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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
The narrative will be: "why did anyone ever care about this shit?"
Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was. People were getting burned for saying the consecrated host is just a cracker. Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.
When talking about current culture war issues, it's hard for us to imagine how they could become irrelevant to the point that future generations would be baffled that anyone ever cared. But that's how people would have felt in the 1600s; it was a literal battle for immortal souls, how could this battle ever become irrelevant? Yet it did. I think our current battles will eventually suffer the same fate.
Speak for yourself, pal 😁
Though Robert Hugh Benson did try writing a novel, "The Dawn of All", about a future where the Catholic Church is dominant and heresy is punished, and even the heretic agrees it is necessary to maintain social harmony, but it doesn't work for modern readers (and I think not even himself). His other SF future novel, "Lord of the World", is much better.
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There are 10k splinters of Protestantism and Catholicism is a joke. Nobody has a clue if salvation is through faith, good works, or both. It really really matters if you have any concern for our immortal souls. Maybe consider that everybody lost the 30 years war.
Read the Epistle of St James and never mind Martin Luther unable to make up his mind about it.
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Isn't it obvious that this is true because both sides ultimately lost? There were no large doctrinal changes, people just stopped caring about their religion that much.
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That’s what happens to half the issues. The other half get resolved so thoroughly that everyone in the past looks completely evil - slavery, Nazism, etc
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Curiously, a study conducted a decade ago found that only one-third of Irish Catholics believe in that.
I am surprised that as many of one third of Irish people who were baptized Catholic and tick the Catholic box on the census believe in God, let alone transubstantiation.
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I had a history teacher in 8th grade that flat out told our class that if someone even dares to mention to her that WWI was about Archduke assassination she would fail them for the year. [1]
So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.
[1]It was directly post communist time, the educational system had the outdated view that functioning brain in the pupils was not optional, so she expected to actually know what were the political tensions in Europe.
The assassination did kick it off like the first domino falling, though. I agree that political tensions and ambitions amongst the European powers, with their interlocking web of treaties, alliances, secret understandings, and backstabbing had drawn tighter and tighter so that war was on the horizon anyway, and the Balkans were a powderkeg so that once war was declared everyone immediately started trying to make advances into that territory, but the assassination was the spark that lit the conflagration.
The Austro-Hungarian empire was shaky, the dynasty was nowhere near as solid as it looked, and there was plenty of scandal affecting various members of the imperial family. Kill the heir presumptive (who has succeeded to that position after the deaths of other, closer members and who can't have legal heirs of his own due to the morganatic marriage) and you immediately knock away an important support for the entire structure. You can't expect that to have no repercussions, even if the whole of Europe then leaped upon the chance to settle scores, win territory, and advance their own interests.
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A while back I read this book about the Catholic/Protestant strife in Sweden in late 1500s which eventually culminated into a Game of Thrones -like civil war between two claimants of the house of Vasa, the Catholic Sigismund and the Protestant Charles, to the crown of Sweden, the latter eventually usurping the former and confirming Sweden's status as a Lutheran nation. The book concentrates on the Finnish side of it (Finland having been a part of Sweden) but covers the entire realm.
One of the things the book shows is that there was both a political and a religious side of it. Obviously when you have a war between two kings like this there's going to be politics beyond religion involved and Lappalainen portrays, for instance, Klaus Fleming (the chief Finnish noble of the time, a chief supporter of Sigismund's claim) as a person who didn't really give a rip about any of this religious stuff and just supported his King out of bullheaded loyalty. At the time, it is also made clear that the two royal claimants, for instance, genuinely believed that their side was correct, even if this didn't stop them from engaging in all manner of scheming and occasionally portraying their intentions otherwise than they believed.
The culture war aspect is also in there; even though the county initially was quite favorable to retaining Catholicism or at least much of it, the Lutherans worked hard to convince the city folk of Stockholm that the Pope was the Antichrist, and this crucially limited Sigismund's field of action at the times when he should have been able to work to stabilize his rule. And the economic side; there was a localized civil war in Finland, the Cudgel War, technically about the kings but really about Fleming (the implicit viceroy of Finland at this time) taxing the peasants in order support King Sigismund so much they eventually rose up against him.
Likewise, the strength of Lutheranism meant that Charles had to acquisce to Lutheranism becoming the specific flavor of Protestantism Sweden would adopt for good, even though his personal sympathies were towards Calvinism. And, of course, trying to be a centrist won one no favors; king John (Sigismund's father, Charles's brother) had tried to create a middle-ground version between Catholicism and Lutheranism, and it just meant that everyone assumed he was secretly supporting the other side.
Of course, the eventual victory of Charles and Protestantism in Sweden would have huge consequences for Europe and the world, since Sweden would go on to fight 200 years of unrelenting Protestant holy war and operate as the sword of Protestantism. If Sweden had fallen into the Catholic camp, it might have meant that at least the Lutheran side of reformation would have been eventually quashed. And there were more immediate consequences; Sigismund also ruled Poland-Lithuania (as king Zygmunt III Waza) and, after losing in Sweden, concentrated on ruling that country, leading to a host of consequences for that country.
Henry IV of France spent years waging war against Catholic lords before giving up and converting. This secured him the crown, which he used to instill religious tolerance and wind down the French wars of religion. It also drew the ire of everyone from betrayed Huguenots to the English monarchy. Catholic radicals weren’t impressed, either, and one of their assassins would eventually succeed. These intrigues spanned decades, and I have no reason to believe they were unusual for the period.
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At the same time in France, you’ve got the aptly named Politiques, elite supporters of the french monarchy who didn’t care that much about religion. It appears they were in the minority though, because King Henry III was involved in the ‘War of the three henrys’ with Henry, Duke of guise, chief of the catholic party, and Henry, King of navarre, chief of the protestant party(future french King Henry IV). It did not go well for Henry III, even though he had the easy central position. He lost control of most regions and paris, while the other two would just go at it, while ignoring him.
Fun fact : all of the henrys were assassinated, the second by order of the first, and the two kings by catholic zealots.
Fun connection: Henry III was actually King of Poland-lithuania for 2 years, 13 years before your guy Sigismund III Vasa. When he inherited the french throne he just up and left.
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I think this is partly true, but to the extent it's true you can say the same about the current culture war.
If you asked a devout Catholic in the 1600s whether people should be burned at the stake for questioning the transubstantiation of the consecrated host, most of them are going to say "yes," and their reasoning isn't going to invoke political strife or other secular reasons. They are going to give a religious account of why it's important to burn heretics - e.g. if we suffer a heretic to live, they might lead my children into heresy, causing them to suffer in hell for eternity. It's certainly true that this underlying belief and reasoning was stoked and amplified by political actors who stood to benefit from the conflict, but the reasoning itself stands apart from the political strife going on in the background.
I think you can say the same about culture war issues today. Much of the culture war is being driven by inter-elite conflicts or by conflicts between elites and the common man. But the underlying reasoning stands apart from this conflict - e.g. if you ask someone their opinions on trans issues they are going to appeal to object-level arguments to support their views and they won't perceive their views as being the product of cynical elites stoking the conflict.
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I can maybe believe that the elites were primarily motivated by real politik, but masses and mobs really did murder each other on the streets throughout the era. I find it hard to believe that their true motives were stuff like decreasing regional tax-kickups to the Holy Roman Emperor.
I agree characterizing it as an inter-elite struggle I think is incorrect. But I think even for the hoi polloi, I think the violence while on the surface religious, was mainly executed politically. The differences in dogma providing a patina to cover what really can be seen as later as grasping for political control even for the common rabble. I don't have a good quote but I found this source interesting on the period: https://archive.org/details/voraciousidolsvi0000wand
Which might be a salient message for the conflicts in our own age.
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I don't know much about the continental side but in Ireland a lot of sectarian mob violence in the 17th and 18th centuries can be explained by fear of another Jacobite rebellion or unwanted economic competition from Catholics:
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