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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.
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.
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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