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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.)
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.
That is the libertarian dichotomy.
An Effective Altruist would say
The Christian wold say
The Scientist would say
The SJW would say
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.
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
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