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Notes -
GK Chesterton and MAGA
Chesterton personifies the paradoxes he loves to pursue in his writing. A member of the Fabian (socialist) party, he is remembered primarily as a bulwark of conservatism. Deeply immersed in early 20th century high British society and culture, he was Catholic rather than Church of England. Writing prose and poetry on the transcendence of family, he never had children.
A populist, he writes a warning to MAGA.
To be sure, Chesterton does not shy away from condemning progressive society. In one memorable anecdote he tells a relativist that in a functioning democracy, the relativist would be burned on a pyre. In his pithy essay "The Return of the Barbarian" (1934), Chesterton states "I do not mean that any of that sort of liberty or laxity or liberal-mindedness has ever had anything to do with civilization." Yet Chesterton writes the essay not as a warning against Liberalism, but to identify the rising Nationalist Socialism of Germany as the true enemy of civilization. Even though the civilization may be decadent, flabby, and decayed, civilization must still fight for civilization. For barbarism is an uncontrollable beast. It contains no introspection, no self-corrective. Chesterton ends the essay in his typical incisive style:
"There are many marks by which anybody of historical imagination can recognize the recurrence: the monstrous and monotonous omnipresence of one symbol, and that a symbol of which nobody knows the meaning; the relish of the tyrant for exaggerating even his own tyranny, and barking so loud that nobody can even suspect that his bark is worse than his bite; the impatient indifference to all the former friends of Germany, among those who are yet making Germany the only test—all these things have a savor of savage and hasty simplification, which may, in many individuals, correspond to an honest indignation or even idealism, but which, when taken altogether, give an uncomfortable impression of wild men who have merely grown weary of the complexity that we call civilization." [Emphasis added].
As a confirmed MAGAt myself, I feel a distinct discomfort reading this warning. There is a cold nihilism and gleeful cruelty in the MAGA intelligentsia. The rank-and-file MAGA populists cower from modern complexity, preferring the comfort of totalizing and simple narratives. If MAGA feels less barbaric than the Brown Shirts it may only be because our civilization doesn’t have the will or vitality to produce real barbarians.
Yet what is else is the solution when faced with Weimar problems? Chesterton lived in the relatively prudish Britain, and did not need to directly confront the debauchery of Weimar Germany. Easy for him to work within his civilization to promote his conceptualization of the common good. What would he have suggested when faced with the ubiquitous celebration of buggery or an importation of an alternative "civilization"?
But, of course, Chesterton (or rather, custom and common sense as channeled by Chesterton) does have the solution. In his essay "On the Instability of the State" he counters the prevailing notions of the Total State by satirizing the ephemerality of modern nations. In contrast, true societal stability is only found in the Family, the bedrock on which all civilization stands. And while the modern assault on the Family threatens to break civilization as assuredly as any barbarian uprising, it is still an institution that takes only two willing companions and the providence of God to initiate. And it is on this rock that the next great civilization will be built. "In the break-up of the modern world, the Family will stand out stark and strong as it did before the beginning of history."
The family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization. The Iliad and the Odyssey are for the most part concerned with Brotherhood; the Gospel is wholly concerned with Brotherhood; Roman society revolved around fraternal organizations; medieval society revolved around male guilds or monasteries; American culture revolved around fraternal civic organizations (see detoqueville); and freemasonry (highly influential precursor to modernity) was a brotherhood that emphasized equality between members. It is more correct to say that the bedrock of western civilization is the männerbund and not the family. It is true that men cared much for their family name, but they cared so much because it enabled rewards and status among male peers. All striving was done by men, with men, and for men, negotiated among men outside the family fold. I’m not really sure where this idea originates that the “family” is the bedrock of the West.
Even just at a basic level: Rome was established by two brothers raised outside any family. After one slays the other, he invites other men into the city, exiles and criminals. They proceed to steal women in order to have progeny for their city. Obviously this didn’t happen, but it is a symbolic account of how the Romans saw the foundation of their culture: men negotiating and fighting with other men is the essential thing, women and the family an annoying requirement to keep things moving. And if it is disagreeable that the Roman myth could inform us today, then read the gospel again. Almost immediately, Jesus departs from his parents (curtly rebuking his mom) to find other men with which to found His Kingdom. Some of the Apostles had wives, and they aren’t even mentioned in the writings, so we don’t even know their names. The crucial bit is how men interacted with other men, in the ecclesia or assemblies of men, which prefigured our modern brotherless church, where only men were allowed to speak, where women were taught to “learn quietly with all submissiveness […] not permitted to teach or to exercise authority over a man, rather is to remain quiet”.
Chesterton is funny. He would have done great on Reddit. I wish he were alive today so I could inform him that the Christians used the swastika symbol before they ever represented the cross. Not because I particularly care, but just to dunk on him.
When you are a medic on triage, your task already determined, what use is it to cry over destiny? Does civilization begin with weeping? Stephen Miller understands civilization and what it has consisted of since the dawn of time. I’m sure he is familiar with Agincourt and Toledo.
And Chesterton’s beloved civilization was at its best when it bathed in a totalizing and simple narrative. Chesterton forgets this. The narrative was “God and King”, and both were simple. There is nothing simpler and more totalizing than the original gospel message, either of Jesus or Paul.
I’m currently reading Fustel De Coulanges’ The Ancient City, which goes into extreme, meticulously-researched detail about just how profoundly family-centric were all of the ancient legal and religious institutions of Rome, Greece, India, and all of the other major Aryan-derived civilizations. It is simply not remotely tenable to claim otherwise, given a cursory survey of the available information. The extended family — the gens in ancient Rome — exercised totalizing control over the lives, property, inheritance, and legal standing of individuals. Said individuals’ level of kinship was meticulously catalogued and determined their legal standing toward each other, their religious obligations, etc.
You can claim that those civilizations only began to count as “Western Civilization™️” once they began to introduce reforms to mitigate/complicate this paradigm; my observation is that boosters of the “Western Civilization” framing are fairly shameless in the way they selectively pick the parts of ancient history that they want current society to recapitulate now, and fully ignore/misrepresent every counter-example or inconvenient element which would cast their narrative into doubt.
But it was the male heads of the gentes who determined the allocation of privileges and roles per gens, and who put together the rituals, customs, and rules which grew Rome from a collection of backwater kin networks into a civilization. They made their determinations not within the family or family network but between the male heads, in the Senate or through another male-determined process. It was males with families deciding things with other males that have families. The gens existed as a consequence of male political life, as a way to neatly ascribe responsibilities and privileges and promote order.
And? They also thought staring at goat entrails would reveal mystical truths about the universe or earn favor from their gods. Old-timey people did all sorts of dumb shit. Patriarchy was just another log on the dumbass fire.
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This is exactly the thing I predicted you would do, though! You acknowledge, apparently, that during the period in which the various Aryan peoples speciated into their various proto-nations (a period which lasted at least a thousand years) they were highly clannish, with each family having pervasive control over the legal and religious life of its members; you just don’t think they counted as “a civilization” (let alone as “Western civilization”) until they began moving away from that paradigm by introducing a political superstructure on top of it. This means that even though the Hellenic peoples spent a much larger period of time without such a superstructure than they did with it, all the before stuff doesn’t factor into your analysis.
You get to pick and choose the precise moment when you think a multi-thousand-year-old societal evolution began to count as a civilization, which means you conveniently discard the preconditions that led to it as long as they don’t satisfy the parameters you want a civilization to look like. In my opinion this reveals the fundamentally constructed and aspirational nature of “Western Civilization” discourse. Do you acknowledge it as such?
If there are human societies which emphasize the family unit, but which have no civilization, then something else is required to cultivate civilization. The Ju/'hoansi have marriage ceremonies and families, but would never develop civilization. The barbarian German tribes practiced more faithfulness in their marriages than the Greeks or Romans, but they didn’t really have civilization. I am using the 19th century of civilization that is appropriate to remarking on Chesterton. A modern anthropologist would probably say all of these are equal civilizations.
Well yeah, this makes sense, because we want to look at where their civilization began. If they had 50,000 years of families and extended families, which is possible, then that stuff doesn’t really matter as a bedrock for civilization. If some men get together and steal women as property and then start forming a city that will one day make art and enjoy philosophy, which is Rome, then that’s civilization. If Cistercian monasteries pop up in the middle of nowhere, all unmarried men, and after years a micro-civilization begins to spring up nearby as an outgrowth of their industry, then that’s civilization founded on the opposite of the family. Or if some of Alexander’s troops get bored and settle down with some women they took, then that’s civilization with a very ad hoc family. I can imagine Spanish troops taking indigenous wives in Mexico and forming a little city with art and music — in what sense can we plausibly say that the foundation of this is the family?
I suppose we first have to determine what we mean by civilization; I’m pretty sure Chesterton has a certain thing in mind.
Western tradition is to only call certain things “civilized”. I guess we can disagree with this, but is that a fruitful inquiry? This may be a matter of taste, but I highly doubt Chesterton would believe that the pygmies of Africa have civilization because they are mostly monogamous.
But your original claim was that “family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization.”. You then brought up Greece and Rome as central examples of “Western civilization.” But both Greece and Rome did have family as the bedrock of their civilization for a very very long time! It still occupied a massively important part of their society long after the point when they had collectively achieved elements of social and technological development that you identify in this post as preconditions for civilization: art, philosophy, and industry.
Were they “civilized” but not “Western civilization” at that point? When, chronologically or otherwise, did they officially become Western?™️ (Surely “Western” in this peculiar usage must not have any consistent relationship with geography, as you believe that the Greeks (and somehow the Hebrews, presumably) are more “Western” than the Celtic and Germanic tribes who were physically situated farther to the geographic west.
I’m open to conceding that there is some combination of societal and technological development at which a polity can be said to be (lowercase c) “civilized”: some identifiable factors might be the ability to coordinate large-scale public works, pooling of resources, economies of scale, the ability of the centralized power structure to reliably feed its constituents, the facilitation of leisure activities, etc.
However, under that understanding, the Third Reich was extremely “civilized”. It was wealthy, highly politically centralized, had a thriving artistic and philosophical life, and was in every way a peer competitor to the other rich European powers. Whatever Chesterton seems to mean by “civilized”, it has only a tenuous connection to those elements.
The tribes of pre-civilized Greece and Rome may very well have practiced family-oriented extended kin networks for hundreds of thousands of years before they ever developed into a civilization. Lots of primitive tribes did that. The road from the dark ages to the archaic period to the classical civilization of Greece is marked by a different activity: male political formation involving the polis. The men leaving the family to go join (or obey) other men in political matters. Is my understanding correct that you want me to call the Greek dark ages “civilization”?
No doubt, but that doesn’t make it the bedrock of the civilization — the necessary precondition, the cornerstone, the thing which once achieved places them on the road to civilization.
But I am disagreeing with Chesterton, though retaining the appropriate turn-of-the-20th century understanding of “civilization”. Here, as an example, is the definition of civilization in Webster’s 1913 dictionary:
This is what I mean by civilization. I don’t see much of a reason to determine the exact moment something constitutes civilization. To paraphrase the highest court in our civilization: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["civilization"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the [hodgepodge kin networks] involved in this case is not that.”
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