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 -
An attempt to summarise the decadence discourse
This has been the most interesting debate on the Motte for several months, possibly because it is only tangentially related to the main thrust of the US culture war. Given the messy debate across multiple top-level posts with various allegations of strawmanning, I thought it was worth trying to isolate what we still disagreed on.
Given that this started with a discussion of Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thread I am going to call the sides broadly in favour and broadly against Devereaux's thesis pro-D and anti-D for brevity's sake. I am decidedly pro-D, but my goal in this post is to identify consensus and disagreement, not to engage in the debate.
Things both sides appear to agree on
(At least within the local Overton window)
The disagreement
Things that are peripheral to the disagreement
I disagree with this framing. Can you (or someone anti-D) name a single example? The Roman Empire? The Eastern Roman Empire? The Holy Roman Empire? Song China? Ming China? All of them spent centuries in a gradual and violent decline. Saying hardcore barbarians destroyed them would be like saying pneumocystis jirovecii was the reason so many gays died in the US in the early 90s.
Aztecs and Incas? While the Spanish were super hard men, it feels a bit like cheating to call them virtuous barbarians, given that their opponents were literally Stone Age civilizations. If an alien fleet with vaguely cruciform ships attacked Earth tomorrow, kidnapped Trump with a tractor beam and then shot down 999 ICBMs and tanked the thousandth one, I certainly wouldn't say the problem lay in our moral decadence.
McNamara's Idiots, sending low Iq people to Vietnam while capable people managed to dodge the draft.
Sending mediocrely talented soldiers to Afghanistan for deployments that last a few months while spending exorbitant amounts of money keeping them comfortable instead of having high quality people spend years in Afghanistan and building relations with the locals.
The fringes of the US empire have been nibbled by a lack of conviction by the American elite class.
More options
Context Copy link
I think there is schoolboy history going on which suggests that the collapses are faster than they actually were - I foolishly thought that the Manchu conquest of Ming China was much faster than it was, and the traditional British schoolboy thought that Rome fell suddenly in 410AD because both the first sack of Rome and the loss of Britain happened that year. If you pointed out Romulus Augustulus and 476AD he would say that the Western Roman Empire fell suddenly in 410AD and the Emperors between 410 and 476 were local warlords with ideas above their station.
Note that this is a general problem of dating the fall of former hegemonic empires - the imperial title gets assumed by the warlord who happens to control the old imperial capital (and possibly several pretenders as well) so it can look like the empire continued existing for a while after it functionally fell. When did the Western Roman Empire as Diocletian and Constantine understood it cease to exist? mu.
But the canonical examples of declining "decadent" empires are indeed the Western Roman Empire after the 3rd century crisis, the Song before the Mongol conquest, the Ming before the Manchu conquest, and the Ottoman Empire after about 1800. Another obvious example is the Achaemenid Empire before the conquest by Alexander the Great - the events of the Anabasis prove that Achaemenid Persia was already militarily ineffective 70 years before Gaugamela. That one is an example where the collapse is sudden and surprising.
More options
Context Copy link
Qing Dynasty China in the first Opium war is a good example. The Manchus were archetypal hard men when they swept past the Ming Dynasty to take control, and even by the time of the Opium War there was still a great emphasis placed on martial prowess by the Manchu minority.
The empire was still massive and they considered themselves without peer. By the time of the war there was no doubt that the technological gap between Europe and China was becoming large; this was not a case of there being a massive technological gap. China had no trouble obtaining modern materiel through trade nor was there any sense in which they could be outnumbered. The trigger for the war was essentially part of the superiority complex of the Middle Kingdom and both Britain and China likely viewed them as the greater empire at the time. Britain's small expeditionary force probably had no ideals of gaining territory or forcing terms upon China. They merely wanted redress for the initial insults and to gain fairer terms for future trade.
Yet once the sides met, there was only ever one winner. There was not a question of the Chinese fighting poorly. And while the gap between the two navies was a big factor, it still seems likely that China could have repelled Britain's attack had they had they any kind of competent strategy or been able to bring enough of their force to bear.
So there we have it: two empires, alike in size and strength, both very much in their decadence phases, with none at the time believing the Brits would be so thoroughly victorious.
Two empires, both alike in decadence,
In fair Hong Kong, where we lay our scene,
From recent grudge break to new mutiny,
Where foreign blood makes foreign hands unclean.
More options
Context Copy link
Lolwut? The first Opium war was 1839-1842. Decadence critiques of the British Empire don't really get going until the Crimean War in the 1850's, and are not particularly convincing until much later. As late as 1897, Kipling writes Recessional as a warning against future decadence, not a critique of present decadence.
The decline and fall of the British Empire is not one where the Roman-style decadence theory makes sense. The British Empire is still vigorous and expanding up to and through World War One*, and is militarily effective in a way decadent empires are not during World War Two. The Empire is abandoned, mostly voluntarily, before the classic signs of decadence appear at home.
* Getting into a stalemate when fighting a peer competitor is not a sign of decadence or military incompetence. Gallipoli was a mistake, but not the kind of mistake a decadent empire would make. WW1 Britain invented tanks and anti-submarine warfare, and General Allenby and Lawrence of Arabia's operations against the Ottomans were dashing British imperialism of the old school.
I'm taking decadence as being 'population are relatively wealthy with few material concerns'. I guess it would be more accurate to state that both countries were very much not in the 'hard times'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you look for "Fremen" and end up with the British Empire in 1839, the country that lorded over literally one fifth of the world at the time, then I doubt you can find a good central example at all.
Maybe England in 1587 is a better example of a plucky underdog dealing a surprising defeat to the hegemonic power, but it took Spain 200 more years to fade into irrelevance as a great power.
You really ought to check the disparity in force in the first Opium War.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So I think this parallels Pareto's Foxes and Lions theory / metaphor. Lions can take bold action. Foxes are clever and can see ahead. To function institutions need a mix of both. Over time Foxes push out the Lions using clever tricks. Eventually the Foxes face a problem where clever tricks don't work and it becomes a major crisis.
My own thinking is that people who are too physically comfortable tend to become purely socially focussed. This leads to things like "I choose the bear" where they haven't really absorbed that bears are real and can kill them.
Colder climates used to have a check with weather. The winter kept people aware that too many wrong moves could lead to their death. Technology has mostly solved that for people living in cities.
California is a good example. They decided to abandon their long term plans to expand the reservoir system as the population grew. Victor Davis Hanson talks about this frequently. There's not really a counter argument to the point that "more people need more reservoirs". But that involves giving money to the wrong sort of people to do the wrong sort of work. So they always seem to start screaming about how it's pointless due to climate change.
I don't really think the change needed is a deep shift to something like a warrior ethos. However something much smaller like a major grid failure that cut off power to Sacramento for two weeks would teach some important lessons about keeping institutions functional to all the government workers.
I think this is an important point that touches on a difference between two theories of "decadence" which sometimes have very different policy implications but which e.g. Gods of the Copybook Headings tries to merge. Pro-Devereaux would cite this as proof that decadence is an incoherent concept, from an anti-Devereaux perspective it is an interesting sub-debate.
@DradisPing is setting out an idea of decadence where a society loses the ability to build and fight at the same time, with the inability to build generally becoming visible first. The Sparta bros have a different idea of decadence where a decadent society is one that focusses too much on building at the expense of fighting.
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly at a certain point the overly financialized/abstractified economy becomes totally unmoored from anything resembling reality, thus decisions are made with a worldview that doesn't conceive of violence being a possibility and runs on 'The meat is made at the back of Costco' logic.
More options
Context Copy link
It's got nothing to do with giving money to the wrong sort of people (??) and everything to do with there not being any worthwhile places left to dam. There's 1400 dams in the state already.
Define "worthwhile". If you get around the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, you could dam several major northern rivers: Klamath, Trinity, Smith, and Eel each could support several reservoirs (there are old plans to build "dam ladders" up those rivers). But that's unpopular, for ecological, indigenous and financial reasons.
You could also just add capacity to existing reservoirs by upgrading the dams. There's many candidates. Again, expensive and unpopular.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I had some comments I wanted to make in the previous discussion but waved-off because properly addressing the issue was going to be a 1000+ word task and I had other obligations vying for my time.
The short version is that Devereaux seems to have either badly misread Dune or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The simplest and most obvious example of this being that the Fremen of Frank Herbert's Dune are neither "poor", nor are they "unsophisticated". There's a whole sub-plot about them being far more populous and industrialized than the Landsraad initially realize because the Fremen have been bribing the Spacers Guild to keep their settlements on the southern continent from showing up on satellite surveillance for the better part of a century.
I'm also generally skeptical of the idea that Devereaux (or anyone here for that matter) has a sufficiently coherent and intelligent idea of what makes "a good soldier", or what "strong" and "weak" mean in this context to be of any real use.
I think this misreading of Dune is very common, and probably intentional on Herbert's part if Dune is meant to be Lawrence of Arabia in space (the real WW1-era Arabs did not have a secret industrial base, but positing one fixes the plothole caused by Paul Atreides not having the British Empire as backup). The reader doesn't see the material wealth of southern Fremen society (apart from the high-quality stillsuits) in the first book (and, on advice from trustworthy friends, I haven't read the others). Unless you do a word-by-word close reading, you will come away with the idea that there are more Fremen in the south than expected, but that they are just as "Fremen" (in the Brett Devereaux sense) as the northern Fremen.
Incidentally, one of the Spartan royal families claimed descent from the semi-mythical Mycenean House Atreides, so Herbert is also invoking Sparta as part of the trope.
Herbert also deliberately makes the case that "hostile environments create the best fighting men" via his comparisons of Arrakis and Salusa Secondis. Unless we're meant to assume that everyone in-universe who comes to that conclusion is barking up the wrong tree.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ve always though “hard men make strong times” Ibn Khaldun Fremen thesis G. Michael Hopf was a bit of a truism. If you plotted a graph with time on one axis and “hard times / good times” on the other, it would be fairly obvious. If the line is continuous, if you can only ever go toward “good times” or “bad times,” then the thesis says nothing. If the line goes up, you’re in good times, and when the line goes down, poof, presto, it created bad times just like we predicted. All it really means is that nothing lasts forever.
More options
Context Copy link
Now, we can check the ur-example of decadence, the example all this debate is about, late Roman Empire how well it check these boxes.
5th century Rome was less martial than Republican Rome at its peak, but I do not see less "warrior values" than in Principate when Rome was at its greatest power. (warrior skills and ability are another matter)
Ditto. In 5th century, you do not see extravagant luxurious life of the first century.
If anything, the opposite. In classical Rome, corporal punishment was reserved for slaves and provincials, Roman citizens (about 10-15% of population) were extempt. In late Rome, everyone except tiny elite of "honestiores" legally belonged to the "torturable" class.
Sort of - unlike in classical Rome, late Roman women had option to leave their family authority to stay celibate and dedicate themselves to religious life. If you want to make case that nuns (tiny percentage of population) destroyed Rome, do it.
Again, no evidence of it. In first century, Caligula could divert the army to build bridge over Bay of Naples. No such wild tales from the fifth century.
"Wealth redistribution" in late Rome was from the bottom for benefit of top oligarch class. This is period when free grain supply for city of Rome stopped for good.
More options
Context Copy link
This comes from 1980's GOP talking points ("dO yOU kNOw Roman Empire was destroyed by GOMMUNISM?").
Traditionally, virtuous society was seen as egalitarian republic of small self sufficient farmers, and society where handful of oligarchs owns everything and the bottom 99% are mass of dispossessed serfs was seen as degraded and decadent society ripe for picking. No one before Ayn Rand said that Roman Empire fell because it was not grinding down the peasants hard enough.
The Sparta bros are implicitly disagreeing and saying that the virtuous society is one (like Sparta) where there is no limit on the ability of warrior elites to extract the resources they need from their inferiors. Given the overlap between Sparta bros and lost causers in American right-wing politics, and the overlap between Sparta bros and manosphere guys advocating an extractive model of male-female relationships in Zoomer Twitter, I think they might mean this.
I think the idea that a virtuous society is one which supports a warrior elite is old, and the innovation of Christian chivalry is that elite class women and priests are now explicitly protected from warrior elite predation in a way peasants are not. Whether "virtue = share of resources commanded by the warrior elite" or "virtue = egalitarian culture capable of arming and feeding a large militia" depends on whether the military technology in a given society favours a few expensive units or a lot of cheap ones.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Hard" and "weak" are simply so vague as to make the theory virtually unfalsifiable. And there are so many other factors going into military prowess and conflict that make the connection extremely weak at best. Did the hard times of Vietnam and the 70s make the US better at kicking Saddam's ass, or were the two wars too different for any comparison? Something like the Schlesinger liberal-conservative cycle lays out somewhat clearer parameters.
More options
Context Copy link
I didn't read the prior thread, unfortunately, but I'm surprised to see this whole summary without any mention of Douthat's The Decadent Society. Douthat's been the foremost person articulating a criticism of Western or American decadence at the moment, I would have thought, and his definition of decadence is something more like an absence of creative ambition or drive. His short definition is a combination of "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development".
Thus for him, a decadent society may still be rich, productive, or militarily powerful, but it lacks drive. It lacks a goal or ambition beyond merely continuing on in its current state. In that sense he thinks that a society can be decadent long-term, even on the scale of centuries. With this approach in mind, military weakness can be a sign of decadence, but is not guaranteed to be, and for that matter military strength can be an enabler of decadence. It is possible to be militarily decadent, if one is powerful, devoted to maintaining a strong military and warrior ethos, and yet nonetheless in a kind of cultural stasis.
I find this a more useful, well-rounded concept of decadence than one that just seems like it's based on a vague mental image of wealthy Romans getting drunk and having orgies while the barbarians ravage the frontiers. That may be an uncharitable description, but I think something roughly in that area is what the "weak men make hard times" meme is gesturing at.
Then it is another point against counting late Roman empire as "decadent". Late Romans had enormous ambition and drive - to be Christians, to be the correct kind of Christians. People who DNGAF do not spend enormous resources on building churches, and would not bother with ceaseless religious strife and persecution.
I don't make a claim about the fall of the Roman Empire.
My take on the full meme - strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men - is mostly just that it's stupid.
That is, taken at face value it is obviously false. Even if you operationalise strong/weak men and good/hard times sufficiently as to apply it to specific historical situations, it fails to bear out predictively. If you try to use it to predict the rise and fall of particular civilisations - say, Chinese or Indian dynasties - it's just not accurate enough.
You can try to nuance the meme enough to make it useful, but it's all epicycles and retroactive interpretation. If an empire fell, per the meme it must have been full of 'weak men', and if one rose or enjoyed good times, it must have been 'strong men', and if you shift around your definitions of strength and weakness enough you can sort of retrofit it into any given situation, but the same definitions usually won't apply to other situations. Alternatively you can retreat into generalities, but these are useless and without insight. It's good when people have a sense of civic duty, or are prepared to endure hardship? It's bad when elites are feckless and irresponsible? That's not particularly insightful.
I do think that decadence is a useful concept and one that we can validly talk about. I also think that it makes sense to talk about common factors that contribute to the downfall of a civilisation, and I think that things like moral or civic character, popular legitimacy or faith in a system/ideal, or irresponsibility or waste on the part of elites, are probably among those factors. I broadly think that asabiyyah is real and important, though I don't endorse Ibn Khaldun's entire theory surrounding it. Anyway, I think it is both meaningful and true to say, for instance, "the United States as of 2026 is decadent".
But I see no need to defend the weak men/hard times meme to establish all that. It's just an oversimplifying, unhelpful internet meme. It's dumb. That's all I really have to say about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Curious about the anti-D response here: in the 60s and 70s, the USA strikes me as clearly more decadent than the USSR, while the USSR was much more left wing. Are those statements accurate? And yet in the USSR case, bad economics trumped any edge in resistance to decadence. How does someone reconcile this tension?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link