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 -
People tend to interpret their experiences in terms of the language they are familiar with. We don't just design our concepts to fit our experiences, but retrofit our experiences to fit our concepts.
Example: some years ago I was in a church group and we discussed this article. The short summary is that it's an article by an evangelical woman discussing her experience of PMS, which she describes in biblical terms as a 'fight with the flesh'. 'The flesh' is a category in Pauline theology that tends to denote bodily urges or impulses, especially impulses to sin, which he negatively contrasts with the spirit. The author suggests (and I tentatively agree) that there is a useful lesson here for everyone, male or female, because even those of us who don't get PMS nonetheless struggle with unchosen impulses that come from our hormones. The group that I was in, however, was appalled by this article, and felt that it was patriarchal, misogynistic, and so on. I was confused. As a man, I obviously can't experience PMS, and for that reason I hesitate to judge someone who experiences it as part of her struggle in the flesh. However, to people without a Christian background, the language probably seems even more bizarre.
(In that specific example I think my fellows were probably just engaged in reflexive sneering at evangelicals. It's not really about the author's experiences, or what she finds helpful. It's about Those People being bad.)
Charitably, I try to interpret young people using 'trauma' in this very expansive way the same way that I would interpret this woman using 'the flesh' in an expansive way. It is language borrowed from a larger meaning-making structure (a mythology, in OP's language; a 'religion', if you must) that they believe in. These people probably aren't thinking of their lives as a spiritual struggle with a fleshly body corrupted by original sin, but they do have a guiding narrative of their own, of a kind of authentic self damaged by psychic injuries or 'traumas' which must be gently coaxed into flourishing.
This narrative might be bad on its own terms, of course. If you ask me, I think it's a kind of generalisation of a therapeutic model of care to the whole life, and that generalisation is bad. Therapeutic care has a place, but it should not be all of life. Even so, understanding that it's part of a whole system or language of belief is useful for contextualising what it is that they're saying with "do you have any traumas?"
More options
Context Copy link