Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I have $92,000 in my Donor-Advised Fund. I haven't made a grant in 30 months, which means I have 6 months to make a grant or the fund will be liquidated and merged into some generic charity fund. I only need to donate $500, but I'm inclined to donate at least half the fund.
Who should I give to?
The first place I went to was GiveWell. Unfortunately, it would appear all their top charities are woke. For instance, here is what Helen Keller International had to say:
"We are overwhelmed with grief and concern over the killing of George Floyd—on the heels of the recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. Racism has no place in America, or our world."
Should I just give these people my money anyway? My problem is that I think wokeness makes the world a worse place, so while I think it's probable that the organization does good by preventing blindness, they are also harming the world by propagating a quasi-religious framework which hinders human thriving.
Are there any charities that would meet GiveWell's criteria for effective donations that are non-woke (or ideally even anti-woke)?
If you have any pet causes, now would be a good time to post them. My chance of donating is fairly high in the next week or two. I've been feeling a bit Scroogish lately and would like to turn that around.
Let me describe some of my beliefs and the very tentative conclusion they've led me to, and you can decide how many of these beliefs you share and thus how seriously you should take my conclusion. I frame this as a description rather than an argument because I don't think I can capably advocate for any of these views, at least not succinctly the way someone with more talent could, and thus I must simply hope you already share them.
Suffering is bad, but, lacking a good word to describe this, [failure to reach potential / absence of joy] is far worse. The worst suffering is caused when a source of joy disappears. Some of the worst pain you can experience is losing a loved one or getting divorced, with physical pain a very distant runner-up. I'd rather have a child, experience a few years getting to know them, and then lose them, than never have them at all. Same with marriage etc. The worst position you can be in, I think, is to squander great potential and end up living a bare-minimum life without having tried hard to better your situation.
So, all else being equal, I think the life of a paraplegic with a good attitude is more valuable than the life of an able-bodied person with a bad attitude. Second-order effects and other caveats aside, I think it's pretty easy for anyone to squander all of their gifts, and I also think it's doable for someone with no gifts to live an extremely meaningful and joyful life pretty much unrelated to their material circumstances.
In the long run, I think culture beats charity. As Zero HP Lovecraft says:
I think this is true, but culture, and human belief, are in the end what determine human wellbeing along multiple dimensions. Optimistically: everything is downstream from culture in the sense that if you fix culture, literally everything else will be fixed in short order. Culture is downstream of everything else in the sense that there are actual actions you can take which will meaningfully affect culture.
Fund a woke charity, and you may save 3 bazillion lives, but you're also subsidizing the status and reach of some of the most woke people in the world. In the long run I think this may actually matter more--the poor people will survive, which is great, but they or their descendants will be forced to bend the knee to ideologies which will ultimately destroy them, spiritually if not physically.
So I think the best sorts of charities do one or more of the following:
I think #3 is probably the lowest-hanging fruit, and usually leads to #2, so that's where most money should go. Find someone who makes good art, but isn't crazy enough to pursue that rather than support their family. Pay for a year of their work and see what happens. Maybe if a few thousand people do this we'll get an excruciatingly beautiful work of art which we wouldn't have otherwise, valuable both in its own right and as a cultural cudgel against competing ideologies. I'm not sure what all of Lars Doucet's beliefs are, but he strikes me as a good writer, and were it not for his obligations to his family he would be producing art right now (at least if you count indie games as art). Instead he's working in real estate on something lucrative but ultimately meaningless. I'm sure there are plenty of people like him, both skilled and with their priorities straight, who could be unleashed by those of us with the same priorities but considerably less artistic talent.
I'm also interested in #1, but tbh I think capitalism is probably the best way to accomplish that, so if your talents lie in that direction it's probably better to create/fund a startup than to create some ridiculous scientific institution aimed at promoting conservative values.
I would be interested to hear you expand on this.
Are you talking about ascetic artists practicing those things? Storytelling media about them? Usually that ends up going poorly, comes off very cheesy, and the actually brilliant works are things like Dostoyevsky just showing all these different people (and Ivan is convincing, but everyone in-world loves Zosima. In my own experience we much more need to produce more people like Zosima, I've known approximately one, which is more than many people have known).
Have you ever heard of this working? How would this work? What would you expect them to produce?
I guess someone might say: look at the Inklings. They were sponsored by the British University system (somewhat contra #1), with enough slack to produce excellent conservative friendly stories. Which sounds like an argument for more slack at work. It isn't necessarily an argument that they would have produced something even better had they been freed of their day jobs -- their teaching jobs (and even war experience) were probably important to their development as storytellers. Meanwhile, people like Dickens or George MacDonald or Dostoyevsky had to keep writing to pay the bills, and this contributed quite a bit to how much they wrote, which is good to the extent their work is worthwhile. Faulkner is maybe not so conservative (I'm not actually sure I care about artists being "conservative, vs being true and beautiful), but he also seems like an argument for "jobs with slack;" stories brew slowly. The current Substack arrangement seems worse, because writers are expected to produce thoughts way too fast (though Chesterton thrived in a Substack adjacent editorial culture), drowning out their good work with a sea of trite nonsense. But this can also be accomplished with patronage (c.f. Rod Dreher -- talented enough, some good content, but just churning out 8 things a day under patronage; he might be better off having to also teach school or something).
Commissions are great. Hire someone to paint a mural or cast a sculpture. This is the Renaissance method, still in use, not at all the same as just paying them to potentially create something, everyone hopes, and very good for their interest in continuing artistic pursuits. I know churches that bring over iconographers to cover the insides of their churches with icons, and it would probably be beneficial to offer scholarships for them to take on an American apprentice or something, but I think this is more of an issue of people liking some people's work more than others, rather than otherwise capable people lacking time and money.
Storytelling about them. My view is that a good traditional fantasy book is pretty good at promoting traditional values, and a big part of this is because of how Tolkien defined the genre. The point is to watch impressive people overcome adversity.
I've never heard of anyone trying it with conservative authors. The only one who comes to mind for progressives is Marx, who is either a perfect example or counterexample depending on how you look at it. I'd expect the majority of the beneficiaries to produce little of consequence, a sizeable fraction to pick up a talent which eventually leads somewhere, a small fraction to create valuable works of art sufficient to support them, and a tiny fraction (optimistically 1 in 10,000) to create something truly significant.
It's worth considering the downsides--these people would be giving up a year of career development for a chance at great success. If they succeed they still lose the real-life career experience and maybe their art is actually worse than it would be otherwise. If they fail they lose that experience, their careers are hurt, and maybe they are at risk of becoming dissatisfied with regular life. I would hope the upside, being better at art, would make up for some of that. I have many family members who have successful regular jobs and quasi-careers as artists on the side; they'd appreciate having an extra year of experience in their fields of passion.
I love the idea of jobs with slack. If anything that's much better, because they get life experience, have the time to create, and don't have to worry about their livelihoods once the year is up. The Inklings seem like quite an outlier, but you are changing my mind somewhat towards supporting institutional support.
I strongly agree with this, but what I'd consider true and beautiful is seen as pretty far-right. The point isn't to wage the culture war but to promote values good for self-betterment rather than entertainment, which incidentally leads to better entertainment. Still thinking of Tolkien here.
There just isn't as much inherent demand (or economies of scale) for this as there is for other forms of art. Books, movies, videogames all have way broader reach. The idea would be to start a virtuous cycle where the artist makes money doing what they love, and consumers get more of what they love.
I'm an extremely shallow consumer myself, and read all sorts of litRPGs, fantasies, and prog fantasies, wasting easily hundreds of hours per year. I can think of only one which even slightly scratched the itch I have for "person gets powerful and then protects others." Books like that exist, I'm sure, but all that I've found have been super low-quality. There's a big market for these stories, but the people who would write them are too busy with safer ventures.
(I want to write that story myself, but at my current trajectory I might be able to retire in about 5 years if I work hard, leaving me with another ~45 to find and pursue whatever I determine to be the best use of my time. So it's not happening for 5 years.)
I see what you mean better now, thanks. I was partly confused by your use of "artist," which is more often used for visual arts and a bit musicians, where it seems like you mean something more like storytellers, for the most part.
It would be interesting to try, though I'm pretty skeptical. The way you describe it, it sounds sort of like offering sabbatical opportunities to non-academics, in exchange of some expectation that the person will create stories, and then like you say, that isn't necessarily compatible with many people's career paths. Would it be somewhat like Scott's grants projects, where it's posted somewhere that interested people are likely to see the opportunity and apply? Or maybe someone knows a person who has something in mind, and offers it personally? I could see Brandon Sanderson organizing something like that, but just for fun storytelling, rather than Culturally Important Art.
Movies and video games are quite different industries, as far as I can tell, and way more expensive (especially movies), but maybe they'll be getting cheaper with the new AI technology? At least in a decade or two? Could offer some interesting opportunities for smaller operations to try to enter the field.
I used to read a lot of low brow fantasy (spent a whole winter alone in Alaska with Edgar Rice Burroughs novels). The morality seemed... fine, I think? Lots of emphasis on courage, anyway, which is fine.
Interesting. Have you written stories before?
I kind of liked the subplot in That Hideous Strength where Jane is on birth control, and is super bored alone in her flat, trying to work on her dissertation. And then later Merlin says that they could have had a child who would have been super important and amazing, but the time for that is past, idiots! My guess would be that the book reading population (or at least the population willing to read a book written by a Mottizen) is significantly more likely to be in that kind of situation than the (more numerically common, but unlikely to be affected by this meme space) "never married 19-year-old with three children, below the poverty line" mentioned by an article I just looked up on the statistics. Or the young underclass women Theodore dalrymple is known for writing about.
I'd include the visual arts if I thought they were likely to be impactful at all. IDK if our culture has moved on, or if it's always been this way, but visual art doesn't seem to have the same reach or emotional impact as other forms of art. I do include musicians, but know much more about writing than music, so writing is what I've been talking about.
Yeah, I'd do it on a personal level, but honestly it's not well thought-out yet.
I'm not super impressed with low-brow fantasy books (despite them being essentially all I read nowadays, lacking better alternatives), but Tolkien for example had:
and so on.
Not really, but I'm excited to try. I started writing/posting short stories this year with the goal of improving that skill. Currently I'm not a good writer at all, but I still think with some practice I can do better than the drivel that's popular on Royal Road these days.
I like that, though it's probably too on-the-nose to work the way I'd like it to. That story won't reach mainstream audiences nowadays.
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