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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26648 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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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:

  1. If the culture war ends in X-catastrophe, then we won't look back on it at all, because there will be no more historians.
  2. If SJ wins, it'll look back on now much the same way it looks back on the '50s right now, with maybe a few mentions of Nazis added.

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.)

From The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

The culture war is permanent, because there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them. That is baked into human nature. In one decade the censorious will use Christianity, in the next, they will fight it, but it is the same impulse and the same people. One generation's scolds will enforce patriotism, the next will condemn it, but the underlying impulse is the same. The church lady is the schoolmarm is the SJW.

We will always fight, and the technology of the day will determine who has the advantage. Movable type empowered the free, a centralized Hollywood and three TV networks gave power to the conformist.

There was a brief moment where the internet was simultaneously difficult enough to require the ability to set up a router, but easy enough that there were lots of people doing it. This enabled the free. Just a few years ago the largest subreddit was The_Donald. A few years before that the most popular politician was Ron Paul, and the Republicans had a lock all three branches and the majority of the governorships.

2014 is Haidt's year that changed everything. Facebook, and then Instagram, as apps on phones removed all the technical and logistical barriers of a computer in a physical location. Now we are as centralized as the days of three TV stations, and once again the joyless scolds and censors have the advantage.

Sooner or later some free people somewhere will develop a way to fight back, and we will bring the 90s back, and soon after that the censorious and conformist will find a way to defeat us again.

there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them.

That is the libertarian dichotomy.

An Effective Altruist would say

there will always be people who want to help others, and there will always people who want to ignore them or merely feel good about themselves

The Christian wold say

there will always be people who believe in Jesus, and there will always be people who reject him for a life of sin and pleasure

The Scientist would say

there will always be people who pursue truth, and there will always be people who cling to dogma

The SJW would say

there will always be people who stand up for the weak, and there will always be people trying to oppress them

etc. etc.

The Culture War is not simply the dichotomy of the free versus the controlling. That is simply the dichotomy people on this forum tend to favor.

I'm usually a fan of this viewpoint, but in this case I'm not entirely sure if it's true. If you have a scientist and a christian, for example, and both subscribe to the sentences you picked for them, but they are also both fine with letting the other one be then you don't have a culture war on your hand; you merely have a disagreement.

A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted. In which case @satirizedoor's dichotomy holds. Though you may argue that often enough both sides actually want to control the other side, so it's rarely a conflict between pure freedom and pure control and instead a conflict with different preferences for what to control and what should be free. But the basic fact would remain that culture wars may be about any topics in the first order, but they are always ultimately about controlling people with other viewpoints.

I think the focus on censorship is misplaced. Censorship is one of the many ways a Culture War can play out, and it is neither necessary nor sufficient for showing a Culture War is occurring. Consider, for instance, a racial minority marching for civil rights. It doesn't matter whether there is censorship - that is quintessentially culture war. Conversely, consider censoring how to make nuclear weapons - that's not a meaningful component of any significant Culture War.

A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted

I agree with this. A Culture War is created by two groups of people attaching so much value to a dichotomy that converting the other seems important. So, necessary conditions for a Culture War are

  • A dichotomy [ Edit: or two? I remain agnostic on the extent to which each group can have separate conceptualizations of the dichotomy ]
  • Value placed on the dichotomy enough to prompt both ends to attempt convincing others

Hey now, you can't stop there - what is it actually?

I agree KnotGodel is near the right track but not exactly, and GP had a point. In Culture Wars of the way way past, we have stuff like 30 Years' War, or iconoclasts, or Akhenaten's cult. What is the common thread?

My theory: in culture wars, culture is the fuel, war is the process, but the engine is the mass media technology. Each form of technology comes with its particular equilibrium where the locus of control is. (To torture the metaphor, it is a twin-engine aircraft and the other engine is the technology for waging war, but that is no longer the culture war, just the regular war.)

Outcome is likely to be Cuius regio, eius religio once again.

There is certainly precedent for it

Hence the name?

It's not everyday I get to use so appropriately so I couldn't help but comment.

It's led to the most hilarious accusations though.

Turns out that if you say "maybe follow a norm where you don't interfere in the internal affairs of another country and they agree to do to same to you" you'll find yourself accused of being both ultra far left and ultra right wing

The Culture War? I guess something like the social activity related to emotionally-charged dichotomies?

I guess something like the social activity related to emotionally-charged dichotomies?

I've grown more partial to describing it as bike-shedding at a societal level, and I think this make sense: the entire concept is that organizations spend disproportionate time on relatively minor but easy-to-trivially-understand issues because people think their opinion matters more than it probably should. I doubt there are many, if any, people out there without an opinion on gender (although those opinions vary drastically), sex, skin color, and all those times they were treated unfairly. Because everyone thinks they understand the big picture, arguments get exceptionally heated.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century. Amusingly, we seem mostly content to trust bureaucrats on those, probably far more than we should: see gain-of-function research funding, or any number of fraught defense procurements.

We don't spend as much time in popular culture talking about more complex issues, like simplifying the labyrinthine tax code (unless something's in it for me), or which areas merit extra research funding (astronomy? fusion? vaccines?), or how to maintain Western cultural hegemony for the next century.

These are matters you can afford to concern yourself with when your immediate existence and position does not seem threatened. The Culture War is caused by and causes such feelings of imminent threat, and so more ambitious concerns are drowned out by what at least appears to be acute crisis.

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