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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.