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 -
What do you think of Napoleon's Legacy?
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night. By terrible mistake I related to a friend who loves the Emperor that I enjoyed the movie, and was informed that the entire film was a piece of British propaganda. I objected that the British were hardly in the movie at all, only to be explained that the things Scott chose to highlight or ignore mostly followed the contours of the British perspective on the conflict. For instance, Waterloo is emphasized because the British played a decisive role, even though Napoleon stood no real chance of victory during his return, whereas the larger Battle of Leipzig which really ended Napoleon's bid for domination wasn't even mentioned because the British weren't there. And of course what about the fact that Napoleon only ever declared war twice while Britain was actively funding other countries to oppose France, and so on and so on.
My friend's counter-narrative of perfidious Albion being the real villain behind the Napoleonic wars is likely no more straightforwardly true than the narrative that France alone was at fault, but it's a helpful reminder that even today there remain vastly diverging perspectives on the immense impact of the man, the myth, and the legend of Napoleon Bonaparte.
For instance, there's also of course his political reforms, which are the part I found myself missing the most in the movie, even though they would have been impractical to include. A while back Scott touched upon a study by Daron Acemoglu claiming that long run growth was much higher in the areas that Napoleon conquered, due to him abolishing guilds, monopolies, and other rent seeking institutions. Rebuttals included people arguing that Acemoglu et al forgot to control for access to coal, after which you supposedly see no impact from Napoleonic conquest remaining.
Or military reforms. Was Napoleon a genius for coming up with military reforms like how to mobilize national resources and break armies down into self-sustaining units that could live on the land and rely less on supply trains? I've heard people argue these were really mostly Ancien Regime ideas crafted after their loss in the Seven Years War. Napoleon only took advantage of the flux of the revolution to be the one to ram them through.
And what about Republicanism and liberalism in general? Did he hasten them along by spreading their ideas farther and faster than they ever would on their own, or did he doom them for decades by encouraging the conservative monarchs to see liberals as a threat to be immediately stamped out, rather than a nuissance that could be tolerated?
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?
As an individual, he was world-historically brilliant. The human condition, however, is not exhausted by exceptional individuals. The fact that France has repeatedly taken the wrong side of European history makes me glad he lost. Compare Germany, which was a consistent force for good (BRD GmbH being of course less German than Vichy France was French).
Basically, my litmus test is if someone is allowed to be mentioned in a neutral or positive context by the mainstream, he’s not the hero my people needs – not the Man against Time.
I am trying to figure out what the "wrong side of European history" means. In the American sense, it usually means "bad ideas that deserved to be crushed". In the European sense, I'm thinking more "unable to exercise one's advantages", as they were largely playing from the same ideological rulebook.
(I hope I'm wrong about this, and look forward to any effortpost this inspires.)
Nations are rational agents, but also memetic ecosystems. Few memes have caused as much damage to European civilization (of which North America is an indelible part) as those of equality, civic nationalism, radical individualism, class struggle and plutocratic free market capitalism. France often pioneered and served as a platform for such ideas, which is how it became an inspiration for many generations of subversives, though of course it wasn’t alone in this. Already in the days of Napoleon this led to disastrous consequences, such as granting citizenship to non-European aliens who had been selected for contempt towards the majority population. Today, of course, no one from that era would register as an egalitarian – indeed they would be considered fascists, i.e. non-persons. But so would American WWII vets. This doesn’t change the fact that in retrospect, we know exactly what they fought and died for.
The story of European wars and alliances is a sad one characterized by misadventure, greed and shortsightedness. I do not wish to imply they were directly driven by ideology like the American Civil War was, only that my race would most likely be better off if they played out differently. As things stand, and as of course you know, we are going to become a minority in our own homelands in a few generations, and most of us are so demoralized they don’t see any problem with that, so forgive me for perhaps being a bit melancholic.
A form of civic nationalism worked well for Rome for hundreds of years. I doubt that Rome could ever have managed to extend its power to the entire Mediterranean if they had stuck to an ethnic nationalism model that privileged ethnic Romans hugely above all others.
One could also argue that civic nationalism is what bound France into a nation that has endured the test of time. There was a time hundreds of years ago when the people who inhabited what is now France did not think of themselves as being part of one ethnicity.
There is also, of course, America - the most successful European-based country of all time. The mostly English founding population managed to successfully integrate a very numerous German population, and then other ethnicities as well.
Ethnic wilting was contemporaneous with the decline and fall of the western Roman empire, if not its proximate cause. Hardly a point in favour of "civic nationalism"; the Germanic barbarians that Rome allowed to settle in its lands from the 3rd century onwards were never assimilated, and to use anachronistic language, formed a fifth column.
As for America - large-scale Irish Catholic (and later German) migration was the proximate cause of the collapse of the sort of agrarian yeoman republic that most of that American rebel leaders had envisioned. The sort of Irish people that showed up en masse in the 1840s - starving, illiterate, destitute, non-anglophone and uncivilised - ruptured the white/other distinction that had bounded the USA's participatory democracy for white landowning men, and necessitated the shift to managed democracy: yellow press, chickenfeed for the hoi polloi, the impossibility of complex public arguments and time horizons beyond the next election.
Were I making an argument for democratic universalism - I wouldn't - but if I were, I'd pick an example where a state identity has authentically and comprehensively erased localist ethnic distinctions into a single homogeneous "the people". 19th century France is actually not a bad example. Any country you can think of where ethnic division is still noticeable has not, ipso facto, succeeded in democratic levelling.
I would say that the Roman Empire could only be founded on ethnic nationalism. Over the course of centuries, it survived by slowly granting priviliges/power to ambitious and competent outsiders, starting with the Latins, then the Italians, then to provincials, ramping up with Trajan and peaking with the Illyrian emperors, and ultimately ceding it to barbarians like Stilicho or Alaric. So the seemly mutually exclusive ideas "civic nationalism worked for Roman Empire" and "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire tracks with the loss of its Roman character" can actually coexist.
Imagine the state capacity of Rome like the material of the balloon, and its prosperity as helium. As state capacity contracts, the balloon must release air, otherwise it will pop. It is a "bad thing" for Rome to be leaking power, of course, but necessary for survival. You can only leak power so long until there's no empire left, though.
More options
Context Copy link
Having America remain an undeveloped, agrarian country that exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods was much more the vision of Britain than America, and was basically the relationship of dependency that most empires af the time practiced with their colonies. Some American founders did want an agrarian yeoman republic. Others, famously, didn't, and the most influential British-American founders were pushing policy to leave that dream behind and usher in an industrial future from the moment the country was founded, without any input from the poor, huddled masses of Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Jefferson, face of the whole agrarian-yeoman fad, probably did even more than Hamilton to encourage our infant industries:
More options
Context Copy link
I am not arguing for a form of civic nationalism so extreme and unbounded that one decides to allow large numbers of unassimilated and highly militarized ethnicities into one's lands, and even makes them an essential part of your military forces. I think that is going too far. However, that does not mean that a more circumscribed form of civic nationalism does not work. Rome would never have become a superpower to begin with if it had stuck to ethnonationalism, it had to switch to civic nationalism in order to become a superpower empire.
As for America, the thing is, the agrarian yeoman republic would have been swept away by economic changes one way or another. After the industrial revolution, whether America had imported millions of Irish and other people or not, it would have been forced to switch to a different social/economic/political system one way or another because otherwise it would not have been able to compete with other great powers.
Rome had pretty much completed it's conquests by the time Augustus became emperor. They added a few bits and pieces like Britain and Dacia but nothing huge. The edict of Caracalla was still two centuries away at that point. So I wouldn't exactly call them civic nationalists when they became a superpower. Italians were very much the central ethnicity and the vast majority of the citizen body during their rise.
Italians are not the same thing as Romans. They did not see themselves as Romans. My understanding is that the Roman Republic's early rise to power was based in part on their willingness to assimilate other Italian powers into a new political concept rather than just attempting to utterly crush, enslave, subjugate, and kill them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link