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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.
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.
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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