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Notes -
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.)
From The Gulag Archipelago:
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.
Hey now, you can't stop there - what is it actually?
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.
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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