This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What is best in life?
It’s odd that this question never comes up, because both culture and politics hinge on an image of the ideal life. Ostensibly, humans want to maximize the greatness of their life. Or, we can say they want to maximize the “enjoyment” of their life, where enjoyment refers to the full spectrum of experiences (rather than just vices as it sometimes colloquially means). If you were to imagine a hypothetical person with enough money to spend his life however he wants, what would this person do to maximize his “having lived well”? What does his life consist of? We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.
Emotions > Information
After considering this question, I came to interesting conclusions, which are perhaps interesting enough to post. The emotional life, or the “felt” life, has all the significance. When we study mathematics or get into programming, the fruit of our labor is a feeling. We stumble upon a beauty and order in mathematics, which is a felt experience. Or we reach a catharsis from solving a programming problem, which is also a felt experience. The value is not in the information or specifics per se; were a person to be put on an antagonist of the opioid or dopamine or serotonin receptor and were numb to the enjoyable emotional state, we would conclude they experienced nothing of value.
This means that mathematics and all “informational” learning is only valuable insofar as it induces great emotion, where the ideal life is concerned. If you could conceivably experience a greater variation of beauty and order from something outside of mathematics (which may not be the case, or it may be the case), then even learning math would be unnecessary to experience the ideal life. Put another way, if we are measuring someone’s life by their experience of beauty, then we care only about the felt experience of beauty, and not its intellectual antecedents or mental symbols. Someone whose brain cannot process the enjoyment of music would have no benefit from reading the sheet music of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion (the antecedent); and similarly, someone who can already fully appreciate the music (the consequent enjoyment) gets no value from knowing the sheet music. And so the ideal life must consist of rich emotional or felt states — interpreted broadly as “mental states which affect our emotional life”, so as to include experiences of order and beauty and the sublime.
Memory of Experience > Experience
I realized also, that memory is crucial to the ideal life. If we compare two men, and one of them experienced great states and has a clear memory of them, and the other experienced one greater state and has a poor memory, the former man has lived a better life. The fact that we intuitively see that having great memories is important to maximize the enjoyment of life actually tells us something profound about what we value: contemplation. We would rather live the life of the person who has experienced 99% enjoyment of ten things than 100% enjoyment of one. We would rather be the person at the pub telling us about his many adventures than the person who is currently climbing Everest experiencing the one great adventure of his life.
So the contemplation of our experiences is crucial. And there’s another way to prove this: who has a greater appreciation for a loved one, than the person who knows the loved one most? Having a deep memory of a person is necessary to fully appreciate them. So it is with appreciating a book, album, or story. We would not want to be an emotionally sensitive but senseless child with memory loss, who experiences wonder and beauty for the first time every day, because the inability to know and contemplate these things is the inability to fully appreciate them.
The Emotions that Matter
To me, it’s actually obvious which emotions are great, because human societies have come to general conclusions on this no matter the time period. There’s the experience of deep serenity and peace and security, which can come through family and certain rituals and prayer. There’s the experience of Power or the Sublime which often induces a state of pleasant fear and fuller appreciation of living itself. There’s the experience of order which leaves us relieved and satisfied and warm. There’s beauty which entrances us, and the experience of love and belonging and connection which warms us. There are, IMO, certain general patterns and there’s little reason to reinvent the wheel here. Although I’d say, the satiation of our appetite for food and sex is considerably less important than the amount of thought we give it. For one, it goes away as soon as we are fulfilled. Food then should be associated with memories to enhance those memories, and sex should be associated with love to enhance our bonds.
The Training of Memory
As I’ve determined for myself that emotions are what matter, and what’s more that the contemplation of our emotional experiences are most important, I reasoned that the organization and training of emotional memory is necessary for the ideal life. It’s not enough to have a memory, if that memory is not accessible in the mind. It’s not enough to experience a good thing, if we don’t devote it to memory. Scott had mentioned in a post of his on depression that there’s a failure to update negative priors after a positive experience — there’s a failure to actually learn from the positive experience, to remember, to cohere it into the mind, and to update the prediction model of the world. The experience goes right through us and this is what makes depression so, well, depressing. On the other side of the coin, there is research on experienced “lovingkindness” meditator Matthieu Ricard whose brain shows changes that suggest a greater capacity for joy. That you can practice the memory and skills related to positive emotions is not exactly a new thought in the history of Western and Eastern religion. But for how important it is to ideal living, it’s little mentioned.
Problemata
If great, heightened experiences of varied things is so important, why doesn’t everyone do drugs? Should everyone try opium once in their life to experience a deep relaxation? And to this I say… maybe? If we know for sure that a person would not get addicted to opium, then there’s a legitimate value in trying it once to develop a memory of the deepest depths of peace. I would say the same with marijuana and alcohol and tobacco. But the ideal application of drugs is not the real world. Because everyone can fall into addiction, these things have to be used with extreme caution or not at all.
If personal enjoyment is so important, then what’s the point of a social life? To this I say, that socializing produces unique and more expedient enjoyments. We learn about enjoyment from socializing. And what about the obligation to have children? I would say that children are remarkable because they are little microcosms of human life, and by raising a child you can come to experience greater fullness of life’s enjoyments.
This "ostensibly" is doing quite a bit of work.
Trying to answer "what is good in life" with any rigour is not possible in the format of a board like this. You may equally try to answer in the same space a question like "by the way, what actually is everything?"
To avoid condescension and make clear what I mean, let's even tease apart your first postulate here:
Why is the goodness or otherwise of life applicable to groups of "humans" rather than individuals? Now it might be or it might not, I'm not taking a position, just pointing out that you're implicitly smuggling in a sort of moral realism here, a sense that "the good" is a discoverable truth that's the same for many people, as opposed to say an "invented" individual preference or something else.
The Good is what people want, really? Is that the relation you're grounding it in? You sure? What about people who want bad things etc. Okay, so we'll only trust the wanting of sensible people. But how do we decide which reasonable group's wanting we should trust to define the Good, when the Good itself is the criterion we'll have to use to define reasonableness? (This is close to something called the Euthyphro problem, FYI)
Do they? What does "maximisation" really mean here, is this like arithmetical summing of good to get the most utils? What's the conversion ratio of big boons to little ones? How many fun nights out does it take to equal me bearing a child?
Is this just a synoym for "the Good"? If not, what is it?
Usw, the point is getting clear now!
It’s definitely possible to discourse on it with sufficient rigor to come away with more clarity than before. The Socratic dialogues are essentially that; the Summa is almost that. We’re not trying to Wittgenstein our postulates together to form a Tractatus. The alternative of never (not once) attempting to circumscribe how humans should live means we will forever be doomed to uncertainty on political or cultural shoulds.
That many different cultures developed to include the promotion of certain emotional states and the negation of other emotional states is evidence that humans are sufficiently similar that we can talk about them as a class. We can also use words that describe the deeper patterns of the human condition, like “desire” and “satisfaction” and “memory” to make progress on the question. Further, we can look at human narratives of people who have positive “life-changing realizations”: what do these have in common? Generally an aversion to addictions and an attraction to “deeper” emotional states involving gratitude and awe. And the science of well-being supports this. We can also ask, “when humans feel that their life is missing something, what do they generally desire more of?” You don’t have a lot of people lament that they have too few addictions or pains, or too many good memories with friends. These clue us into universal patterns of the human condition.
That’s not quite my view. “We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.” So it’s not about want exactly. When we’re confronted with another person we can judge their way of life. Most reasonable people have had the experience of meeting people who are living better than themselves and living worse. For instance, someone who loves video games might meet someone whose happiness comes off as much greater; even though he personally wants to play video games, he senses a superior way of life. I think this is a universal experience. When people watch David Goggins, they don’t want to do what he does, but they want to want to do what he does. Something something Lacanian desire.
Phrased like this it seems paradoxical, but we can determine reasonableness by the ability to make accurate predictions. This is really the problem of all authority, not just “authority on the good”. I trust that the bridge won’t collapse, but isn’t this a case of “trusting the reasonable group’s [definition of] the reasonable”, namely bridge construction)? But we don’t even need to “trust a group”; an inquiry into the Good can be used by an individual subjectively to determine what is best for himself given the arguments available. Almost every reasonable person upon reading the scientific papers today would say that awe and gratitude are positive emotions to cultivate — this is not just common subjective sense, but evidenced from testimonies and major world religions. The paradox is interesting to dwell on but not actually applicable to how humans make decisions in the real world, no? But I could be misunderstanding the heart of the argument.
Can i just say, absolute banger of a reply (and definitely better than chatGPT, to whose writing I've been comparing literally everything else today)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link