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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34990 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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There needs to be a taxonomical distinction between political views and what I have recently decided to call "normative views". Political views relate to government policy, and normative views relate to the way we use language and the way we treat each other, i.e. social norms. Whether we define racism as racial discrimination or "prejudice plus power" is a normative issue, as is whether it's ever okay to misgender someone. These issues are only political insofar as they can be affected at the ballot box, and they generally cannot. (Public schools teaching CRT is an example that you can go after at the ballot box.)

Fundamentally these are the same thing, the distinction being an arbitrary one determined by pragmatic concerns. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, the powers of Europe agreed that trying to forcibly convert people from Catholicism to Protestantism or vice versa was a bad idea and ought to be beyond the ken of politics, but that was only because they understood that the consequences of not doing that was another century of apocalyptic Wars of Religion that they couldn't afford, not because they actually stopped wanting to cleanse the world of heretics or thought that it would be a bad idea under more favorable circumstances. It takes an awful lot of punishment before people agree to put down their rhetorical (or literal) knives and move any particular argument outside of the political arena, but these issues often don't go away. They are merely waiting on the sidelines ready to be re-litigated at the right time.

Weirdly, I agree with postmoderns on this: there is actually zero difference between those two. Your call for a taxonomy itself contains therein the normative frame of the logos.

Ultimately the distinction you wish to point out is one between law and morality. But that in itself is a distinction of little utility because one is inexorably derived from the other (which from which is the subject of acrimonious debate among philosophers of power and history). Society will always seek to make coincide what is wrong and what is illegal.

Public schools teaching CRT and P+P=R are downstream from each other.

The reason you think there can be a distinction is because you are yourself, as am I, brainwashed by the Liberal conception of morality that thinks there can be such a distinction. But practically there can not, unless of course everyone is similarly brainwashed. And this ultimately, is inherently normative and political.

Whether we define racism as racial discrimination or "prejudice plus power" is a normative issue, as is whether it's ever okay to misgender someone.

So is your taxonomy primarily a theory of government power? These issues are appropriate issues for government action, these issues over here are not. I can presume, from your examples, that you are interested in rolling back Civil Rights law as an inappropriate place for government power to be applied. This lacks support from the American public.

81% agree that “the laws against racial discrimination in housing and employment should be strengthened” – 93% Dem, 89% Ind, 64% Rep;

91% agree that “government has a responsibility to prevent hate crimes and punish people who commit them” – 96% Dem, 84% Ind, 91% Rep;

77% agree that “laws should be strengthened to protect people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity” – 94% Dem, 84% Ind, 53% Rep;

Now the devil is always in the details, but there is no broad democratic support for a firm red line between social and political issues on race and sex. What constitutes racism is a murky distinction once Civil Rights law is accepted as a category, it becomes a matter of degree and not of kind. This distinction does not exist in most people's minds. So if you want to start using this distinction, you are going to have to do a lot more to prove that the line is where you think it is, and not where other people think it is.

Having a shared set of societal ground rules is a good idea and that's pretty much what everyone in the culture war is actually fighting over, last man standing gets to dictate what is normal and what is acceptable for debate.

So I guess you can join the battle royale and hope to be that last man standing as well.

So is this demand normative or political?

Compare the Scottpost about taxonomies of mental disorders. If you want a document to inform policy, it has to account for normative preferences.

It's a great post, but my reaction was "Yes, any personality trait that anyone could conceivably want medical intervention for should be considered a mental illness, and anyone who has a problem with that is the real baddie for stigmatizing mental illness."

And.. you know, this IS a normative demand I have a preference for having one word that exclusively refers to things that involve government policy and a different word for things that involve individual choices. I want people to voluntarily start using this word. That's normative.

"Values" is a general descriptor for one's sense of justice, of right and wrong, of good and evil, for what ought to be.

By interpreting received data in light of one's values, one forms a "Worldview", a simplified picture of what things are and how they work, a big picture that, while necessarily simplistic, captures the basic essence of reality as one understands it.

Compatible worldviews cooperate iteratively, building trust and cementing "Social Norms" that smooth further interaction.

With a baseline of trust in mutual cooperation and the durability of social norms, one can move on to the search for fine-tuned solutions to specific problems, which is the business of Politics.

Does this help?

I agree with all of this, but I think you can agree two things are linked while still having separate words for them, thereby acknowledging that they are two different things.

I would argue that all of these are different things, and nonetheless are linked; in fact each is entirely dependent on the level below it. This was one of the big revelations for me, back in the early days of the present unpleasantness: that politics was downstream from social norms, which were in turn downstream from worldview and hence values. Prior to that, the narrative I'd received was that politics had nothing to do with questions of value and worldview, because politics was about facts and figures, not unfalsifiable metaphysics. In their defense, a lot of those metaphysics had stood immovable for so long that it was easy to think them part of the landscape, unchangeable as the hills, so it was a great surprise when they began skipping like lambs.

Political views relate to government policy, and normative views relate to the way we use language and the way we treat each other

These two things are incredibly, fundamentally, inextricably, linked together.

To suggest that they could come apart, and furthermore that it’s desirable for them to come apart, is to already advance a substantive political position that will not find universal assent.

They are connected, but there is an obvious difference. Why do we use one word, "political", to conflate axiology, morality, and law?

For an extensive answer to this exact question you'll want to read Carl Schmitt.

The practical difference between those is one of degree and not nature. Much like the difference between two sects, two schisms and two religions.

Because all of those things inspire question about policy, and any question about what policies should be enacted by politicians is political by nature. This is also why things like Covid "got politicized"; the virus itself isn't political, but the question of what we should (and should not) do about it is.

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