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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Toward a principles-based approach to societal flourishing

The heterodox backlash to mainstream wokeness is inherently reactionary. Taibbi, Weiss, Peterson, Loury, Yarvin; even to some extent Dreher and Alexander all bemoan the current system and wish we could turn the clock back to ... 2008, or 1965, or 2015, or 1600.

There have been few real attempts to change the situation. Weiss is a small exception: she has helped contribute to the University of Austin, which, while I'm very skeptical of its success, is at least doing something. Desantis has perhaps the most success at a political level, though he is often criticized by many in the heterodox blogosphere.

Yet all these fights against wokeness whether merely verbal or actual do not propose a positive trajectory for our society; they merely reject the negative wokeness trajectory.

I want to help create a non-reactionary yet conservative vision for flourishing society. I want this vision to have the following elements:

  • Compelling and inspirational. I want people to be energized by the vision.

  • A call to action. This cannot be a passive "keep everything the same as it is right now" conservatism.

  • A call to a better self. I want this vision to have individual impacts even if society as a whole does not adopt this vision (yes, I know I'm channeling Peterson here).

I have articulated one such vision here: https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-flourishing-society. I wrote it to at least provide one such vision of a flourishing society to demonstrate that I am not merely complaining but am willing to put some thought into this. I would love to have others (possibly y'all!) take the baton and make something more compelling and actionable.

wish we could turn the clock back to ... 2008, or 1965, or 2015, or 1600.

Personally, I'd be happy for any time between 1270-1300.

You can't wag the finger about wanting to turn the clock back, then issue a manifesto that... turns the clock back.

We believe that families are strong when there is a husband, a wife, and multiple children. Families are strong when only one parent has to work to provide for the family.

That horse has bolted. One working parent in a family is for those who are wealthy enough to have the wife at home (or single-parent families where it's the mother working, or unemployed and on benefits). Expectations are built around couples where both are working and earning, if you want a mortgage or any kind of expense in living in today's society, there needs to be two wage-earners.

I'd like to go back to 1960 (everyone usually goes "oh the 50s is what you mean" for this view of the family, but it was something possible up to the 70s) but the economy has moved on since, and everyone is terrified to meddle with the economy because we have constructed such a house of cards around it and 'too big to fail' and the stock market and tech companies and all the rest of it, that pulling on one thread will unravel it all.

Tech layoffs right now because companies need to trim the fat and get back to profitability? Unless you have a guaranteed job to walk into as a replacement, you better hope your significant other is working and covering the bills while you try and get another job.

Also, parts of your manifesto are contradictory:

Mandatory work or wealth for those under 65: proof of employment or assets will be required (which can be automated). If no proof is given, the individual will be drafted into performing public service (planting trees, cleaning trash, driving trucks).

versus

Department of Health and Finance. An immediate focus on automation.

So you're going to get rid of all the cleaners, porters, kitchen staff, nurse's aides, nurses, and maybe even doctors via 'automation' in order to have a more lean and efficient health service. So now what do all the unemployed health workers do? How many nurses for planting trees?

You can't say "everyone must have a job" on the one hand, while planning to do away with jobs on the other. And again, see here:

Mandatory nursing for females 18-20 years. This will teach discipline, care, and technical work.

So let me get this straight. We need automation in healthcare because it is way too expensive. Automation does away with jobs. But we will make all women do two years' nursing service. Uhhhh - how you gonna pay for that, if healthcare costs have to be trimmed? And if there is a constant rota of untrained staff who then leave after two years, how do you expect your hospitals to work? I feel you have not thought this through (or you imagine that nursing just means bedpans and changing sheets).

If the mandatory armed forces/nursing service get paid via some kind of allowance, you still have not reduced your costs. You're just doing an accountancy shuffle where "we take the money for wages out of the healthcare budget and claim we've saved it, then we pay it out under a different heading".

You can't wag the finger about wanting to turn the clock back, then issue a manifesto that... turns the clock back.

I'm fine with "turning the clock back" if there is a first-principles based approach for justifying it. What I don't want is nostalgic wishing for the "good old days". This is neither a compelling forward-looking vision nor epistemologically sound.

Also, parts of your manifesto are contradictory:

I'm not here to defend my article to a great degree :). I only weakly believe in it myself. That said, this statement is not a contradiction for two reasons.

First, there are roughly 3.7-4 million nurses in the US. There are 30 million aged 18-24. Making some rough assumptions, 10 million are thus between 18-20. Half of those are women, so we have 5 million 18-20 year old nurses, which is not out of alignment with the existing nursing population.

Second, my aim is not to reduce nursing staff; it is to reduce the inordinate bureaucratic bloat in finance and health. We spend an astronomical amount of our output on health care and finance. Health care and finance are both "intermediate" activities for the economy. One keeps the working population healthy enough to work, the other provides capital for businesses. Both industries should be enablers but they are a drag instead. Reducing the bloat can free us to focus on "final" goods and services.