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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I've been wondering for a while now if this (generally - I'm not talking about your wife specifically) isn't an underappreciated disaster of the transition from a broad-based traditional Christian culture to a Oprah / Doctor Phil Therapy culture.

I know I've seen stats suggesting that it has long been the case that women are much more reliable church goers than men. I've likewise seen the claim that normie women seem more drawn to recourse to external "shared" social authority than most normie (non-alpha) men, broadly speaking, too, which goes hand-in-hand with that. Trotting out some folk evo psych, maybe it's all a consequence of their greater general social awareness, verbal communication skills, agreeableness, and neuroticism, as well as physical smallness and the general ambient threat of unchecked male risk taking and male libido and male strength? It's not hard to concoct just so stories about why you might expect exactly these dynamics to emerge, just based on biology.

I have to say, too, as a parent of elementary age kids of both sexes, watching their small social groups emerge and evolve, all the stereotypes are largely true. My oldest daughter, who is in 5th grade, is already having to navigate mean girl social power emerging, with a keen sense of "what is normal" and "what is weird" seemingly drawn from the ether and lots of social policing and exclusion. There's no shortage of girls in my other daughter's kindergarten class (including her, I am not happy to say) who have their "tattle to authority at the slightest imagined infraction" knob turned up to 11... and this emerges despite no shortage of unsupportive feedback about the behavior. The tattling urge is just real, overpowering, and pervasive. Meanwhile, my third grade son and his friends are almost literally small apes with almost no social awareness at all... and again, this despite no shortage of exasperated feedback. They wouldn't even think to tattle as a result of any of their messy interactions.

Anyway, if you go along with any of that, it's not hard to see how the Christian concepts of "faith" and a general "Let go, let God" orientation have a very specific role in easing the demons that beset anxious women who are prone to relitigating all the things that inflame their worst inner voices. One general read of the tradition might say, "There is an authority outside yourself, it can and must be infinitely trusted, it is the root of all reality, it is all benevolent and all knowing, you are a child of God and of infinite worth, you are not wise enough to stand in judgement of anyone or even yourself and humility and hope and forgiveness are thus commandments, despair and gossip are sins, trust God and do your best and turn to faith to come to internalize that all this suffering and anxiety and confusion and difficulty has meaning and has a point and will be bearable." The "Gospel" is literally the "Good News", right?

(I'm not well-versed enough in other traditions to make similar comparisons for other religions or cultures. And of course this is just one read of the tradition. I'm just interested in comparing a certain read of Christianity vs Modern American Therapy culture here)

I'm not saying "Christianity is folk CBT!" But it's not hard to see that at least one reading of the tradition seems very well oriented towards dampening those horrible, anxious, destructive inner voices in a great many women.

The women I know who are totally saturated in therapy culture seem to be marinating constantly in hyper-negative re-litigations of all the particular events in their lives, meanwhile, while loudly evangelizing it as a universal solution to everyone else's problems somehow. And it's clear that therapy culture has replaced what would have been a religious faith and practice previously, even for nominally religious people. And to top it all of, it's all straight up scientism - totally empirically unmoored and indifferently so, the worst kind of woo that the replication crisis (or hell, even Karl Popper in his original engagement with the relationship between Freud and Science) should have swept away long ago. It's all "The Music Man" style confidence games. It's treated with a very specific kind of "authority", and a lot of cash is being made, but the grounding of that authority is, it seems to me, entirely on a foundation of sand. Sticking with my biblical references, as Christ said and then William James reiterated, "By Your Fruits Shall Ye Know Them". And my subjective opinion of therapy culture is that the people most vocally invested in it seem like giant flash red warning signs about it.

I don't intend to evangelize Christianity here, by the way - rather, this is just one more comment in the genre of "I did the New Atheist thing and now I have deep reservations about how much baby got thrown out with the bathwater". Chesterton's Fence et cetera.

I've been wondering for a while now if this (generally - I'm not talking about your wife specifically) isn't an underappreciated disaster of the transition from a broad-based traditional Christian culture to a Oprah / Doctor Phil Therapy culture.

Christianity has its own expensive forms of therapy. Just look at pilgrimages, Hail Mary's, time spent talk to someone who never says a word in response (close to some psychodynamic therapists?). And it's easy for people to transfer their neuroticisms to hell, maintaining faith, or the disturbing fact that so many people think you are out of touch with reality. Any one of these concerns can lead to fear, depression, or anger, just as much as a therapist's unscientific speculations on "repression", "authenticity", and "self-esteem".

Here's an evo-psych just-so story: women usually like to be attended to, whether that's by friends, family, "the boyfriend who will always be there for you" (Jesus) or a therapist. This is important, because women who were attended to by many people were more likely to successfully raise children. Human children are hard to raise to raise to reproductive viability, even now.

However, compared to therapy or some other religions, Christianity is fairly cost-effective. A person looking to satiate their lust for attention and elevation of their feelings' importance could do much, much worse.

However, compared to therapy or some other religions, Christianity is fairly cost-effective.

Not if you’re tithing. Becoming a Christian is probably more effective than going to the shrink down the street, but the shrink usually doesn’t make a claim on 10% of your income.

the shrink usually doesn’t make a claim on 10% of your income.

Good news (pun intended): neither does Christianity. You're encouraged to give what you can, not required to give 10%. 10% is just a decent reference point for "it hurts but is bearable".

Varies by sect, Catholicism requires that you ‘contribute to the support of the church’ in keeping with ability. Mormonism makes a strict tithe. Protestant denominations vary.

The prudent investor will definitely seek a good bargain when purchasing a Christianity.

(I am not mocking Christianity, but the pragmatic approach to theism, where one adopts a religion based on its "cash value", to use William James's term. I admire the mind of a Thomas Aquinas or a C. S. Lewis, whereas pragmatism seems deeply cognitively corrupting.)

I have to say, too, as a parent of elementary age kids of both sexes, watching their small social groups emerge and evolve, all the stereotypes are largely true.

Whenever I read stuff like this, my reaction is that we need each other. Both sexes need to work together and cooperate, to balance out our strengths and weaknesses. The boys can help the girls to not worry so much and to get things done without endless committee discussions seeking unity. The girls can help the boys become more, uh, "civilized," expressing their emotions and not hitting each other. Ideally we'd all be perfectly well-rounded individuals who are good at everything, but it's more realistic to just balance each other's strengths and weaknesses.

But instead we're increasingly split off into special interest groups, and put in competition with each other. Feminism seems to increasingly paint the world as a struggle between men and women, and then MRA groups react accordingly buy fighting back... it's just so tiresome.

Anyway, if you go along with any of that, it's not hard to see how the Christian concepts of "faith" and a general "Let go, let God" orientation have a very specific role in easing the demons that beset anxious women who are prone to relitigating all the things that inflame their worst inner voices. One general read of the tradition might say, "There is an authority outside yourself, it can and must be infinitely trusted, it is the root of all reality, it is all benevolent and all knowing, you are a child of God and of infinite worth, you are not wise enough to stand in judgement of anyone or even yourself and humility and hope and forgiveness are thus commandments, despair and gossip are sins, trust God and do your best and turn to faith to come to internalize that all this suffering and anxiety and confusion and difficulty has meaning and has a point and will be bearable."

My god, you sound exactly like my evangelical mom when you say this.

Some of the most effective advice against mental demons actually comes from my mother -- she talks frequently using the exact language you've used here, about how we've got all these voices in our head that sound like one's voice but aren't. And in her mind, it's a choice to listen to them or to do something else that's important; focusing on them gives them more power.

What's funny is prayer also came up as a potential coping strategy (in a long list of coping strategies) that my definitely-not-religious therapist shared are helpful to some people when dealing with strong emotions. And I can share I do find it helpful at times.

If you allow me to be psychological instead of theological, I think it has the same effect as those mental excercises where people imagine their worry as physical object and then imagine getting rid of it. It unburdens the mind in a way it will accept. (And if you'll allow me to be theological instead of psychological, there was a thread not too long ago about why people believe in petitionary prayer, and this is it -- it's not about somehow bending the will of God towards something, but about releasing the concerns about which you can do nothing outside of yourself and putting it into the hands of God.)

and a lot of cash is being made

By whom? My impression is that therapists are broadly pretty middle class and their bosses aren’t exceptionally well off either.

One of Shrier’s points is that it’s much more appealing for therapists to treat an anxious but otherwise normal teen than someone with a worse condition, since they make the same money, the client is generally easier to get along with.

My googling just now suggests that mental health services in America cost something like 200 to 300 billion dollars a year. You can decide if that sounds like a lot or not, I suppose.

Anyway, I imagine it's a combination of things. I'm going to be totally anecdotal here and make some guesses based on women in my life who seem heavily steeped in this culture, so take it with a massive grain of salt.

On the one hand, you have celebrities like Dr. Phil (net worth $460 million) who genuinely do seem to make a lot of money off of their national brands. Same thing, I suspect, with high profile therapy-oriented book authors who cycle through media targeting women. More than just the money they make, though, they soak up a huge amount of attention while cementing the public frame that everyone could and should use therapy, no different from going to a doctor, and that therapy works and can help anyone. Any time I find myself at a doctors office waiting room in the middle of the day with women's day time tv on, I'm constantly caught off guard by how utterly pervasive the therapy language is in the normal conversations of the (if I'm being mean) clucking hens on those shows. It's the water the fish are swimming in, to mix animal metaphors. This space seems to have a lot of really high profile shysters, to my eyes - it reminds me a lot of tele-evangelists for a slightly different subculture.

And on the other hand, there is the properly credentialed world of normal, local therapists out there who, I suspect, mostly believe in what they're doing but are also aware of how hard and fuzzy working with people is, aren't making huge bank, and are trying to do their best... not that different from, say, teachers. I actually had plenty of experience with such counseling in my teen years, as a matter of fact. And my impression is not that such people are bad people particularly - but like anyone, I think they kind of have to believe that what they do is generally helpful and a helpful part of a solution to other people's problems, even though often times people don't seem to get any better (but then, people really are enormously complicated, and change is hard, and people need to want to change, and you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink, and very often it is the social context of someone that is holding them back, and...) In all of this, they are just like the people I know in high frequency trading who kind of have to believe that by increasing liquidity in the system, they really making finance more efficient for everyone, and just like the higher up I know at Raytheon who kind of has to believe that national defense is obviously important and a net good and Raytheon is itself a net good in that space, and just like the literal DEI trainer I know (mom of my son's friend) who is a nice person who kind of has to believe that she's making the world a better place by running DEI workshops at our local bank. And all of them have mortgages that kind of depend on them believing that what they do is worth doing, even though it can be hard to tell when the world is so complicated, so they can keep their own lives afloat. But all of that eventually adds up to real money, in aggregate.

And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great. Maybe they would be even worse if that was not a part of their life; there's literally no way I could know that. But I really, really do wonder.

And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great.

This has the same vibe as “all the people I know who seem most drawn to oncologists all seem like they’re sick.” Um… yeah?

I don’t think therapy works for everyone. It works for some, and not very well for others. I’m rooting for myself being in the first group. But I hear testimonials from people who it has definitely helped, and I don’t see any reason to doubt them.

There might well be people of your acquaintance who went through therapy, found it helpful, and then moved on. They don’t talk about it, because it’s not an identity for such people, and mental health is very personal. The people for whom it is and identity and doesn’t work well are definitely the ones who are going to talk about it more. I’m not sure you can make a good argument about its effectiveness from the people who talk the most loudly about it. I think you need studies for that.

But I agree, therapy culture is toxic. It’s the equivalent of WebMD making everyone think they have cancer. It takes something private and useful and turns it into a very public weapon. Most people don’t need the tools of therapy, and I think the idea that they do is silly. It’s a condescension to the needs of a select group of suffering people. It’s like chemotherapy — it saves lives, but you shouldn’t give it to someone without the need for it.

Any number of behavior healthcare organizations which aren't paying anyone very much but are employing a lot of people to handle all the paperwork.