follow with their almost exact same story from their own life, start to finish with the same inane outcome, instead of saying something like "that happened to me too" and letting someone else talk.
I think there's a missing personality trait that I thought was conscientiousness, but it turns out that means something different (being organized and careful). The trait I am thinking of is more like "conscious awareness of reality," which is like, can you tell how your behavior is interacting with the people around you, do you work with theories of mind, are you able to weigh your thoughts and feelings and choose what to say next, etc.
Maybe this all boils down to rising autism numbers but I feel like this is something that is supposed to be learned, and I would hope that if you haven't learned this by the time you are an adult there is something wrong with you. Instead it seems to be almost the default human condition to anxiously spit up each little itemized story you've accumulated that is interesting only to you, or seal-clap when others do so, when instead you could be doing something interesting like asking open ended questions to the group because I feel like I encounter this constantly.
My gut feeling on this is that it's not just a kind of autism style drug or biological induced disease, it's more a symptom of cultural decay, and seems more like we have bad values -> we get worse people type of movement over time. And I feel like it could be a generally self-reinforcing thing where people are getting less "nutrition" from their conversations with others, therefore they spend more time alone, conversational skills decay, etc.
So this is a bit of a rant but maybe someone here has thoughts to debate or add onto this?
I'll try a charitable steel man of the other side. Note, first, that I totally get what you're saying and 100% agree.
But, we also have to remember that the Motte is a community of Turbo Autists who like weird shit and want to talk about things. That's fucking fucked up, man.
But, anyways. The steelman that I can think of is something like the following; Small talk, which is most of conversation, isn't about the transmission of information at all. We already know this. But it is also not about the direct fellow feeling and a sense of connection. It is about the indirect conveyance that both parties "get" the other party and so can establish rapport, comfort, then trust and only after all of this will both parties maybe mutually agree to get into "deeper" conversations.
It's signalling all the way down, sure, but, recognizing this, it let's you be a better conversationalist.
Let's use an example. At one of my regular bars there's a woman, Lauren (not her real name). Lauren will give you a blow by blow of her day every time she sees you. She went to the store, gee prices are high!, in the parking lot, on the way out, a guy was driving aggressively and nearly slammed right into me! God, idiots in cars, right?!. I'll stop recounting the details here as I am sure this is already giving many people PTSD flashbacks to inescapable hour long conversations like this.
I don't care about Lauren's day. But I do care about Lauren. Through multiple interactions, I've come to find that Lauren is what I would call a basically good person (BGP). She hasn't ever thought deeply about a values system, metaphysics, or a general philosophy of life. But she takes care of her aging mother and is nice to people in that normie kind of way. Lauren's never going to be a close friend, but I wish her well.
So I make small talk with her. It's easy because I'm not really trying. When Lauren says, "Idiots in cars, right?!" I don't have to think of a Motte level reply. I say, "They seem to be everywhere" or "Imagine if everyone had to take driving tests once a year!" or, simply, "Oh, I know what you mean." (interestingly, a lot of the comments in this thread began with some version of that last one. Hmm).
And these little comments make Lauren "feel heard" as the kids say. Really, it means that Lauren feels like I care about her to some extent. Because I do. And I demonstrate that by following her flow of the conversation. If I didn't care about Lauren, I'd do something like adjust my fedora and state, "Akshually, the rate of accidents has been declining at 3.5% for two years now and ..." Which would demonstrate that I'm valuing pedantic "accuracy" above the early stages of casual, reciprocal comfort in a social setting. Or, I'd start replying with monosyllables and would reduce eye contact, and would shift my body position away from her, which would indicate I don't care about her at all.
But it's so hard to listen to! The inanity of it! Yes, I agree. So don't listen. Stop putting yourself through that. It's amazing how much people cue one another for reaction points. Big hang gestures and facial gestures, emphatic rises in volume, pregnant pauses and so forth. A lot of it is non-verbal, you just have to kind of watch their expression. And then there are, of course, the literal verbal cues; "Know what I am saying?", "Right?!" (appended anywhere), "Can you believe it?", "And I was like whhaaatt" and all of the unlimited rest of them. These are the weird conversational detritus that people accumulate over the years. They're space fillers, to be sure, but they're prompts; "This is the part, now, where I want you to emote with me so I can gauge if you "get" me." It is quite literally the same as waiting for the big green arrow to show up and click on it to acknowledge that the green arrow has shown up.
A quick side note: In one of my capital-N noticings, I've seen that one of the hallmarks of urban African-American language patterns is the near constant injection of "Know what I mean?" or, more colloquially, "Know what I'm saying" at the end of sentences. To me, this reflects a profound sense of interpersonal insecurity that can only be remedied by constantly checking in with the other person to re-confirm their general empathy.
Returning to the main topic, the failure mode of small talk isn't that it's uninteresting and boring. That's a feature, not a big. It's low effort for a reason, so that people can spend more time evaluating one another and signalling their reciprocal positive intent. When we get into those warm, sticky "deep conversations" (that definitely aren't mental masturbation) they flow so easily because we're actually 100% into them because it's safe to do so. We've already checked all of the comfort and safety boxes with the interlocutor so we don't have to spend that cognitive overload evaluating them. The structure of some of the best conversations I've had have been nothing more than these exact kind of dueling monologues you described. They just happened to occur with people I really trusted on topics that we shared a common interest in because we had discovered the shared interest via small talk.
So, all of this Steel manning is to say that I don't think what you saw is necessarily indicative of the Collapse Of Western Culture. I think it's people in a technology laden world doing their best to do what they've always done in conversation; fellow feeling, establish rapport, building relationships. That it is grating on you (and, frankly, most of us on the Motte) is to make a category error; you're looking for a conversation when, in fact, you're in the middle of a verbal game of Emote-With-Me.
The road to hell is paved with
good intentionsBasically Good Persons who, not having thought about their values, are easily led to commit atrocities when their neighbours all tell them that that is what a Good Person does.(In the 1980s, some Concerned Citizens¹ lobbied heavily to include in children's television series the message that The Complainer Is Always Wrong, and that one ought to unquestioningly follow one's peers. Had I been in those meetings, I would have wanted to take out a copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem and ask "are you sure you want to stand on that principle?")
¹“He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'." -- Sir Terry Pratchett, The Truth
(GNU Pterry)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link