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 -
Conversation, cooperation, civility, all the foundations of complex, positive-sum human interaction rely on shared values to operate. Liberalism generates values-diversity. When values become sufficiently diverse to be mutually incoherent, conversation, cooperation and civility can't function any more. That's what you're seeing around you: values-incoherent people losing the ability to interact in a positive-sum manner because they lack the necessary common ground.
Just a bit too pat and simplistic. Looking around, it seems to be precisely the illiberals of all stripes who cannot engage civilly.
if liberalism generates values diversity, then illiberalism has a symmetric failure mode whereby, due the illiberals' need to enforce cultural uniformity, tribal boundaries are formed along literally any cleavage site in value-space (no matter how close the groups' values may be in absolute terms), and are amplified until civil behavior becomes impossible. Indeed, some of the most horrific and bloody human conflicts have been between some of the most culturally similar tribes.
It seems to me that you are begging the question; do you recognize a population of illiberals of any stripe who nonetheless engage civilly, or is the identifying mark of the illiberal an inability to so engage?
How many of the illiberals you actually observe emerged from uniformly liberal environments? How many of them used to be liberals themselves? How many of them arrived at illiberalism through liberal arguments pursuing liberal ends by liberal means? How many of them even recognize that they are now illiberal?
What percentage of Europeans would agree that Europe no longer has any meaningful claim to free speech principles? Would you agree that Europe no longer has any meaningful claim to free speech principles?
Do you believe that "free speech" is a coherent, actionable concept that has been in meaningful effect? If so, where and when? Do you expect its return?
I am skeptical that people who lose the capacity for mutual toleration are actually close in values-space in any meaningful way. Could you give some concrete historical examples of people losing the capacity for mutual civil behavior despite coherent values?
On the other hand, I observe large human cultures operating in highly cohesive, cooperative ways for centuries. Few of these long-term-successful cultures appear to me to have been equally or more liberal than our present society in the modern era, and most and perhaps all of them were much, much less liberal.
Does it seem that way? I don't think I gave any indication that I believe only liberals can be civil. Illiberals of a tribe can often be civil to illiberal members of the same tribe.
As for the rest of your questions, they come across as an antagonist gishgallop. Instead of subjecting me to a barrage of questions that clearly veil some point you are trying to make, you would do well to simply state your point clearly.
Now it is you who are begging the question.
If your idea of "too different in values" applies to two groups of Arab muslims who have the same genetics, same language, same religion, same basic economic modes, who disagree over point of theological authority, then your conception of distance in value space is hardly meaningful and not useful as a predictor of conflict. It's probably borderline tautology, for obviously any conflict arises over some difference or another.
We agree that we can't tell whether a group of people being civil with one another are liberal or illiberal. The question is if we can tell whether a group of people being uncivil are liberal or illiberal. You seemed to be claiming that uncivil = illiberal. If my argument is that both civility and liberalism break down under sufficient values-incoherence, and you reply that people being uncivil are displaying illiberality, the problem is whether evidence can distinguish between our hypotheses. I agree that illiberals are uncivil to those they oppose, but the question is why. I am also pointing out that liberals observably turn into illiberals and embrace incivility, which your argument doesn't seem to account for, and which it really ought to, given the numerous horrifying examples of the problem.
I think my questions were quite reasonable, but I can reframe in the form of a statement, if you like.
Liberal ideology led directly to present strains of illiberalism, by obvious and publicly observable attempts to implement Liberal principles. This happened quite uniformly all across America and the Western world in general, all at the same time, very decisively, and with surprisingly little conflict from within Liberal culture. Illiberalism did not defeat Liberalism, it very clearly emerged from it by obvious extrapolation from Liberal principles.
Often, this Liberal > Illiberal transformation happened very publicly and obviously in numerous prominent organizations, and even in specific notable individuals, and both those transforming and those watching them transform recognized that the transformation was being driven by pursuit of specific, clearly-articulatable Liberal principles. They were not rejecting Liberalism, but rather their Liberalism was self-destructing.
These Liberal > Illiberal transformations are fundamental changes, such that where the transformed have ended up is, from the outside, very obviously incompatible with what were presumed to be bedrock principles of Liberalism, and yet many of the transformed do not themselves recognize that they are no longer Liberal in any meaningful sense. The best example here is probably Free Speech: both America and Europe claim strong adherence to freedom of speech, but the principle is rapidly dying out in America and is more or less entirely dead in Europe, and neither society seems to have common knowledge of this fact.
This seems like a reasonable point, given how fraught prediction is in general... And yet it seems to me that attempting to assess core values and the conflicts between them still gives better predictive value than trying to label people as "liberal" or "illiberal" based on ideology or apparent temperament. Some examples:
No one on the Blue side saw Freeze Peach coming, near as I can tell. No one on the Blue side saw Trans Rights coming; it was still being treated as a punchline in Blue entertainment as little as a year before it became a bedrock issue for the Blue Tribe vanguard. No one saw the collapse of the atheist movement coming. No one of consequence saw the ACLU flip coming.
My recollection is that Conservative Christians did see the general flip toward illiberalism on the part of Blue Tribe coming as far back as the 90s, and arguably much further back than that, based on an assessment of values rather than surface ideology.
Currently, it seems to me that a lot of people have predicted a hundred of the last zero collapses of Woke, and have consistently underestimated political radicalization in general. On the other hand, quite a few people have been wrong in symmetrical but opposite ways, so maybe it's a wash.
Despite this, it seems to me that the arguments for Liberalism that I'm aware of are, at this point, entirely bankrupt, and rely on ignoring the evidence of cultural evolution over the last few decades. Zunger's thesis, near as I can tell, remains unassailable: Tolerance is not a moral precept, and Liberalism's collapse seems to be an obvious consequence of Liberal axioms to the contrary. If you think otherwise, I'd be quite interested in your arguments.
Just as a matter of observational correlation. I'm not claiming that, logically or mechanically, every uncivil person is necessarily illiberal or vice versa. Although, we both seem to agree that illiberals have a tendency to be uncivil to the outgroup.
My point was that empirically illiberalism is no strong bulwark against incivility. And so, if we are to judge a group of liberals by their purported tendency to incivility, or as generating uncivil behavior, then we can just as easily do the same thing to the illiberal group.
What is your claim, that liberalism is worse than illiberalism because liberals sometimes turn into uncivil illiberals?
But I wont deny this sometimes happens. Liberal societies can decay just as illiberal and pre-liberal ones can and have. Yet illiberals can often turn into liberals. And illiberals can delvove/schism into tribal violence for reasons that have nothing to do with liberalism. This is why I said your argument is too pat. You consider only side of one particular dynamic and present it as if it were sufficient for wholesale judgement against liberalism, but it isn't.
You should give a lot of thought to the problem of prediction. Because if you are going to reject liberalism and replace it with some illiberal ideology, then it would be nice to know that whatever you replace it with does not lead to worse failure modes. If you want to prevent conflict by preventing so called value-drift, this is necessarily a pre-emptive act. And if you cannot reliably pre-emptively determine which values are load bearing and which aren't, you are going to cause a lot of unnecessary pain and conflict by tamping down on "values diversity".
I may or may not disagree depending on how you determine whether something is or is not a core value (in a way that's not tautological). But I'm confused because you were the one who initially cast the problem in terms of liberalism. What distinction between values, ideology, and temperament are you making here?
Oh are they entirely bankrupt? You have not remotely justified that lofty claim.
We can just observe how quickly the illiberal right (ham-fistedly) reached for classical liberal defenses such as free speech when their preferences were being contested. Even now the maga conservatives consistently appeal to classical liberal principles in their efforts to root out the woke left. They could just be lying of course. But if they're not (and even if they are) that is an indication that liberal principles are game-theoreitically valuable in a way that will ensure their continuation.
Lost the first version of this, so it'll need to be a bit abreviated.
No,
You seem to be treating Liberalism and Illiberalism as equal and opposite ideological poles.
My claim is that Illiberalism is more real than liberalism, because Illiberalism is the base state and liberalism is a superstructure necessarily built atop it. Liberalism is a luxury that exists only where illiberalism has created the conditions necessary for its existence. Further, Liberalism tends to degrade those conditions, and the more Liberal we go the faster the degradation. When the conditions degrade sufficiently, Liberalism collapses back into illiberalism, often without many of the Liberals even noticing the change. Liberals who turn illiberal in a crisis are simply expressing their ideology's internal contradictions, and "more liberalism" will not solve the problem, but rather accelerate it.
Civility is not a product of liberalism. Civility emerges when values are mutually coherent, allowing the recognition of common interest and common humanity, positive-sum reciprocity, group loyalty, charity and so on. Such an environment can be codified as an ideology, which is what Liberalism is. The problem is that Liberalism confuses its progenitor civility not as a consequence of illiberal social organization, but rather as a constant feature of human nature, and concludes that since civility and its own emergence coincide, more liberalism will lead to more civility. But Civility maintains its rigor through duty, obligation, debt, conformity, enforcement, none of which Liberalism is fundamentally interested in, particularly resonant with, nor capable of maintaining from within its own ideological frame.
Liberalism, unrestrained, always degrade civility and values-coherence, until it triggers a crisis too undeniable and too acute to ignore, at which point it will transition back into the harshest forms of illiberalism and resolve that crisis with a bloody hand. The only way to prevent this ideological boom-and-bust cycle is to moderate Liberalism, to accept that "More Liberalism!" is not a universal answer to the problems of living together, and sometimes what we need is less. Likewise, actual civility requires rules and standards, and punishment for breaking them, which in a limited context can appear quite uncivil. "It's all good, man" is not a general answer to the question of how to live together; sometimes it is not all good, and something must be done as a result.
All societies decay. But our society went hard on maximizing Liberalism and then very rapidly decayed, and the most liberal portions of the population decayed the fastest. The Freeze Peach meme emerged and was rapidly propagated from the deepest-blue, most "liberal" parts of our society. And efforts at effective mass speech control and censorship. And attacks on presumption of innocence. And mass political violence as a live and effective method for pursuing social change. And severe violations of freedom of assembly and movement.
Can you point to some examples?
Schism and tribal violence are an innate and irradicable consequence of human nature, and are perfectly able to express themselves under Liberalism and Illiberalism alike.
One might turn this around and ask Liberalism to predict whether the outcome of its unlimited and yet oddly selective tolerance might not lead to worse failure modes. I can point to a long history of Western civilization that operated on levels of liberalism considerably below our current norms. Can you point to an example of how injecting population-replacement-level amounts of Muslims into sclerotic western democracies works out long-term?
In any case, I'm not sure what is to be gained by discussing the problem in the abstract; it's better pursued at the object level.
Core values are values people will compromise all other values to secure, because they are valued more than those others. Ideology is a story people tell themselves to try to encapsulate their value judgements into general rules; when they run afoul of reality, often they change. Temperament would be a term, perhaps poorly chosen, for general bearing, apparent attitude, politeness or bluntness, the register of one's voice, the minutea of how one generally communicates.
In Harry Potter, Professor Umbridge's temperament is unfailingly polite and mild. Her ideology is bureaucratic managerialism. Her core values are totalitarian power and control.
In reality, the ACLU's temperament and ideology were staunchly liberal, but in fact their core values were Blue Progressive, and when those core values came into conflict with their professed ideology, the ideology abruptly and seamlessly changed.
The failures of Liberalism as an ideology are self-evident. Europe has implemented a variety of blasphemy laws and has been busily jailing, fining, or otherwise abusing people for the words they say or even don't say, and the European and American consensus is that this is fine. America retains some narrow, formal protections on paper, but our government has proven perfectly willing to violate these protections in egregious ways, whether to punish or to censor, on a variety of pretexts. More damningly, the ideals necessary to maintain formal free speech protections simply and very obviously do not exist. A probable majority of Americans believe that speaking the N-word justifies physical assault; one jury was willing to apply this standard retroactively, acquitting a stabber because his victim responded with the N-word. Large pluralities and perhaps outright majorities believe that firing people for their speech is good and necessary. A large plurality of Americans are willing to endorse violence and even murder as solutions to political disagreement. And at the end of the day, are they wrong?
What is your defense of Liberalism? Show me how it works, where it fits in to the world around us. Show me where you think we are and how you think we got here. I claim that in our present context, Liberalism is as useful as a warm pitcher of spit. Why am I wrong?
Who, specifically? Which "Illiberal Right" are you referring to, when and in what context?
I made such appeals when I was still a Liberal, watching the Liberal consensus collapse around me. The consistent failure of such appeals is why I stopped being a Liberal: evidence showed that such defenses didn't work, because they were built on lies.
My speech, my arms, and my vote is not protected because of the Constitution and Liberal ideals. It is protected by anonymity, numbers, and an advertised bloody-mindedness toward those who would infringe upon them. These are not perfect or perhaps even very good protections, but they handily beat Liberalism, which is very clearly no protection at all.
The Liberal Game Theory argument is trash. "Don't restrict the rights of others, or they might restrict yours." But if I recognize rights for others when I am in power, and then I lose power and they gain it, they are completely free to refuse to recognize my rights. And then, having violated my rights, if they lose power and I regain it, Liberals will not agree that I should refuse to recognize their rights in turn, thus providing the consequence their "game theory" relies on.
“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles” is a pattern Liberal "Game Theory" has no answer for, but Illiberalism can handle easily and honestly. We should not live by lies. Skokie Liberalism is gone forever, and pretending otherwise will not help you. Liberal Maximalism depended on a fundamental lack of knowledge of the consequences of its policies. We have that knowledge now in abundance. Lessons have been learned, and will not be soon forgotten.
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