This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
(Mixed rant / actual CW post. I defer to the Delphic wisdom of the mods to discern this)
New book by Blake Butler out.
New Yorker Review.
Marginal Revolution blogpost.
What caught my eye was the uncharacteristically vitriolic nature of Tyler Cowen's post. He flatly states "I don’t know of any better argument for social conservatism than this book." That's the culture war angle which I invite comments on. It produced some thoughts regarding household privacy which I hadn't thought of before. Would there be progress across all of the trans/COVID restrictions/guns/abortion issues if we frame it as "just don't talk about some stuff and we're all fine."
But on to the semi-rant part.
It seems like both Butler and his wife are people supremely in touch with the importance of their own emotions and, even worse, their own perspectives of their own emotions. It really does seem like the unending continuation of a sophomore's first late-night dorm room pseudo-philosophy discussion. "But like, I feel like ... I kind of ... get it, man."
Take this from the review:
Philosophy. Nature. Baking. The Office(!). And two sentence platitude poetry. Forgive me if I'm not with "it" or, even worse, if, like Abe Simpson, I don't even know what "it" is anymore, but this seems like almost a parody of a bad basic b*tch dating profile. I wonder, would she have described herself as "quirky." I'll quickly chastise myself here for disrespecting someone who has taken her own life. Let's move to a deeper question.
From all accounts, Molly, Butler's wife, seemed to be a deeply troubled person who allowed her mental health issues to fester to such an extent that she behaved extremely poorly. True emotional spousal abuse, almost gleeful infidelity before and during marriage, and some questionable professional-personal decisions. Yet all of it seems to have been hand-waved away through a self-serving belief in some sort of deeper understanding of "the human condition." I remember thinking something similar when reading Christopher Hitchens on his own drinking. Hitch was a raging alcoholic, and he knew this. When he wrote about it, however...
Oh, ho ho! What a card! Yes, he's sauced beyond belief, but have you seen his turn of phrase?.
It's a simple assertion; no amount of genius - real, imagined, or self-perceived - excuses you from being degenerate, abusive, socially irresponsible, or actively antagonistic. My worry is that Mr. Butler and his late wife were constantly so self-absorbed that they used a mix of literary romance, hyper-rationalization, and substance abuse to avoid engaging with a very normal, good, and productive feeling: guilt.
I've written before about how modern society ripped away traditional male gender toles and how that could be good, bad, or a mix. That's beside the point. The point is that it failed to produce any sort of replacement. It's a void and we're seeing the fruits of that.
In terms of guilt, a movement away from traditional religion may be good, bad, or mixed, but there's been no secular alternative. The Catholic church has a very prescriptive system and process for the sin-guilt-penance feedback loop[^1] I do not see the same in the modern secular culture. In fact, I see the opposite. The pop-psych concept of "self care" appears, to me, to be a blank check for instant and unequivocal absolution from responsibility. Did you sleep with a bunch of your spouse's friends, randos, and some of your own students? Do you have a drinking problem that's causing you to fail in your high trust relationships? Do you use social media as a social weapon? - take some time to understand your own trauma and experience. Where's the part about going "holy shit, I fucked up bad here and need to say sorry."?
This all ties up to a larger theory that modern and postmodern culture does two things that are mutually reinforcing in a downward spiral. (1) Emphasize the individual above all else (even the immediate family) and (2) Remove traditional social structures, expectations, and rituals and replace them with nothing so that the only refuge is deeper back into hyper-individualism. Sprinkle in our du jour oppression narratives and class struggle and you've got the perfect recipe for a level of personal-self deception that leads, ultimately, to self-destruction; suicide, in Molly's case.[^2]
Nature abhors a vacuum (I can use that cliche because I'm a bad writer who can't get published). It follows that those going around in their Hoover Uniforms and actually creating vacuums are truly deplorable.
[^1]: I know this religion the best, which is why I named dropped it. My assumption is that the other Abrahamics, at least, have something similar. [^2]: Caveat that I am not wholly blaming modern culture for causing Molly's mental illness, but I am saying it probably abetted its growth and the lady's ultimate demise.
I think this passage from a recent Sam Kriss newsletter on the backlash to "trad" stuff and religiosity he sees brewing is an accurate forecast of the response to these sort of critiques.
His hypothetical critic's view of this sort of talk strikes me as accurate. People used to a captivity of sorts freaking out over the prospect of choosing what to do with one's life and find one's own meaning for it rather than having someone else pick it for you, now that the old shackles that restricted the lives of prior generations have rusted through in some areas so some may slip out of them and go their own way. IME having lived in the kind of strict traditionalist religious rural community that many aspiring trads seem to salivate over, in such worlds there are no shortages of people with badly managed mental health problems damaging themselves and others.
Not gonna lie, you had me until you concluded with "But there are also crazy people in conservative communities."
There sure are. I didn't say they're weren't. In fact, I explicitly said that replacing some religious informed traditional models of society could be good, bad, or mixed. I am not actually a reactionary. I did say, however, that a void (which your post in the quote of Sam Kriss does an excellent job of illustrating) is a bad thing.
Let me reemphasize: I am not advocating for a snap-back return to pre-1869 western societal structures.
When you say "People used to a captivity of sorts freaking out over the prospect of choosing what to do with one's life and find one's own meaning for it rather than having someone else pick it for you, now that the old shackles that restricted the lives of prior generations have rusted through in some areas so some may slip out of them and go their own way," I think you're, first, minimizing the self-determination that conservative / traditional folks still do (I would say, must) exercise. Second, and much more importantly, people "going their own way" is often not benign. An eccentric hermit who spends his days writing in the nude on his own property is a far cry from the paranoid-schizophrenic so detached from reality that he puts a bystander into a position that could cost the latter his freedom.
To me, this is a kind of unrealistic libertarianism. "You just do you. I'll do me. The rest is fine" falls apart pretty damn fast if we believe that extra-judicial violence is bad, public goods exist, and contract law is ... a thing. But, hey, I'm probably just afraid of that level of freedom.
To clarify, that was addressed towards the linked Tyler Cowan discussion saying that he didn't know of a better argument for social conservatism than that book.
Please clarify on what you mean. I have noticed a disproportionate number rightist mottizens seem to be from left wing areas, especially progressive urban areas of the California, the Pacific Northwest or New England, and having broken with a default worldview of left liberalism see rightism as an independent minded rebellious choice of sorts, with very few being from hard conservative areas where right wing views, religious zeal, strict men's dominance over women, etc are the default majority worldviews and having those is a matter of inheritance and conformity with ones surroundings, with left views being the break. If you mean self-determination in the break with the surroundings sense, that could explain it.
The examples given mention traditional social structures, expectations, etc. Think more secularism rather than going to church, or having equal division of labor in a relationship versus traditional gender dynamics more than the mentally ill yelling about little green men on the sidewalk.
I'd characterize it more as a previous set of man-made structures having grown rickety and eventually collapsed as the winds and rains rolled through, incapable of withstanding the challenges of the changing climate, with some people pining for the old building styles that can't handle the new weather now while there's also an explosion of people fiddling with different building styles and materials to see what man-made structures work for them and hold up, which crumple, and so on. And at the same time, you have areas where the old man-made structures haven't been challenged by weather changes yet and still are standing. The fracture of the old structures in some areas giving the opening for better ones to be developed.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. Cowan is weird too in that he seems to be broadly ambivalent about social politics most of the time and then will come out with things like this from left field. I mean, Blake Butler is very very into experimental prose territory. I was surprise Cowan had Butler's new book on his radar whatsoever (come to think of it .... was probably just the New Yorker review. Cowan is an O.G. haute-couture literary type)
Currently live in a "hard conservative" area in the Old Confederacy. I was responding to your initial assertion regarding conservatives / traditionalists living a life that had already been mapped out for them (or something to that effect - I'd direct quote, but I'm in a weird spot with the editor and afraid of losing my comment here). The problem is that trying to live that "mapped out" life is very difficult to impossible even in "hard conservative" areas. What's far more common is public displays of fealty to those old ideals, paired with a sort of domestic realpolitik wherein family structures are far more modern (and post modern) than folks want to admit. Here's a neato example. If you really want to live in an actual conservative/traditional directed life, you have to make that choice everyday.
Broadly, this.
The former leads to the latter. They're inextricably linked. Lorenzo Warby's masterwork "Worshipping the Future" demonstrates this (and is engrossing it is readablility)
Awesome extended metaphor, but I got lost. I don't understand what you are saying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link