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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The future Liberals want by Noah Smith on substack. It’s not that interesting a vision really: the future of the West is highly diverse, urban, self-expressive (trans accepting), and abundant with oh thanks an olive branch for conservatives.

I think the bizarre thing about this is that Noah — as woke, neolib as it comes — felt the need to write this at all. Everyone knows this is the vision; it’s all we hear about! Conservatives all know that this is what is on offer if society remains on autopilot towards the future too.

What strikes me about it is a vision of total anomie and dissolving of any sense of common culture and this is supposed to be good. Each nations singular (or maybe 2-3 tops) religion replaced by anything or nothing. Each national ethnic group replaced by a multicultural hodge podge with inclusion and acceptance for all. Diversity of income (inequality). Imagine there are no countries…

I can’t help wonder what families are supposed to be like in this vision — or indeed if they really exist. Is a world of radical self invention fuelled by technology compatible at all with human flourishing as its always been known: freedom to choose the burdens we bear for maximum meaning. What if blank slatism wasn’t a description of the world, but a challenge!

It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).

The "vision" makes no allowances for reality.

How about radical environmentalism? Here, I think Thiel is envisioning some sort of mashup of degrowth ideology and over-regulated Eurosclerosis. But when it comes to the major environmental threat we face — climate change — the solution will be the opposite of degrowth. The price of renewable technologies (solar, wind, batteries, and electrolyzers) has come down so far, so fast, that decarbonizing our economy will actually lead to increased profits, increased growth, and abundant energy.

Meanwhile, in Europe and California, they're actually doing the degrowth thing. Shut down the power plants, ban fossil fuel use. Increased profits, increased growth, and abundant energy? No, recession and shortages

Today, however, this attempt at broadening the core American polity has been hotly contested — Hamilton is hated by conservatives, Lizzo’s flute-playing has ignited a culture-war debate, and the 1619 Project is of course wildly controversial. And these divisions have been exploited adroitly by our illiberal enemies, as when Vladimir Putin cynically accuses America of racist colonialism while simultaneously railing against trans people and atheists.

You see? When conservatives oppose the 1619 Project, they're helping Putin.

These urbanists don’t want to turn the whole world into Manhattan, or even Amsterdam. Instead, their visions are of somewhat-built-up suburbs that offer more transit options (trains, buses, e-bikes), are more environmentally friendly, and combine multi-family housing with single-family housing. The person I know who has done the best job of drawing pictures of what this might look like is the architect and artist Alfred Twu:

Ah, yes, their neighborhoods are wonderful visions which offer all thing to all people (except nasty car drivers). But that's all they are, visions. And the nasty car drivers stubbornly refuse to go away.

But now we’re adding a third type, which may be the best of all: densified green suburbs.

And the only qualities they lack is that of existence and possibility. Yes, you can find architects and artists to draw a Utopian vision. But just because you can draw it doesn't mean you can build it.

I believe the answer to all of these can be, and should be, “yes”. But so far the Abundance Agenda is still just a talking point and a collection of op-eds, while no one is really presenting a coherent future vision of either good jobs or entrepreneurship.

To its credit, the "Abundance Agenda" link in the original mentions the National Environmental Policy Act and other regulations. Noah does not; he is too busy blaming conservatives for not getting with the program. He's willing to say empty words in favor of free enterprise, but not to acknowledge that his "liberal democratic future" is in conflict with itself. And it won't be the "Abundance Agenda" that wins.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives. They are soulless, placeless expanses originally envisioned by liberals. The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging. There needs to be places for people to meet, small businesses and room for local culture. A stroad with endless generic housing with some big box stores selling the same products that can be found on the other side of the planet is essentially the anti thesis to the traditional city. The urbanist walkable city with cafes and restaurants at least has the aesthetic of a real city. My main critic of liberal urbanism is that it focuses purely on the aesthetic and not the function. There is no focus on having a common culture, a sense of belonging, an architectural style unique to the town and its geography etc. It is a disney-world version of a city. I would still much rather have that then the completely atomized suburban sprawl that has been built since WWII. Suburbia has isolated people from their communities, made people fat, ruined the environment and created a boring society. Instead of a public square which is a public space there is a mall which is nothing but a commercial space controlled by someone who has no connection to the town.

Cars are a massive waste of space, force kids to sit in their houses while their mom has to drive them to their friends, and replaces the bakery with bland factory bread. The best thing that could happen to conservatism is 150 dollar per barrel oil.

The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging. There needs to be places for people to meet, small businesses and room for local culture

The traditional city in one of the cores of global power is also a multicultural hodgepodge. There’s nothing new under the sun.

Cars are a massive waste of space, force kids to sit in their houses while their mom has to drive them to their friends, and replaces the bakery with bland factory bread.

So you're okay with me transporting firearms, ammo, sundry incendiaries, cannon and the (entirely legal!) bulk explosives necessary to feed them on your public transit?

I find it strange as well, but perhaps it's because American conservatism can trace its lineage back to a liberal revolution and its adherents see themselves as carrying on the values of that revolution. The liberal/libertarian elements of the ideology have always struck me as an odd thing to pair with social conservatism, but its followers take them seriously it seems, and in that case perhaps it's no surprise they would opt for the freedom and individualism represented by a car-based society over the sense of community offered in walkable cities. America's immense cultural reach also means that these libertarian tendencies can be exported and influence other conservative movements worldwide.

Wherever we want to go, we go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is... what the Black Pearl really is... is freedom.

Having one's own means of serious transportation means freedom and autonomy compared to being stuck with muscle power and/or wherever the Powers That Be deign to permit you to go. That is greatly valuable in itself.

And yet that freedom has eroded the very foundations of the community and turned society into an atomized and compartmentalized expanse of boring sameness.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.

Because cities make people childless even more. Because the real vision of people attacking suburbs is a rich Manhattan with clean streets, while the rest of the riff raff has the right to enjoy unpoliced gang violence in their neighborhood because you aren't allowed to move away to the burbs.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.

People in cities become collectivists, because people are piled so close together that just about anything you do becomes the business of your neighbors. If you want to go anywhere you're stuck with your 3mph feet on crowded sidewalks or getting piled together on crowded, dirty, and slow government-run (not just government-built) transportation.

The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging.

The city of reality is not as walkable as advertised (you can walk in your neighborhood but the city is likely too big to walk to downtown or any other neighborhood), and has little sense of community (partially because people move around all the time, partially because it's so big and crowded -- the paradox of being alone in a crowd is a common one) or sense of belonging. Conservatives pine for those things but the places they existed mostly don't exist any more because they require a small number of people in one place for a long time who mostly interact with each other, and that's just not the modern world. Ironically one of the few places you actually can find this is in neighborhoods full of generational welfare recipients; they may be dysfunctional communities but they are communities.

Exactly. Cities make people “oversocialized” (ol’ Ted K was right) and constantly needing to consider other people’s feelings when you pursue your life’s ambitions (or truth for that matter) dulls everything. I had a post back in the old country about spending a few months living rurally and one observation I missed was how much more ideosyncratic, but not neurotic, country folk are. If you want to build a new structure on your land you just need to figure out who will help you with it and whether stuff will fit in your truck. In the city meanwhile you need to grovel to a planning board for years like a peasant. Freedom is good. I wanted to build!

The other thing is that walkable urbanism is only possible for families — I.E. the only important demographic over the long run — if crime and disorder is very low. I’d love to live in a walkable suburb if we tripled the prison population and had absolutely zero tolerance for disorder. But hey, that’s not in the liberal vision.

This is why there's a weird current of pop culture that looks at the Cyberpunk Sci-fi city as utopia. the city where the very vastness has resulted in it becoming a new frontier, the concrete jungle... etc.

The idea you could have all the idiosyncrasy of the country with all the opportunity of the world at your finger tips... because enforcement had broken and no one could be made to care about stepping on their neighbors toes.

.

Its the only "dystopia" that people are actively excited to revisit again and again, or whose style they try to emulate... no one's clamoring for more stories in Oceania... there's no hype train for being able to play in the world of Atlas Shrugged

I don’t know about this.

I see far more families out on the street hanging out and just generally enjoying life in Latin America (where crime is much higher) than I do in the United States. It’s always the top thing I notice traveling between these two.

Latin American streets are full of life. Full of families, tons of children running around, events, gatherings, all manner of activity. US streets are quiet, dead, there’s nobody around, and even just walking around is shunned.

I also noticed that this affects my mental well-being a lot, and it’s the main reason my political persuasion is basically an urbanist in the way Noah describes.

There's things that could confound this: LatAm places have held onto traditional cultural aspects better than NorthAm places; better shared culture between people in the city; nobody ever felt the need to flee the cities (and if they did, they probably just straight-up fled the country instead); and part of the crime rate vs. niceness thing could be you can just shoot someone who makes your life/experience miserable and mostly get away with it.

I don’t think these are great counterpoints as, LatAm is one of the most ethnically diverse places of the world, and it’s definitely true that people structure the cities there based on fleeing from crime.

But there may be something in what you mention about the idea of fleeing cities, in the US, city cores became the crime ridden parts, whereas in LatAm, the outskirts are typically more dangerous and the city center is more clean and well kept.

That’s probably part of it. But in my opinion, car culture is the biggest factor here. Here in the US we went all in on designing everything around the car, and it upended basic communal life in my opinion.

Probably helps that the Mexican government never wages war on the productive classes within the city and never forced the children of the middle-class into the most violent neighborhoods at bayonet point.

America had functional urban life from its founding to the 1960s... then the federal government waged literal war on it

.

edit: this is why Canadian cities consitently remain intact in-spite of everything, even with modern homelessness and drug problems the middle and upper-middle class will still live in "inner suburbs" as few as 100 meters from housing projects or homeless shelters... because they can send their kids to schools, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, where their kids won't be interacting with that and anyone dealing drugs or interrupting class or comitting violence would be removed.

The liberal vision is generally not very good at accommodating itself to the needs of families, so it’s no surprise there.

I had a post back in the old country about spending a few months living rurally and one observation I missed was how much more ideosyncratic, but not neurotic, country folk are.

I agree. Cities seem to foster these weird little hyper-networked monocultures where everyone thinks similarly, acts similarly and just generally behave as if they stepped straight off a conveyor belt, because everyone is absolutely obsessed with what everyone else thinks of them (though it's likely not out of any sense of community, they adopt these beliefs and behaviours because there are incentives to do so). There's also a tendency to self-elevate and to thumb their nose at the poor, uneducated country-dwellers who aren't as liberal and cosmopolitan as they are, though I won't get into that.

Country folk, on the other hand, generally seem much less... Borg-like, in the way they act. It was refreshing, the few times I've been out there. I'm sure there are things that are lacking in rural areas, such as economic development and job opportunities, but there's a vibrancy and genuineness to the people there which you simply do not find in the city. I suppose it's a consequence of not being involved in perpetual status games.

Suburbs have one big advantage, they separate the functional people from the pathological when society stops doing that for them in cities. For most parents that one thing trumps all the advantages of a city.

This is it. I don't care about the "benefits" of living in the local major city. Trash and shit strewn homeless encampments, dirty needles, shit on the sidewalks, comical levels of property crime, did I mention the Hep-A infected shit?

But none of that exists in any suburb that I have lived in. The lack of effective public transportation is an effective filter to all those problems. I have a family to raise, so I live outside of city limits.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.

The only thing he said about suburbs was that, unlike whatever grand plan Noah has for society, they have the advantage of existing, and being relatively functional. People have every right to demand a successful test run somewhere, before you start redesigning their communities from scratch.

Traditional cities have functioned and existed for millennia and still function and exist with tens of millions of people living in pre car developments across the western world. What hasn't been able to function well is the complete break with tradition after WWII when cities were entirely redesigned and we ended up with long range commuting, massive environmental damage, low social cohesion, extreme blandness and the sheer ugliness of urban sprawl. Looking at what has actually worked and created cities like Barcelona, Budapest, Boston before WWII or Copenhagen is a much better route than continuing with one of the biggest failures of progressivism in the 20th century. Suburbia was a progressive project, and it doesn't make sense for conservatives to take the blame for it.

Those places exist, but not as conservative communities. Cities are consistently the most progressive places in their regions, so it's hard to see them as the way to work out conservative values.

Can you link to an example of your ideal city? Is it working well there?

Can you link to an example of your ideal city?

Singapore.

Is it working well there?

It's doing great! Its public transport is excellent and rates of car ownership are much lower than in America. By metrics like life expectancy and quality of health care, it's one of the best places in the world. It also has an ethnically and religiously diverse population (including a higher proportion of Muslims than any Western city), so objections that it wouldn't work in America because of a lack of cohesion are not valid.

Besides the other comments, Singapore also has a brutally-authoritarian government. Being like Singapore would produce cities that even Conservatives might love to live in, but at a cost that no liberal could ever countenance (namely, beatings and executions).

Singapore's not diverse at all -- there's hardly any blacks or hispanics.

While I am a strong proponent of conservative urbanism, and I wholeheartedly agree with your choice of Singapore as a model example, I think you’re barking up a wrong tree by positing Singapore’s ethnic diversity as a counterpoint to American concerns about racial issues in contemporary urban society.

Yes, Singapore has a variety of different native East Asian and South Asian ethnicities. None of those ethnic groups is remotely close to American blacks in terms of their propensity to crime, their inability to maintain an orderly and peaceful society, or their glowering hostility to other races, constantly threatening to boil over into stochastic interpersonal violence.

When 21st-century Americans complain that cities are too diverse, what they really mean is that there are too many blacks. Full stop. You cannot possibly make sense of discussions of race in America if you interpret the term “diversity” literally and naïvely. Our cities would work just fine if they were 30% white, 30% Asian, and 30% Jewish. This isn’t my optimal society, but it would absolutely be orderly and pleasant.

Actually, I think Malay–Chinese relations in Singapore are an excellent analogy for Black–White relations in America.

Singapore is roughly 15% Malay and 80% Chinese, with the rest being smaller ethnic groups that don't really matter for Malay–Chinese relations. This is very similar to the US a few decades ago: 15% Black, 80% White, with the rest being Asians etc. Malays and Blacks consistently underperform economically relative to the Chinese and to Whites, respectively. Both the US and Singapore had race riots in the 1960s. Since then, the US has had race riots regularly, while Singapore hasn't had any.* Singapore also has extremely low crime rates. I think this demonstrates that improving race relations in America is possible.

What do you think makes Black Americans so much more problematic than Malays?

* Singapore had one relatively small riot in 2013, but this is unrelated to the Malay–Chinese conflict.

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I understand what you're going for, the question is whether you can reproduce that in a modern context.

Suburbia was a progressive project, and it doesn't make sense for conservatives to take the blame for it.

Maybe they just don't want to take the blame for whatever comes next.

I think the thrust of Arjin's criticism here is this: okay, suburbia sucks. Now what? What do you propose to do about suburbia sucking? All the car-centric infrastructure in the US, well, exists. It would presumably cost an astronomical amount to get rid of it, possibly more real or financial resources to rip all of it up than it did to put all of it there in the first place.

The other argument often lobbed at pro-city people (one I don't necessarily agree with, but see as an unavoidable stumbling block) is that cities suck to live in because criminals and other ne'er-do-wells will shit up the place and get away with it. Those same people will point to recent developments as evidence that the city-dwellers making cities worse places to live will never be held accountable for such.

The first step would be to allow densification of existing areas instead of continuing to build more far flung suburbs. At least in my city, property in denser areas is much more expensive than in the suburbs. This means we're building out a bunch of suburbs for people who would rather live in the city but can't because bad land use policies have resulted in a shortage of housing.

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