site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.

As someone who was essentially born into the Blue tribe of the culture war and raised to be its soldier, I think you almost have it with "legacy of slavery," but rather, it's the broader oppression narrative, of which the legacy of slavery is one type. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in the bluest of blue areas, this oppression narrative was just taken for granted as Obviously True, with the notion that all the Bad Stuff like slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. in our society could be gotten rid of, while keeping all the Good Stuff we like, if only those ignorant people would stop holding up these old, decrepit, sexist, racist patriarchal structures. There was generally a real sense of pity for these ignorant bigots, though certainly there was some disgust as well.

It seems that in the decades since I was in school, this kind of teaching has only become more common in schools in less-blue and non-blue areas. It also seems to me that encouragement of active disgust instead of condescending pity has come into vogue in that time. Given that, I don't think Blue tribe's nigh-genocidal hatred of the Red is that surprising.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction. Much of the ideas behind this oppression narrative came from academia, and specifically parts of academia that are largely allergic to empirical testing. Sans empiricism, success in the field became even more about winning status than it normally is, which freed people to make more and more extreme statements (e.g. any old idiot can argue that murder is wrong, but it takes a true genius academic to argue that murder is right) without the messy real world getting in the way. And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

Of course, that just moves the question back another step: why did the Blue Tribe allow the humanities in academia to be so freed from empiricism and basic checking as to allow status games to dominate over truth? That one's probably above my pay grade, but my guess would just be generic laziness, nothing interesting in particular. Doing rigorous analysis of anything is tough, and the appeal of taking shortcuts is always there even when you know others will critique your work. When you can be confident that others won't, and this becomes common knowledge among everyone in the field... it'd be surprising if it even accidentally produced truth even once.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe?

From the inside:

Thanks to science and reason, we know how to solve all our problems.

Given that we know how to solve all our problems, if a problem isn't solved that necessarily means that someone is choosing not to solve it, or is otherwise obstructing the solution.

Therefore, if you have a problem you can't solve, the solution is to find the people blocking the obvious solutions and get them out of the way.

From the outside:

Progressive ideology doesn't actually have workable solutions. When the solutions their ideology preaches fail, they need scapegoats. Their relationship with Red Tribe is built around this scapegoating behavior.

A whole host of those subjects have never been and will never be empirical in any real sense. They might be occasionally rigorous (I would argue the philosophy is rigorous, but outside of the logic subcategories are not really empirical. You can create perfectly logical arguments that run counter to empirical reality if you desire.) or create a pseudo-empirical structure (like psychology, sociology, and anthropology have) where terrible research methods (don’t get me started on self report) can be run through statistical analysis and conclusions can be drawn. There are ways to teach these subjects that are at least honest (historical analysis of literature or the intent of the author over a [outgroup] analysis of whatever literature).

But if you insist on empirical evidence and research in the arts, you essentially cannot have it. There’s no real scientific methodology to creating literature and thus no way to make it rigorous in analysis. And thus you either stop doing it and simply teach the undergrads to write coherently, or it morphs into a cesspit of whatever is socially and politically radical (because it’s impossible to fire someone for bad research when the entire field is unempirical) with no checks.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction.

I think this is the wrong answer. Your answer should naturally prompt the question 'if its just arbitrary status games across all relevant areas and institutions, why do they all cohere to exactly the same result?'

These people already shared a framework which lead to all of them to arrive at the same conclusion regardless of their subject/position/domain. That should key you in to the fact that its not the competition per se.

As you mention:

And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

The end-points were predetermined because they were all competing to do the same thing for the same moral reason. The end points existed before the institutions did. They were always driving towards them.

The academics in question are largely leftists, and leftist have always held that distinctions between things and people is the moral evil and that people who support fundamental distinctions between things are therefore the least moral persons. For example:

We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need....We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses. We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!...We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property!... Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex. Since all have the same faculties and the same needs, let there then be for them but one education, but one nourishment. They are satisfied with one sun and one air for all: why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them?

Already the enemies of the most natural order of things we can imagine raise a clamour against us.

Emphasis mine. Manifesto of the Equals, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals 1796. It goes thousands of years back before this but this quote is the one I had at hand.