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 don’t believe the naval training would have translated into a willingness to demand a duel for honor from a fellow officer. The training would have been drills, target practice, and so on, rather than making them wholecloth insensitive to death. That’s a big leap to go from “fire at a target when I say so” to “demand that the brother who insulted you show up with a pistol or he loses all honor”. And the fact that they typically lost honor is telling, it was expected that they would duel.
My point is different: they have been trained out of applying their instincts at a young age. Not quite “wussy”. A bear that has been trained not to bite isn’t a wussy, it’s just a trained bear. But really, my main point isn’t even about violence per se, but about all the powerful cognition we have for labeling enemies and wanting to defeat them — cognition which is wasted in leisure rather than being applied toward any Genuine Social Good. This could be expressed with total pacifism! The Somalis express their warrior instincts with total pacifism: they rally in political brotherhood, steal resources, and create propaganda to label their opponents as evil racists. The natives can do the same, or they can use their instincts to rally around and punish them draconically, or do whatever they wish as free men in a free land that their ancestors conquered with blood and sweat. But maybe move beyond the strategy of “complain and game”, which characterizes the youth of every longhouse’d male, myself included.
To me it seems we are remarkably sensitive to death today, and I think it comes from a denial of our own absolute and impending mortality. We refuse to grasp that we will be dead and before we die we will live a number of unremarkable and fleeting years in old age where we watch war movies of men dying honorable deaths. This denial is the drive behind transhumanism, probably. Whereas our honorable and civilization-building ancestors grasped their mortality and did not want to go out as coward or losers, our ancestors like Lincoln and Hamilton who showed up for duels. At any moment our oligarchs — like those in Russia and Ukraine — will demand that we will all just perish in agony in no man’s land, similar to our ancestors in Vietnam, WWII, and WWI, and the civil war, but worse, because of drones. We should accept this. At any moment, we will actually be forced by a corrupt and selfish government to kill people who don’t even deserve to die.
“Fictional” is irrelevant, because people do fictionally what gives them pleasure. There isn’t a fictional homework simulator, or a fictional laundry simulator. There’s no fictional “comfort dying grandmother” or “be broken up with” simulator as this would be unpleasant. And “sanitized” is not my understanding of male video game culture. When a teenage boy sees that he can shoot his enemy’s head off, or that impaling them leads to his moaning in agony, he finds it awesome. That’s why developers put those features in. Out of all the millions of possibilities to have fun, males consistently choose “pretend to kill my enemies realistically with my friends” simulator, which they do because they like to imagine doing that. They could instead play “paintball simulator” or “airsoft simulator”, if they were averse to violence, but those don’t even sell. No one wants to play fencing simulator, they want to play “literally chop my opponent’s hand off” simulator with the blood level set to realistic. And they listen to raw odes to violence in rap (near ubiquitous now, to my displeasure), and they watch movies like John Wick where the protagonist mercilessly kills his enemies under the faintest pretext of justification. And they watch Game of Thrones and find it awesome that Jamie Lannister kills a bunch of people.
That’s because of socialization. This same man will clap as the rebels in Inglorious Basterds execute a surrendering soldier. And that’s also because of socialization.
In my last reply I wrote “if”, as in, cause and effect, a diagnostic thing. That is descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not Minnesota and am not advocating for anyone to do anything, but opining that if they wanted to solve the issue there are certain prerequisite steps.
What is the difference between "men have a natural in-born tendency to violence, and socialisation is required to make them peaceful" and "men have a natural in-born aversion to violence, and socialisation is required to make them militant"?
All people are socialised, and soldiers or military elites of past ages were socialised into those roles. Today people are often socialised into different roles. Obviously socialisation has a huge impact on adult behaviour.
But you seem to be claiming something more than that people can be socialised for violence (or more specifically, for certain forms of controlled violence) or against violence. I understand you to be making a claim about inherent nature or essence. Does the claim that all men have this inherently violent nature stand up?
Yes, I think it's absolutely sanitised. When I was in primary school I thought Turok 2 was awesome, and that's a game where you have a gun that fires a drill that homes on to and burrows into an enemy's head and mulches their brain. But this is not a realistic depiction of such a weapon. It is highly sanitised. The enemy wiggles in a funny way and then their head explodes. That's the kind of thing that young boys laugh at and it is very far from realistic death.
And of course there are very popular non-lethal games? Paintball simulators don't sell? The Splatoon series has sold over thirty million copies. It's paintball. It has live concerts in real life. If you look at the most popular video game series, yes, there are some at the top about violence (Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed), but there are also totally abstract games (Tetris), sports games (FIFA, NBA 2K), games about everything under the sun (Mario), games about building and creativity (Minecraft), games about bug-collecting (Pokémon), games about racing (Need for Speed), games about life simulation (The Sims) and so on. Conflict and fighting feature in most games and I think people do find those enjoyable or exciting, but you suggested that realistically killing enemies is overwhelmingly the most popular thing in games. In the top ten best-selling game franchises, I see maybe three that could fit that description (CoD, GTA, and AC).
Male nature and human nature is just more complicated than you're asserting here. I'm not saying that men in their natural state (which probably doesn't exist, unless you want to get really into studies of wild children) are all harmonious peaceful stereotypes. I think that people in general, both male and female, do have some aggressive and competitive instincts. But I think those are just one part of a larger and more complex mix, that we also have cooperative instincts, including those that make us hesitate to inflict violence.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “what is the difference” between those things; I assume you’re asking rhetorically? I don’t believe the nobles we were talking about were socialized to enjoy killing; historical military training did not focus on dehumanization of enemies. They were also raised in a Christian environment, although probably one less obsessed with pacifism, and were merely socialized to stop being shamed about violence. You can look at toddlers, who are “violent” in the sense that they constantly hit and throw until corrected.
This seems like a game that is mostly played when parents don’t want you playing a violent game; one study finds the majority of players are under 19. If you look at Steam’s Most Played by Hours, it is all violent games with the exception of Stardew Valley and a cat that plays the bongos. This doesn’t include FortNite which is likely the most popular game among young males by a margin. The reason Tetris is on the list is because of tech limitations in the 80s / 90. Pokémon is popular because of children in both genders (especially in 90s and 00s), not because of teenage or adult men. You’d really have to look at a list of only titles males play since technology has allowed shooters, so since ~2000. Final Fantasy is there because it’s been around since 1987 and played by both genders. I’m not quite sure if “franchise” is even the right thing to look at, rather than genre; if boys play 100 different “war simulators”, but there’s only one hegemonic soccer simulator, then it would seem that they prefer the one soccer game over the hundreds of split up violent video games. Eg Medal of Honor is 40mil units that should just be combined with all shooters
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
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
More options
Context Copy link