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 -
That's a tall order. A lot of people seem functionally incapable of empathy - and there's a whole topic of partisan Discourse going on about it, and on the difference between empathy and sympathy.
Many people seem to interpret a call to empathy as something like "Imagine if your brain as-is right now were transmigrated into another person's body, how would you feel?" They can't even wrap their heads around the notion that they're supposed to be imagining that they had learned an alternative fact pattern, much less held to a different epistimology and metaphysics.
Of course it can't happen here; everyone knows the Nazis are the bad guys! Everyone who can imagine otherwise is a demon in a skinsuit, which means they aren't people and should probably be stripped of rights and isolated away from everyone else, perhaps in some sort of walled camps.
You're right, but probably not for the reasons you think. Nazi empathy was popular among the Jewish emigre academics of the postwar era, and empathy took on particular prominence as things like the Banality of Evil and the Milgram experiments entered the public consciousness. The problem was that Germany couldn't be written off as a political, economic, and social backwater where Hitler was a thug exerting his will over an ignorant and unorganized population. That the German public went along with the horrors of the Third Reich was proof to them that Western Enlightenment epistemology was fundamentally flawed and in need of replacement. The Marxism that they offered as an alternative, however, was verboten during the Cold War, and this interpretation would only take hold among committed leftists.
For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.
I think @Iconochasm was correct: most people do seem to consider "empathy" as "feeling really hard about someone or something" without any shift to their information state. No theory of mind is exercised in the process, and so it usually ends up being an onanistic "see how hard I feel? I'm not callous (like those on the other side)".
I don't think your observations are wrong, it's just that they're orthogonal to the point being made.
The other point is that this is sympathy. I can be very sympathetic to your plight while not understanding a damn thing about why you do the things you do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They were in my view, about half right. Enlightenment thinking does have flaws, especially in moral reasoning. It’s almost impossible to find any evil that one cannot find some justification for if given just the right set of circumstances. I can justify the murder of millions if my reason is “good enough”. The relativism and utilitarian principles given by the enlightenment put everything, up to and including genocide, on the table. Marxism doesn’t work any better as it is a product of the enlightenment. It’s not really an alternative source of moral inspiration, it’s just a different flavor. What is needed in my view is an outside, definitive and authoritative source of the ideal of Good, and a framework that imagines that the most important thing is to live by the ideals of The Good and thus you cannot change the ideals just because you have a good excuse.
Can't you always do that anyway? Aside from hypothetical "no-killing-ever-ever" systems, the ones that really exist and are widely adopted always have killing exceptions, and they all revert to some kind of consequentialist decision process in sufficiently unusual circumstances (what is most virtuous? what violates the rules the least?).
I don't know, seems to me that all the talk about ethics is just wankery, that in the end it has to all be broadly isomorph.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t really recall that being the dominant conservative viewpoint, at least where I grew up. Explaining Nazism isn’t really that big an issue for classical conservatism: humans are prone to cruelty, and civilization barely holds those impulses in check until it doesn’t. While the specifics differ, Germans went Nazi for the same reasons Russians went Stalinist for the same reason Comanches smashed babies against rocks: humans are inclined to cruelty, and organize in ways to facilitate organized cruelty.
The bigger argument is if conservatism, or any particular ideology, has a good track record of restraining those impulses. That’s a far bigger and honestly unresolved argument.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link