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 -
A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
Very obviously the race swapping is done in a very one sided direction while the opposite is condemned as cultural appropriation, racism.
It has a culturally genocidal element and is not unrelated to afrocentric ahistorical lies. It is cultural appropriation to the extreme.
I don't object to societies having their own version of Shakespeare plays with their own actors. Or adaptations like Departed and the such. But there is a point where this gets a more sinister racist hue, and this has already happened. The ideology of marxist nationalism or liberal nationalism for groups like blacks and other progressive beneficieries of progressive stack is key part of what is happening. And it is about racist devaluation of the history and culture of certain peoples to the benefit of other peoples and also under hateful spite from the perspective of an ideology that sees white ethnic groups as evil. Cultural marxism like original marxism promises utopia once the class enemies/ethnic enemies, oppressors are destroyed. This is part of said mistreatment, humiliation and destruction. Is cruelty and it is immoral and ought to be stopped and punished.
Ideally this tactic of not noticing this, or earnest inability to see what is happening should be accurately perceived as supporting this racist extremism and not be tolerated but treated as pathological and hateful. The slippery slope to hell includes massive amounts of downplayment and understatement while it is ongoing to bring us there.
It isn't all that complicated really. If you support massive double standards status quo at expense of X you really are a racist out to get X. What the policy is like in the actual is what we are primarilly debating. Because else you can tactically support how it is implemented by technically promoting it in the abstract. At the very least if you want to talk about abstract race swapping, you need to do the work to show that you aren't supporting the actual policies implemented today, in the way they are implemented today.
In a more general sense which should be less of the focus than how "race swapping is good actually" would be applied in practice today, which is in a blatant one sided manner, but still:
I believe that people have a right to have their own history, culture, traditions and that being respected. And while it is harmless for a different people to sometimes play with them, it is disrespectful towards groups for their own original history to be distorted and that is different from the way the original people are depicted. Race swapping if not limited promotes distortions of history. That is the difference between portraying historical figures as a different race and ethnic group that distorts how the original material and history is viewed to more minor local adaptations. Humanity has a long history of ethnic cleansing, and removing local names, cultures, and icons and replacing it with ones of another ethnicity. This race swapping can facilitate this and be a part of it. And it is today part of it.
Plus, authoritarianism in favor of antinationalism and anti-religion anti-nation, anti-race has already been tried and found to be extremely repressive and destructive. Even if it was possible to apply this in an even handed manner, it would still result in quotas applied and authoritarianism. And it is destructive of some of humanity's richness to deprive it of its nations and peoples and unique histories. In addition to cultural genocide, this ideology can lead to mass murder and has lead to it in the USSR especially, both in terms of genocides of ethnic groups (that weren't total genocides) and other targets of mass murder under a supposed antidentitarian utopian end. The end result is not diversity but a far left monoculture, and you get tribalism and repression in favor of the "antidentitarian" extremist faction who are intolerant of more moderate tribalists, who are more moderate tribalists on ethnicity, religion, etc.
This isn't what we got today. What we got today is blatantly bigoted concern trolling that promotes race swapping and extreme anti-identitarianism to its outgroup so that is retained (like extreme nationalists are extreme antinationalists for the nations they want to destroy and conquer) but this critique is nowhere near as present and excuses are made for progressive stack groups. We can see that anti-identitarianism didn't work on its own premise of eliminating anti-identitarianism.
Certainly not only in that it promotes extreme tribalism of antidentitarian tribe, but also ethnic conflict and other forms of conflict still spinns and groups which have an identitarian ethnic agenda such as outright tribalists for their own ethnic groups and liberals and other progressives that support racist discrimination in favor of ethnic ingroup and against ethnic outgroups hiding behind antidentitarianism have taken over what now pretends to be antidentitarianism which plays motte and bailey games.
Its tactical support of not caring about your culture/race promoted towards the outgroup. This necessitates for those who want to promote the general pro race swapping attitude to oppose the current status quo and the current movements with their motte and baileys, if they really are something different than them.
Of course, I have also argued against race swapping* in the abstract even if we were to agree that the way it is implemented today is blatantly racist the reality is that it is bad in that case as well but also anti-identitarianism has failed under its own goals and leads to racist movements that carry the pretense of anti-identitarianism to use it to undermine the outgroup at the benefit of the ingroup. What has happened and is happening is telling us what is the trajectory of this extreme antidentitarian approach.
I don't buy the concept of cultural appropriation. I've learned too much about things like Greco-Buddhist art and Daoist Christian syncretism to think there's anything wrong with "appropriating" cultures, even in the most sacred of contexts.
There's a difference between treating another culture or group with dignity and respect, and refusing to do anything with that culture's art, fashion or stories. I actually think it's a bit racist to refuse to let cultures mix and mingle as is their natural tendency historically. It would be much easier for humans if everything always stayed separated into Platonic ideals, but the reality is that especially in the Old World everything was very connected and ideas in one part of Europe might find their way to India or Japan given enough time historically.
I think you're seriously misreading the situation in a number of ways. You see victory, and call it defeat.
When the Greco-Bactrian kingdom started depicting Buddha in Greek-style statuary, was this a humiliation for the Buddhists or the Greeks? No, of course not. If anything it showed the strength of Greek culture and of Indian Buddhist culture that when these two great cultural groups mixed they produced something new.
Western culture has been so successful that a Puerto Rican man made a musical about one of America's Founding Fathers and it was wildly popular. Was it a humiliation that many of the cast in Hamilton were black or Hispanic? Of course not, this is a sign of American and Western culture's strength, not its weakness.
I'm sorry, but I honestly can't unlearn how artificial nations are. Modern Greeks learn about the Classics, even though a lot of Greeks are descended from the Ottomans and haven't got a bit of Hellenistic blood in them. The majority of French people didn't speak French until surprisingly recently in history. The drindl and lederhosen are the costume of specific regions of modern Germany, and not Germany as a whole.
It's all fake, fake, fake.
Not our nation of course. Our nation, uniquely among all nations, is autochthonous and authentic. It's totally real and wasn't the result of decades or centuries of nationalist agitation to make us think of it as primordial and true.
I think "nationalism" only makes sense if you are a nation. Yes, yes, I pointed out how nations are fake above, but the United States really isn't a nation. I like someone's description of it as a "civic state." Americans trace their origins to a common civic history, not a common birth like Japan or France.
At one point it might have been a proto-nation of primarily anglo origin, but today it is such a mess of ethnicities that I doubt if it can truly make itself a single nation, though the growing circle of those considered "Han" across Chinese history might provide an interesting template going forward. Certainly, "white American" has become somewhat of a group, as well as "black American" and those ties might be enough to call each group a nascent "nation." I just don't know if I buy that as a solid glue to hold together American society though.
Like, is it a humiliation to anglo Americans that many white Americans love institutions created by, of and for anglo Americans? Is it a humiliation that the anglo Founding Fathers can sometimes be depicted by people of obviously non-Anglo (if still white) actors?
I don't know - I think Western culture is pretty awesome, but I'm not a chauvinist about it. I also appreciate (in Kipling's sense of the word) many of the non-Western cultures I've been exposed to. None of those cultures are "pure", isolated islands for the most part. Oni from Japan might have some influence from Indian rakshasa, and so on and so on, the lists of cross-cultural pollination are endless.
I'm pro-race swapping because I'm a student of history and the humanities, and those fields show again and again that you just can't keep a "pure" form of a culture around for any length of time. New circumstances always arise. There's always another tribe or nation or people along the horizon, ready to throw your conception of the world into disarray, or who just has a really cool story that you can't wait to put your own spin on.
Do you buy the concept of desecration? The idea of wishing to act upon that which others value, because you know it will dishonor or devalue that thing for them?
If you recognize this mode of behavior, do you think it is a good thing?
No, it is a humiliation that for many people, the founding fathers can only be respected if they are reimagined as black or Hispanic.
To the extent that I value the Founding Fathers, it is for specific reasons. If others value them for completely orthogonal reasons, that is not a victory for my values, and may in fact be a defeat.
To the extent that it was a symptom of the creeping racialization of American society, yes, it was in fact a humiliation.
Like our elections, amiright? ...Oh, shit, no, that's probably the super serious and absolutely unshakably real part that we're supposed to treat as sacred and beyond questioning, since that's the primary mechanism by which we keep the peace between ~350 million fractious, heavily-armed and not terribly sociable murder apes. I mean, you've correctly identified that the idea that we're some sort of common, cohesive culture and values-set to unify us is laughable, so it's a good thing we have indestructible, immortal rules-based systems that are impervious to defection or manipulation or loss of trust, right?
No, it's really not. And it's the sort of thinking you're displaying here that made that the case.
If we really are reducible to white Americans and black Americans, given that I'm not black, someone cheering for the black Americans isn't cheering for me or mine. This seems to me to be an absolutely fantastic reason not to reduce us to so ignoble a state as our race, and I will continue to resist all efforts to do so. That includes people deciding that the only way the Founding Fathers can be appreciated is if they're race-swapped and translated into rap.
One might be forgiven for observing that only a self-described "student of the humanities" would frame this fact as a hopeful, optimistic eventuality. Perhaps you should lean a bit harder on your history, and the record of how new tribes and nations and peoples usually affect those who came before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link