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 -
What I mean is that there doesn't seem any compelling reason to believe the story you're telling. Obviously both men in the 21st century and men in the 12th century were socialised into particular contexts and for particular behaviours. On what basis do you say that the behaviour of 21st century men does not reflect natural instincts, but the behaviour of 12th century men does? (Especially since the 12th century men we're talking about, warrior aristocrats, were given a martial education from a very early age.)
On video games specifically: I don't have figures specifically separated out by gender, but I don't see anything in the conversation before now that says that under-18s don't count. I'd take "that's including women" as a valid objection specifically for The Sims, but gaming in general is such a massively male-dominated hobby that I doubt it makes much difference for anything else. And I don't know why you think that pre-2000 games somehow don't count. Aren't you making a claim about innate male nature?
I note that you also skipped over the point about even these violent games being extremely sanitised. You cite Fortnite, for instance, and Fortnite is a heavily stylised cartoon game. Fortnite looks like this. It is not even attempting to show realistic violence. Likewise on Steamcharts, you have games like DotA 2 or Apex Legends, which are similarly cartoony. Even the 'realistic' games are heavily sanitised. Here's Counterstrike 2 - while it's higher-fidelity than Fortnite, it is still obviously cutting out most of the gore, grime, and terror of war. I feel the violence on display here ranges from what you'd be happy to show to primary school children to PG 15 or so.
That young boys like to play war isn't really contested - but none of this play-conflict bears much resemblance to real war.
But we aren’t talking about 12th century warrior aristocrats, we are talking about civilized Europeans from 1600-1860. You claim, for some reason, that these men wwre socialized to make them want to kill acquaintances who insulted them in duels and to loot the cities they conquered. But the church was against dueling at this time, and men continued to do it up until the punishments became prohibitive and accuracy ruined the fun. You’re asserting this like it is fact, but there’s nothing in their culture that would have made them do this. Being brought up to serve in the military does not translate into a willingness to duel a colleague. And the reason I note Napoleon is that his army was decidedly not made up of “warrior aristocrats”, and yet they all looted, everywhere they went. I think it was the most looting since antiquity. You have a just so story that these men were all socialized into behaving this way, but they weren’t. Vikings were socialized to behave that way, but a Frenchman in the Napoleonic Era was not.
Men are placed in a mass indoctrination facility (schools) with omnipresent mass media, and they pretty much can’t get away with crimes. Additionally, they have endless leisure to satisfy their instincts. And in this leisure they do a simulation of what their ancestors did.
Many teenage boys are not allowed to buy any game they wish, so Splatoon may not tell us what they prefer to play, only what they can play. This is a family friendly, child friendly title.
I think you should contemplate more why boys like to play Fortnite. Sure, the developers took out blood and replaced it with a shock effect so that they can still sell it to children. But what is the game mechanic, and what does that tell us? You and your squad go around killing enemies and looting their corpses. You also destroy buildings and loot chests from them. Your enemy might dance over your fallen corpse. It is not sanitized in any psychological way, there just isn’t any blood. But Skyrim, the Witcher, Halo, Call of Duty, etc etc all include blood. Forget blood for a second. If Fortnite was only for males and males of all ages could play whichever game they want, I have no doubt it would include more violence, but a lightly sanitized version is required to bring in the female and children demographic.
How can you possibly look at the mechanics in these games and believe that males don’t have the aforementioned instincts? The popularity of this game would be literally inexplicable without understanding psychology. If males don’t have these instincts, then Fortnite should not be enjoyable because it’s filled with violence, right? And people don’t ordinarily like to be the recipient of violence; very few people want to watch videos of people dying. Yet they like to inflict violence in their evolved conflict scenarios. And this perfectly explains why a boy would want to aim a weapon at an enemy and destroy him and loot his body. What is your alternative theory for why this mechanic is popular throughout so many titles? Why don’t they want to aim a flower at a friend and blow a kiss, like the girls playing SIMS or Animal Crossing or whatever?
And yes men have other instincts: the “building things” instinct explains why they love Minecraft (and why no one plays Tetris now really, Minecraft bring its superior outlet). The systems-oriented instinct, unique to men, which is why they play city skylines and etc. all of these instincts coexist and you can combine them to predictably create a best selling title, like Minecraft. The skeletons and other mobs are just stand-ins for humans, which the player has to kill and loot.
I don't see anywhere you specified that? I said '12th century' mainly because '12th' is an inversion of '21st' and I found the aesthetic pleasing. The examples you actually gave at the start of this conversation ranged from the 19th century to the 16th to biblical Israel to the Fourth Crusade, so I took you as making a pan-historical claim, about men in all times save apparently the present.
It seems to me that people in all times and places are socialised, that soldiers specifically are a heavily selected group not representative of all people (both because soldiers are specifically trained for killing and because the most killing-prone people are more likely to become soldiers), and for that matter Western soldiers still happy to do war crimes, so the claim that there's something uniquely softening or, if you'll pardon the casual term, wussifying, about modern socialisation seems to outrun the evidence you've presented.
I say this particularly because the evidence you've presented is... what, that boys like playing action video games? That doesn't seem much different to me to boys liking action movies, or boys running around the playground pointing their fingers at each other and yelling "bang! bang!", which, the last I checked, boys still do.
There's just no substance here. Do modern men have a particularly different attitude to violence than historical men? I'm not convinced they do. If we are in a more peaceful age, you could attribute that to us having more peaceful socialisation, or past peoples having more violent socialisation, but neither thesis is more obviously true than the other, so the claim about innate male nature remains unjustified.
Napoleon’s soldiers were conscripted from the general population, not a filtered group of people.
This is like scratching your head at someone injecting themselves with heroin and saying, “what, humans enjoy the experience of activating their endogenous opioid system?” Uh, yeah! The strongest evidence of what males innately like to do is what males volitionally choose to do when they could do anything: their leisure. That boys like to pretend to shoot each other, pretend to “raid the flag”, form snowball fights with ramparts, and watch people shoot each other on TV, and listen to gangster rap about slaying opps, is strong evidence of an innate disposition and innate pleasure. Because of course, we evolved to do this as much as we evolved to eat and copulate. At least most of us. Neither you nor @Amadan have supplied a convincing explanation for the universal leisure activity of males esp. young males.
Being taught that they can have no tribal allegiance in America, and being presented with endless media and stories about how such tribalism is low-status and thus deserving of ostracization, they cannot engage any of innate tribal cognition WRT to Somali fraud. Not being able to engage in this cognition, they can find no enjoyment in combatting Somali fraudsters. They cannot engage in fraud against Somalis, but more importantly they cannot even organize to defeat the Somali fraud politically, because this requires a certain incentive pleasure or fun: dominance and victory over an enemy. To get any pleasure out of defeating the Somali fraud requires that you see Somalis as your enemies, and to see the defrauded Somali tax payer as your teammates. This is impossible for those Minnesotans who believe that (1) every American is on the same team && (2) distinguishing between cohorts with the team violates the most sacred rule of the team’s moral law which is called “racism”.
The Somali community, of course, has tribal and religious customs which maximize their in-group affiliation. They know they are a team, and so they engage in politics as a team. This makes politics incredibly fun and filled with those pleasures which are normally associated today with games. Every Somali gets enjoyment out of donating money to his team’s character and working to increase the victories of his team’s character. The Somali can engage in politics the way a boy engages in Guild Wars II, or a man engages in Eve Online, or a teenager watches his favorite streamer beating a game. They have no compunction about taking the resources of the native Swedes because, well, why would they? It’s a game and you are my enemy.
This is what I mean about the sociobiological asymmetry; I’m not quite making a claim about quantities of innate violence
I mean, if your point were just that boys like competitive games, then sure, that's obviously true. I also think that girls like competitive games, though I think that boys and girls play different types of games because they tend to complete in different arenas. For boys it's usually some variant on defeating someone else, overcoming someone else, achieving a concrete goal faster or more efficient than them, and so on; for girls it's usually more about achieving attention. It's what I call the masculine and feminine modes.
Where I disagree with you proximately is with the claim that all men, innately, have a strong predisposition to violence, and that it is exclusively modern, Western, implicitly white society that socialises that out of people. I don't think you've provided significant evidence of that, and as far as I'm aware there's evidence suggesting that ancient people as well required ritual and training to psych themselves up to acts of violence. This is true on the personal level (as discussed regarding retributive violence) as well as on the communal level (every fighting organisation or warband in history has those combat rituals). You make some evolutionary claims, but books like Man the Hunted make a reasonably convincing case, to my mind, that humans like many animals evolved with a greater emphasis on avoiding costly conflict than engaging in it.
Where I disagree with you in a more ultimate sense is with the idea that any of this has anything to do with Somalis running day care scams. It may well be that successfully running a scam feels good. Certainly I think white people of my acquaintance feel good when we manage to get more money from the government than we ought to have. But the claim that Somalis are somehow much more keen on this kind of scam whereas white Americans have domesticated themselves and become wimps far outruns any kind of evidence or even plausible speculation on your part.
You still haven’t quite addressed why, in your worldview, men like to simulate realistic violence against each other, as even implying that these are not the most popular games, they are so popular that a majority of American men have played and enjoyed them. If it were “just that boys like competitive games”, then why don’t they just stick to a pong-like game, or Wii tennis, or a soccer title? There is some reason why they like to shoot each other and take their resources, and while my etiology of this has explanatory power, it seems to me you refuse to even offer an explanation for this phenomenon. Consider that, if men were offered a game where they get to inflict suffering on an innocent animal, I think most men would never play this and would find the whole concept abhorrent. So it’s not “blood and gore per se”, it’s not that men are interested in experiencing some novelty related to that; instead there is something particular about the act of blood and gore coming out of enemies. I can’t force you to supply an explanation, but surely you notice the dissonance here: in a highly competitive marketplace with tens of thousands of options, males enjoy a particular feature which — in your worldview — they would be either be naturally averse to or naturally ambivalent to choosing.
It’s unfortunate that you can’t provide the relevant passages, evidence, or arguments. Am I supposed to take the view of an economist on the history of Icelandic revenge culture for granted? I managed to torrent it (thanks Russians), and the passage about men being “chickens” in revenge cultures is just sort of a narrative that the author weaves without referring to any real data. Maybe his evidence is on another page.
Here’s a study on how violent men in Iceland conferred a fitness benefit: “We show that, on average, killers gain a very significant fitness advantage despite the often high costs they pay and, more importantly, that they had a dramatic effect on the fitness of their male kin”. This is more scientific than the book you recommended, where the author is all over the place talking about Hamlet and stuff.
Medieval Iceland was violent, their heroes were violent, their wives came from captured Irish slaves, and they descended from the most violent of the Norse who had inflicted violence upon all of Europe. This should have made you intuitively skeptical of Miller’s hypothesis that Iceland proves that all men are chickens naturally averse to violence. If someone insulted you in Iceland, the norm was to fight them. There are sagas celebrating men who request to kill another man because they want rights over a particular woman. So, a lot of the violence was purely volitional, as was the entire Viking raiding and pillaging over Europe, and the Varangian Guard.
However, I deny you really need any extra evidence on this. The “look at what males like to do” argument is strong. The next best argument would be “look at how brothers behave”. IMO this doesn’t require strenuous argumentation.
Yes, because of their culture, their religion, their tradition, and probably their biology.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I just don’t think this applies to a lot of historic conflict since the advent of civilization. When you’re an man in some European country some time in the last thousand years and one year the King and his council decide that you’re at war with this random other European country because of competition over control for the Caribbean or something happening in the Spanish Netherlands (you’ve never met anyone from there) and then thirty years later the next king decides that actually you’re now allies with the people you fought against and your son needs to go off and fight the people you were allies with, this isn’t some deeply visceral intertribal conflict against blood enemies. This is politics. Until the modern period most people didn’t even have what we’d call a modern, nationalist conception of the state or loyalty to it.
For 200 years, immigrant groups have plundered America, destroying everything the Anglo Saxon founding fathers have created. That much is obviously and entirely true. But it also left the descendants of the Irish who destroyed the peaceful, English eastern seaboard, the New England of gentlemen’s clubs and old Boston, long forgotten, the ‘swarthy’ Scandinavians (according to Ben Franklin who settled the Midwest, the Italians and Poles and whoever else poorly placed to frame their own civilizational conflict against later groups of migrants.
If you were a soldier fighting for your King against another kingdom, the whole “ancestral-tribal cognition” related to ingroup and outgroup was activated against that nation; it was activated and deactivated according to political interests of the Kingdom. Songs and propaganda and stories would be disseminated for this purpose. Particular acts of bravery in slaying the enemy might bring you praise or greater status, or sometimes some reward. In the medieval era the common soldier often had no blood ties to the noble families who decide on war, but they still had all of this collective / tribal / dominance cognition going on. The noble families were united by shared ancestral heritage, unless they had just lost a war, in which case they would be united by heritage within a few generations.
In the modern era you see much more explicitly “deep visceral intertribal” cognition: https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/napoleonic-pleasures/le-chant-du-depart-2/
And the famous Marseilles anthem
These were the favorite songs of Napoleon’s troops, the avowedly White supremacist Napoleon who has such quotes as
Now the Minnesotan can theoretically use any of the tribal cognition package he has; it is hypothetically possible that he can draw whatever criteria for ingroup that he wants, by any criteria. But culture prevents from doing this, and so he has no interest in solving the crime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link