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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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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).

I generally like Noah Smith, but not this piece.

It seems he thinks leftist diversity is actually diverse, and while it's obvious in retrospect this was initially quite jarring. My greatest fear of liberalism is that it will in practice turn everything into a samey globalist liberal soup. I'd rather have an archipelago of self-assorted communities, than everything integrated everywhere.

Is a leftist political philosophy more likely to cause this result? Possible evidence against, a westerner that has gone somewhere "exotic" has likely gone somewhere more conservative. Perhaps I'm just pattern matching? Possible evidence for, the left-aligned western culture does seem to have a more quickly evolving memeplex.

Or, maybe the left-right bitching is all smoke and mirrors and really it's the authoritarian/libertarian axis of the political compass we should care about. If that's the case I can do no more than to continue screaming into the void.

My greatest fear of liberalism is that it will in practice turn everything into a samey globalist liberal soup. I'd rather have an archipelago of self-assorted communities, than everything integrated everywhere.

I'm not sure if "liberalism turning everything into a samey globalist liberal soup" is actually a thing. I'm suspicious of it because we hear about it from both the left and right; the left phrases it as capitalism destroying indigenous cultures while the right phrases it as destroying traditional values--it feels like both cannot be true at the same time.

So, is liberalism turning everything into samey globalist soup? (I love this label, by the way). I'm not sure.

Yes, it allows people to cross cultural and geographical boundaries to engage in a similar activity, eg. teens from all over the world can play Call of Duty together. But does that mean they grow detached from the culture that immediately surrounds them? There appear to be specific flavors of camaraderie among gamers of different nationalities. In the same way, people are afraid of "cocacolization", but wherever I've traveled around Europe and the US, I've seen a lot of local flavors, even local coke knockoffs.

Stepping away from my own subjective experience, it looks like, if anything, the world is undergoing fragmentation. Famous SV venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote a little bit about it some years ago. And, if anything, it seems like this process is the fastest and most powerful in the liberal west--people sorting themselves out by beliefs, music, age, interests, lifestyles (eg. monogamy vs polygamy), etc. Which makes sense, because there being no culture-enforcement in the form of a church, a government, or a tradition, people will find values that bind them, creating more diversity instead of less. Actually, thinking about over the last 50-100 years, the period of solidified nationalism, it was the pre-globalist world that looks like samey soup: top down, church/government enforced beliefs and rituals.

it feels like both cannot be true at the same time

‘Indigenous cultures’ are just traditional values that the left decided to care about.

I mean, it’s cultural diversity.

It’s previously been a conservative impulse to destroy indigenous cultures by integrating them into the ‘correct’ belief system (here: the church). This occurred across Europe and N and S America.

Isn’t it conservatives who want people in nations to have one culture and not several?

That sentence also goes the other way- "traditional values" are just indigenous cultures the right decided to care about. Confederate monuments/lost cause of the south are little different from indigenous languages- they're important to older stock in the areas they exist in, a lot of other people don't like having to deal with them, and the main difference is being on opposite sides of the culture war.

Sure, but I think those traditional values are actually the remnants of an older monoculture that was steamrolling everything, and the left was so successful in usurping it that they stumbled into the position of becoming the new monoculture.

It’s always been an awkward position for the left, they’re temperamentally suited to fighting the power structure and so things got weird when they suddenly became it.

Confederate monuments are a good example of traditional values that are not a surviving remnant of a monoculture and which conservatives defend. Barbecue and certain forms of country music can probably also go in this category.

For non-southern examples of the right defending traditional values which are not just remnants of an older monoculture, several states have laws guaranteeing pharmacists the right not to dispense birth control of any kind to protect the religious rights of Catholics, who have never been a majority in this country, and these laws are almost entirely advocated for by the right.

the left phrases it as capitalism destroying indigenous cultures while the right phrases it as destroying traditional values--it feels like both cannot be true at the same time.

Why not? Those are the exact same thing. It's very America-centric to claim that they're not.

Maybe I phrased it poorly. My suspicion is triggered because both the left and the right agree on some version of this.

On the surface, that should lead to an "aha! There must be something true to this!". But given how rarely this happens, it has the opposite effect on me.

Perhaps it's because of horseshoe theory? As in "both the left and right agree that free speech should be curtailed" (huge generalization, just for example) -- that triggers alarms in my head, but not because of the issue at stake, but because of the agreement.

So, is liberalism turning everything into samey globalist soup?

People have felt this way for some time

Before clicking on your link I correctly guessed what it would be.

I guessed this one

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6vTPjuT3rTA

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