site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Fertility is a wicked problem, and I'm not sure what you're asking is even possible, as I think the underlying social/cultural issue can't really be solved by a lone conservative head of state/government in an otherwise hostile liberal democratic global culture though executive political action. But I will attempt to answer the question as a thought experiment nonetheless.

Firstly, I'm going to constrain any potential actions to something that is 1) practical 2) politically feasible and 3) sustainable (so it can't just be easily overturned/revoked as so as you're out of office).

It's easier to highlight incorrect or misguided ideas than it is to identify correct ones so I'll do that first. Economic solutions and incentives do not work. This is not to say they don't have any impact (it can slightly increases it), but they are not going to remedy what is a long term social and cultural issue. As I've pointed out before, the fertility rate of the US was higher under the worst period of the Great Depression than it is today.

Specifically, child care support/subsidies is a complete red herring. While I have no hard evidence to support this (it's not something anyone has ever bothered to study), but I strongly suspect child care support might counter-intuitively have negative effect of fertility rate. I believe that child care support actually encourages women who already have children to start or restart working, and thus lower their long term fertility (have one or two kids, go back to work), rather than the often stated goal of encouraging or helping working women to have kids. In other words, child care support is more aimed at getting young mothers to work (and become 'economically productive') rather helping working women become mothers.

Okay, now for policies that improve fertility and are feasible

  1. An aggressive campaign remove any form of female affirmative action and similar policies, particularly in education and employment.

This is potentially politically feasible because it's theoretically possible by using the liberal ideology against itself. The most obvious example of this is Title XI lawsuits in the USA used by men to stop women-biased policies and affirmative action (though I must say this is an extremely uphill battle). It's sustainable because it exists within the liberal legal framework already. It's not trivial to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Though this will heavily depend on the given country's political system. Also, while I say it's feasible, that doesn't mean it's easy or likely. Fighting against gamma bias is extremely difficult. Going any further than this (e.g. actively discriminating against women) is completely unfeasible and any suggestions about this are pointless.

An even more aggressive approach would be to somehow take back control of the education system and academia from woke stranglehold, but I'm not even sure how you would go about it, short of burning the whole thing to the ground and rebuilding, but I don't think that's feasible.

  1. Destroy and disrupt social media as much as possible, especially dating apps.

This is less about improving the fertility rate, but actively halting what I think is a massive compounding factor to its decline. Social media, especially dating apps, are not at all conducive to the formation of traditional family life, no matter how many people say they found the love of their life on Tinder. Social media more generally is also a vector for political and social ideas that are not at all helpful to the goal, to put it lightly.

The most practical way to go about it would probably be to invoke anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws and attempt to break up the social media/tech companies and extremely weaken their networking effects that way. But this would be a huge effort. It could probably would be possible through playing on existing left-liberal fears of social media and tech companies. The best bit is that there is already a push to regulate dating apps to 'protect women' but this mostly just means to put more burden on to men (usually wanting men to have to provide id to sign up to dating apps), because who would actually want to stop the meaningless casual sex? It would be possible to turn this into just straight destroying the dating apps though in the name of protecting women.

  1. For certain parts of the world, actively promote religious organizations (especially Catholic Church) and weaken the separation of church and state.

This is only feasible certain parts of the world (for example, Latin America and some parts of Eastern Europe), and presents a double edge sword (or even a Faustian bargain if you're so inclined). Weakening the separation of church and state will result in a whole host of other non-fertility related problems, but is a potential strategy for the question being asked. Churches remain some of the only prominent conservative cultural institutions left, so obviously promoting their influence and status would work towards the goal. The big caveat is that even churches are not immune left-liberal cultural take over, and that includes even the Catholic Church. Not sure about long term sustainability.


I might think of some more ideas later.

Ultimately, I think what's needed is a new traditionalist-conservative vision that leads to a new conservative movement, one that isn't tied to right-liberation ideology (thanks America). I have some vague sense about what it might include, and I think it will happen at some point, but I think it's impossible to know it until it happens. I think it will necessarily have to acknowledge and rebuke both all the liberal and post-modern leftist arguments (post-post-modernism?). In essence, something along the lines of 'yes, we have heard all your arguments about how society should be and found them lacking. The stable traditional family and lifestyle remains the contested champion of the basis to build a functioning, just, prosperous society'.

Church attending Christians in America are above replacement fertility(albeit not by enough to balance out their apostasy rate). And IIRC there’s a nearly one to one relationship between the fertility rates of Ukrainian oblasts and the percentage of the population which belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.