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 -
Sorry, all this snark is uninteresting. If that's the impression you're getting from your contacts, you are in a bubble, like many emigres. We're not in the 70s nor the 90s. As of 2020s, roughly 1% of the Russian population is Christian enough to bother taking part in the Christmas service, vs 47% of Americans. Churches in Russia are empty and subsist on government dime. American Christians also have coherent beliefs about, say, the Third Temple — a condition which would be unimaginable in Russia (outside professional Antisemitic circles) where nobody reads the Bible and Christianity is a vague, ethnically coded token of being based and patriotic, more like Chinese ancestor worship. There aren't even any "cultural Christian values" like charity. The State's preference to persist in this Orthodox advocacy is not indicative of the popular demand for irrationalism; quite the opposite, it's another grift vector and a top-down attempt at social engineering like the insane WWII sacralization (Immortal Regiment) that the people passively accept (which is actually a massive mark against Russian culture, just a different one).
Russia is an irredeemably jaded, atheistic country with performative orthotrad LARP (which liberals despise and so discuss a lot) at the top; the United States is a nominally secular polytheocracy and wholly indifferent to the ostensible Western tradition of rational thought or whatever. Weirder things had happened in history.
Your assorted defenses are even less interesting. The archetypal "Russian great" who can stand on the international stage, among Westerners you've listed, is not some cute Tyutchev. That's Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, Mendeleev and Lobachevsky, Suvorov and Zhukov, Serov, Vasnetsov and Vrubel, Pavlov and Vavilov, Pontryagin and Kolmogorov, Tsiolkovsky and Sikorsky, Korolev and Sakharov, Cherenkov and Glushko, and so on and so forth (seeing your snide remarks on Pushkin, motivated by his fairly minor African ancestry, I exclude clearly ethnically alien individuals like Levitan and Aivazovsky; but as they are recognized to be "spiritually Russian", they demonstrate the assimilative capacity of the Russian egregore, if anything). Those are obviously normal European elite human capital, whether from noble and admixed families or from the depths of Eastern European serf/Cossack/military/clergy genetic pool, with more or less intense educational and professional engagement with the West proper. There is no comparison to be made to the Japanese or Bolivians or Arabs, whether in achievement or, more to the point, in the degree of relatedness to the European cultural tradition; and your framing is simply a rationalization of the personal sense of distance from Ruskies and Soviets. This isn't so much Usenet or, rather, FidoNet as Tiphareth discourse straight from 2003 AD. It's all so tiresome.
I do not recognize your "answers" as honest, because your entire line of argumentation – in essence, going back to the top, that «Russians are just Europeans from 200 years ago» thesis understates their moral and philosophical distance from the West, and why they're therefore more deserving to be considered vermin by modern Europeans – is deeply biased, whether you can recognize this or not. I've had enough of this sophistry with the likes of Verbitsky, long ago, so here my explanations end.
This is exactly indicative of massive popular demand for irrationalism and attempt to channel it for official state purposes. Remember explosion of astrology, shamanism, psychic powers and all sorts of occultism and woo that instantly happened when Soviet censorship eased just by a little bit. The same with WW2 cult (and cult of Stalin) - these came from the bottom, at the beginning Immortal Regiment was purely grassroot phenomenon.
Not that Russia is any exceptional, it would be hard to find true rationalist country, with low rates of belief in both traditional organized religion and astrology/witchcraft.
Does the fact that nobody goes to the Church have any impact on your glib judgement?
What glib judgement? It shows that Russians are modern people who are not satisfied with medieval style of worship. Trad style churches are empty in the Western world too.
Golden icons, singing and incense were big things for old time peasants, but modern man needs modern religion.
This is how you fill churches in 21st century.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link