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 -
Let's talk babies! There's a viral video going around on X about a young lady who supposedly never wants kids, then gets to hold one of her friend's babies. She immediately breaks down crying, and declares she wants eight kids!
I find this story fascinating because I relate to it on such a personal level. For much of my early life, even up until my late 20s, I also was staunchly someone who never wanted kids. I would proudly declare this intention to the older people in my life, and they'd look at me with a gleam in their eye and say "sure kid, just give it a few years." I resented their calm certainty I'd change my mind, but turns out they were right.
For me though, it wasn't JUST growing up. It was, as the woman above experienced, spending time around young children. Once I got to babysit my niece and nephew regularly, I realized that kids are incredible to be around! They're so full of joy, laughter, and just general excitement about life, in a truly infectious way.
Personally I think that a huge reason we have so many difficulties in the culture war, in fertility, and I'd go so far as to say mental health, is because our society is no longer oriented around children. We separate young kids from every other age demographic besides their own, and their parents. Most teenagers / young adults spend years or even a decade without ever being around a small child for more than 10 mins. I know I did.
There's something deeply wrong in that setup, as I genuinely believe a huge part of the human experience lies in spending time with the little ones. They really do have the kingdom of Heaven, there's just something so pure and untouched by the difficulties of life in their way of being.
I also suspect that our general breakdown of communal sentiment is tied to a lack of being around kids. I think that as you spend more time around kids, you naturally care more about your community, safety in your neighborhood, and wanting to form safe groups. Novelty in the form of partying and drugs becomes less interesting because you get all the novelty you need from raising young ones.
Either way, while I know it will have to play out over long time scales, I do genuinely hope we can get back to a society where having lots of kids and spending time with them at all ages is far more common than today.
Yeah I strongly suspect this is true. Even as someone who has always wanted kids. Seeing my brother parent my niece, and not an older relative or acquaintance, has made it seem achievable whereas before I found the idea incredibly intermediating. We live very far so don't see each other often seeing him interact with her as a toddler for like a three day visit made me want kids, now, not vaguely in the future.
Another thing is the phrase that "your life is over" when you have kids. In places where kids are more integrated you don't change your habits that much you just bring the kids to what you were going to do.
More options
Context Copy link
You what else nobody ever see anymore? corpses. Used to be there were bodies everywhere. Now not so much. Everyone thinks they can live forever so there's no need for kids. Time to bring momento mori's back in the streets where they belong!
If true, we would observe baby boom in war zones or mega violent nightmare places like post-Soviet space or South Africa.
Do we observe it?
More options
Context Copy link
Actually I've heard people seriously argue this on twitter. Perhaps there's something to it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While I agree that having people of different ages around you is extremely great for healthy development, I don't think it's sufficient. Italy, for example, is extremely child-friendly, with none of this North Sea-adjacent coldness. Their TFR is still shit.
Housing theory of everything takes over though.
Italy and Spain have the same problems. High youth unemployment and low access to housing.
Young adults have no prospects and continue living with parents in a tiny house. Can't convince anyone to have kids in such an environment.
More options
Context Copy link
It's actually extremely interesting you mention this. In the past few years my two vacations have been to Italy and Britain, both with a small child. In Britain it was almost impossible to find a nicer restaurant that would allow us in with a baby/toddler. In Italy it was the complete opposite, everyone was extremely welcoming and fawning over our toddler even at the fanciest restaurants in Rome and Naples. But as you said, fertility rate in Italy is trash. My sense is that explanations for low fertility are often very poor and the people giving them don't even give the most minimal examination at international comparisons.
Asked why they aren't having children, American millennials will usually say things like lack of affordable housing, lack of universal healthcare, and so on. But Scandinavia with their generous social welfare is not really doing much better. In Italy they will probably point to things like fashion/beauty culture making turning women off being a mother in order to preserve their looks/figure/etc. The real explanation obviously has to apply to Sweden just as it does Japan, USA and Italy, so anything culture-specific can only be but a small part.
At the margins, Scandinavia (and France, which now has an even more generous welfare state) were doing better than other Europeans pre-pandemic, but Scandinavian fertility took a dive during COVID-19 and didn't recover. (Despite Sweden's successful lockdown-lite approach). France remains one of the highest-fertility countries in Europe.
Whatever the real explanation is, it applies across the west, and even more so in first-world Asia. Feminism has the wrong dose-response profile (within countries, patriarchal subcultures are more fertile, but if patriarchy was fertility-enhancing at a national level then first-world Asia would be doing better than Europe, Hungary would be doing better than the UK, and Korea would be doing better than Japan). Urbanism seems the most likely story on a superficial look, although it hasn't hurt either Modern Orthodox or Haredi/Hasidic Jewish fertility.
More options
Context Copy link
It's famous that Americans say they want 2.7 kids, but only have 1.6 kids. So there is clearly a disconnect between stated desire vs reality across many populations at the moment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m curious if you take the average Italian teenager / college student, if they actually spend a meaningfully larger amount of time around babies than in other western countries…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was a study released about 10 years ago from Australia on programs which used infant dolls/simulators in schools (e.g., an assignment to take care of this robotic doll for a week) in order to prevent teenage pregnancy.
The study found exposing teenagers in schools to these robotic baby infant simulators increases teenage pregnancy.
I had a similar experience. It wasn't until my friends and family started having kids that I was around babies and small kids again and they're great; I changed my tune about having them. I wish I had started far earlier.
More options
Context Copy link
I find it funny how infrequently people run into babies these days. I'm pretty sure my own daughter was the first infant I held in my arms as a upper-middle class white male, since my immediate family is nuclear with no particular extended mix and most places I'm in are just fairly explicitly no-baby zones. Most of my friends never really interacted with an infant till I had one as the first person in the broader group.
More options
Context Copy link
Little people are so random and cheerful most of the time that it is easy to forget that they do throw tantrums, usually for predictable yet necessary reasons. Being around kids a lot makes it kinda wash out but occasional babysitting doesn’t do that.
More options
Context Copy link
Most of the time I'm around a small child for more than 10 minutes, what I recall is grubby tantrums, usually punctuated by the parents either hissing at the child to shut up in their best rendition of a gorgon, or ineffectually pleading to calm down.
Need I clarify that those are not the beatific and inspiring experiences you describe?
If this is happening every ten minutes someone is doing something wring. Either it's a kid unfriendly area, the parents want the kid to sit to still, or they've just lost all control but this has not been my experience.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just parents not being good at what they do.
It's hard to say-- I do think kids come into the world with some fairly strong personality tendencies, and some kids are just more prone to tantrums than others. But I also know a lot of parents who get caught in the "ineffectual pleading" cycles.
I've found that a little bit of enforcement of punishment (simple stuff like a time out, taking away a toy, etc) up front can prevent a lot of those embarrassing moments when your kid needs to be on their "best" behavior. For most of the situations in which they are in public, they needn't be quiet or particularly polite. Kids will be squirrelly and that's fine. But if they're throwing a tantrum... well, yeah, it's really a shame that it turns off all the non-kid-havers.
A good chunk of it is; it's not like there's any objective way to measure performance beyond stuff, everyone has an opinion (and the more competent parents are, paradoxically, more likely to take advice they shouldn't be; the less competent ones won't), a first impression from "literally baby" tends to be detrimental to noticing the areas where that's no longer true.
But more than those things (and much as parents will parrot this when attempting to assert vetoes over stuff their future teenagers will do), parents are generally way too close to the problem. Stuff that's obviously wrong to outside observers won't clock that way, and since the only person who'll ever be held to account for that is them 10-40 years down the line, with a healthy dose of "well, it worked, didn't it?", it's not something one is going to casually get shocked out of doing.
More options
Context Copy link
I think if you teach the kids to be polite and charming and hold a conversation with an adult (which is often pretty easy since children like positive attention, and which you can do at a pretty young age, depending on the kid's personality) it makes adults more forgiving of the squirrellyness and in turn makes parents less uptight and prone to hissing ineffectual threats at them. And if they're your kids, it will make your conversations with them more interesting as well. (I also second your observation that actually enforcing punishment works!)
Also, young children are really hilarious. The closest thing I've ever seen to Loony Toons in real life has got to be pre-k kids discovering basic principles (obvious to any adult) like "socks on hardwood floors are slippery." By all means keep your kids safe, don't let them run with scissors and what have you, but if they are healthy and active they will find ways to generate their own slapstick comedy routine daily and if you can just laugh at the harmless but shocking foibles instead of getting sucked into their frame of mind about how the latest insult to their tiny person is a catastrophe of truly monumental proportions you'll find them much more entertaining.
For various reasons, I basically raised my younger brother.
When he was a toddler, he had a toy truck with a nine volt battery in it. Once he discovered the latch, he decided he was going to eat that battery. With God as his witness, that battery was going in his mouth. No force on heaven or earth would stop him.
For three solid weeks, I did everything in my power to keep him from eating that battery. Eventually it reached the point where I had to use the bathroom, and when I came out, I saw that he had pushed a chair up to the counter and had scaled the cupboards to grab the toy from the top of the fridge.
At that point I figured that letting him taste the forbidden fruit was probably safer than the lengths he'd go through to get it, so I put the toy on the ground and let him go to town.
Immediately after the contacts hit his tongue, a look of absolute betrayal crossed his face that I have never seen on anyone else before or since. Through tears, he asked why did you do that?
He never tried to eat a battery again, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've had broadly good experiences. A few tantrums, babies do that, but mostly they sleep. Later on, my godson is still pre-verbal but my friend's 4/5 year old children and my nieces are adorable, playful, and friendly for the most part, especially if you let them win at Mario Kart. (They make fun of my Japanese for not being as good as theirs, which is humiliating, but you can't have everything.)
The only hard part is that you have to put out as much energy as the kids do or it's no fun for anybody and it's exhausting after a couple of hours, so you have to tell them to bugger off for a bit. But it also seems clear to me that this is what the energy of young-adulthood is broadly for, my friends don't usually have to worry about doomscrolling or getting bored because the kids take up all of the energy that would otherwise get pushed inwards. Hobbies and career can do that too, of course, but not as effectively IMO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say our social tools peak in a small loosely related group (tribe or village) that's multi generational and limited in number so people spend time with kids, elders, peers and the whole group is below the Dunbar number.
The issue is were much much wealthier because we can specialize to an enormously finer level than that set up allows and once specialized, we maximize value by rearranging so that we're physically near other specialists.
My deep regret is that the Internet didn't let us establish specialist networks over wide geographic areas that let us stay in villages for social lives while teaming up globally for productivity. Instead we tried to turn the globe into our village which is making everyone miserable.
It's interesting to what extent this is purely a luxury practice of the managerial class; how much of it is MBA's who NEED to see all their reports in their little cubicles from their fancy desk in order for their dick to get hard.
It's not getting solved either; even if WFH is cheaper and equally productive, the people who have been selected to decide how the economy actually is regardless of the facts have decided "My first priority is feeling like a big business man doing big man business".
The strivers would always congregate in order to get ahead, but the other 80% of those who just need to go along for getting along purposes would probably want to live walking distance from their family instead of paying 100000000000$ a second for a studio.
More options
Context Copy link
Hemingway levels of economy of words. Blown away by how much weight this comment holds (seriously).
I'm a remote work maximalist for this reason. There are certain companies, including new startups, that have hardcore work in person requirements. Monday to Friday, no exceptions. Not only will these places fail to attract and keep high level talent, they're literally contributing to social malaise and atomization. This isn't their intent, per se, so I stop short of assigning moral culpability here. But their anti-social and anti-family negligence is profound.
This can work for um work, but I highly doubt it’s possible for more general social configurations.
That was my point.
The internet means whatever your career specialization is is not longer geographically bounded.
This means we can create communities of varied occupations / occupational classes where the focus and emphasis is on the strength of that community.
Instead, as @atelier's parent comment points out, we self-segregate into enclaves of rough career equivalence; suburbs full of striver type PMC jobs, wealthy neighborhoods full of lawyers / bankers / executive types.
To be fair, this is a complex system - housing costs and class based behavioral patterns also matter. The point is that the global flexibility that the internet should've allowed got inverted so that being in tech and not living in SF/NYC/Boston and a handful of other places means you work in tech but aren't in the right tech circles.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is a tremendously underrated explanation for why things are the way they are.
Been reading my third Neal Stephenson novel lately and I think that he saw this coming way ahead of time and started thinking about solutions.
Which ones? I guess Diamond Age has that theme between the lines, but which others do?
Diamond Age is what I am reading now. Cryptonomicon was perhaps more interested in the Internet part and less the solution part, but the other Stephenson novel I've read is Snow Crash where, like in Diamond Age, society splinters into smaller enclaves, philes, or "burbs." Personally I don't think Snow Crash is as good as Cryptonomicon or (so far) Diamond Age but it is pretty interested in The Internet Future.
Perhaps "solutions" isn't quite right - perhaps Stephenson was just trying to peer ahead into the future a bit. But if you don't like the Global Village the philes seem like a solution.
I'm not sure the people in the Snow Crash burbs actually share much community, but I guess I can see the splintering into smaller units - even if many of those are just franchises of some anarcho-capitalist mega-corp that collectively hires armed security. Sounded more like a thought experiment to me, along the lines of "what if every American suburb was a gated community that had cyborg pitbulls mauling tresspassers?" And American suburbs famously don't have that much actual social community going for them.
Also, absolutely read Anathem next, if you haven't already. It's by far his best work, and the one that actually has an (extremely utopian) solution to exactly that problem!
That might be true, although IIRC Snow Crash explicitly notes that some of them are organized along ethnic/racial or religious lines, so I suspect it's implied in certain cases.
Thanks for the recc, will take note!
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