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Apparently the conversation stirred up by @HlynkaCG and pursued most ardently by @FCfromSSC in last week’s culture war thread has continued on even into this week, since I was tagged in a new comment therein today. I’d like to drag that conversation into the current thread and make a somewhat meta comment about how that post and it’s subsequent comments reflect larger dynamics that I’ve observed.
I’m not going to rehash my complaints about what I see as a gross misunderstanding - I won’t call it a deliberate misrepresentation, for reasons I’ll lay out shortly - of my and others’ worldview. I’m not writing this as a call-out post of any of the participants. Rather, I want to offer up a model that I believe explains the fundamental disconnect in analytical frames, without casting one frame as inherently worse, or more dangerous, or less accurate, than the other. Furthermore, I believe that my model helps expose the illusory/contingent nature of the supposed “left-right” divide and offers an alternative framework for understanding 21st-century political divisions.
The “tradcon” worldview espoused by Hlynka, FC, and writers such as Rod Dreher, is highly optimized for a particular model of human social/political organization, and its priorities and bugaboos are a direct result of this optimization. As long as the conditions typical of that type of society are satisfied, the tradcon worldview is the optimal worldview for those living within it, and creating mental guardrails against deviation from - and temptation away from - this worldview is crucial to maintaining the integrity of that type is society. The society I’m referring to is a village or a small town. And this isn’t simply about raw population numbers. No, this is specifically the type of settlement in which the vast majority of humans have always lived, and requires certain other conditions besides a small population. The village is almost completely ethnically/tribally homogeneous; “identity politics” in such an environment are not only incoherent and baseless, but also profoundly corrosive, insofar as they introduce arbitrary and false division and conflict into what ought naturally to be a harmonious environment. Additionally, the distribution of talents and personality types is relatively flat, with very few extreme outliers on either end. In such an environment, egalitarianism and especially humility are both vital and appropriate. A man in such a community might help a neighbor erect a farmhouse on Monday, perform a secondary ensemble role in a community theatre production on Tuesday, help clear a patch of overgrown forest on Wednesday, and act as a lay preacher on Thursday. It makes about as much sense for him to perform these various roles as it does for any other villager to do so, because his particular and idiosyncratic distribution of talents is not substantially different from that of any other villager chosen at random - or, at least, there is no a priori reason to expect that there is a significant difference.
In such an environment, it absolutely makes sense to adhere tightly to the maxim “I am not better than anyone else around me, and none of them are better than me.” It makes sense not only because *it is true in an epistemic sense - again, this is a highly genetically-similar population with a very equitable distribution of traits - but also because it is morally true, inasmuch as it is vital for everyone to believe that, since people being collaborative and taking on a variety of interchangeable roles as required by the day-to-day needs of the community is crucial to the functioning of the village. One of the worst moral failings in such a community is “being too big for your britches” - thinking you’re too good to get your hands dirty or help with whatever task needs doing today.
Another important moral axiom for people to follow in such a community is the principle of forgiveness and, as a corollary, the principle of not judging any individual based on his descent from, or resemblance to, any other individual who has committed a transgression. The social fabric in this type of community is fragile and vulnerable to the corrosive influence of grudges, gossip, and - in the extreme case - multigenerational blood feuds. (I have spoken negatively in the past about the forcible Christianization of northwestern Europe during the Middle Ages, but arguably the strongest case to be made for the benefit of Christianization was that it helped to tamp down the hyper-violent clan feuds and culture of revenge killing that typified Germanic societies at that time.)
So, FC and Hlynka, I do not want you to change your worldview! From what I understand, both of you currently live in more or less the type of society I am describing; therefore, the tradcon ideology is adaptive to your lived reality and is optimized for the type of lifestyle you’re living - and, presumably, the type of lifestyle you believe that more people ought to want to live. And frankly, for someone in your position, accurately modeling the inner thought process of outsiders and interlopers is beside the point; you are, and primarily should be, concerned with identifying threats to your way of life. Maintaining solid rules of thumb like “if someone comes along who is arrogant and presumptive enough to believe that he has something better on offer than the collection of traditions and principles that has sustained our delicate social fabric since time immemorial, do not trust him” is the adaptively correct approach. I should probably commit to not arguing with you in the future, because we are just going to spin our wheels as I get angry at you for what I see as a deliberate failure to understand me, and you keep ramming your heads against a consensus which is optimized for a lifestyle radically different from your own.
All I ask in return is that you acknowledge that the great majority of us who use this sub do not live in communities where the conditions I’m describing are the reality. Therefore, the principles and worldview which is optimal for you is in fact suboptimal and even actively self-defeating for us. I know, I know, you’re Christian universalists and you believe that at the end of the day everyone would benefit equally from adhering to your worldview. I’m sure you find my thousand-foot-view, morally relativist, anthropological analysis unhelpful and destructive. But I have to live in the world that I live in - a highly-complex, highly-diverse urban society that demands stratification and the ability to reason probabilistically about people based on group generalizations, since I have no possible way to get to know each person I meet as an individual. I need to be able to draw reliable probabilistic assumptions about people in order to impose some measure of legibility onto an environment which by its very nature defies that legibility.
My belief in the utility of group categorizations is not a result of reading Marx - even when I was a leftist I read very little of either man’s work - but rather a result of my observations as someone who lives in a diverse major city and went to diverse public schools. My experiences have given me what I believe are extremely useful analytical tools. They are not primarily about me deriving a sense of superiority over others; I started Noticing™️ group differences long before I developed any systematic understanding of race, let alone a positive and intentional racial self-identity.
Were I to make a serious effort to adopt your principles and apply them to my day-to-day life, I would be crippling myself - denying myself the use of an important tool, and thereby granting leverage to my enemies, who will continue enthusiastically employing those tools. The stable equilibrium you believe you’re endeavoring to protect has already been destroyed some time ago in the environment wherein most of us have to make our way in the world. And unless we all go back to living in the Shire, that equilibrium won’t be coming back, because it is inherently at odds with the necessities created by complex and diverse modernity. I applaud your decision to live in the Shire, and you’re probably right that a lot of people would live richer and more fulfilling lives were they to make the same decision. For those of us who won’t or can’t, though, we’re stuck having to get by with our analytical framework that works for us, and I don’t see any outcome other than continued bickering if we keep colliding our respectively-optimized frameworks against each other.
Everything you claim about cities was true of small-scale societies too. Differences in capability were either similar or more stark - the 'smart kid' would have to work with his 'dumb kid' cousin, instead of being put in a smart kid class or a job with people of similar talents. Other differences matter too - a child, a woman, a young man, and a village elder, were not 'equals' in any sense in terms of power. And the farming village priest or tribal shaman hardly have an egalitarian relationship with the rest of the village*. Sure, economic specialization was much less stark, but someone would still be much better than another at bow-making or butchering. And they weren't really more 'harmonious' than modern life - embedded in 'strong communities' or 'spiritual connection', sure, but that easily coexists with conflict.
this blog or his substack, generally, push against the 'egalitarian / peaceful / conflict-free hunter gatherer' idea. this book's account of christian farming villages, although I think it's somewhat biased, either by the author or by 'publication/popularization bias', isn't really concordant with villages being 'harmonious' and 'egalitarian' either.
So I think the reactionary anti-egalitarian claims apply equally to small societies as they do large ones, and indeed small communities of the past lived as such.
To be clear, my argument is not that small villages are inherently more harmonious; certainly I’m well aware of the staggering levels of interpersonal violence that occurred (and still occurs today) in hunter-gatherer societies. My argument is that if you’re a small, homogeneous village, tradcon Christianity is the optimal ideology to maximize your success, relative to other religions/worldviews.
Well, all those hunter-gatherer societies remained inegalitarian for tens of thousands of years, despite the potential selective gains from 'tradcon christianity'. And Christianity originated and spread initially among the Roman Empire, which was hardly a small, isolated village. Of course, evolution/optimization can just 'miss' good designs just by bad luck or a lack of a way to get from here to there smoothly, so that doesn't prove anything. But it is suggestive!
I also don't think the 'something like christianity is good in villages' is descriptively true - abilities aren't evenly distributed (consider what the effects of severe disease, like parasites, which disables as much as it kills, would do to ability distributions). And 'judging people on descent' is generally valuable, both in the form of "you want a wife with healthy parents and brothers" - but also because the children of people who commit transgressions may have genes that contribute to the same - maybe you don't want to marry your daughter off to the town rapist's son, lest you encourage more rape.
I don't think 'blood feuds' really distinguish Christianity/egalitarianism's applicability to small-scale societies from its applicability to large-scale societies - the decline in killings is, if you value it, as good in a big city as it is in a remote village. And its lack in modern societies, or large cities, is arguably related to our continued adherence to Christian morals/values even without the religion of Christianity, so if the comparison is 'pagan village, blood feuds' vs 'christian village, without blood feuds', vs 'post-christian city, without blood feuds', the Christianity / small village interaction isn't important. Although (hypothetical tangent) blood feuds maybe were adaptive, and maybe if your village is at X scale, dividing into groups that are as big as you can coordinate and having wars at that scale have helped to, medium-term, aggressively select for competence - if X region has lots of small-scale wars while Y region farms peacefully, maybe X region ends up being both slightly smarter and better war-prepared, and develops larger-scale coordination earlier?
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Great post. I’d go further and say that even in the Big City the general attitudes and worldview of the tradcon can be applied to daily life, there’s enough self-sorting that within your “Dunbar number” you can mostly interact with great, kind people who are enjoyable to be around regardless of their racial, religious, whatever identity. It’s not necessary to know or care about the average IQ or murder rate of different groups of people at all. But when you are talking about governments they are by necessity only dealing in population-level abstractions when they do anything. The “dissident right” (DR) view is that when you are dealing in population-level abstractions, there are natural differences in the way groups of people who are not genetically similar will behave and perform, ON AVERAGE. So depending on what your society is optimizing for, different groups will have different outcomes on average, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to change this.
So in response to this the government can do what Hylnka and FC and other trad-cons would like, which is pretty much nothing. Don’t discriminate based on immutable characteristics, arrest people if they commit crimes, have a pure meritocracy without thumbs on the scales like affirmative action, and don’t worry about how the race/gender/etc. distributions of doctors or prisoners may end up. Encourage and incentivize strong family values to everyone to give them the best possible chance to give a good life. This is the idealized view of the 90s to a certain extent. I think everyone in the DR would view this as a massive improvement to what we have now.
The problem is in the DR view that this is inherently unstable. People notice how different groups act on average, this creates collateral damage against good people who come from lower-performing groups. People form natural ingroups based not only on shared culture but on shared “superficial” identities like skin color. So, in a democracy, this creates coalitions of people who will advocate for their group’s interests, which by necessity takes the form of legal discrimination, framed negatively as Jim Crow, or framed positively as civil rights laws or affirmative action. I ask the Hylnka’s of the world, what can be done about this? In the progressive view there are all sorts of social engineering projects that aim to fix these problems. I think Hylnka would agree they have only made everything worse. So if you could be handed the keys to a country as multi-cultural as the US is, with a similar form of government and completely race/sex/ethnicity-blind policies, what would you do to prevent it becoming exactly what we have now?
If the tradcons are in charge then they don't have to put up with 'coalitions of people who will advocate for their group's interests'.
A lot of these issues can simply be solved by more self-sorting.
Don't like 'being a good person from the wrong skin color'? Try some other country where you are not the wrong skin color. Plane tickets are incredibly cheap, but somehow this is not something the 'we are literally getting murdered in the streets by racist police' crowd want to hear.
How many of these people will stick around when they finally get told 'you know what, you're not getting a freebie today'?
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That’s kinda rubbish.
I find myself in a smallish 20,000 population Irish town, right now, looking after elderly relatives. I was born in London and lived there, Dublin, and San Francisco for long periods. I’ve also lived in Hamburg, and tiny villages in Italy and Spain. What can I say - I can work from home.
Since I’ve been here in this small town, I’ve had to, because of the relative incapacitation of my relatives and the relative dereliction of their house, deal with plumbers, painters, movers, carers, hospitals, GPS, doctors, local solicitors and therapists. All are as good as any city equivalent, if not better. Shops are shops. The internet is fast. The supermarkets are as full as London, the movie theatres show the same stuff. Restaurants are plentiful as it’s a touristy town, and there’s two in the Michelin guide. That’s good enough for us, for now. And of course the fast food is about the same. Obviously museums are lacking but there’s an interesting art scene, albeit mostly amateur. Churches hold recitals of classical music. Up the road from me loves, ensconced in his castle, is a world famous artist.
Of course the best of the best are not here, but neither are the worst of the worst. Force the majority of this town’s population into cities and they would do just fine. Force the worst of the worst of the cities into small towns and they would be homeless and broken on the street.
The supposed complex life you have, which you think is only possible in cities, is neither that complex or that unique to cities. Nor unique to this era.
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I want open by saying that I appreciate the point you're trying to make and I appreciate you putting in the effort to engage. Dead serious, comment reported for being actually being a quality contribution.
Having said that though I also gotta say I disagree, and I feel like that disagreement comes down to a difference in what we think we are optimizing for. You say that the Trad-Con position espoused by myself and others is "optimized for a particular model of human social organization", whereas I would argue that rather than being optimized for a specific model/environment it is optimized for a specific job/goal. That goal being to foster empathy trust and cooperation in otherwise dangerous low-trust environments. As it so happens this goal is highly adaptive if you are say, a soldier in enemy territory, a sailor on a ship in the middle of the ocean, or a member of a persecuted minority, and I would argue that this is why our ancestors were successful. Call it what you like "God's Favor" or "Escaping the defect-defect equilibrium" it worked, and it continues to work when those involved actually put the effort in.
Why does Cthulhu seem to swim left? Because right wing memes (more specifically the old-right's memes) are not optimized for mass appeal. Simple fact of the matter is that people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables, they do not enjoy being told that they are no better than anyone else. What they do enjoy is ice cream, lazing on the couch, and being told that they are special.
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I’m glad to hear this worldview works for you, but part of the point @Hoffmeister25 is making in my view is that this can’t and won’t work for most people. At least not in and urban modern context.
To repeat my response down thread, Christianity has clearly failed to adapt to the modern, secular worldview. This has been going on since at least the 18th century if not well before then, but the cracks in the religion of the day have been growing. There’s a reason less people are religious than ever.
And I agree that’s a bad thing! Religion is great for people! But if tradcons just sit in their villages and talk about how great their life is and try to push their outdated worldview nothing will change. You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.
Honestly, I’m rooting for y’all. I’d like to see a return to spirituality, but it has to be a new spirituality that’s true to our circumstance, not one from two thousand years ago.
@FarNearEverywhere this may be a more put together response than my other one downthread.
If religion is great for people, how is it outdated? Wouldn’t the thing which is great for people be evergreen in its greatness?
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If you want a philosophy for encouraging moral behavior in an urbanized, low-trust, secular society, might I suggest Confucianism? I think you're asking something of Christianity that it just wasn't made for. Even Islam might be more theologically amenable to this sort of compromise, having never undergone a separation of church and state.
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...and I disagree.
I don't think the issue is that it "can’t or won’t work" I think the issue is that it is difficult and that it's rewards are often deferred.
"Stand up straight, eat your vegetables, and stop thinking that you are any more deserving than the people around you" might not be a message people want but (as @urquan observes) it is often the message they need to hear. Mine is the radical notion that being healthy and being happy requires putting in effort and taking responsibility. It's one thing for a guy to say that he wants to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club and entirely another for him to want it enough that he changes his diet and starts doing push-ups.
There's a meme floating around that goes "Hard times breed hard men, hard men bring good times, good times breed weak men, weak men bring hard times". If I had to posit a mechanism, it would be that as society becomes more affluent (or "complex" as @Hoffmeister25 puts it) the selection pressure for healthy/pro-social behavior decreases. It becomes easier to get away with being a parasite or becoming a soulless hedonist because you don't know everybody in your neighborhood, and why would anyone want to eat veggies when they can have ice cream? Problem is that if enough people start going down that road shit will eventually hit the fan and when it does it will be those that maintained those healthy/pro-social behaviors that tend to come out alive/ahead.
Where are the hard men bringing good times to africa and all the other god-forsaken places? They've had hard times for millenia. The west has had good times and weak, decadent, civilized men for centuries. Hard men bring hard times, which breeds more hard men.
It's a reactionary, pro-hardness meme, I'm surprised you take it at face value. Christianity is soft. I could see the meme being used by a roman aristocrat decrying this new age stuff, a knight when the church was pushing for the truce of god half the week, or right-wing critics of christianity like gibbon and nietzsche.
They are bringing good times, OFC for themselves only. What would be otherwise the point of being "hard man"?
Luxury Homes in a Gated Community in Hargeisa, Somaliland
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That is indeed a good question. One possible theory is that they GTFO the moment they get the opportunity. Another is that hard times don't actually breed hard men (or that hardmen do not actually bring good times) and that there is some other mechanism at work. A third is that the reactionary "pro-hardness" crowd doesn't actually understand what real "hardness" entails on a societal and civilizational level. That would certainly mesh with thier accusations of Christians being "soft".
For my part I'm not neccesarily endorsing the reactionary view, just positing mechanisms.
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I dunno, I think there's a there there, even if it's just a Dissident Right meme. Hard times suck, but they create obvious opportunity to improve. One of the last truly "hard times" faced by the human race was World War II, and the period after that saw the birth of technological revolutions that changed the very fabric of civilization. Consequently, abundance leads to slack, and while we should praise slack, our comfort and abundance leaves us with a hell of a lot to lose--and we may have to eventually lose.
In addition, it's not even necessarily that the men of these times are weak, but perhaps they are just insufficiently-vigilant, and the good times are always at risk of being exploited by a few bad actors. Or perhaps the shine of a glorious new era simply fades eventually and the slack cannot last very long.
I keep thinking of that quote from Akira: "the passion to build has cooled, and the joy of reconstruction has been lost." This was from a Japanese story where Tokyo had been rebuilt after WWIII, obviously echoing what was likely the then-contemporary mood of 1980's Japan, where the economic bubble was at its peak while the Japanese identity was somewhat lost in the post-WWII boom. The movie's climax and conclusion features an explosion much like the one seen at its beginning.
Of course, maybe history is not cyclic (as reactionaries might claim), but progresses (as Christians, Reformers, Liberals, and Progressives might claim), and our current woes in a world of progress, abundance, and slack simply stem from our potentially-softer, worry-free future simply being unevenly-distributed, as per Gibson. You look around the world and you can see places where times are tough, where people are enslaved by the past.
Now that you mention it, WWII is also an example of that meme being wrong. Imperial Japanese and nazi leaders were hard men, especially compared to their western counterparts. The meme would have predicted a win for them and prosperity for their people. Stalin was about as hard as them (it's in his name), but his people did not have a good time either.
Deep down it's a vacuous statement, of the type 'after the rain, the sun' . When you try to use it predictively, it fails more often than not.
I doubt that WWII (or WWI) accelerated much of anything. We were already well on the way to our present technological society. We didn't need huge wars in the 19th century to industrialize and build planes, trains and automobiles. If we had fought such a war, people would thank the god of war for granting us such wondrous gifts. Probably because they couldn't face the fact that millions died for nothing.
...As uncharitable as this may sound, your post reminds of the claim/belief that we'd be in space right now if the Library of Alexandria didn't burn down, which is a viewpoint that has met some skepticism in recent years.
Again, as I stated above, things would be nice if we had the slack to develop, but it's also perhaps inherently unstable. The whalefall is eventually consumed, removing pressure works until things get kinda crappy [epilepsy warning?], and there will always be those who envy you.
WWII was triggered in part by the Great Depression, which was brought about by a combination of some predatory practices on top of classical coordination failures, and even at that time, people were already reeling from WWI, in which many had died for practically nothing.
I think what I'm trying to say is that things can get better, but it often takes some real bad things happening before that to get there.
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I think we’re on the same side? Obviously I think people should do the right thing and do what’s good and healthy for them. Religion is a way to coordinate and convince people to do that on a massive scale.
My point is that Christianity is no longer convincing for most people. It doesn’t do the job it was made for.
Possibly, but I feel like the claim that "It doesn’t do the job it was made for" is where we part ways. My core claim is that it sill does the job just fine. The contrast being that in my view the job in question is not "to be popular" or "make people feel better about themselves" the job is "to foster empathy trust and cooperation in otherwise dangerous low-trust environments". That it is how people behave in the breach that matters.
So what is your answer for those who don’t believe, or those who literally can’t make themselves believe due to cultural upbringing etc. Are they all doomed to eternal damnation?
That is not and I hope never will be a view of morality I endorse.
My answer is that I'm not sure that specific beliefs matter all that much. We were all born doomed, we are all on the hook. The test is in your response to this. Are you going to whinge about it? Or are you going to tuck your shoulder in and get to work?
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Christianity's job is not and has never been to "convince most people". Its job is to communicate the truth to people, and they are free to either conform to the truth or reject it. If they choose to reject it, even if they choose to reject it en masse, that is their problem, not Christianity's.
Modernity is poisoning our entire world. The solution is to stop chugging poison, not to complain that people are being unreasonable for pointing out that our society is chugging poison. Yes, this means letting go of many things one might rather keep. Yes, this means re-examining the philosophical axioms of our current society. Yes, neither are easy, but the wages of sin is death, and not in some abstract, theoretical, poetic sense, but in a million concrete horrors even now blossoming all around us.
Humans are not entitled to happiness, peace and plenty, either individually nor as a group. The idea that they are, the idea that these goods can and should always be available, is one of the core lies of the Enlightenment, and coincidentally one of the lies that convinced people to abandon Christianity. Well, now the lies are breaking down, the short-term pleasures are spent, and the consequences are arriving, and you are insisting that Christianity needs to undersign at least a few of the falsehoods so we can maybe keep them going a little longer. For Christians, that doesn't seem like a very good idea; it won't actually help, and it will actually make things worse.
Bailouts and enabling don't solve chronic problems. Sometimes people need to hit rock bottom. Sometimes even that doesn't help. In any case, we each still get to choose, and we all collectively get to live with the consequences of those choices. Why should it be any other way?
Universal human rights are just as much a ‘lie’ as Christianity. The Christian church has fractured split and broken down far more times than Enlightenment ideals, although it does have staying power.
The mythos we use to organize societies are all lies at some level, it seems you only want to use that word on things you disagree with though.
Whether God exists and whether Christianity is true are open questions. And sure, we can argue over what our priors should be, and about the efficacy of strict materialist axioms... But the Enlightenment Lies are not open questions.
Rousseau and his disciples claimed that unconstrained human reason could create a utopia. It actually created mass slaughter leading to a brutal dictator who launched some of the bloodiest wars the world had ever seen.
Marx claimed to have a foolproof, inevitable method for creating a classless utopia. It actually was a plan for mass-slaughter, misery, privation and slavery on a scale never seen in human history.
Freud claimed to have unlocked the secrets to a scientific approach to the human mind, by which all mental ills could be cured. He'd actually invented snake oil, but he sold it well enough that his descedents are still running strong, ruining lives and dooming institutions with their quackery.
Dewey and his disciples claimed to have a scientific, rational approach to education for the young. They and their descendants have effectively destroyed the American Education system.
Prison policies, the justice system, policing, the legal profession, public politics, art, philanthropy, the sexual revolution, race relations, childrearing, the economy... the list is endless. In each area, the children of the Enlightenment claimed that they knew how to fix things, used those claims to secure power, and then either failed to fix things or actively made them much, much worse. Depending on how one does the accounting, they killed well north of a hundred million people in the last century, immiserated and enslaved half the planet, and do not appear to have learned a single thing from the experience.
So no, I am not using "lie" as a synonym for "something I disagree with". I'm using it to refer to people actually lying in very obvious, immediately verifiable ways. Specifically, I'm referring to the people who built the modern world, who convinced a Christian civilization to abandon its faith on the promise of something newer and better, and then conspicuously failed to deliver. They promised a world free of Christianity's moral rules and the boring constraints of practical reality, where everyone could just do what they want and be happy and everything would be great. They've delivered horror and misery on an unimaginable scale, and they should be held to account for it.
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Right now nothing works for most people. And it's a damn shame.
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Well gosh, I feel such deep pity for you having to be so clever and talented and live in the hustle and bustle, unlike us dumb beasts of the field 🙄
If you've never lived in a small village, you have no idea that there really can be the guy who is the best at thatching or singing or ploughing or whatever. There's at least as much probability that the people all gathered at the Bay Area House Party are as interchangeable as the villagers you mention; they're all a certain level of smart, they're all clued-in to the same kind of 'I love ethnic food isn't it great there is such a selection here in the big sophisticated city' trendiness, they're all approximately much of a muchness and could be swapped in and out of their tech/software/EA/finance jobs pretty much interchangeably.
Oh, you don't like that characterisation? Then stop imagining that you and yours are somehow special in the entire history of humanity. Yes, small communities can be the Valley of the Squinting Windows. But the "highly-complex highly-diverse urban society" can also be full of people living in little bubbles who never interact even as they pass each other on the street.
"the necessities created by complex and diverse modernity" has been a trope ever since we started stacking clay bricks on top of each other between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Sigh. Here's your periodic reminder that you don't have to make your point in the most belligerent, sarcastic manner possible (that's a figure of speech - yes, I know you're capable of being much more belligerent and sarcastic), and that launching into someone like this with an extremely uncharitable interpretation of their words is bad form and runs counter to the sort of discussions we would like to promote here.
tldr: dial it down. Again.
I'm one of the dumb peasants from the village who are all interchangeable cogs and of course we can do more than one thing because it's all so useless and worthless, we may as well be equally bad at them all, unlike the smart big city dwellers.
So yeah, I kinda take it personally when someone goes at it in those terms. Wrapped up more nicely, but it comes to that as what is meant.
If I'm to dial it down, then so are they when it comes to insulting an entire set of people.
Then report the comment and spell out in what way you think it broke the rules.
FWIW, I don't think @Hoffmeister25 broke any rules. I can see how you might consider his distinction between village life and "complex urbanized society" to be condescending, but you could have responded in a thoughtful manner, as other people did, instead of just yelling "How dare you call me a dumb beast?!" Which was pretty clearly not what he was trying to say. If you took it that way, you can either explain why you took it that way, or you can consider the possibility that your reading is uncharitable.
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You're right, at least all the people at the rationalist houseparty are heavily selected for intelligence and other stuff, so they're somewhat similar. In a village, the 'de novo large dna deletion' guy who's intellectually disabled and the '1.2SD fewer deleterious mutations than usual guy' who's pretty bright do everything together, and they're pretty different!
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I feel like you're being needlessly mean here but I also kind of agree with you that there is nothing new under the sun.
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This reaction - this visceral defensiveness, this searing chip on the shoulder, this hyper-vigilance that reads contempt and derision into any insinuation that people like you have different optimal life strategies, different skill sets, different strengths and weaknesses than people like me - is a pattern that I observe constantly, and it reinforces my thesis. Not a single thing I said was intended to call anything about your lifestyle worse than mine; in fact, I explicitly acknowledged that for a vast number of people, the Shire life is better and more fulfilling than life in the hyper-complex modern city. This is not because those people are dumb and bad, while I’m smart and good. These people have much stronger moral fiber than I do, and they are incredible at the roles which they perform, both in their local context and within civilization as a whole. Their life path is lower-variance than the big-city striver’s life path, and as someone who basically lit my twenties on fire in pursuit of the high-variance path and am now figuring out how to pick up the pieces, I am acutely aware of the very obvious upsides of your preferred life path.
I believe - at least, my reading of history and my good-faith observation of the world around me leads me to tentatively favor the belief that - humans have largely-hereditary proclivities which make a given individual better suited for some life paths than others. While I absolutely do believe that some people have particular proclivities which make them unworthy of life in any society which I want to live in, I also think that the vast majority of people have important roles to play, and that a healthy society uses subtle social engineering to, as effectively as possible, sort people into the roles which suit them best. In the case of the small town life, that role is fairly broad, in contrast to the more highly-specialized roles needed in complex urban life. It is an admirable and vitally-important role. I wish there was a way I could have this conversation without you guys immediately detecting derision and contempt, and I’m still striving in earnest to figure out a way to do so, but as I said, your optimal strategy is to over-detect outside threats from arrogant social engineers who want to exploit you and destroy your way of life, so it’s natural for you to detect that in me, regardless of what I believe I’m trying to do.
What’s complex about modern life? A mass the size of a paper clip can destroy entire cities. Giant metal machines move things around. We’re surrounded by a ‘concrete jungle’ most of our lives. There are constant loud noises and smells and all sorts of things we didn’t evolve to adapt to.
The key is that Christianity hasn’t evolved to adapt to this either. Religion must reconcile itself with the philosophical issues science and mass industry bring to the fore. Is God logical? Well Protestants destroyed that idea long ago.
Does God like science? If we fully read from the book of Nature, do we become God?
Why would god create a world where we can have atrocities like WW1 and WW2? I know I know the problem of evil has been endlessly rehashed. But clearly the philosophical answer was not good enough to keep the faith for most people after those wars. Modernity has broken our spirituality, and so religion must adapt if it wants to fulfill its role.
Or you can try and win through a fertility race or something, but as @aqouta points out that’s gonna be a bad time for all involved.
I’m trying to make a larger point about how the power and understanding we’ve gained from scientific knowledge have fundamentally changed our relationship with the world. The average slob can’t escape this cultural change, it’s “in the water” so to speak.
Maybe one day I’ll take time to summarize the slow demise of meaning in western society.
I was trying to evoke the dramatic changes to our understanding of the world that science brought in with poetic language.
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Your thesis is that the radical changes of modernity demand changes from philosophy and religion. From my perspective, the problem is that none of the claims you're making seem accurate.
Humans still grow and love and die, exactly as they always have for all of known history. They still have an innate hunger for meaning and justice, chase ambitions, nurse hatreds, exact revenge, offer forgiveness exactly as they always have. A mass the size of a paperclip could destroy entire cities then as well as now (presuming you're referring to hypervelocity meteorites or something, because otherwise it can't do this now either...), and further, the destruction of cities by war, plague or disaster is not a novel development. people were living their lives in profoundly disagreeable, unnatural environments since the invention of slave labor.
I defy you to describe an actual philosophical issue raised by science or the modern world generally. It does not seem to me that such issues exist. Atheism is at least as old as the written word; people reasoning about the chain of causality is at least a few thousand years old. Nothing we have developed has actually cracked the fundamental question of how an entropic universe can originate itself, or offered any answer to the questions that plagued the ancients. Nothing we've developed has in any way changed human nature or the fundamentals of human existence in even the slightest way.
...Beyond this, I suppose it comes down to how one reads the history of modernity, and what lessons one draws. We agree, at least that modernity pushed Christianity out of its central place in society, but we disagree strongly on how and why this was accomplished, and therefore on our conclusions about what is likely to happen next. You see Christianity failing when confronted with questions it couldn't answer. I see people turning away from Christianity in pursuit of a series of dazzling lies, which are now unsustainable. If you are right, Christianity will continue to decline and eventually go extinct. If I am right, modernity will implode, and we Christians will be left with the work of picking up the wreckage.
"Is the scientific method a useful tool for uncovering reliable knowledge about the physical world?"
Religions generally make claims about moral truths and historical truths, and the scientific method isn't competent at measuring either. But philosophy covers all types of knowledge and claims to truth, and both science and religion fall under its broad sweep, if in significantly different sub-areas.
That's a fact, not an issue, I'd say. There never has been significant disagreement over it from any side.
Modernism disagreed, and claimed that since the material was all that exists, nothing in the cosmos fell outside its purview. It claimed that Science, properly applied, could engineer away the problems inherent to the human condition. Christianity claimed it would not, in fact, be able to do that. A century later, it's pretty clear Christianity was correct and the modernists were wrong, and it only took murdering a hundred million humans and enslaving and immiserating a few billion more to establish that.
Hypothetically, sure. In practice, it doesn't seem to me that philosophy as a formal discipline actually delivers much in the way of actionable insight, certainly does not do so better than the best of religion, and in fact seems to converge on religion when it is operating well.
In some cases, yes. In others, no. Death by childbirth has been a plague on humanity since forever; in Genesis, a painful and dangerous birth is listed as one of the common curses of humankind up there with mortality itself and the need to work to eat. Yet, while this particular plague is not yet fully healed, I daresay we have been making some good progress on that front. There was a time, not so long ago, when it was completely normal and unremarkable for most parents to have to bury most of their children, and even a young and perfectly healthy woman had to seriously fear death every time one was born. In wealthy parts of the world, that is now virtually forgotten. So that's one.
Are you taking Communism, specifically, as sole representative of Modernism as a whole? Because I'd argue that the Green Revolution and smallpox eradication have at least as good a claim of representing the application of science and rationality to society, and the number of lives those saved far outstrips the number taken by the most murderous regimes.
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Certain people claimed that we could engineer away certain problems inherent to the human condition. Some of them were right on certain matters (e.g., certain diseases), and others were wrong (various utopians). Why is that such an indictment of materialism or the Enlightement or science or Science or whatever? I don't understand why you tar them all with the same brush.
The basic idea of the Enlightenment is that the scientific method is a reliable way to discover truths about material reality, and we can use those discoveries along with reason to try and improve our lives and solve problems. That seems straightforwardly obvious to me. I also don't think there's a bailey concealed under that anywhere. The fact that some people said "Hey, using my reason, and using what I think are some facts I think I learned from science, I believe I can engineer human nature to excise the nasty bits like greed and jealousy and perfect us" is no more an indictment of science/materialism than "Hey, I think these cardboard arm flaps will make me fly" is an indictment of aeronautics, or, for that matter, that, "Hey, I think the good Christian thing to do is burn witches and kill baby Native Americans so their innocent souls will go to Heaven before their society misleads them" is an indictment of Christianity.
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The framing/definition of 'issue' here seems to be the issue. I'd say the biggest issue raised by science is that people don't believe. Once a critical mass of people don't believe, the transformative power of religion, the ability to get people to self reflect and change, loses out. Religion without that is, to me, essentially pointless. You can call that science or "dazzling lies" or whatever you want to, but if you read the history of the scientific revolution many great thinkers, esp. Pascal, John Stuart Mill, Marx, etc predicted the exact crisis of meaning we have now if we couldn't reconcile Christianity and science. Turns out we couldn't.
I'd ask that we Christians try and fix the ship now, instead of picking up the wreckage. We seem to have strong disagreements on what that means however. I somehow don't think Jesus would approve of this whole ethos you're espousing, essentially: 'they brought this upon themselves, we'll let them kill themselves and look down in our smug superiority. Then we'll come in and say 'I told you so!.'
I believe. So do the ~1k people who show up at my church every sunday morning, and a sizable fraction of the dozens of millions of people who claim to be Christian nation-wide. Clearly whatever harmful effect Science has had has somehow missed us all.
You appear to want religion to deliver broad-based social benefits, but broad-based social benefits are not the point of Christianity. It delivers those as a fringe benefit of its core mission. Trying to make them the center only compromises the core mission, resulting in the loss of the fringe benefits as well.
Marx and Mill at least were foremost among those selling the lies. I reject their critiques categorically, because they based their ideologies on predictions and those predictions have been thoroughly falsified. Science has not, in fact, materially altered the human condition as the modernist prophets insisted it would. We are having the problems we're having because we built our society around the idea that their prophecies would come true, that science and reason could solve our most serious problems. Well, it turns out that was a mistake, so maybe you should take it up with the people who scrapped a functional society on the promise of utopia through the limitless power of human reason.
If you have a functional way of preventing our society's suicide, I'm all ears. The only caveat is that it needs to actually work, not just sound good. I think I have a pretty good understanding of both Christianity and Modernity, and I am very confident that attempting to reconcile the two is not actually going to work. Still, if you think I'm wrong, there are no shortage of purported Christians attempting the project, so maybe they can help you out. I'm going to stick with trying to convince people to stop chugging poison.
I do not think I am being smugly superior. The culture war is maddening, and deeply corrosive to the soul, and I am attempting to find a reasonable response to it. I appreciate that "I told you so" is not a nice thing to hear, but we did in fact tell them so, repeatedly, and they've been shouting us down for more than a century. It does not seem hard to me to predict the general direction all this is moving in, nor that most people will refuse to change course right up until they run headlong into some of the more immovable parts of reality. And even then, most of them will not learn.
Read Hosea, or any of the prophets. We all, at the end of the day, have it coming. None of us deserve peace and happiness; when we get these things, it is a mercy, and temporal mercy is not infinite. Sooner or later, we have to account for the choices we've made, and that accounting is often collective.
How about the idea that the best way to order society and our individual lives is to do as Christians do, just without believing any of the supernatural bits? For example, emphasizing the importance of community, family, marriage, and children; discouraging sexual promiscuity; encouraging the virtues of humility, modesty, grace, charity, etc.; being skeptical of sudden changes to long-held traditions and ways of life. To name but a few.
And isn't it by the very use of reason that we can even come to the conclusion that those things are worth normalizing? I feel like you're using "reason" in some strange "capital-R" way that I'm not getting. What's the alternative to reason? And, whatever it is, are you not using reason to propose that we use that alternative? It's completely incoherent.
Your issue seems to be with people and ideologies who use flawed reasoning to advocate for shitty ideas, like Communism and Fascism. Well, I must confess - and I don't care who knows it - I am not a fan of people using flawed reasoning to advocate for shitty ideas. "But," you might protest, "how would we guard against convincing-sounding shitty ideas that we perhaps don't yet know are shitty?" Well, how did Christianity do it? Reason! They had reasons for supposing those ideas sucked (or at least that we should be wary of them), with perhaps a healthy dose of conservativism (in the sense of risk-averse and traditional). What are you proposing Christianity adds to that? Why not keep the reasoning and skip the middle man (Christianity)?
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This is the key and I strongly agree with it. Especially for folks like myself in sales, you have to be able to understand and thrive within many different types of communities and social settings.
It may not be ideal, but it's the world we've built. Blame Capitalism, blame science, blame Christianity, blame whatever you want, but we are in a fully global world. Our societies are so intertwined we would likely collapse if we were fully cut off (as we got a peek of during the Covid supply chain crisis.)
The biggest tell for me that these sorts of posters wouldn't be able to survive in a different world comes from Resident Contrarion's post on what it's like to be a Christian. He flat out states that the center of the Christian worldview is that anyone who is not Christian, who doesn't hold the faith, is morally wrong and will go to hell. He tries to equivocate by saying he doesn't really think they're bad people necessarily, but it's clearly hogwash.
You can't operate in a global society if you go around thinking that everyone who doesn't share the specific interpretation of your religion is immoral, a view @TheBookOfAllan very clearly lays out downthread. The cognitive dissonance will either drive you insane, or you will become a cold emotionless shell who can't connect with the vast majority of people. Maybe some trad folks are okay with that tradeoff, personally I find it repugnant and against the very point of society.
I get the sense they realize this, and want to persuade/manipulate/force everyone to go back to that time. Unfortunately the Djinn is out of the bottle, and I find it ludicrous people seriously think we can return to that sort of traditional world.
Said the person telling us that this viewpoint is wrong and must not be permitted 😁 Why I'm laughing is that the whole liberal, cosmopolitan thing works only insofar as everyone signs on to Universal Culture. Once that does not happen, the Diverse Inclusive Look At Our Varied Skin Tones groups can't manage to hang together, because it all relies on the red/black/brown/yellow/white/male/female/trans/enby folx all singing from the same hymn sheet about what values they all share and implement.
This is not going back to the Shire, this is deciding what are the principles by which you live. Because right now, we've got the "connecting with the vast majority of people" city of San Francisco deciding whether it should pay out $5 million in reparations to the black citizens, and that's not universalism in action, that is one group being made the centre of a particular worldview in which they have all the virtue and another group have all the blame.
Kind of like "if you're not X, you're morally wrong and will go to Hell", now I think about it.
This is a fair point, and I could’ve made my argument more logically.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that the tradcon worldview needs serious updates if it is going to convince or work for many people in modern urban life. Obviously the SJW view is pretty bad for folks as well, and I’m not trying to defend it.
I suppose I’m saying I blame the tradcons of yesterday for not updating their beliefs and making them relevant in light of science/modernity/whatever, and I blame the tradcons of today for the same thing. You can be happy in your bubble, but someone really trying to do good would be working to update their spiritual or social technologies to help society as a whole.
Then again maybe it’s a doomed project, who knows.
I think you finally managed to get at the core disagreement.
The tradcon doesn't need - or want to - convince the people in modern urban life. To them, it is self-evident that modern urban life does not work.
If you are convinced that modern urban life works, then complaining of its difficulty and the rigors of how hard it is to make it in modern urban life is not going to change any minds. It will in fact convince tradcons of their position.
Right now tradcons benefit heavily from modern urbanized life. If the Amish or mennonites want to make that argument, sure. But all the posters on here are getting massive advantages from city life and industrialization while shitting all over it.
That is, to be pithy, not cool.
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