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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.

Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:

The imminent publication of Holly Lawford-Smith's Gender-Critical Feminism was announced that same month, and almost immediately no less than two petitions of complaint appeared, one from the OUP USA Guild (the union representing the New York staff of OUP), and the other from "members of the international scholarly community" with some connection to OUP. The latter petition expressed the scholars' "profound disappointment" at OUP's forthcoming publication of Lawford-Smith's book, and suggested various "measures the press could undertake to offset the harm done by the publication of this work." OUP needed to confess to a mortal sin and repent. None of the scholars had read the book that they so confidently denounced (since no copy of the book was available for them to read), but this is a mere detail.

This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:

Publishers often commission reviews of a manuscript from (anonymous) experts in the relevant field, and I had to go through that time-consuming process yet again. It was also rather risky, since—as by now you are well aware—the experts in the philosophy of sex and gender tend to brook no dissent. Responding to the (hopeful) publisher’s question, “Will it make for an outstanding book in your view, or simply a work of average quality?”, one expert wrote: “Neither. It is of extremely poor quality.” Another question: “What would you highlight as the ONE feature about this book that might make you recommend it over other titles available?” “None. It shouldn’t be published.” Lastly: “Is there anything superfluous that could be left out?” “Everything—see above.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with harsh criticism; I have doled out plenty of that myself. Maybe my book deserves it. But a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict—that helps both the author and the publisher. If I had made, as the reviewer said, “sweeping claims” that are “often false,” or had “seriously misunderstood” arguments on the other side, it would be a simple matter to give examples. But the reviewer supplied none: not a single quotation, page number, or chapter reference. From my experience publishing in this particular area of philosophy, this lack of engagement was par for the course. In fact, I found the reviewer’s hyperbolic report reassuring: if I had made mistakes, at least they were not easy to identify.

"What is wrong with my argument?"

"Everything."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Just all of it, it's just bad."

This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.

All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?

Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:

Look, I’m gonna level with you here. Like the vast majority of leftists who have been minted since Occupy Wall Street, my principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies. At all. That requires a lot of reading and I’m busy organizing black tie fundraisers at work and bringing Kayleigh and Dakota to fencing practice. I just don’t have the time. So my politics have been bolted together in a horribly awkward process of absorbing which opinions are least likely to get me screamed at by an online activist or mocked by a podcaster. My politics are therefore really a kind of self-defensive pastiche, an odd Frankensteining of traditional leftist rhetoric and vocabulary from Ivy League humanities departments I don’t understand. I quote Marx, but I got the quote from Tumblr. I cite Gloria Anzaldua, but only because someone on TikTok did it first. I support defunding the police because in 2020, when the social and professional consequences for appearing not to accept social justice norms were enormous, that was the safest place for me to hide. I maintain a vague attachment to police and prison abolition because that still appears to be the safest place for me to hide. I vote Democrat but/and call myself a socialist because that is the safest place for me to hide. I’m not a bad person; I want freedom and equality. I want good things for everyone. But politics scare and confuse me. I just can’t stand to lose face, so I have to present all of my terribly confused ideals with maximum superficial confidence. If you probe any of my specific beliefs with minimal force, they will collapse, as those “beliefs” are simply instruments of social manipulation. I can’t take my kid to the Prospect Park carousel and tell the other parents that I don’t support police abolition. It would damage my brand and I can’t have that. And that contradiction you detected, where I support maximum forgiveness for crime but no forgiveness at all for being offensive? For me, that’s no contradiction at all. Those beliefs are not part of a functioning and internally-consistent political system but a potpourri of deracinated slogans that protect me from headaches I don’t need. I never wanted to be a leftist. I just wanted to take my justifiable but inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things are and wrap them up into part of the narrative that I tell other people about myself, the narrative that I’m a kind good worthwhile enlightened person. And hey, in college that even got me popularity/a scholarship/pussy! Now I’m an adult and I have things to protect, and well-meaning but fundamentally unserious activists have created an incentive structure that mandates that I pretend to a) understand what “social justice” means and b) have the slightest interest in working to get it. I just want to chip away at my student loan debt and not get my company’s Slack turned against me. I need my job/I need my reputation/I need to not have potential Bumble dates see anything controversial when they Google me. Can you throw me a bone? Neither I nor 99% of the self-identified socialists in this country believe that there is any chance whatsoever that we’ll ever take power, and honestly, you’re harshing our vibe. So can you please fuck off and let us hide behind the BLM signs that have been yellowing in our windows for three years?

Honestly, it would be good for everyone if nobody voted. The reason that neo-liberalism must be so careful to purge society of crimethink is because we vote. I don’t think that all efforts for propaganda would stop, but the volume and ubiquity of culture war propaganda would vastly decrease if it didn’t matter so much that I personally sign off on various issues. Ukraine could fade into the background and I could call their capitol whatever I wanted. I could believe whatever I wanted to about transgender issues without worry about the elites or their lackeys trying to thought-police me to death. There might well be limits to this, but at least the volume, the fear, would be turned down.

Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.

A question I’ve asked before: look at the monarchs of every modern European country that still has them. Now imagine that tomorrow, their parliaments abolish themselves and return to them perhaps not absolute power, but the significant degrees of power their ancestors had a few hundred years ago. Would life really get much worse for the average Brit, or Spaniard, or Dane?

I’m not sure it would, if only because the monarchs would inherit largely functional institutions built by their democratic successors. But to speak for the normie constituency: since the last time the nobility was in power their countries were quite a bit poorer and more war-prone, is there a reason you think they would do an equal/better job than moderns? I feel like an active case has to be made here.

Wrt democracy making people care about politics, most non-democratic countries still invest quite a bit into propagandizing their populations and demand even louder and more public affirmations of political views. Maybe this is because centuries of democratic examples have changed the way you have to govern citizens anywhere, maybe the information age just changes the way you have to keep control of a population, maybe increased urbanization just means rebellious commoners are a much more concentrated threat - either way that genie is likely not going back into the bottle.

Strong monarchies exist today- if we exclude oil states, we get Morocco and probably Malaysia, neither of them war prone, Liechtenstein and Monaco- both of which have higher standards of living than their surroundings, although they’re tiny micro states- Tonga- which doesn’t seem notably worse off than democracies in Polynesia, despite the instability of its leaders on a personal level- Swaziland- which is a shithole and may not have had any way to avoid being a shithole- and Bhutan- which is simply strange.

Notably, these are all constitutional monarchies with full parliaments.

The Malaysian king doesn’t do a ton of day-to-day governance, parliament handles the actual show. Even his role in recent years of playing a part in selecting the Prime Minister (who actually leads the country) has been a historical anomaly they justified due to instability, and even his own position as monarch is semi-elected as a rotating representative from their different states.

Morocco’s king is a lot more powerful (even if parliament still plays a big part) but, idk, it’s still a mid tier country with a lot of poverty and dysfunction. None of these places, or even the old European monarchies, seem as nice and functional as your average liberal democracy.

The King of Morocco is pretty powerful, but I wouldn't consider him all that competent I guess? His powers are greatest in foreign policy and the judicial system, two areas where Morocco is notoriously bumbling. Notably, Morocco experiences pretty significant population outflows of Moroccans leaving each year to try and live under liberal democracies. The leaders of Bhutan and Oman are competent (or at least bin Said was, I don't know much about his successor) but their countries are also poor. Even adding in the rest of the oil states, most achieve pretty middling GDP per capita and HDI scores.

Liechtenstein and Monaco do have extremely high living standards, but neither are anywhere near absolutist. Liechtenstein is a literal direct democracy - the princely powers you describe of vetoing referendums were vested in the monarch by a public vote in 2003 (notably the monarchy did not have these powers when Liechtenstein achieved its own huge takeoff growth) and those powers can be taken away by the public at any time as well, as they considered doing and rejected in the 2012 referendum. They can even vote him fully out of power whenever they want, and he has no power to veto (that was part of the deal for increasing his powers in 2003). For what it counts, I have no personal objection to people voting in a powerful executive like this, or in France or wherever.

I don't know much about Monaco, but it's not really clear to me how powerful the Monacan Prince is beyond his veto power; they seem to have an elected parliament that makes all the laws, no? He can call for new elections, but so can Macron. He's described as "representing the country" in foreign affairs, but the Minister of Foreign Affairs seems to make all the actual calls. Should we even consider this a normal case? France literally handles their whole military defense.

By the same token, both Liechtenstein and Monaco are tax havens with populations under 40,000, both countries put together could easily fit on some college campuses. This feels a lot more objectionable to me than the petro-states. If I was arguing for the success of the liberal democratic model I don't think wildly successful Luxembourg would be a fair go-to example: it's circumstances are too unusual and probably don't scale to bigger countries.

This is part of why I thought the more useful comparison would be between the modern European nation state democracies and those same countries under their former monarchies, which tend to look quite a bit poorer and more likely to go to war.

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