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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.)
I'll add that the Culture War could end because No One Came: it exists for now because people show up to argue, and care (or pretend to care). It fills headlines because nothing more notable is going on. I suppose it's similar to (1), but I don't think it needs catastrophe to the level of "no more historians", but something more on the scale of 9/11, which I remember basically dropped the floor out from under partisan bickering in the US (which wasn't unheard of in early 2001) for a few years. I've previously described Kulturkampf as akin to bike-shedding, where we argue most about comparatively trivial details that we think we understand instead of the actual hard questions -- I don't know that I completely endorse the position, but it's worth consideration.
And sometimes time moves on and leaves political positions behind. Historically, the original progressive era met its end in the World Wars of the last century. Not all of its policies went away (the forty hour work week seems generally-accepted), but things like Prohibition and eugenics were largely pushed out. Notably, eugenics became strongly associated with Nazi Germany, and some progressive leaders (most notably Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh) were seen as sympathizing with them. Far left political parties generally were sidelined during the Cold War as communist-adjacent, leading the "progressive" label to fade until probably around 2000 or so.
It really depends on what you think the culture war is about: if you think it is two inconsequential groups like 4chan going to war with Tumblr then yes it fades, but I don't think that the people dead in the summer of love make it so inconsequential.
On one hand, yes it does seem important in the heat of the moment, even to me! Lives really are at stake, but at a societal level a few lives lost here or there are, while absolutely tragic, the sort of thing that, while we'll say we don't like bargaining with and deem priceless, in practice we'll gamble as if they don't really matter much to us. Witness, for example, fights over making streets safer for pedestrians, which many are happy to argue against (myself included sometimes) because it'll add a minute or two to a given car trip.
The Culture War also has no shortage of examples of catastrophizing on all it's extremes: witness that time that our current president told Black voters that milquetoast Republican Mitt Romney would "put [them] in chains," or how using undesired pronouns is akin to genocide, or how an admittedly-neglected immigration policy is a deliberate choice by certain figures to drive "demographic replacement." I'm not going to claim there isn't a kernel of truth to those claims, but finding common ground probably requires ceding that the bigger picture being painted is pretty biased. Of course, that position does embrace mistake theory, but I personally think we're still at a point where it's viable and nobody needs to be actively coordinating meanness.
Certainly, but to get down to brass tacks how many dead people will it take before it is a catastrophe? One of the more fun bits of the community is that we can break this down into QALY and similar stats without people thinking we are moral monsters.
And so does the Israeli-palestine conflict, exaggerated claims in the bailey do not mean that the motte is indefensible.
Generalized firebombing is beyond the pale at the moment, but I'd not be against something more surgical against people actively engaging in ratfucking and other anti-social behavior.
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