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 -
The replacement of classical liberalism with “woke” is exactly why classical liberalism did and does need to adapt. Likewise, the Amish may genuinely live more happy and sustainably than the trad posers, but the posers’ culture is more popular, and their simple life (a necessary ingredient of their happiness and sustainability) means they don’t have the force to stop it. Ultimately, you cannot recreate the past, only a crude imitation with misery nostalgia; the only way forward is to combine multiple elements of the past to create something novel, analogous to entropy and evolution.
That doesn’t mean classical conservatism nor liberalism will completely lose to their replacements. Those are after all inferior in many ways. The future will take some of what the present does right and some of what the past did right and leave out some of what each did wrong. I wish we would take classical liberalism’s idea tolerance and coherence and adopt it to modern trends…but what ideas the future takes and leaves, ultimately no-one can know.
They can’t stop it, but neither can you. It’s not stopping unless the entire culture accepts and supports conservative views. Which isn’t happening.
The trads are not trying to undo all of western progressive culture, because that’s likely impossible for them. Instead, they propose to build enclaves where they can keep their kids safe from the kinds of ideas and material culture that exists in the rest of the world. It’s a redoubt, a fortress intended to at first provide protection and support for the like minded, but eventually have enough power to make changes.
Oh, the Amish survive, and classical liberalism and other niche ideologies with at least a few members. It's just that they will never leave nicheness unless they change. Even the Amish, with hundreds of thousands of members and growing faster than the general population, would take 30 years to reach 1,000,000 members at approximately their current rate (3%/yr) - and in 30 years the world will be much different, so it's practically certain they'll adapt in some ways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Classical liberalism is dead. What is left of its mantle has been taken over by a few libertarians who can't understand how their preferred policies leave them open to being consumed whole by their illiberal enemies. It turns out there is no stable free equilibrium; for a time, we maintained an unstable free-ish equilibrium based on reciprocity, but that's gone and it's not coming back.
But for the grace of god I go... again... Despite Carl Benjamin's tilting at straw effigies, classical liberalism's primary virtue is not tolerance. It is closer in the moral latent space to an eigenvector of Forbearance, Self-Restraint, and Respect for Autonomy. It requires Humility to recognize that despite moral disagreements one does not have the right to coerce another to a particular moral foundation beyond some minimally burdened social contract.
CL is not "Stable" it is metastable. The required spark to push into into a stable region is one that humans evolutionarily lack. Our socio-cognitive firmware was just not not setup yet to make that leap because evolutionarily it was not effective. We are stuck in an evolutionary saddle point and need an externalized existential disaster to push us forward to continue our evolutionary journey. The son-of-god can preach until he's blue in the face about the need for forbearance, humility, and compassion but humans revealed bible is the bigotry of small differences. We'd much prefer to shank our neighbor for praying to the same deus in a slightly different way.
The next evolution of CL needs to account for that unflattering facet of humanity, it needs an actual immune system and more importantly, it needs to maintain that immune system in the face of several hundreds of years of uncheck dominance. CL won so hard that it became immunocompromised. The illiberal enemies have had to metastasized like a cancer from within because CL could not be beaten from without. People got lazy, complacent, and the tree of liberty went unwatered.
No. If you were in the position of the person you are pitying with that phrase, either the world would be in a such a terrible state that there would be no one to save you, or the people you are imagining would be in your current position would not spare a thought to save you. That is one of the blackpills of the culture war; that mercy is taken advantage of, and restraint is treated as weakness and met with ruthlessness. Your well-treatment of your enemy will likely merely contribute to your own destruction.
There isn't really a bright-line difference between "metastable" and "unstable". Either one, a small perturbation pushes you out of the stable region. What held us there was reciprocity -- the threat of retaliation for bad behavior, and the promise of co-operation for good. It has failed. Bad behavior was justified and retaliation declared illegitimate, and co-operation was not offered. We're out of the stable state and I see no way to get us back in.
More options
Context Copy link
Can you name actual, historical examples of "Classical Liberals"?
What did these people think of the French Revolution? Temperance? Communism?
What makes the differences small? Like, I've heard this line a million times, but very rarely with an argument attached that actually demonstrated the basis for the assertion's correctness. It seems likely to me that attacking other humans' capacity for grouping into a homogeneous, stable unity is probably a super-useful predatory adaptation, and my grandmother, what long teeth you have seems like a fitting observation the home coalitions of many who have historically made this claim a centerpiece of their argumentation.
Yeah, see, stuff like this. Assuming peace is easy and so failure to achieve it is a moral failing. Assuming all religions or even all branches of a particular religion are basically the same, and so conflict is de facto unreasoning. Crystal defects are one of those features of the natural world that seem to have a lot of salience at all levels of scale, and the idea that human conflict is a "simple mistake" is both very recent and possessing both remarkably poor predictive accuracy and a strong correlation with other beliefs notable for their remarkably poor predictive accuracy.
Maybe the Son-of-God needed to preach about the need for forbearance, humility and compassion because humans find these ideas so difficult to maintain and generalize.
Certainly it's become clear that religions do need some alignment to perpetuate themselves and to provide public goods.
The desire for absolute doctrinal alignment may be a failure state of bookish religion especially but it's not coming out of nowhere, and the denominations with the lowest attrition rates are not the ones that are blase about differences.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or "why Cain kills Abel" for short.
You don't need to use that fancy language or understand computers to communicate this concept; even someone from 1000BC can hear it and know, including that God has a real problem with this, even straight up calling it 'sin' [oddly, 'didn't like the offering' was not sin even though it facially meets the definition of such], but also won't do fuck all to stop it (as a design constraint of creation/humanity, not what He'd personally prefer in that moment [1]).
Diana Moon Glampers is evolutionarily correct, but not morally correct, to kill Harrison Bergeron. Humility is why you're supposed to be angry about that.
So did it for Christianity, for the same reasons.
[1] Jesus as proof.
Why is this in the middle of your analysis? It's two different problems.
If you're this type of liberal yourself, which I suspect you are, then I am truly sorry.
I have no other input other than to remind you that "get laid" [or "reproduce" more broadly] and "die" are in that order for a reason.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Plato's Republic makes way more sense once you replace "philosopher-king" with "classical liberal".
The distributed biological intelligence system called "life" is incapable of determining whether this problem halts.
Humanity can define the problem, but must outsource this to a meta-intelligence to compute this in any productive way, and in that light a deity whose "graven image" is humanity itself is the natural choice (which inherently frustrates analysis of whether or not that deity actually exists, but that's out of scope).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link