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 -
Last week, my company released its 3rd annual DEI report. It consists of a laundry list of DEI achievements, some questionable statistics, and inspiring messages from very well-paid executives.
Performance reviews are another feature of this time of year. Conventional wisdom holds that getting a good review depends on meeting your pseudo-self-defined goals for the year—and, by implication, on setting achievable ones. With that in mind, our executives set measurable, sensible goals with every expectation of meeting them.
That was a joke. The goals were 1/2 women and 1/3 people of color. We were reasonably close on the latter, not that this required any particular change. But our goal for gender parity was hilariously out of line with the ~1/4 we currently have. I could propose various reasons why an engineering- and manufacturing-heavy corporation that makes devices for killing people might not employ so many women, but that’s not really the point. No, this is not a serious goal. It’s advertising.
My company is not particularly woke. It repeats some of the phrases and buys into the aesthetic, but it’s clearly not ideologically captured. If there are true believers, they sure aren’t in charge. DEI is valued insofar as it keeps us from alienating potential talent and potential customers—and no more. At the end of the day it’s not going to shoot itself in the foot in service of equality or equity.
I believe this is true of the vast majority of corporations in the US! Identity politics are a small part of the business signaling that goes on every day. It’s directly proportional to how much the product is a cultural symbol rather than a material good. Apple products or Amazon media or Super Bowl ads are more likely to publicly proclaim their diversity because they’re selling an idea. It does not require true believers, though they help with credibility. The idea itself is what benefits from woke signaling.
This has implications for the trajectory of DEI. Debating whether woke ads are going to increase or alienate support is missing the point. That sort of identity politics is downstream of the culture war, and should not be used to make predictions about “peak woke.” It represents corporate ability to score points off the prevailing winds, not ideologues’ level of infiltration into corporations.
Defense contractors are wildly biased towards veterans. Our hiring is more likely to involve some sort of aggressive patriotism; their scruples are more likely to support selling drones and bombs. Sometimes this even has an advantage of rapport with customers. But this is an end, not a means. It would be a mistake to predict growing evangelism for veterans due to our obvious ideological capture. Likewise, reading DEI reports as a foothold in the culture wars is missing the point. They are a specific form of advertising, and follow the popularity of idpol rather than driving it.
The first generation remembers a time before DEI so they might be able to do it cynically, not make any big changes but just say the slogans and muddle along. The next generation has no memory of anything else. They don't realize that you're not actually supposed to believe that it's feasible to have an engineering department that's 50% women, 30% black and 10% trans. They believe, from the bottom of their hearts, that there are just as many qualified black and women engineers as white and asian men and that it's only sexism and racism that's keeping them out.
And when they try to implement this stuff for real then what can anyone say to stop them? After all, it's right there in mission statement that diversity is a core corporate value, that a diverse company is a more effective company and that it's everyone's responsibility to promote a more equitable society. Anyone who tries to stop them will be not just a racist but also insubordinate.
Your company has AIDS. It's immune system is dead and it's just waiting for pneumonia or strep throat to come in and finish the job.
This assumes there is no such thing as a free market. Sure, a single company can suicide by keeping a significant dead weight in its workforce, but they'll just be outcompeted by companies who don't, or maybe even countries who don't. Markets are just entropy, and entropy always wins out.
Sure if you do enough bad policies for long enough then eventually society will collapse and the problem solves itself. I'm not yet nihilistic enough to throw up my hands and wait to be scooped into the dustbin of history when the alternative is to just stop hitting ourselves in the head with a hammer.
Society won't collapse because a few companies might lose out to French, Japanese or maybe Chinese companies, and then have to reform, create new organizations, or limp on as a second rate economy (like Europe has been doing for 50+ years without a sign of collapse). The gap between where the US is now and collapse is monumental. It is the most powerful, rich, and culturally dominant nation in human history. It basically has to conjure up boogiemen to create competitive incentives. Undoubtedly the US will collapse someday, just like every other civilization or nation ever, but woke won't be the cause.
Btw I'm not saying woke stuff is good. It's just an exaggerated threat to terminally online right leaning types. You could realistically go a month in a wealthy suburb living out your life and never have it affect you at work, home or your kids school's. One of the actual biggest issues in America right now is a huge gap between the perceived importance of a problem (Global warming, school shootings, woke, or whatever) and actual significant problems.
The counter-argument/most relevant argument I'd make is that nations can die not only when they lose resources to sustain themselves, but also a desire to.
This really was the crux of the Soviet crack-up. Economically, the Soviet Union was a basketcase, but it was a basketcase that could have held itself together if it wanted to. The post-Soviet states of North Korea, Cuba, or even Russia itself in the causcuses show that a very poor, very dysfunctional state can still hold itself together. Ultimately, suppression is relatively cheap, and rebellion is hard, and barring outside intervention no insurgency in history has thrown out an occupying army without the assistance of another army nearby to assist.
But politically... the deathknell of the Soviet Union wasn't the economy, but the internal sense of political legitimacy. There's a saying that goes along the lines the Soviet leaders wished to be social reformers, thought they were social reformers, pretended to be social reformers, and then finally wished to be social reformers. The ideological justifications and pretenses of the Soviet communist system withered over time in the face of available alternatives, the cyncism of the elites and the populace grew, and over time fewer people were willing to die, or even kill, in the name of authorities viewed as unjust and corrupt and failing. The more the Soviet Union became less a transformational project and more just a corrupt empire of a state, and a state that couldn't even deliver good results, the closer it got to the point where it was unable and unwilling to hold itself together by force.
The issue not just with wokeism in particular, but polarization in general, is that it arguably creates the same dynamics of distrust, disunity, and de-legitimization in the US in what is essentially an ideological state bound by buy-in, not blood-and-soil or religion or other common identities.
Take your pick of post-modernist critiques, but if racism/sexism/-insert-ism is the worst sins of the day, but your political opposition- and by proxy the other half of the country in a two-party system- are the worst sinners of the day and the government is fundamentally build upon, with, and for the worse sins of the era... why continue it, if you can't control it to fix it? If fixing it is even possible, which various critques basically amount to an impossibility? Believe in the good of the commons requires believe that the commons are, in fact, good. But if the commons are not good- and in this case the commons can be shared institutions, norms, or whatever- defecting is rational, even if it comes with long-term penalties. And when defections start occuring, the commons start to crumble.
We already have seen this in various back and forths. The borking of Robert Bork began a practice of practice of blocking / slowwalking judge appointments into the Bush years, which led to the retaliation in the Obama years, which led to the Democrats removing the judicial filibuster, which led to the loss of it to the Supreme Court, where now the organs of the Democratic Party actively discuss and lobby for court-packing or defanging the Supreme Court. The politicization of consolidated national media, which ostensibly strived for neutrality at the start of the era of national news television like CNN but then created ideological conformity that gave first to Fox News for underserved markets, and then to the Trump Russia hoax affair, has not only cratered trust in media in general but driven the development of information silos for much of the American population. Campus free speech issues didn't remain limited to college campuses, but went both up the employment chain and down into primary education, where considerable fractions of both the voting and non-voting publics don't feel safe voicing their own political opinions. The religious right was happy to muster it's social pressure power into politics, and reaped the whirlwind of an equally evangelical zealotry by people who also saw other believers as a problem to be fixed. When everything is political, and you hate your political rivals, you either burn the shared space down to deny it, or you use it against your hated political rivals.
Yes, a state like this can go on for quite some time... but who is going to want to fight and die and kill for it, if it comes to it? Especially if any interested outside party decides to help things along in a material way? And why would they want to? The Soviet Union had plenty of resources to pay for people to kill the people who didn't want to be with them anymore. That wasn't the issue- a desire to was.
Woke theory is just one of the discrediting ideologies that undermines that desire for their to be a shared nation. And without that desire, the US can absolutely fall apart even if it still has resources. It's far from impossible to see something that makes Brexit look like a wise and just solution.
Now, for the record, I don't think it will actually go that far. I view a number of the issues in US politics right now as within the scope of past political disruptions that were survived. There are dynamics that make this unique- namely this is the first major American political realignment since the invention of social media, and things that previously wouldn't have been publicized are now prevalent- but my own view is that between demographic changes, internal migrations, and the cycling of the American elites as part of both, the system is in the process of changing rather than collapsing, and more to the point is doing so in the context where a lot of its major alternatives are going to do worse.
More options
Context Copy link
Some reason this reminds me of the fed 18-24 months ago. When it was woke fed and everyone gave speeches that were yada yada yada we need to have monetary policy that helps the black unemployment rate.
The fed got a lot less woke when inflation became an issue. Sort of like woke fed was just an act you did when you didn’t have anything real to deal with.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you have a method for determining whether a perceived problem is worth taking seriously? If so, could you describe it?
Some are easier than others. Mass shootings are a very easy problem to dismiss. If you are less likely or roughly equally as likely to be harmed by something as a lightning strike, then it is a non issue in my view. Mass shootings are within the rough range of lightning strikes. Children drowning in pools is a much bigger issue, albeit also a total non issue in relative terms.
Other problems are indeed more complex. I don't really want to go into detail on global warming right now (I've spent way too much time on here today, I need to get work done), but I think it's quite easy to see that if you do a very pessimistic estimate of economic and technological growth on the timescales where global warming might be devastating (100+ years) and then include the opportunity cost of the measures taken to deal with it (which are all basically growth dampening) then I think it's quite clear that its at best a non-issue and at worst the policies are significant cost to society with little to no benefit. It seems to me very similar to the panic in the early late 19th and early 20th century about malthusian population collapse. It probably would not have taken much of a leap in 1890 to take an extremely pessimistic economic model, look at it, and say "This is fucking dumb, we're going to be too rich for this to matter."
As I understand it, we were bailed out by the Haber-Bosch process without which we would have indeed reached those Malthusian limits. Is this incorrect?
That's not an argument against what I'm saying. You can't predict exactly how future growth will work, but betting it will be there is pretty obvious.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link