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 -
I do think part of the left sees power as illegitimate (automatically defending ‘the weak’, and inferring from it an oppressor/oppressed relationship) and the bloodstained as innocents. The interlocking wills, people’s lack of agency, and the irrelevance of ideas/ ease of manipulation is a frequent narrative of the hard right on here. They also defend the carrying out of immoral orders (I had multiple debates about Lee and Rommel's moral character) without blinking.
At least in our conversations, it seemed to me that the disagreement revolved around what constituted an immoral order.
Otherwise-moral and even admirable actions become evil if they benefit evil. Lee leads the Confederate armies, the Confederates are evil, so Lee is evil.
The status of "Evil" is judged by the worst significant feature of a society. Sufficient evil, even if concentrated in a portion of the population, overwhelms the moral weight of other non-evil or even good portions of the population. The Confederate government perpetuates slavery, therefore the entire Confederate polity is evil, and so cannot be served without serving evil. Lee can't fight for "his home" or "the people" or "his men", who might be more worthy of such valor, but all his moral action must be assigned to "the confederate government", and hence, "slavery".
Big actions are more culpable than small actions; Lee is evil, but a confederate policeman isn't, because his action is smaller, less pivotal? Would this be an accurate inference?
Nevertheless, Evil people have no moral right, no defense permitted, no action allowed beyond unconditional submission to the Good.
Would these be a fair summation of your views?
First two points roughly correct.
Even he had agency, and therefore chose to serve, and is, evil, just considerably less so.
What does this even mean? If you “unconditionally” submit to evil, you’re evil. If you’re evil, different moral rights apply.
Let’s not necessarily rehash that discussion just from that narrow aspect. In my view, you, pal, are also guilty of ‘clouds above’ postmodern thinking and denying people’s agency, making Lee, Rommel and all the nameless followers your bloodstained innocents.
Suppose I'm a non-southerner, who travels to the south to free and arm the southerners' slaves. I do so peacefully unless resisted with force, at which point I shoot those resisting me. Your argument would be that a Southerner who tries to defend himself and his fellow southerners against me, and the lawyer who prosecutes me, and the jury who convict me, and the judge who passes sentence, are all evil in the same general manner as Lee (if considerably less so), correct?
What about the Southern baker selling bread? Is he evil in a similar fashion as well? He's contributing to the Southern economy, isn't he?
...The question I'm aiming at, is whether the Southerners can be rounded to "evil" in the way you claim. Suppose I say Lee is not fighting to defend slavery, but rather the bakers and the butchers and the candlestick makers, the mothers and their children, the poor farmers who own no slaves, and so on; his problem is that he can't defend the former without also defending the latter. One might put it more simply by saying that Lee recognizes that his society contains both good and evil, realizes that he must defend either both or neither, and believes that it is better to defend the evil alongside the good than to leave the good defenseless.
As I understand it, you believe that the Evil invalidates the good, and that therefore it is better to leave the good undefended if it means the evil is undefended as well. Correct?
"Good" attacks "Evil". And to be clear here, we're explicitly not talking about people "attacking" in a way that's intrinsically Good, if such a thing exists, we're talking about people who you consider "Good" attacking people you consider "Evil", through morally-neutral methods like tanks and bombs and guns. Your position, as I understand it, is that the "Evil" people have no right to defend themselves from the "Good" people, because they're evil and therefore unworthy of defense. As you say, "different moral rights apply". Would this be accurate?
And in my view, your moral arrogance is matched only by your moral incoherence. Clearly, one of us is seriously in error. And yet, how are we to determine which without examining the particulars of the arguments? I am amused by the fact that in the last thread, I argued that everyone is guilty, and in this thread you're rounding my position to saying that people are innocent or somehow not responsible for their actions, a position I have never held and categorically reject.
And the farmer, and the postman, and the tinker taylor soldier spy. Not the thief.
They have no right to “defend” their “property”, human beings.
The good are friends to one another, they do not fight wars against themselves. “Leaving the good defenseless” here means “refusing to fight a losing war that will end up harming them more”.
Why do you keep insisting that it’s me who labels them evil when you’re out of arguments? If you want to argue that the confederacy and nazi germany weren’t evil, just do so. Your original argument, if you recall, is that the overarching evil somehow does not ‘transfer’ to those who help and carry it out.
I told you a million times: when you condemn all, you condemn none. Your binary thinking, once again, erases all meaningful distinction. Hey, if everyone is guilty, that means your previous distinction between the good and the evil in southern society is moot, so that baker can be rounded off to evil by your own standards.
Interesting. Are you claiming that a person doing evil things to evil people therefore becomes good?
In this case, presume these people in particular don't own slaves, they merely live in peace with the people who do. In this scenario, suppose I shoot several people for resisting my attempts to free slaves, and then their non-slaving neighbors arrest, try, and sentence me for my "crimes". After all, by the laws they live under, I had no right to either free slaves or shoot people who stop me from freeing slaves. By enforcing the laws against murder, they align themselves with the evil those laws were protecting, correct?
This would seem to imply that whenever a war is fought, at least one side is evil by your standards, correct?
It is by no means obvious, especially in advance, that the war would harm them more than submission. Especially since the most recent experiment in the large-scale abolition of slavery terminated in a campaign of torture, rape and murder by the slaves against their former masters, resulting in the complete extermination of the formerly slave-owning society. I'm curious as to why you believe that Southerners in the pre-civil-war period should have known for a fact that freeing the slaves would harm them less than, say, fighting the civil war and another century of Jim Crow. I do not know that for a fact even with the benefit of hindsight.
I have not yet begun to argue. I have not yet even disagreed with what I perceive to be your labels. If they are not your labels, however, then state which physical laws or empirical tests establish their Goodness or Evil and provide the equation by which we might crunch the numbers on a given sample. Failing that, name the divine authority by which they are so defined, and explain the rules by which their Goodness or Evil is determined. Either of these is a reasonable basis for discussion. What is not reasonable is to insist that the set of Good people and the set of Evil people is too obvious to require justification, and also happens to exactly coincide with your own opinions on the matter.
That is not my argument. I have already stated that I think all states and indeed all humans are evil. I also think Nazi Germany was significantly more evil than the Confederacy, and think it arguable whether the Confederacy is more evil than the US in its current state. But in any case, your understanding of what it means to be Good or Evil is evidently not one I share, and it seems to me that the implications of our two definitions diverge rapidly. I'm trying to nail down what you mean by "evil", so that I can productively explain my disagreement.
No. If I have ten prisoners, condemn all ten, and promptly shoot all ten in the back of the head, they in fact all die. If I kill every living human, the equality of the outcome doesn't bypass its finality.
[EDIT] - the disagreement here seems to amount to you thinking that when it comes to morals, whatever is not forbidden is mandatory. That is to say, if someone is "condemned", then they must be killed, and if they are not to be killed they should not be condemned. I do not think condemnation works this way, or should. Someone can deserve death, and yet be spared due to mercy, expedience, extenuating circumstances, etc. This does not make them deserve death less, it merely means that giving them what they deserve must be balanced against our other interests.
No, it does not. I am arguing that Lee should be respected not because I think all men should be respected, but specifically because I think some men should be respected in this way and others not, and I think Lee is among the former. The fact that I reject your distinctions and definitions does not mean I reject any distinctions and definitions. One would not think this a difficult point to grasp, yet it evidently eludes you.
No, because I don't think "rounded off to evil", in the sense you seem to mean it and the way you seem to describe it, is a thing that should be done. Under certain circumstances, I'm willing to say that the baker should be fought and even killed. Under rather more stringent circumstances, I'm even willing to say his hometown should be firebombed indiscriminately, killing his family. But this is because he's an enemy, not because he's "Evil", and if we can resolve the conflict such that he becomes my friend again I am willing to consider the fighting and killing he did against my own side as a regrettable tragedy, and his service in opposition to my side as honorable conduct even if it involved killing my own family, friends and neighbors.
Of course, this presumes he conducted himself honorably. Honor forms a backstop, limiting the scope and scale of conflict, so that even mortal conflict does not become existential conflict. If he does not conduct himself honorably, if he pursues evil for its own sake, then it becomes justifiable (though not necessary!) to cast aside all restraint, and to condemn any who aid or even tolerate him as evil themselves. Slavery as practiced in the South was quite noxious, but it was not evil for the sake of evil. The extermination camps in Nazi Germany, and organizations like the Cheka in the Soviet Union were. But all germans, and even all german soldiers, were not as evil as those knowingly participating in the extermination of the Jews, or those who raped and tortured and murdered the innocent at the direct orders of Lenin and Stalin. Nor is there any shortage of examples where, having conquered the Evil, the victors extend them mercy they doubtless do not deserve, and while I have my reservations about such mercy, I have my reservations about condemning it as well.
The attitude I describe above is the raw material for constructing a durable peace from a state of serious conflict, and it was in no way rare in previous generations. Northern soldiers do not generally appear to have hated Southern soldiers at the conclusion of the Civil War, and reunions that brought together soldiers of both sides to commemorate their shared struggle were common so long as those soldiers survived. That people like yourself have lost all concept of this way of thinking speaks poorly both of your education and of our future prospects as a society: when the serious conflict comes, you will have no conceptual grounding to even recognize the road back to peace.
Do you see the parallel to the justice system? Parasitic behaviour, like thieving, on an evil entity (itself parasitic, among other things) is fundamentally good. Plying one’s trade and paying taxes, thereby strengthening the entity, is to become its accomplice.
More or less, but it’s unclear if it’s murder. The northerner just gives the slaves guns so they can answer the guns that keep them in slavery. Turns raw oppression into a gentleman’s duel.
Yes, the good can’t fight a war against a side they believe to be good. There is no ‘doubly just’ war.
Imo your view of the american civil war is too colored by your present CW concerns. I’m not interested in re-litigating that issue, what interests me is the general question of personal ethics under a (universally accepted) evil regime. If the evil of the southern cause is too murky and personal for you, take the nazis or pol pot or whatever.
Yes, I don’t believe in supererogation. That doesn’t mean all those who fail to do ‘the best’ deserve death or imprisonment, but they have failed morally to a degree.
Of course. Evidently we’re talking past each other if you think I condemn them all to death, even after the war and regime has ended. That’s just an absurdly barbaric position. I also never implied we should ‘cast aside all restraints’ in defense of the good, a position you keep imputing to me.
That’s rich coming from you, the guy constantly saying no peace is possible with his enemies. Have I not consistently affirmed my belief in the resolution of conflict by democracy and discourse, and defended a westphalian peace, against those who think like you on both sides?
Indeed. You've claimed that every war has a "Good" side and an "Evil" side, correct? Is "Good" and "Evil" relative or absolute, in your conception? Do you look at the two sides, add up their virtues and vices, and the one with a higher moral score is therefore the "Good" side, and the lower is the "Evil" side?
If it is relative, suppose we have nations A, B and C. A is +5 good. B is +5 Evil. C is +10 evil. A and B fight, A is the good side, B is the evil side. But if B offers that they form an alliance against C, then B becomes good, because C is worse. Would that be correct?
Or is it that there is a minimum bar of goodness, and those above it are Good, and those below are Evil? But you've already said you don't believe there can be a war where both sides are good. Can there be a war where both sides are evil?
They think it's murder, obviously, but you and I understand that the people I killed in this hypothetical were perpetuating evil, whereas I was acting for Good, so when I shot them for resisting me I was simply doing the right thing. The fact that I broke their laws is irrelevant, because their laws serve evil, and are therefore illegitimate. Is that the general idea?
An odd phrase, given your next statement:
I tend to think of gentlemen's duels as "doubly just": they are a form of lethal conflict where the assumption is that both sides are, to a considerable extent, in the right, yet nevertheless cannot reconcile. But leaving that aside, why can't one or the other side be good, but mistaken about the other side?
This seems almost exactly backward. My present CW concerns are colored by my understanding of the Civil war, wars generally, and history generally. Nor am I confident that you grasp either my present CW concerns in any meaningful sense, nor history generally. I agree that we can get to it later, though.
My entire argument is that "universally accepted evil regimes" don't actually appear to exist. All regimes are some degree of evil, because all people are some degree of evil. No regime is completely evil, because no person is completely evil. Few regimes even manage to concentrate their evil to an unusual degree, because regimes involve large numbers of actors, and large groups of actors regress to the mean. Some people embrace evil wholeheartedly, though, and some regimes allow those people to group together and secure power, such that they can enact unusually concentrated evil. The more concentrated evil is, the more obvious it is, the closer it is to evil for the sake of evil, the more severe and obvious its immediate harms, the more we should judge people harshly for failing to recognize it and act against it.
Your view, as I understand it, is that a given regime should be judged by its worst acts, and that the evil of these acts transfers to everyone who supports the regime in any way. The honest butcher and the honorable soldier are evil, because they live under the same government that empowers the men operating death camps. This culpability remains even if they do not know that the death camps exist, or what goes on inside them, or have no obvious way of acting against them. The soldier could surrender, and the butcher could burn his shop down and turn to robbing his neighbors, and failing to do so makes them culpable in the evil of the regime they support.
Interesting. Do you see all acts as either good or evil, or are some acts simply neutral?
...And yet, when I say that all people are some degree of evil, you say that I'm engaging in "binary thinking", because obviously Evil means raping babies and murdering grandmothers, not the small-beer, negligible indecencies we all inflict on those around us each day.
Would you say that failing morally is evil? Do you think anyone manages to "not fail morally" in this sense? Or do only the really serious failures matter? And how does this work with your statement that evil done to the evil is good? If evil done to the evil is good, and we're all evil, then the more evil we do, the more good we are, and that can't be right. So it must be that some people are good and other people are evil, but what makes them so? As I asked above, is the line between good and evil relative or absolute, in your view?
You've argued that their support for evil makes them evil, and you've argued that evil done to the evil is good. Were this a coherent argument, it would mean that robbing them, at least, would be a good thing, and I see no reason why "evil done to evil is good, actually" would apply only to robbery. Why not murder as well? Why not torture or rape? If robbery within an evil society undermines that society, why wouldn't torture, murder and rape undermine it even more, and thus, by your argument, be even better?
No peace was possible with Nazi Germany or with Soviet Russia. Peace was possible with Germans and Russians once those regimes fell. Blue Tribe is not a race, Progressivism is not congenital or heritable in any meaningful sense, and innate racial conflicts aren't a thing that exists in any case. Further, the thing that makes peace with Progressivism impossible is precisely that they agree with you on topics such as this one. They have no conception of limited conflict. They are not capable of uncertainty or doubt. They do not value honor in their opponents. They believe the world is divided into good people and evil people, and they want the good people to win and the evil people to be destroyed. Stable peace is not possible with such an ideology; the best one can do is wall it out and wait for it to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or else hammer it to dust until its surviving adherents abandon it completely.
Peace not being possible doesn't mean that the other side is evil. Often, one or both of the two sides are simply mistaken. In this circumstances, it seems to me that limiting the scale of the conflict as much as possible is a good thing, because the hotter the conflict burns, the worse the harm people inflict on each other, and the more opportunity evil has to flourish.
And once the regime falls, you need decent people on the other side to work with to try to put a stable peace back together. To the extent that the other side actively eliminates its decent people, building a stable peace becomes much, much harder. This is why honorable enemies should be valued: because conflict is unavoidable, and peace is precious, and they help restore peace. As I and others have pointed out repeatedly, conflict doesn't require honor, but peace does. To the extent that you eliminate the sort of honor typified by Lee or Rommel, you are not reducing the risk of conflict, but ensuring that it will burn indefinately in a self-perpetuating cycle.
And if democracy and discourse fails, you believe that one side of the resulting conflict is blameless, and the other side is evil, and that harm against the evil side should be maximized until their regime and ideology are crushed, no?
[EDIT] - Wait, no, hold on. In the slave-freeing and -arming example above, you appear to endorse illegal actions, including killing people, in defiance of democratically-enacted law. You didn't say that freeing and arming slaves would be a bad thing because that would be a violation of discourse and democracy, you said go for it because slavery is evil. So which is it? If discourse and democracy gives a result you consider evil, are you still evil to "follow the rules" and cooperate with that evil?
For the record, I don't think you understand how I think very well at all. I certainly do not understand your thinking very well, which is why I'm asking so many questions.
I think your criticism regarding the rules and my failure to ‘even try to meet the standards” was below the belt, given that I have answered hundreds of your questions in good faith in the course of our long-running discussions . However, as a mistake theorist I am an inveterate optimist and a glutton for punishment, so here’s the next batch.
Both sides can be evil, or neutral. The rest of the section is mostly wordgames. You throw moral condemnation around all the time, it’s only when I use good and evil that I have to start the definition from scratch.
The situation is this: I give a gun to a slave/jew, and when the sheriff/SS catch us, a fight breaks out, leaving law enforcement dead. Yeah I think that’s morally fine. People are allowed to defend their freedom with lethal force. I hold the policemen responsible for enforcing immoral laws/doing evil, they are not an inert instrument of the democratic will.
The laws are irrelevant whether they serve good or serve evil. The laws are just the cliff’s notes version of morality, for those who need a shortcut. If legality and morality conflict, morality should win every time (whether it’s your morality or mine).
‘Gentleman’s duel’ was ironic, I do not care for southern honor culture, or duels. A gunfight breaking out between a slave and a slaver is a “just war” for the slave, not a ‘doubly just’ duel.
Because you’re never supposed to resolve a mistake by killing the other side.
No, you can fail morally, repeatedly, without being evil. But at a certain threshold of moral failure, you become evil, and that essentially means that ‘the good’ can treat you as an enemy, and no longer give you the benefit of morality. That’s why lying to a nazi policeman is okay.
But of course if one withdraws the benefit of morality willy-nilly, one quickly finds oneself in a war against the whole world. For example, I do not consider you, or most of my political opponents (even nazis), or most westerners, to be evil and vogelfrei. Unlike unconvicted murderers, Lee-rommel and nazi bakers. A key difference is that they have done evil.
No. If tomorrow, your side and the woke declared a civil war in my country, and most people picked a side, I’d want nothing to do with it, and leave. Like a duel between two acquaintances, I’d be disgusted by both sides.
Yes, still evil. The mob’s will is not absolute, and I am not bound by democratic rules to commit genocide. The contradiction in your position is that you appear ready to jettison democracy and discourse, start slitting throats , declare war on your evil enemies, now, for a level of oppression that is objectively far below that of the jews under nazism or the blacks under the confederacy (who apparently are not justified in their rebellion).
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