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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.

Anyway sorry for the rant. It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety) has just won the Italian elections and will very likely going to provide the prime minister to a cabinet that will include a 85 year old Berlusconi among others. Italy is the 3rd most populous and wealthy country in the EU. It also acts as a perennial threat to the stability of the Brussels-led order and the euro, since an Italian default or currency exit would almost definitely trigger the collapse of the euro with who knows what consequences. The EU looks determined to fight. Meloni herself does not sound like the type of politician who will accept to be crushed as easily as her predecessors. Here is a French interview with a 19 years old activist Meloni. She still sounds like a true believer to me. To get the gist of just how radical (from the EU-norm) she is willing to be with regard to cultural issues, I recommend this speech from 3 years ago (with English subs).

What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown? How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe? Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions? Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard? When the ECB will have to start increasing interest rates substantially and Italy has to choose between bankruptcy or euro-exit, how will this go under this government?

P.S. Italy was one of the most anal countries with regard to vaccine oppression and corona measures in Europe. Does anyone know what the position of the Fratelli was back then? And how they talk about these things now?

Whenever I hear the term, "far right," what I hear in my mind is "90's liberal." You may need to clarify what exactly you mean by that, making clear how your definition is distinct from partisan media painting anyone they don't like as fascist.

If you believe that "Family, country, God" is "far right" then you should recognize that is almost half the country. And that also means over 90% of people in the last thousand years have been fascist.

And that also means over 90% of people in the last thousand years have been fascist.

I do unironically agree with this. I believe humans have a natural tendency to organize around political forms similar to feudalism, whose combination with industrial society is more or less what most people call fascism. It is certainly what Mussolini seemed to understand when he was referring to his party's ideology. I also think the unique weirdness of the term fascism (it is really difficult to define in a way most people agree) has a lot to do with this underlying nature. Intellectuals of progressive/enlightenment bent keep recognizing signs of fascism everywhere because human societies keep reproducing elements of it adapted to the changing societal conditions.

You are right at recognizing the political terms of right and left can refer to very different positions on issues at different times. But I believe that is because the specific issues are not that relevant when coming up with these labels. What matters chiefly is the direction and speed of political change (or lack thereof) you want. Today's far right might look more leftist than yesterday's conservatism (case in point, Meloni is an unmarried mother of 1 hardly a Catholic motherhood icon) but it is still far right because it advocates for a fast reversal of the enlightenment project while yesterday's conservatism just wanted to conserve the society as it is.

Not even a "fast reversal" as much as hoping to stop the exponential acceleration without allowing basic questions to be asked.

We've come full circle from the Revolution, now natural law itself is fascism and the natural inclinations of man are a tyranny that must be abolished by managerial totalitarianism in the name of liberal democracy that's in theory based on natural rights.

None of this makes any sense.

I blame Marcuse for it. There's many people to point at but he's explicitly the one who said that fascism is the natural tendency to even have a mild appreciation for any form of authority that must be stamped out and "pre-censored" everywhere if there's any chance to have communism or even not have the holocaust again.

Nonsense this is, but nonsense that defines our politics unfortunately.

I do unironically agree with this. I believe humans have a natural tendency to organize around political forms similar to feudalism, whose combination with industrial society is more or less what most people call fascism.

I'm not convinced. Humans may organize and develop hierarchies automatically, but I don't think it's people on the bottom who espouse the idea of "knowing one's place", and that idea is an important part of fascist thought. At the very least, they would not believe it is moral or right that they remain where they are, even if they have to accept it.

I don't think it's people on the bottom who espouse the idea of "knowing one's place"

I don't think there's any particular juncture to fascism here, but the Vendee was a poor region in France and fought back hard against the Revolutionaries (though there appears to be a large historiographical debate over the degree to which the Vendeans were ideological as opposed to just pissed about conscription and/or taxes).

A second, different piece of evidence might be taken from the awful reception the Russian narodniki received during the "Going to the People" attempted uplift of peasant and communal livelihood during the late 19th century - the poor peasants reacted very badly to ideas of overturning society, even to their alleged benefit; they also reacted badly to modern agronomy, medicine, religious skepticism, and literacy. Quite invested in "their place in the world," at least to hear the narodniks write about it.

It takes a shocking number of dead peasants before an intellectual will admit his ideas were wrong.

Changing medical and agricultural practices puts the peasants lives on the line. They weren't going to make any big changes without a lot of proof.

Almost everyone in almost every human society in the past remained exactly where they are in the economical/political order their entire life. Almost every traditional religion that I can think of is based on the idea that human hierarchies are ordained in some way and should be maintained. When peasants rebelled, it was typically not against their place in the traditional order but against an overlord who is not keeping with their responsibilities in the traditional order.

That was, until the Western discoveries of the rest of the world and industrial revolution suddenly made it possible to have societies where everyone is constantly striving up and a lot of them are indeed succeeding. This created new radical possibilities in societal thinking (commonly expressed with the umbrella term enlightenment) and today we are so used to it that we cannot even imagine people were serious in their traditional beliefs of hierarchy. Surely the peasants always hated their lord and envied him? Maybe some of them did, but this is the typical mind fallacy in my opinion.

That was, until the Western discoveries of the rest of the world and industrial revolution suddenly made it possible to have societies where everyone is constantly striving up and a lot of them are indeed succeeding.

Would you mind expanding on this? How did exploration/colonisation factor in?

Almost everyone in almost every human society in the past remained exactly where they are in the economical/political order their entire life.

Sure. But them accepting their lot in life isn't the same as proof that they found it moral that they are in that lot of life.

Almost every traditional religion that I can think of is based on the idea that human hierarchies are ordained in some way and should be maintained.

Which hierarchies? It's one thing to speak about the family hierarchy in which children obey parents and wives obey husbands. Quite another to speak about a class hierarchy in which your role is to be a low-class peasant and that's just and fair.

Just from a quick glance at Wikipedia's list of peasant rebellions, it doesn't seem like the typical rebellion was about punishing rulers for not obeying traditional responsibilities.

I can accept your argument that people believe those hierarchies are to be maintained, but I feel like that's a defense by higher-status people to protect their standing from the lower-status people, meaning we're probably not talking about peasants.

I remain open to proof of your argument.

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