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It has much more of a track record of encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions though.
I mean yeah old things have more track record than new things?
That said, trans ideology has gotten me a lot of good youtube content and podcasts in only about 15 years, at that age Christianity hadn't produced much more than a single carpenter in Galilee.
I'd say trans ideology has a lead in the Time Trial rules. Of course it has a long way to go.
(and, more seriously, lots of non-Christian places have had adaptive behaviors and institutions, so attributing those things to Christianity just because they happened in Christian nations is a nontrivial claim)
It’s actually extremely plausible that Christianity is the main reason western Europe and not other high-IQ regions took off. Christian ‘lifestyle rules’- monogamous, free choice exogamy in particular, but also monasticism- contribute meaningfully to modernizing behavior and you will note that East Asian societies attempting to modernize by force imposed monogamous exogamy.
How much of that came from Christianity itself and how much came from the Roman Imperial substrate it grew in? Rome is uniquely the source of a lot of Western legal traditions, democracy itself is Greek and republics are Roman. I don’t know but I doubt a place as cosmopolitan as the Roman Empire was inbred. Even after Christianity came to dominate Greek and Roman Philosophy were taught in schools. I think Christian apologists tend to overestimate the influence Christian ideas had on making society what it eventually became mostly by portraying the Romans as idiotic barbarians who were completely backwards.
Having read a lot of the philosophy they produced, the Romans were a sophisticated civilization that believed in virtue and reason and that ideally laws would serve the public good. The Stoics are halfway to being Buddhists and there was a strong sense of duty and helping your fellow man. They were nearly modern in their thinking, and very pragmatic.
The one thing Christianity brought that didn’t exist before was Missionaries. They’re the first religion that had as a major tenet to convert the world and that if you weren’t specifically a Christian (and an orthodox one at that) you were damned to eternal hellfire. The Judaism that Christianity grew from wasn’t missionary, and still isn’t. They believe that their religion is for them and that others are not expected to become Jews. Buddhism sees itself as one choice among many. Only Christianity and Islam really push the idea that if you don’t become part of the religion, you’re damned to hellfire. This gives a lot of push to recruit, and conversion of the Indians was a driver to get people to the new world. And since the west developed the mindset of “our way is correct, and everyone should adopt it” you can create more westerners by conversion to our ideas.
Sure, lots of scholasticism is based in greco-roman intellectualism. That part's true. But universities specifically grew out of church-run schools of the sort that Greece and Rome didn't have. Stoicism in particular had a few proto-enlightenment ideas but was actually suppressed by Christianity; Christian metaphysics and philosophy is mostly Aristotelian.
Now as far as marriage customs, Roman marriages(monogamous, limitations on domestic violence, exogamous) do look recognizably more Christian than other ancient marriage laws- including Ancient Greek marriages- especially in manu marriages. But there's some striking differences; the Roman concept of marriage takes for granted that divorce for a better deal was a common occurrence used by both parties, remarriage was mandatory, the bride didn't have to consent and was often betrothed years ahead of the actual marriage for physical reasons, and a married couple was part of and under the legal control of the groom's father's household rather than being legally independent. Now in some ways Christian marriages might have looked notably morally strict/reactionary with a few eccentricities to educated Romans- the harsh restriction on divorce and short betrothals, for example- a bit like how Mormons are seen today, but classical Rome was simply not a society which practiced those things even as a relic, any more than calling cards are part of courtship today.
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Did Christianity have a better record after ~40 years of existence?
Honestly, does this matter? If it takes 1000 years for a belief system to mature enough to perform well, then that's even more reason to stick to established systems.
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I wonder what a dozen intelligent AGPs would have been able to make out of trans ideology if bound by a common Church and actual vigorous oppression. Even stuff like this is fairly compelling, in a demonic sense. And I probably know a dozen online characters who could do better…
Well they’d probably just do what smart AGP who want to push the cause among skeptical people already do (as you’ve noted) which is to claim it explicitly as transhumanism rather than a sexual fetish. And from transhumanism, presumably, one can fashion some kind of quality millenarian religious ideology.
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In 70 AD Christianity was certainly led by people trying to encourage adaptive behavior, that's basically the plot of the Pauline letters.
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Pretty sure even at the beginning it was encouraging people to get married, and start families, and avoid various forms of hedonism, so yes?
I thought it was very explicitly 'leave your families and follow me' at that point?
After ~40 years of existence?
I think that was supposed to be in his mid 30s, so, pretty close? A biblical scholar might have more info.
I wasn't aware he proselytized right out of the cradle.
I mean people were worshipping him in the cradle, or at least following portents and omens to find him and give him gifts and etc.
I'd call worshipping Christ 'Christianity'.
By that logic we could probably track the beginning of progressivism way back to the French Revolution, and the ~40 years excuse no longer applies to it at all.
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That's highly dependent on how people interpreted it. A fair few people castrated themselves, and more went into the desert to pursue lives of extreme asceticism. Remember that early Christians were like, a millenarian cult that believed that Jesus would be back in a few decades... Then a few centuries...
If you just take the Pauline letters as the orthodoxy in the early Church, which it was and still is, there's virtually nothing disagreeable (modern progressivism notwithstanding)
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The weird apocalyptic stuff coexisted with more prosocial messages (Paul allows for marriage for those who can't be celibate, attacks the use of prostitutes).
There is a legitimate question of when they fully got it out of their systems. 40 years is...tight. The Gospels fit around that time and they have prosocial messages and hints of anti-family stuff.
By the standards of the age, it's not really prosocial at all, which is why the Romans hated it so much and tried to suppress it. I think it ended up being more prosocial and Christian Europe was in some ways morally better than the Roman Empire, but someone walking around in 100AD probably would have looked at these weirdos celebrating a guy that got horribly tortured to death, living lives of asceticism in the desert, rejecting all of the dozens of sects and cults that existed mostly harmoniously in the Roman Empire, rejecting the entirely proper worship of military power and violence in favour of humility and peace, and they probably would have reached a fairly similar conclusion to a modern conservative looking at trans people - 'these people are freaks and a threat to our society'. Tell me, when the time comes for war against the Parthians, who's going to get the job done? A bunch of flaccid cheek-turning monks, or our red-blooded Jupiter-worshippers? If we don't make our ritual sacrifices, who's going to guarantee us victory in war and calm seas in travel? If this God of Jesus is so powerful, why didn't he protect him? I'll put my faith in whoever the Senate declared a God last week, thanks.
The Senate deified Julius Caesar. Rome's track record of having gods powerful enough to protect themselves from their eventual killers (who would then go on to declare them gods) isn't exactly stellar.
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Even contemporary pagans remarked on the exemplary sexual ethics of the early Christians.
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If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions. I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.
Neither do I, yet I note that much that replaced Christianity as social bedrock has been quite explicitly delusional. Secular Materialism talked a good game, and then when people actually committed to it, they went utterly mad. Meanwhile, us Christians continue to chug along, succeeding by the Materialists' standards as well as our own.
Some variants of secular materialism went utterly mad. Stalinism, for example, or the Khmer Rouge. But Western society as a whole is not mad, at least not by the standards of the typical society throughout history, and it is chugging along just fine for the most part.
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Okay, I was inclined to be snarky, but if this is your basic problem with it, then I have to respect that. I too much prefer "is it true or not?" than "is it prosocial or not, even if it's a heap of bullshit?"
An honest atheist is a more worthy opponent than all the patronising "of course it's dumb as a description of reality but if you look as it as early sociology..." rationalisations.
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That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.
I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.
But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.
Humanity is not stuck in the ridiculous position of having to choose between the rock of trans-ideology and the hard place of Christianity. Choosing these two specific species of insanity is eliding the fact there are plenty of less insane alternatives.
It's true that there are lots of society-wide ideologies to choose from with staying power, but none of them are liberal rationalism.
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Name a less insane society organizing religion then.
We know what the cult of reason begets, we tried that one pretty thoroughly since 1789. Positivism turned out a lot more insane than Abrahamism.
You're not going to get out of the need for a metaphysics. Better men than you have tried and they all failed. Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.
If you’re looking for alternatives, I’d point to Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zarathustrianism. They all have decent track records of producing high civilizations.
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I deny the need for religion in the first place. Or if there's a "need" for it in the psyche of the average human, poor thing, it needs to be excised, not fed.
I obviously disagree, even if Wokism has plenty of traits of religion.
I simply can't think of any society throughout the history of man that has lacked a religion, in the sense of a shared metaphysics.
It seems to me you're arguing for something that's categorically impossible, so please explain.
Categorically impossible? In the sense that either the laws of logic, physics or biology prevent it? If you want an existence proof, I'm right here.
We know very rough correlates for religiosity in the human brain, so it's plausible enough to me that there's likely a biological means of removing such tendencies. At the very least, we have systems of metaphysics that have been stripped of supernatural elements, that would be philosophy. The fact that Wokism, as you initially brought up, is largely lacking in the same while being quite convincing and virulent, is proof of possibility.
There's obviously no society in existence that doesn't have a shared culture/memeplex, but that's not what I'm positing, it's the removal of supernatural bullshit from its underpinnings.
Precisely.
And much as I can understand it being frustrating from your point of view (I too used to think of myself as an atheist in this sense), I do not believe you are not religious, I just think you don't consider your religion one.
This is an absolute, complete and total lie. And any reasonable skeptic must concede that all knowledge lies on foundations of metaphysical assumption.
We can have this conversation in as much detail as you wish as this particular line of thought is something I have contemplated in detail, but I'll give the gist of it to save us time.
Let's take the sum of all scientific knowledge. That is, knowledge about nature obtained through empiricism. The truth of it live and dies on the validity of the scientific method and its accuracy in depicting the world or obtaining a true appraisal of it.
But this in turn requires of the world one absolute and undeniably metaphysical property: that the world is logically consistent. That is to say that the world obeys laws of causality, that the same causes produce the same effects and that observation has the ability to make accurate predictions. In other words, that miracles are not possible. That there is no Cartesian demon pulling the wool over our eyes.
This is not something science and logic can ascertain, since it is axiomatic, and it must be believed purely on reasonable faith. And it is also essentially metaphysical since it is a belief about the very structure of the world.
Let's damn empiricism for the sake of argument, and restrict our question to a priori knowledge. Mathematics and all the truths that can be obtained by logic.
These also rely on a base axiomatic presupposition, one that is made explicit by Randian Objectivism and other deduction edifices such as Praxeology: the faith in the very ability of deductive logic to produce truth. Yet again we arrive at a metaphysical axiom. A=A and other such base presuppositions that are, if quite reasonable in themselves, still faith based statements about the nature of the world.
All systems of thought have this issue, the grounding problem, and metaphysical skeptics such as myself deny the necessary truth of all statements that rely on merely reasonable grounding propositions, and therefore of all statements.
Consider Newtonian physics: a very useful model of the world, one that we use in engineering on the daily. But also one that we know from observation to be wrong and mere approximation. I believe all knowledge to be thus.
I understand your position (I think), but I am convinced it is untrue. For the aforementioned reasons. Positivism is a metaphysical doctrine that is, if not supernatural in the literal sense (since it's a kind of realism), certainly requires faith in an unfalsifiable metaphysical doctrine.
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Your use of that metaphor is telling, we need hard objects to cling to, we need something to serve as an epistemological bedrock. Something is going to be unquestionable in whatever worldview we eventually settle on, and so far us/the secularists haven’t done a good job building something on top of the bedrock of rational observation.
Who's "we", white man? Jokes aside, I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence. I don't aspire for more because it's not possible to have an "objective" morality or foundation in the first place.
What policy preferences or cultural peccadilos a society has doesn't particularly matter to me, as long as the central tenets don't violate our best understanding of the laws of physics, as Christianity does, or biology, as Wokism is guilty of.
The problems crop up when someone else wants their subjective goals and desires to be fulfilled, and you are standing in their way. How does society's institutions satisfy you both? If they can't, who wins? That's where we get the Progressive Stack. On what do we base 'this is how we run things so that as a whole we can muddle along'? Great, we've settled the law of gravitational attraction, but how does that apply to deciding if Sparklina-formerly-Bob can now take your stuff because xe is the mostest oppressed and you owe xer, cis scum?
That's not the progressive stack that's just society. If some people want abortion outlawed and some people do not, there is no objective answer that will satisfy both, just as with Trans ideology. And the answer is the same, whoever can get more popular and institutional support.
Which means the people who are all "abortion is a human right!" have no grounds to complain if their opponents manage to win on that one, and yet they do. People will still fight over principles, no matter how much anyone wants to implement a society of "just lemme have my fun and leave me alone".
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Classical liberalism seems pretty peachy to me, let people do as they please as wrong as they don't infringe on a narrowly defined set of rights that belongs to everyone else.
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No, it's going to be some flavor of insanity because it's purity spirals all the way down. The so-called less insane alternatives are just stepping stones between there and here.
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