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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):
In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:
There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:
I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.
Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").
Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.
Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.
The nuanced version of this is less concerned with individuals changing their minds and more concerned with generational succession and coalitional realignment.
In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation), but while they were weak their immediate goals coincided with liberals' and they needed liberals' help to achieve them, so the coalitional rhetoric catered to liberals. Now that SJers are more numerous and powerful, and have already picked the low-hanging fruit, they have run out of common goals with liberals, and don't need the liberals to maintain a shot at power, so they kicked the liberals out of the coalition so that they could pursue their more illiberal goals. Meanwhile, the Moral Majority is no longer a majority and now needs the liberals, and also their most immediate goal of reversing SJ excesses is shared with liberals, so they've started including liberal things in their rhetoric.
To poke slightly at this one aspect: perhaps the movement started in the 90s and early 00s with adult 3-foundationers, but because of institutional capture, a generation of 6-foundationer children grew up influenced by this ideology (instead of the more natural-to-them 6-foundation traditional conservatism), and they fleshed it out into a full 6-foundation system of its own.
I wouldn't call the 3-foundationers SJers; I'd call them "90s liberals" or something (and there were 6-foundationers earlier than the 90s, just not in large numbers). But yes, that's my working bulverism of SJ as well.
It reminds me of the theory that young children form a creole language based on an adult pidgin.
That's the definition of a creole, yes? A pidgin spoken as a mother tongue.
Last I heard, that was the generally accepted theory, but like pretty much everything in linguistics, it's always being poked at.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What are these foundations? Why are there three versus six? I'm not familiar with this terminology.
As the others said, moral foundations - care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.
Everyone cares about the first three, but WEIRD (white/educated/industrialised/rich/democratic, and especially autistic) people care much less about the last three (while caring more about care/harm), which generates liberalism (and is why liberals frequently fail ideological Turing tests for conservatism, because it's harder to hypothetically add things to a moral compass than to remove them).
As @fishtwanger said, Haidt's book laying these out is dated because it predates SJ. My best working theory of SJ is that it's what happens if you try to cram 90s liberalism down the throats of people who are six-foundation-inclined; they will take superficial features of it, connect them to the missing foundations, and produce a bizarro-world morality that has all six foundations but lacks coherence and is divisive rather than unifying.
As I said above, this is a bulverism; it's an explanation for "why would people believe this crazy thing despite its craziness" rather than "what is the thesis of this thing and is it true". I don't like bulverism, and I don't like thinking of people as, well, morons susceptible to memetic effects. But it's the most sense I've managed to make of SJ.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, moral foundations theory. It's not the most grounded theory, because the foundations were largely eyeballed from initial data and then expanded based on feedback and discussion, instead of being chosen by some sort of factor analysis. And if someone does enough research on this to put it on solid ground, "three" and "six" are probably not what the result will be. But they're good enough for a shorthand.
The original book is interesting. It's dated, because it came out shortly before SJ hit, and it didn't anticipate SJ at all. But it's prophetic, because its thesis explains exactly why SJ is the way it is. And then there's the last section, which isn't talked about much, but which strikes directly at the heart of the rationalist project. It suggests that our capacity for rational thought is actually a capacity for rationalization and rhetoric, evolved to help us form strong coalitions with other humans, to help in intergroup competition. And that it's entirely incidental that this also happens to allow us to think rationally about the world, although it might be inevitable (as long as the simplest model is also correct). Which has some implications about LLMs, too.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty sure this is referencing moral foundations theory.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link