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 -
I've been thinking a lot recently about fundamental tensions, dualities, dialectics, how these map onto each other and relate to our societies, cultures, politics and secular cycles.
Bear with me a moment, I know this is abstract. But I think it provides a useful map for thinking about many issues, no matter which side you are on.
Consider a binary that we find very much in the news, culture and politics of the day, sex. Male-female is the binary, but there's a lot of definitional games being played. This binary is the poles of a fundamental tension, with a spectrum of related tensions in complicated combinations. But just think quickly on the issues of the day, and you can map that tension onto pretty much anything. In politics, which is “male” R or D? Hot or cold? Light or dark? Gay or straight? Drugs or prohibition? Guns or not? Notice the issues do not track cleanly, because both sides of any binary have a range of variability and expression for the same aspect. So, prohibition tracks female, which tracks D, but democrats generally support more drugs (but not tobacco). And male tracks R tracks guns, but prohibition on drugs, which tracks female. One side expresses their freedom in economics, the other in sex. One side demands order for the border, the other demands order in DC. Everyone is in tension, and so are our groups.
Thesis: This duality and how it resolves onto the issues of our day and the circumstances of our lives are a good descriptor for who we are, why we believe what we do, have the politics we have. I believe this helps us to understand why other people disagree with us, when we are clearly right about everything. The failure modes of these dualities explain the suffering experienced by the sentient in virtually all modes of life, no matter how objectively comfortable.
This extends to genetics itself (nature/nurture), primal forces (life/death, chaos/order, pleasure/suffering, violence/peace) and personal psychology and philosophy. It reaches into our very conceptions of these ideas, rationality vs irrationality.
Consider the subreddit AITA. What's the appeal here? It's weirdly attractive, tons of comments, shit flying everywhere. It allows people to see two "films" and argue for their conception. We have news silos because we are all practicing to do this. To see a situation and judge it by our lights, and then go forth to do battle with those on the opposing side. Goes for social media pile-ons and cancel culture, sports talk radio and small town gossip trains.
Hey there sportsfans, how about Coach Chucky? Is he a moron or what? Phone lines are open, call now.
Hey there Conservatives, how about this tranny reading to kids, whaddaya make of that shit? Isn't that weird and creepy? Donate money to me to keep telling you how nuts Liberals are!
Hey there Liberals, how about Current Republican having the same border policies as Previous Democrat? KIDS IN CagES!!!!!
The reality is that every duality has a fundamental legitimacy to it. Individuals have different ideas about exactly which values they hold on which scales of which issues.
Let's consider the two human archetypes by pole of duality. This is in no way determinative, as there is huge variation on most of these scales, but think of it very generally. You have male, nature, chaos, violence, irrationality, pain, greatness. And female, nurture, order, peace, rationality, pleasure, mediocrity.
These tensions need each other, as people need each other. Order decays, and is renewed by chaos. Male chaos is redirected by female order to more productive pursuits. Progressives come up with new ways to change society, Conservatives try to make sure it doesn't fuck up the good bits we already have. At this level of abstraction, conservative codes female, but politically that's not how it is currently, which is an interesting way of thinking about politics. The “feminine” politics of order are largely in the service of a “masculine” political project of trying out new shit. And the “male” embrace of inequality and freedom is channeled into the conservative project of slowing down the progs. The interactions are functionally infinite, so all this is descriptive rather than predictive. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and none of this means that these current realities are permanent in any way. But the tensions are.
Now let's put in some rudimentary statistics, and start making some basic assumptions that are certainly not 100% accurate, but should be a good descriptor of reality. Within each tension between two poles or archetypes is a bell curve of human behavior. It can be tall or short, but the poles of a tension are rare. Pure archetypes always are. Most people, psychology and behavior will cluster around the average value to some degree. What is true for IQ is true for violence, income, sex and number of offspring.
This begins to explain secular cycles, Freud, political organization and horseshoe theory. It explains why marginal members of groups are often the biggest cheerleaders. The most famous German nationalist was Austrian. Shaun King is white. The richest woman in the world is a dude. The first black president wasn't “black-black” (ADOS), and the first black president was Bill Clinton. Math is not without its ironies.
If it were the case that humans had a single nature, we should not expect cycles of any sort. We should simply solve our problems the most direct way and have a smooth path through history. We see nothing of the sort, but we do see a general tendency toward higher organization, larger civilizations etc. Think of the law of averages pushing this vast ocean of human duality relentlessly toward the middle. Order is winning, at least for now, but it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and we all know it. Hence the millenial cults of the Second Coming and Global Warming as the duelling apocalypses fueling the paranoid fringe of each political religion.
We all feel within us that this level of organization can't be sustained with the number of people we are producing, and that is going to mean a lot of death at some point. Malthus has been wrong for a long time, but the heat death of the universe is a long way off and he won't be forever. The popularity of the zombie movie is a social expression of the human connection to this fear. It is our fantasy that we'd be the ones to survive.
The reality is, the world isn't ending today and probably not tomorrow. We'll keep muddling along. We are the richest and most advanced we've ever been, more people are living more comfortable lives than any time before, and in fact in all the time before added together! And we're miserable as shit.
Our dual nature is oppressed by every temporary victory of one side. All order and the very real benefits it brings are at the cost of very real oppression. Freedom is dangerous, unequal and in general a bad bet. Yet it militates within us, furious and raging at the restrictions of our social lives. We feel an injustice in the randomness of the world, the pointlessness of all the suffering, the sheer cruelty of sentience in a cold and mechanical universe. What Dillard calls the “glut of pain”.
The problem with rationality is that it is death in the end. The math of the universe says that we are here to suffer until we die, and no amount of joy we steal from relentless time will last. Following our natural instincts to reproduce our genes will only bring more people into the world to suffer until they die. Once we lose all excuses for our suffering, we find that it was within us all the time. Transhumanists and wireheaders fantasize about bypassing suffering via drugs and technology. Religious gurus variously channel and redirect it. Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something. If you want to know why there is a loss of meaning, it is because we are running out of excuses to explain our psychic pain.
But for every pole is a competing and legitimate one. Life finds a way, hope springs eternal, it's just crazy enough to work. Any good game theorist can tell you that irrationality is rational at times. It is this that Camus refers to when he says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not happy with his circumstance per se, but happy that he has his suffering laid out before him, and he is willing to meet it. In his punishment there is more time. The irrational search for another roll of the dice, a possible future, a chance at the gods. A revolt against death, against inevitability, against math itself. A sense that if we can hang in this game long enough, if we play our cards right and we get a bit lucky, we might someday escape this hellworld within our own skulls.
Yeah, that would be a giant waste of time, which is why I didn't do it.
So you have understood me!
Yes. The duality is within us. If you define things carefully and specifically enough, the dichotomy presents itself. A warm sun on a cold day is "female" because it is comforting and pleasurable, something we associate with the feminine, but hot, sweaty sun is more masculine and cool breeze and shade would be more "feminine" in that specific case. This is not about dogmatic categories, but explaining seemingly contradictory ideals.
Exactly. A functionally infinite set of interactions and influences.
Here we may disagree slightly, but it's definitional. I think it is explainable in terms of a confluence of tensions, and I think it is derivable by these methods, but that no one actually does it. This does not mean I think there is some deep essence to left or right, R or D, I merely use those because the tension between them is high and it allows us to see that as you say, there is no consistency in politics.
That's sort of the point. Take gun and drug legalization/restriction. This is a political issue, not a fundamental tension, but this can be seen in terms of different axes of tension. You have danger/safety, freedom/restriction, power/weakness, pain/pleasure, etc. Everyone looks at those issues, does their party affiliation thing and finds an explanation that satisfies them about why they think what they think. The "freedom" value is associated with the "danger", "power" and "pleasure" values here, which means that people who are really far out on the bell curve on the axis of "freedom" would probably scorn the danger and desire the pleasure and be in favor of both (i.e. libertarians). Everyone else is more toward the average of these tensions, and we get the muddy partial restriction of contemporary politics where certain guns and certain drugs are legal in certain circumstances.
Hilariously, you seem to have almost perfectly misunderstood. There is no shared symbolic content for political groups, that's the whole point. All sides have all the binaries, in infinitely complex combinations. Society, the world, international politics is so fiendishly complex because of these interactions, because every binary contains a million different binaries. Countries, corporations, cities, parties, people are not one thing. "I tried to draw the line, but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time".
Yes and no. Yes there are many factions, and in part this whole little shitpost is about how infinite and varied those factions can be. But I think there are always two sides, made up of those many, many interest groups with their own specific combination of beliefs and interests in constantly shifting coalitions with only two real sides. Roman politics had millions of shifts, reversals, revolutions and coups, but the optimates and the populares, the greens and blues. There is a binary there.
Conflict does not end, it only moves, because the tension is fundamental. When one side of a binary that became political or social "wins", what happens? Where does that tension go? Do all the constituent interests, powers, parties and people just evaporate? Impossible. The conflict just moves. After war, conflict moves into politics, war being the continuation of politics by violent means, and peace being the continuation of war by nonviolent means. Germany won a hegemony over continental Europe in peace much more effectively than they ever did in war.
The various interest groups split into constituent parts and vie for power within that binary before reconstituting with other groups in a new political reality. If one group "wins" at something, they usually split into a new binary and one side will ally with the losers from the previous conflict. So the pre-civil war national binary was slave/free, north/south, east/west. When the south seceded, the national binary was then pro-war Republicans and pro-peace Democrats. When the south lost and was reintegrated, the losing faction from the war years re-allied with the south.
Political coalitions are inherently unstable and given to shedding marginal members. The more one side wins, the more the important contest is internal. Think one-party elections where the nomination is the real contest. The more power one side of a political binary gains, the more important their internal divisions are. If one political group destabilizes the interparty binary, they will be split by the resulting tension, new coalitions will emerge and the two-party binary will return in full effect.
This can be expressed in multiple parties, or only within one party. But there will always be a fundamental division within every group.
From the subatomic to the international.
Everything is conflict.
Dillard says that death is spinning the globe, but she shaded it. She read Heisenberg. She turned back at the pass.
Math is spinning the globe, and death is just part of it. All values resolve to zero eventually.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link