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 think this is basically correct, though there are other personality traits that are related as well. With Lovecraft, in particular, my impression is that he was a highly Open to Experience person who nonetheless was extremely conscientious and concerned about contamination. The highest predictor of political liberalism is Openness to Experience, but the second-most is sometimes called "orderliness," or concern about order, contamination, structure.
There are also people who are highly Open to Experience in an intellectual sense, but closed to experience in a social sense, and I'd probably put myself in that category. I'm happy to try all sorts of wild cuisines or explore all sorts of interesting cultures, so long as it doesn't impose on me all sorts of social tests that I might fail, to humiliation or sorting into a category of "ignorant American tourist."
So I guess you might argue I'm defensively xenophobic; I know what Europeans and LatAms and the Chinese and the Japanese say about Americans behind closed doors. Why would I want people who don't view themselves as natively part of my group subject to that derision to come here, potentially with their derisive attitudes towards me and the people I care about and the customs that are meaningful to me? I know, say, what my friend's French-American coworker says about America. There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America, despite the media representations from Los Angeles that falsify what's it's really like here and which we pump out to the rest of the world -- I'm not sure whether we should be sending our political news or our cultural products to Timbuktu, but no one in Hollywood consulted me.
My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs. I want assurance that the place I live, the customs I grew up with, and the people I care about are not being judged as stupid, corrupt, or contemptible by those joining them.
The feeling that Americans have about our relations to the rest of the world is that we're hated for geopolitical reasons that the average American has no control over -- I don't know who I have to vote for to stop my country from antagonizing foreign peoples like we do every five milliseconds -- and because of wealth that to us feels like poverty, because cost of living adjusts. Both the left and the right feel this, but the left tries to apologize for it or adopt what people say we should (we should be more like Europe, European governments do this, all other western nations do this, we're really just like a third world country, Obama's apology tour), and the right either lives in denial of it ("leader of the free world!," "USA, USA!"), or, more recently, leans into it.
Trump, enter stage left. I don't know if you can understand the Greenland stuff or the America First stuff or the Venezuela stuff without the sense that a lot of red Americans have that the world believes (in their estimation) that the US has no soft power and is a fat, ugly, overprivileged waste of resources that believes in ridiculous, outmoded forms of belief like Christianity, or freedom of speech, or patriotism. I suppose Trump's gut feeling is, "well, if that's how you see us, then I guess that's our only avenue to global influence without abjection and humiliation." To some degree, American xenophobia is directly related to the impression that our attempts at xenophilia aren't met with mutual respect, if not from politicians, then at least from ordinary people or cultural elites.
It's true that cosmopolitanism often correlates with wealth generation, but at the same time, almost no countries on earth are truly xenophilic -- they use cosmopolitanism as a tool, like China and Japan or hell, MBS style Saudi Arabia, while retaining an intense sense of nationalism and a commitment to national identity. So I'm not convinced that cosmopolitanism is useful without limits, and may even be destructive and non-competitive should forming a strong, coherent national identity serve as an adaptive strategy in the modern era after all, as I'd argue it's doing for countries like China.
The issue isn't whether cities are economic engines or whether cosmopolitanism is useful for global economic trade. It's what the limits are to cosmopolitanism's utility. At times, cosmopolitanism begins to feel less like benevolence and more like unreciprocated vulnerability. The US oscillates between generosity and defensiveness because we're desperate to be seen as good. The debate is the same one the country had in 2016: should America be great (again), even if it means being terrible, or should America try to convince the world that, in Hillary Clinton's words, "America is great because America is good." The fear is that it's not possible to be both.
Describing Lovecraft as “conscientious” without mentioning neuroticism feels like burying the lede. You can’t separate his outlook from the absolutely miserable time he was having with his family and his finances.
I think Americans are the same way. Xenophobia comes from uncertainty. When times are good and people are optimistic, we’re all more willing to be cosmopolitan. As times get harsher, more people hit their personal neuroticism thresholds. Those with high conscientiousness are squeezed towards authoritarianism. Their less conscientious counterparts favor anarchy.
This is why Trump populism has outcompeted Tea Party libertarians. It’s why he keeps embarrassing neoliberals, whose radicals despise them, too. He is rewarded for playing the strongman in a way that a progressive cannot.
More options
Context Copy link
This is true for Euros and some foreign elites who have absorbed American blue-tribe memes. For the most part, people love meeting an American, with the same qualifiers as with any foreigner (respect/be interested in the culture, be friendly and funny, try to get off the tourist paths).
Coming here from the Quality Contribution thread, I have to concur. America still has a strong positive, but maybe not explicit halo for europeans, at least for working class europeans. My (Spanish) wife and I went to visit New-York in december and my in-laws wanted as souvenirs Statue of Liberty keychains and (more tellingly) american 1$ bills. They have put these bills in their wallets and phone cases as good luck charms. This is despite them also watching the news daily and absorbing all the anti-american signaling. I don't think a country's smallest denomination bill becomes a good luck charm for foreigners without at least unconscious good vibes being associated with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.
IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.
And 80+% of it is on the Blue side, so Reds who think that Blue America is fake America see real America as consistently losing soft power battles. Foreign tourists visiting America come for the Blue cities, Disney World, and the scenery (which is in Red states, but doesn't express Red political values). Foreign media consumers consume Hollywood, prestige TV, (Blue) pop music, (mostly Blue-allied Black) rap/hip-hop, and the subset of country produced by Reds with atypical political views like Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton. Foreigners who learn American history see the White South as villains, losers, or both. Pro-American foreigners (ipse dixit) see the greatest achievements of American capitalism as Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, not Walmart or Cargill. And we generally respect the output of elite American universities much more than the Reds do, partly because the worst DEI BS that your universities put out is optimised for local consumption whereas foreigners are more likely to see the excellent work they are doing in less-politicised areas like physics.
If I try to think of important sources of Red soft power, I would come up with:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link