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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.

It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.

Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.

This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.

These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.

I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?

Well, I would presumably meet that description. I meet every datapoint here (expect for Land, who I've never bothered to study that much), and I continue to be a member of a far-left party, if an inactive one.

More to the point, I know personally a large number of far-left people who are extremely interested in local far-right online obscure esoterica, most likely often possessing a better picture of the Finnish fringe far-right scene than the actors within it do themselves. There's a personality type that is very interested in fringe, esoteric thinking and figures in general, and that's of course very easy to combine to a general left-wing line.

If I'd have to describe why I continue to stick with the left, despite having a lot criticism about both the workings of the national and international left, would be three points, not in a particular order:

  • I continue to believe that the climate crisis and the resource crisis continue to cause a large (not existential, but still considerable) threat to the stability of the modern society, that simply trusting technology and market-based solutions is not enough, and believe that proactive governmental action is needed both to combat its onslaught and mitigate its effects.

  • I believe the Nordic welfare state to be both one of the most humane models of society to be conceived thus far and particularly foundational for Finnish culture, and after studying it's history, believe that its based not only on ameliorative ("for-the-poorest-and-weakest") measures, but on a strong bedrock of direct state intervention in economy through SOEs and such and on a strong, combative labor union movement.

  • For all the possible criticisms that could be aimed at how it can be weaponized, I find the international human rights treaty framework to be an important fundamental stabilizing civic myth both internally for modern societies and for the existence of a global international community, and worry that many of the thing advocated and agitated by far-right nationalist and populist movements are chipping away steadily at this civic myth, leading to unpredictable consequences.

I continue to believe that the climate crisis and the resource crisis continue to cause a large (not existential, but still considerable) threat to the stability of the modern society

How does climate change threaten - at all - the stability of modern society? Let's say one of the worse posited outcomes happens, and hundreds of millions of africans or poor south asians are displaced - but europe, china, the US, etc manage any disruption technologically. How does this threaten 'the stability of modern society' at all? If 20% of the population dropped dead, or a dozen random cities got wiped off the map, inhabitants included, it'd be unfortunate, but society would survive - and climate change will do much less than that to the US or europe. (and we know this from history - plagues and wwi/ii).

Also: what's the "resource crisis"?

international human rights treaty framework to be an important fundamental stabilizing civic myth

What is the myth specifically? Most people believe less in 'international human rights treaties' and more in a general sense that rights and democracy are necessary for all that is good, and specifically all that is good for happiness and prosperity for the people, especially the disadvantaged. This isn't really a myth, just a set of values and claims about their benefits. Do you mean that individual or collective rights aren't independent goods but rough gestures towards things that are generally contingently beneficial, but it's better for people to believe that protecting "rights" has some independent meaning or value beyond that contingency in some deontological vs consequential sense? I think the difference is deeper - everyone ("progressives") wants happiness and prosperity and freedom from want for all, and the larger part of 'international human rights' are just direct attempts to accomplish that - as opposed to (variously) struggle, complexity, duty, nation, race, beauty, etc.

Since the particular purpose of my statement in this subthread was simply to shortly present my essential beliefs, I am in fact not going to engage in further discussion of them here.

Fair enough. Often people make tangential statements with the intent of inviting further discussion, often they don't, hard to tell which.