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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.

We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.

I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.

So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.

When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.

The culture that these people all seem to want to “R E T V R N” to is pretty explicitly not just Christian, but Catholic, isn’t it?

The idea they are supposedly criticizing, that human beings have dignity, is not a “slave mentality”, it is the foundational idea behind ending the standard where the vast majority of humans were subjects of their King. Christianity is a liberating ideology at its very core.

Of all the dumb, grifting things that people like Richard Spencer have said, this is perhaps one of the dumbest. This puts him into the same category as people like Andrew Tate; just absolute luke warm IQ people who would be working some low intelligence job if it were not for social media.

I think they want to return to pre Christian Germanic paganism, aka a remnant of the time of living in mud huts like the Africans they love to hate.

Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story that’s perfectly compatible with reactionary ideas about things like the place of women.

I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life, or find that their autistic NEET edge lord behavior is otherwise unwelcome in IRL Christian reactionary communities so try to go further back. Twitter edgelordism is escapism whether it’s on the left or the right.

Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story

Citation needed on this claim that somehow Christianity is the source of the technological advancement required to advance out of mud huts. Particularly when for the most of this time period everyone below a noble and a few wealthy merchants, still lived in mud huts.

The claim comes from The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, in which he demonstrates

  1. Cultural change from genuine belief in the Christian God
  2. Catholic marriage law dissolving tribal and clan based social structures which led to the invention of capitalism
  3. Societal structures built by the Catholic Church spread innovations much more quickly than otherwise, supported iterative improvements in technology and lifestyle, and meaningfully reduced time preferences in European populations

Thanks, I got the book and I'll check it out.

Varg certainly does. Literally burning down historical churches and making a whites only pagan tabletop RPG.

Himmler was big on this, but other Nazis made fun of him behind his back about his faux Germanic pagan mystical stuff.

I think everyone wants to go back to some idealized Rome. Our art features it's stand ins, half of Europe speaks a hand me down version of Latin, Americans use the mile Latin for thousand paces even though most people have no idea what it measures lb is the abbreviation for Libra and makes negative sense for pound, out calendar has 4 months that count months in Latin, and we still celebrate people forgetting when Rome moved their New Year, and our planets bear their gods' names. Not even the originators of those deities, the Greeks names for them.

I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.

I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life

I'm not so sure, given that the Christian reactionaries I know IRL can get pretty racist, despite (or maybe even because of) being mixed-race in some cases (Elwood "Chief Red Cloud" Towner was not unique).

Twitterati edgelords are on a whole other level; being a Christian reactionary myself I'm well aware that politically incorrect racial attitudes are common in the community. But going on unbidden rants on the subject doesn't seem particularly common, nor does unqualified praise for Hitler or support for ethnic cleansing or population control.

Twitterati edgelords are on a whole other level

Agreed

going on unbidden rants on the subject doesn't seem particularly common

No, because they've got jobs to keep, because they've got kids to feed. But in private conversations, or anonymous online spaces…

or support for ethnic cleansing or population control

I know a trad-Cath civil engineer who hates suburbs, and argues that instead of the "white flight" retreat that drove their growth and "urban decay," whites should have defended the inner city by "just shoot[ing] all the n*****s." (He's also a rabid antisemite of the "gas the k***s" variety, and has been on some TRS podcasts.) Then there's the Russian Orthodox Native guy who said that of all the terrible things the white man brought to this continent, the worst, above alcohol and smallpox, is black people.

I know a trad-Cath civil engineer who hates suburbs, and argues that instead of the "white flight" retreat that drove their growth and "urban decay," whites should have defended the inner city by "just shoot[ing] all the n*****s."

This is probably because he, like most IRL tradcaths, believes commie-coddler powers that be engineered the civil rights movement to direct the worst of the white flight generating violence against Catholic neighborhoods in an effort to break the cultural power of Catholicism(on the upswing in the 50’s and early 60’s due to very high fertility rates and strong group identity), not because he literally believes blacks should be exterminated.

not because he literally believes blacks should be exterminated.

Did you miss the part where he literally believes Jews should be exterminated? We went to high school together, so I've seen his views evolve from the Heinleinian right-libertarian sort to Trad-Cath Fascist (that's not an insult, that's self-identified).

I have never met a mentally OK enough to be basically functional tradcath who believed Jews ought be exterminated(and I have met a lot of tradcaths, including many who voice politically incorrect ideas and strong antisemitism quite freely), but I have no trouble believing you’ve found one- you wouldn’t be the only friendly or neutral observer who claims to have. I admit to being curious as to his attitude towards converts from Judaism, who would be ethnically Jewish but not religiously.

I recall, particularly, a traditional Catholic priest who once told me that bishop Williamson was of course right about the Holocaust, but he shouldn’t be allowed to say it because he doesn’t believe it would have been a tragedy if it had happened. Even if not exactly mainstream within traditional Catholicism, I don’t harbor delusions of bishop Williamson being one of a kind.

You really do encounter some idiosyncratic characters now and again. It sounds fake, but the boyfriend of one of my good friends, an Arab woman, for about a year at college was a black Muslim African guy (raised in Europe, but first generation and his family mostly still lived in their home country) who was a huge fan of Moldbug and Pat Buchanan. He was ambivalent about HBD/The Bell Curve (which I’ve always found is a remarkably widely-read book for wrongthink) but would discuss it with almost everyone he did coke with, which was a lot of people.

I was chuckling and looking for the retweet button before realizing this is a different site. Your friend sounds like he posts bangers

Also the problem is that almost all modern paganism is a LARP. Since there are no unbroken continuities of pagan faith in Europe (apart from the Mari native religion within the Mari Republic in Russia - though Mari pagan organizations have cooperated with the Muslims in Tatarstan), any "revivalist" efforts are basically based on imagining what such a group surviving to modern age might look like.

Of course if you have a racist Asatru group or whatever, formed by people who have explicitly left the Christian tradition because they think Christianity is Semitic and cucked, you're going to have a group that's more racist than Christians on average, but that's also obviously pretty circular. Other pagan groups think otherwise - most pagans that I've met tend to be far left. It doesn't really explain in any way whether a hypothetical pagan Europe without Christianity would be more "based", or whether a hypothetical future one where Christianity has gone away would be.

I'm aware that most pagans are into hippie nonsense, not racist nonsense, and that even most pagans with conservative tendencies are not particularly racist- the radical esoteric traditionalist crowd is truly fringe of the fringe- but if we're talking specifically about radical esoteric traditionalists, well, they're truly extremists and I suspect have a large fraction which just Does Not Play Well With Others, same as any other frighteningly extreme fringe of the fringe group.

The median pagan just wants to do drugs, and maybe sleep with some rebellious hippy chicks. Most racist pagans are in prison gangs. The 'ethno-conscious paganism as an ideological choice' thing is a small enough group that it's worth asking why people who claim to want reactionary social norms don't join the much larger communities which offer much more reactionary than average social norms which actually exist.