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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.
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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