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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.
...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.
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.
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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