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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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white progressives

white progressives

privileged white progressives

Yawn. It’s really tiresome to see that even purportedly “anti-woke” people have allowed their minds to be colonized by the nakedly anti-white framing that pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.

Well, as someone who has spent the entirety of my adult life in thoroughly progressive social spheres - everything from explicit socialist activist spaces in college, to the world of musical theatre and “queer performance art” - I can tell you from direct personal experience that the people who have been the most vindictive, the most ready to pounce at the slightest hint of wrongthink, the ones who have done the most to sully my personal reputation and those of others far less off-the-progressive-reservation than I am, have been uniformly non-white.

The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions. That’s the reality: most white progressives whose careers or social standing are wrapped up with their ability to stay ideologically up-to-date are terrified of stepping out of line, in a way that this simply far less true of most non-white individuals in the same milieu. Whites are far more cancellable than non-whites. Able to draw on a far smaller pool of mercy and benefit of the doubt, because they lack any sort of shield of “marginalized identity” on which they can fall back when questioned. Why do you think so many of them are socially “transitioning” to “non-binary” and other sorts of low-investment boutique identities? I’ve seen this process play out a number of times among people who, again, I personally know. If you’re a white guy in these spaces, you are literally vulnerable at all times and have to watch what you say at all moments, because you’re inherently suspect. So, you grow your hair out, maybe wear sort of ambiguous clothing, and declare yourself non-binary to give yourself some modicum of breathing room. Yes, many non-white progressives are doing the same, and I do not want to overstate the level of relative immunity from cancellation they enjoy, but the bar is undeniably set higher for them than it is for similarly situated whites. “White progressives” are not the ones primarily driving the dynamics you’re pointing at, and I think it’s a distraction tactic, or maybe part of a personal vendetta you’re prosecuting, to act as if they are.

You have a point about people kneejerk complaining about "white progressives," but while you can argue all you like that it's a handful of POC dominating and terrorizing nice white boys like yourself, they would have no power if not for all the white progressives abetting them. You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness. You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence. That's part of the environment.

You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness.

Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to? The guy who got a degree in theatre and had planned to pursue it as his life’s work, but who gave it up and distanced himself from huge swathes of his social group - burning important and otherwise rewarding relationships which he’d spent over a decade cultivating - primarily because of fundamental incompatibility with the progressive values dominant in that industry? Who’s still rebuilding his professional aspirations from the ground up as a result? That’s the guy you’re accusing of “staying in these ultra-woke environments but complaining about the wokeness”?

You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence.

Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it? You have my entire posting history to disabuse you of that notion. I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness. I believe that this claim is false. This is not a defense of the ideology, it’s merely a disagreement over the people driving the enforcement of it.

Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to?

No, I have not. That's my point. As I understand it, you still live and work in that same environment (I don't know how much progress you have made in leaving it, but you seem like you are still very much a theater kid).

Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it?

No, I think you basically like the white progressive environment, you just don't like the non-white people in it (and all the things they bring), and you think non-white people invented wokeness. Well, in a sense they did ("woke" was originally African-American vernacular), but we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment. Which is quintessential white progressivism. Maybe you disagree with that take, but I haven't seen you offer an alternate hypothesis.

I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness.

Yes, and I think that claim is correct.

we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment

I have seen people say this but it makes little sense to me. The Enlightenment celebrated reason, it was a move away from unconditionally accepting orthodoxies about things like science, religion, and the supposed rights of monarchs.

Wokeness, on the other hand, is largely a turning away from reason and towards orthodoxies.

Why would wokeness be the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment?

You're underestimating how much of this is driven by reason.

Transhumanism in general has a declared goal of freeing the mind from the body, which is the ultimate end of a movement which is the rejection of man's natural condition to recreate him in his own image using technics.

That this in turn makes itself into an orthodoxy is just the eternal irony of philosophy: all movements taken to their logical conclusion invert their original goal.

Now reason isn't bad or evil don't get me wrong. But it is indeed its worship that led us here. There is a direct throughline from Kant and German Idealism to the totalitarian modernisms and to post modern subsersive politics.

Such a throughline that some saw this as the conclusion of this style of thinking way back when the French Revolution ignited it all.

But all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics. The Enlightenment marks an acceleration in this but it's not like humans weren't trying to improve on their natural lot before it, it's just that around the time of the Enlightenment they got much better at it, so much better at it that scientific progress started to seem like it would just keep going and going rather than being something that happened once in a blue moon. Man's "natural condition" is to live naked without knowledge of agriculture or even how to make fire. Man has been rejecting it for hundreds of thousands of years.

I also think that philosophy's impact on politics is overestimated. Totalitarianism would probably have come about one way or another because of the rise of modern technologies that allow near-instant communication and dissemination of propaganda.

As for transgenderism, haven't there been versions of it in various human cultures for thousands of years? Modern transhumanism is not what created it. I doubt that transhumanism even did much to give it its modern, Western shape. Probably most transgender people don't even think in abstract terms of freeing their mind from their body, their concerns are more specific.

all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics

This is absolutely untrue, and you only believe this because you're a man of the Enlightenment living in a society made according to its principles.

People of the past did not think like this. Technological escape from man's condition was a very secondary concern if you actually look at what they left as artifacts of their thinking.

What you value of what they produced and what they valued of themselves are not the same categories, and people always confuse the two.

Man's "natural condition" is to live naked without knowledge of agriculture or even how to make fire. Man has been rejecting it for hundreds of thousands of years.

You're thinking in tautologies here. All you're attempting to relate nature to here are relationships of production. There are other things in life than making transformed goods that can fit on a spreadsheet. And before the advent of this period dominated by merchants, people thought of those are more important.

Are war, honor, faith and family more or less constitutive of man's natural condition than agriculture and business?

I also think that philosophy's impact on politics is overestimated. Totalitarianism would probably have come about one way or another because of the rise of modern technologies that allow near-instant communication and dissemination of propaganda.

As you know, this is a longstanding debate in historiography. But I think sole technological determinism the likes of which you seem to be supporting here is almost entirely falsified. If only because we're not currently living under Both great men and ideology have a seat at the table of causality. Were Marx and Kant not to exist, the manifestations of the industrial revolution would take a distinctly different character, if through similar means.

Consider how similar and yet different those totalitarianisms of the XXth century are from each other despite being determined by supposedly similar technology.

haven't there been versions of it in various human cultures for thousands of years?

No. Androgyny is eternal and its popularity recurs. Transgenderism in particular (both in ideological terms and in technical terms) is wholly new.

Gender theorists are constantly producing propaganda to pretend the past agrees with their novelty, a stratagem borrowed from the one used for homosexuality, but people of the past did not thing of things in those terms and it doesn't make sense to paint social edge cases of completely different social orders using contemporary social theories. No person born before the 1990s ever was "queer" in the sense these people mean.

This is like saying the proletariat always existed because at any time in history you can point at people who have more than others. Useful propaganda. But sociologically moronic.