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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3399 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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The Culture War Singularity is already here

I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.

Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"

Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.

I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.

Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.

Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.

I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Have you reflected on this era? I have. My basic thesis is that New Atheism happened because of Bush. If Gore wins in 2000, online Atheism is completely absent. This frame helps make sense of the dissolution of the movement during Obama's first term. Without an outwardly religious president, the movement quickly lost steam.

This provides an interesting frame for interpreting the popular reaction to Trump. Since Trump's popularity with his voters isn't based on him being a good Christian, there isn't an obvious target besides Trump himself, and this has turned out to be a problem for the commentary class. They can only attack him directly, so their attacks are more nakedly political. This is unappealing for people who aren't already on your side. I think what was so successful about New Atheism was that it felt completely apolitical in the moment. Sure, the current president was a Christian, but that was incidental to their arguments. It felt like we were all online debating the real merits of Biblical historicity, etc., not just engaging in democratic political influence campaigns... but maybe a little bit the latter, in retrospect?

I'm not saying it was an organized operation; things can just happen naturally. And I'm not saying we actually weren't all internally dealing with our religion in a sincere way. But these last 10 years with Trump have really made me reinterpret my time online as a youth.

This post of Scott's about New Atheism is required reading, if you haven't read it already.

New Atheism was a failed hamartiology.

"Hamartiology" is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. Orthodox Christian hamartiology says we all have original sin because Adam and Eve ate the apple. Gnostic hamartiologies say we sin because we are ignorant of our true nature as celestial beings. Some heretical hamartiologies say that all of this is irrelevant, and we sin because we choose to.

We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.

Scott's writing sometimes annoys the shit out of me.

There are certain tics of his that get on my nerves alright. What specifically annoys you?

I think largely it's his self-satisfied voice, and my sense that he imagines his own glistening bubble of experience generalizes. He's at his best I think when he doesn't simplify or draw satisfactory conclusions. That shows intellectual rigor, and I expect intellectual rigor is why many people read him to begin with.

What is this place?

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