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 -
Why doesn't "what if the roles were reversed" ever work? I mean it works for me. I actually am convinced when people bring up that argument. But it never works when conservatives say it to progressives.
Why I'm bringing this up is that recently Abdul El-Sayed's wife appeared on stage wearing something not dissimilar to an outfit from "Handmaid's Tale".
https://x.com/FedPoasting/status/2118389760070725932
What if the roles were reversed? What if Mike Pence or Mitt Romney or J.D. Vance of Pete Hegseth showed up like this?
I have a hard time explaining why this line of reasoning just does not land at all with progressives. To me it seems like a slam dunk. What am I missing? And is there a conservative equivalent to this, i.e. a meta role reversal where conservatives are the one being hypocrites?
Can you give me some examples of times that it worked on you?
My impression is that in general comparison is a poor argument, because it typically ignores some outside context that makes the situations incomparable.
Not the OP, but the classic cases for me are racial role reversals, where a conservative is appealing to color-blind classical liberalism to counter something like "white people are the worst because..." with "imagine if you said black people are the worst...". I would say that this sort of hypocrisy being pointed out did "work" on me when I was younger. It made me realize that most people are not actually committed to consistent principles and helped me to identify that we were moving into a new post-liberal politics in the early 2010s, where the motte was liberal equality and the bailey was a sex and race based hierarchy.
Like many on this site I probably feel an unusually strong need for consistency and logical coherence, and when I was younger I did not have good theory of mind for others. I didn't have good theory of mind for myself, either, to be honest. Now that I have done more self reflection, I can see how my own desire to impose coherence and consistency is quite selective and self-serving when it comes to tribal battles or arguments where my ego gets involved.
Yes, this is what I meant.
Starting with the principle of "all people should be treated equally", then the role reversal thought experiment works.
But I suppose most people don't actually start with that precept. Progressives, for example, might start with a different precept such as "black people are good" and "white people are bad". Therefore, a black person hurting a white person is fundamentally different than the reverse.
So the role reversal argument falls flat. You'd have to attempt to reverse the underlying belief of moral superiority based on race.
It's funny, I was thinking about sex-based role reversals, and I think that they are even harder to make "work" because most people so deeply feel that there is a difference between men and women and that they should be held to different standards, even when they say otherwise.
I had a phase in high school / college where I was something of a true believer in racial blank slatism, probably because it supported the classical liberalism I absorbed from the red state milieu I grew up in. I was uncritically reading people like Malcolm Gladwell and Jared Diamond, along with people like Thomas Sowell, who studiously avoids direct engagement with hereditarian questions (Sowell I still respect, the others not so much). But I always had a strong sense that men and women were different. It probably helps that I played sports, and when I was growing up I picked up benevolent sexism from the conservative adults around me. I did have some problems in college when I took all the talk about men and women being psychologically identical (if not for social conditioning) literally. It wasn't till later that I realized that most people just intuit that there is a difference and instinctively learn when it is appropriate to "treat women equally" and when it is not. My conversations with the ladies did not go so well for a while there...
If race realism and hereditarianism came before the eugenics movement and Nazism never happened, I think it’s unlikely there’d be so much intellectual paranoia and moralizing over race and sex related questions. Not to mention a lot of that stuff came at a time when biology was still very much in its infancy, and so a lot of the race related discussion happened during a time when a lot of things were still uncertain and unknown.
You go back far enough to the Madison Grant and Nordicist schools of racial hierarchies, a lot of that stuff was heavily assailed by later left-wing critics who were correct, but not at all for any of the heralding triumphalism of environmental causes over biology that they led with. It’s because the biology of that time was undeveloped and not well understood, so there was a lot of racial mysticism over things like “pure races,” and other nonsense. It was critiqued even by leading eugenicist thinkers at that time. Being a race realist (which is only to say you believe in the reality of biological differences in human beings) doesn’t commit you to some view of Nordic chauvinism. Not all races share an equal biological distribution of traits and abilities, which explains the relative frequencies of various traits. If you want to argue there are “healthier” or “superior” biological strains for particular abilities, that should be uncontroversial. 19th and 20th century biologists even argued for selective miscegenation and crossing high quality genetic strains from different groups to “drive” social progress. The early eugenicists extrapolated that point further and argued that evolution is still ongoing in humans, but modern civilization and industrial society has decoupled natural selection from reproductive fitness, leading to a “degeneration” of human stock. With humans just like animals or plants, you can breed them “up,” or breed them “down,” or any direction thereof, so to preserve civilization, you have to apply eugenic principles to protect human beings from dysgenic consequences.
It’s an interesting counterfactual to consider… The Soviets had already begun to taboo eugenics before the Nazis rose to power (and ended up tabooing the whole field of hereditarian genetics), so I think that biological realist principles are just not very compatible with egalitarianism in general and would have always come into conflict with universal rights and modern notions of equality.
I agree that without the Nazis the First World could probably have kept eugenics (and the associated race realism) from becoming totally taboo the way it has been for the last 80 years. But the US, at least, would still have had the legacy of slavery and the Civil War and then the pressures that led to the Civil Rights Movement to deal with. And the rise of knowledge work and meritocracy means that intelligence has become more important than ever for determining who can accrue money and status. It’s hard for people to accept that their tribal identity might be one that is fated to be on the bottom for the foreseeable future and that their lack of relative success is fair.
Also, like you pointed out, it’s only in the last few decades that we have begun to have the understanding of genetics and the beginnings of the technology that might make eugenics work for the masses, so it wasn’t that much of a sacrifice for free market nations to taboo it in the past. They gained more of a competitive advantage from leaning into capitalism and individual freedoms than they stood to gain from trying to shape genetics they didn’t really understand. Nazi central planning and authoritarianism could have put in place a sweeping selective breeding program, but returns that might have allowed them to theoretically gain an advantage over the USSR and / or the capitalist nations would have taken generations to manifest. Meanwhile the US became the richest, attracted all the best people, and won. Even if there had been no direct conflict, and instead a multipolar Cold War, I am guessing capitalism would have won before mid-20th century genetic science could have made the difference.
It will be interesting to see how things change, maybe in the very short term. Embryo selection seems like it works, but it doesn’t really scale. If there’s a technological advance that is not as invasive, offers obvious benefits, and “just works”, then I could see widespread adoption (at least for disease prevention and optimizing your children within the “natural” range of outcomes, I’m not sure how the possibility of further augmentation might play out politically). Or maybe AI will end democracy and the elites will be able to augment themselves and leave the rest of us behind without needing our approval. Or maybe the AI will just leave us all behind. Many exciting possibilities!
I agree.
Certainly biological egalitarianism is a false doctrine. Maybe it’ll stay relegated to its seemingly indispensable uses in political/legal discourse or in theology, but I think it’s safe to say science has thoroughly dispatched it from within its gates. I’ve said before as well the same thing you have; in that meritocracy and equality are diametrically opposed to each other. Technology has given us a new frontier for conducting eugenics that’s completely different from the beginning of its earlier, modern industrial practices. I was also going to bring up embryo selection, since it allows us to go in and select highest quality ovum with specific desirable features to maximize their genetic fitness (it’s gained traction and you even see it with these strange looking dorks) and even pick out desirable characteristics. Some people who’ve speculated on this think it’ll relegate sex to a purely recreational activity, and reproduction will become a mostly technologically driven intervention. The cost of it still seems steep. If the economics of it are ever improved and brought down, there’s no reason positive eugenics can’t be on offer to all segments of society, irrespective of race or socioeconomic status, to want only the best for themselves and their children. Who should disagree with that?
The thing is the knowledge of genetic enhancement and improvement is widely known and treated with fascination behind the scenes by geneticists. It’s kept out of the public eye though because of the stigma from WW2 (which yeah, okay, I can see that; but it’s going to come out eventually; “Science advances one funeral at a time.”). I think it’ll be a good thing, the enormous opportunities are there for all of us.
Enormous opportunities for good, but also enormous opportunity for evil (as with every advance that increases the power of humanity). Whose image will we ultimately optimize ourselves in, I wonder? Everyone doing the “best” for them and theirs can destroy a commons real quick.
As a traditional Christian, I instinctively recoil from some of this, so I’m open to the possibility that my biases are not helpful here. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, I suppose.
How do you see this as a Catholic? (albeit a fairly idiosyncratic one, from what I’ve picked up) What makes you optimistic and how do you fit this in with the church’s teachings?
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link