(This isn’t saying anything new, it’s just taking another angle on a commonly discussed topic in case some people find this angle easier to relate to or engage with).
Most people can tell the difference between communities where they matter and communities where they don’t. It’s often really hard to nail down, specifically, the set of differences between these communities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get a feel for it. There are places where people see you and people like you as a peer, a partner, a friend, and there are places where they see you as an imposition they tolerate for the sake of politeness, or a potential threat, or a waste of time and energy.
So lots of people go into a community and they get a visceral sense of ‘wow, this is a place where people like me aren’t welcome.’ And it’d be nice if they could pin it down beyond that - say ‘this is an interaction I had which sucked’ or ‘these are the rules that exclude me’ or ‘this was the thing which made it clear to me that people like me were unwelcome’ - but often you can’t pin it down that precisely. You know perfectly well what you experienced, but all of the evidence that got you there is nothing all by itself, or is almost completely intangible. Sometimes communities have an explicit rule that everyone is welcome, and if you say “I’m unwelcome” they will point at the rule and say “no you’re not”. But you are.
I know a lot of people who are confused or stressed by the discourse surrounding microaggressions. They read through lists of them and see a mix of some things that are obvious misconduct and some things that look harmless, that they do all the time with people of every background, that don’t seem horrible at all. So they dutifully memorize every list they run across and anxiously try to avoid it in future, even though they don’t have any idea why it’s bad, or else they unhelpfully argue with people about how it isn’t that bad.
But I think the actual thing with microaggressions is that feeling of ‘people like me are not welcome’ or at least ‘people like me are only conditionally welcome, welcome if we’re friendly and careful and unthreatening and reassuring and match other peoples’ narratives about us and aren’t angry and don’t make anyone uncomfortable and toe the party line’. It’s really helpful for people to collect and corroborate and discuss and complain about all of the little cues which add up to that impression, but scrupulously memorizing the list of cues and avoiding the things on your list won’t actually make spaces where people feel welcome. The problem is the ‘this space is not for people like you’ thing.
I think this is also what’s going on with a lot of discussion of bad allies. Lots of bad allying seems to amount to ‘loudly saying that people are valued while continuing to be the kind of space where they are palpably not valued’.
Which, of course, isn’t worse than being a space where people are not valued while not even giving lip service to the idea that they should be, but it can be uniquely frustrating because in a space that says ‘we hate gay people’ you can say ‘I am uncomfortable there because they hate me’ while in a space that claims to be supportive and fails at it all you can really say is 'uh. it sucks, for some reason’. Or you can give reasons that seem trivial and insignificant and which, if they were fixed, wouldn’t actually be sufficient.
Aye, this is so.
And the corollary is: you cannot make yourself welcome in a community by force.
Logical argument, guilt, and bullying are all powerful tools. They can accomplish a lot. But they mostly cause people to be less comfortable with you, not more. If you try to use them in order to make people be comfortable with you, then those people will respond by avoiding you or striking out at you or lying to you, or (mostly likely) some combination of the above. It will make the problem worse rather than better.
This is a positive claim, a matter of practicality. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter how unfair people are being to you; it doesn’t matter how good your points are; it doesn’t matter what sins lie upon their souls; you do not have the power to force them to welcome you, because that is not how welcoming works.
(It is a failure to understand this principle, I think, that underlies the systematic universal lying about comfort and acceptance that underlies American elite culture.)
Note that you don’t always need to be truly welcomed, within a given space. Sometimes other things matter much more.
Which is important, because while you can’t get people to welcome you by means of social force, there are other things that you can achieve that way. In particular, you can force acceptance, at the cost of culturally strip-mining the space and ensuring that everyone will be perpetually a little bit uncomfortable.
…those are some nasty-sounding words, but I don’t mean to be pejorative. Sometimes cultural strip-mining and minor discomfort are exactly appropriate. That’s how Truly Public Spaces (government, literal public thoroughfares, etc.) are supposed to work, and so long as we continue to have anything like a capitalist economy, it’s a good way for professional and commercial spaces to work as well. Everyone gets to be present, everyone gets to participate, including weirdos who set you on edge – and there will be weirdos who set you on edge. Everyone is carefully neutral and polite. Everyone knows that, under the thin veil of etiquette, a lot of the people around are going to be contemptuous or at least totally indifferent. No one gets to make assumptions about other people’s fundamental values or passions.
It’s not good to try to live forever in spaces like that. Not having a Real Welcoming Home is torment. But trying to make society’s neutral ground into your Real Welcoming Home is tyranny. The first step towards civilized life is learning to thread that needle.
Not absolutely true, but it’s often true.
(Whenever someone says “this immoral thing can not succeed, so that’s why you shouldn’t do it”, you do need to ask “Okay, but least convenient world, if it did work - if you could force welcome from a community - would it be ethical to?”)
Most of the people to whom this is notionally addressed believe that forcing welcome (at least for certain reasons) is not only acceptable but morally obligatory.
That’s because frankly, it does work and I think the idea that it doesn’t is based off a very limited idea of “working.” There are three general outcomes of a forced policy from above; revolution, schism, and grudging acceptance. The first is the only time where I’d say it’s a true failure, as it’s when a large enough part of the culture overthrows the rule makers and reinstitutes the old norms. The second is fairly common but not a failure mode; if the heretics split off the culture is arguably weaker for it, but the rule makers become far stronger as those people on the fence who stayed behind will quickly become supporters thanks to a brand new close range enemy to rail against.
The final outcome, which you seem to be speaking of, tends to eventually become a pure win as the old membership cycles out and is replaced with new blood who have only known this new norm and thus simply accept it as true. Group cohesion is a hell of a drug, especially when you have no attachment to old norms to hold you back.
To give an example, I don’t think the military is secretly hiding it’s desire to re-segregate it’s units based on race or kick out it’s gay spec ops members, and those were by definition forced from above
This kind of thing works much better, and is much more likely to happen, in the aforementioned “professional and commercial spaces.” Which is to say – spaces where most of the people are there for some reason other than comfort and culture, because there’s some kind of concrete project going on.
@theunitofcaring is (as far as I can tell) talking mostly about communities and other social spaces, and social spaces have a lot of “soft resistance” options when faced with possible members or proffered norms that they don’t like. They can quietly crumble, and maybe later reform in some nigh-identical edition that hasn’t yet been infected by the Outside Thing (or maybe not). They can become more consciously exclusive. Most important, they can do exactly the the thing that @theunitofcaring is talking about: act vaguely uncomfortable and unwelcoming, and hope that the Outside Thing gives up and goes away.
This is not going to work at a company, where the uncomfortable unwelcomed outsider is going to keep showing up so long as someone is paying him. It is definitely not going to work in the military.
Right, they have better access to Schism or Revolt; my argument is that the uncomfortable unwelcomeness is bring grudgingly accepted and eventually leads into full blown acceptence as new members are selected for those who accept the norm and otherwise don’t have attachment to the old norm. It’s slow, but as the firebrands against the old norm get purged fast you don’t really have any way to fight against the normalization if the new norm outside of an early fight or a slow fade of membership. You can see this at play with Country Clubs whose current membership would balk at the idea of not letting in rich black people or single rich women. After all, the new norm is that they’re one of us, not some sort of underclass pleb after all.
You just can’t enforce a rule for too long without it either becoming the new normal or honored in the breach (either via a Revolt/Schism or via everyone ignoring it as the leadership didn’t really have the power to enforce it) as a group will eventually come down on one side or another of said rule. For the short term you’re right, there will be plenty of people who follow the rule in letter but not in spirit, leading to the uncomfortable feeling. But that just doesn’t last in any group I’m aware of.
One important distinction is figuring out what the actual rule that is being pushed actually is however. There’s an ocean of difference between “don’t discriminate” and “don’t make raunchy jokes.” Plenty of people see the first, infer the second, and are confused when the actual norm is just the first
There’s some kind of weird communication failure going on here. You are talking about a model that relies on old members leaving (voluntarily or through purge) and new differently-socialized members coming in. But those old members don’t just disappear from the Earth, and they don’t stop having social lives – and if the thing you’re talking about is a community or a social scene, those old members are in fact the entirety of the thing to which you’re seeking access. You can maybe drive them away with coercive norm-setting, but if they just go hang out somewhere else, effectively all you’ve done is change the address of their clubhouse.
It’s different if they’re parked on top of some kind of valuable infrastructure (like a company or whatever). Then, well, you can steal their infrastructure out from under them. But if you want is access to them…
My own experience suggests that (at least certain kinds of) groups can sustain some level of cultural-dissonance discomfort for quite a long time, if the discomfort is less painful than either fracturing or openly confronting the values clash.
(This isn’t saying anything new, it’s just taking another angle on a commonly discussed topic in case some people find this angle easier to relate to or engage with).
Most people can tell the difference between communities where they matter and communities where they don’t. It’s often really hard to nail down, specifically, the set of differences between these communities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get a feel for it. There are places where people see you and people like you as a peer, a partner, a friend, and there are places where they see you as an imposition they tolerate for the sake of politeness, or a potential threat, or a waste of time and energy.
So lots of people go into a community and they get a visceral sense of ‘wow, this is a place where people like me aren’t welcome.’ And it’d be nice if they could pin it down beyond that - say ‘this is an interaction I had which sucked’ or ‘these are the rules that exclude me’ or ‘this was the thing which made it clear to me that people like me were unwelcome’ - but often you can’t pin it down that precisely. You know perfectly well what you experienced, but all of the evidence that got you there is nothing all by itself, or is almost completely intangible. Sometimes communities have an explicit rule that everyone is welcome, and if you say “I’m unwelcome” they will point at the rule and say “no you’re not”. But you are.
I know a lot of people who are confused or stressed by the discourse surrounding microaggressions. They read through lists of them and see a mix of some things that are obvious misconduct and some things that look harmless, that they do all the time with people of every background, that don’t seem horrible at all. So they dutifully memorize every list they run across and anxiously try to avoid it in future, even though they don’t have any idea why it’s bad, or else they unhelpfully argue with people about how it isn’t that bad.
But I think the actual thing with microaggressions is that feeling of ‘people like me are not welcome’ or at least ‘people like me are only conditionally welcome, welcome if we’re friendly and careful and unthreatening and reassuring and match other peoples’ narratives about us and aren’t angry and don’t make anyone uncomfortable and toe the party line’. It’s really helpful for people to collect and corroborate and discuss and complain about all of the little cues which add up to that impression, but scrupulously memorizing the list of cues and avoiding the things on your list won’t actually make spaces where people feel welcome. The problem is the ‘this space is not for people like you’ thing.
I think this is also what’s going on with a lot of discussion of bad allies. Lots of bad allying seems to amount to ‘loudly saying that people are valued while continuing to be the kind of space where they are palpably not valued’.
Which, of course, isn’t worse than being a space where people are not valued while not even giving lip service to the idea that they should be, but it can be uniquely frustrating because in a space that says 'we hate gay people’ you can say 'I am uncomfortable there because they hate me’ while in a space that claims to be supportive and fails at it all you can really say is 'uh. it sucks, for some reason’. Or you can give reasons that seem trivial and insignificant and which, if they were fixed, wouldn’t actually be sufficient.
Aye, this is so.
And the corollary is: you cannot make yourself welcome in a community by force.
Logical argument, guilt, and bullying are all powerful tools. They can accomplish a lot. But they mostly cause people to be less comfortable with you, not more. If you try to use them in order to make people be comfortable with you, then those people will respond by avoiding you or striking out at you or lying to you, or (mostly likely) some combination of the above. It will make the problem worse rather than better.
This is a positive claim, a matter of practicality. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter how unfair people are being to you; it doesn’t matter how good your points are; it doesn’t matter what sins lie upon their souls; you do not have the power to force them to welcome you, because that is not how welcoming works.
(It is a failure to understand this principle, I think, that underlies the systematic universal lying about comfort and acceptance that underlies American elite culture.)
Note that you don’t always need to be truly welcomed, within a given space. Sometimes other things matter much more.
Which is important, because while you can’t get people to welcome you by means of social force, there are other things that you can achieve that way. In particular, you can force acceptance, at the cost of culturally strip-mining the space and ensuring that everyone will be perpetually a little bit uncomfortable.
…those are some nasty-sounding words, but I don’t mean to be pejorative. Sometimes cultural strip-mining and minor discomfort are exactly appropriate. That’s how Truly Public Spaces (government, literal public thoroughfares, etc.) are supposed to work, and so long as we continue to have anything like a capitalist economy, it’s a good way for professional and commercial spaces to work as well. Everyone gets to be present, everyone gets to participate, including weirdos who set you on edge – and there will be weirdos who set you on edge. Everyone is carefully neutral and polite. Everyone knows that, under the thin veil of etiquette, a lot of the people around are going to be contemptuous or at least totally indifferent. No one gets to make assumptions about other people’s fundamental values or passions.
It’s not good to try to live forever in spaces like that. Not having a Real Welcoming Home is torment. But trying to make society’s neutral ground into your Real Welcoming Home is tyranny. The first step towards civilized life is learning to thread that needle.
Not absolutely true, but it’s often true.
(Whenever someone says “this immoral thing can not succeed, so that’s why you shouldn’t do it”, you do need to ask “Okay, but least convenient world, if it did work - if you could force welcome from a community - would it be ethical to?”)
Most of the people to whom this is notionally addressed believe that forcing welcome (at least for certain reasons) is not only acceptable but morally obligatory.
That’s because frankly, it does work and I think the idea that it doesn’t is based off a very limited idea of “working.” There are three general outcomes of a forced policy from above; revolution, schism, and grudging acceptance. The first is the only time where I’d say it’s a true failure, as it’s when a large enough part of the culture overthrows the rule makers and reinstitutes the old norms. The second is fairly common but not a failure mode; if the heretics split off the culture is arguably weaker for it, but the rule makers become far stronger as those people on the fence who stayed behind will quickly become supporters thanks to a brand new close range enemy to rail against.
The final outcome, which you seem to be speaking of, tends to eventually become a pure win as the old membership cycles out and is replaced with new blood who have only known this new norm and thus simply accept it as true. Group cohesion is a hell of a drug, especially when you have no attachment to old norms to hold you back.
To give an example, I don’t think the military is secretly hiding it’s desire to re-segregate it’s units based on race or kick out it’s gay spec ops members, and those were by definition forced from above
This kind of thing works much better, and is much more likely to happen, in the aforementioned “professional and commercial spaces.” Which is to say – spaces where most of the people are there for some reason other than comfort and culture, because there’s some kind of concrete project going on.
@theunitofcaring is (as far as I can tell) talking mostly about communities and other social spaces, and social spaces have a lot of “soft resistance” options when faced with possible members or proffered norms that they don’t like. They can quietly crumble, and maybe later reform in some nigh-identical edition that hasn’t yet been infected by the Outside Thing (or maybe not). They can become more consciously exclusive. Most important, they can do exactly the the thing that @theunitofcaring is talking about: act vaguely uncomfortable and unwelcoming, and hope that the Outside Thing gives up and goes away.
This is not going to work at a company, where the uncomfortable unwelcomed outsider is going to keep showing up so long as someone is paying him. It is definitely not going to work in the military.
(This isn’t saying anything new, it’s just taking another angle on a commonly discussed topic in case some people find this angle easier to relate to or engage with).
Most people can tell the difference between communities where they matter and communities where they don’t. It’s often really hard to nail down, specifically, the set of differences between these communities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get a feel for it. There are places where people see you and people like you as a peer, a partner, a friend, and there are places where they see you as an imposition they tolerate for the sake of politeness, or a potential threat, or a waste of time and energy.
So lots of people go into a community and they get a visceral sense of ‘wow, this is a place where people like me aren’t welcome.’ And it’d be nice if they could pin it down beyond that - say ‘this is an interaction I had which sucked’ or ‘these are the rules that exclude me’ or ‘this was the thing which made it clear to me that people like me were unwelcome’ - but often you can’t pin it down that precisely. You know perfectly well what you experienced, but all of the evidence that got you there is nothing all by itself, or is almost completely intangible. Sometimes communities have an explicit rule that everyone is welcome, and if you say “I’m unwelcome” they will point at the rule and say “no you’re not”. But you are.
I know a lot of people who are confused or stressed by the discourse surrounding microaggressions. They read through lists of them and see a mix of some things that are obvious misconduct and some things that look harmless, that they do all the time with people of every background, that don’t seem horrible at all. So they dutifully memorize every list they run across and anxiously try to avoid it in future, even though they don’t have any idea why it’s bad, or else they unhelpfully argue with people about how it isn’t that bad.
But I think the actual thing with microaggressions is that feeling of ‘people like me are not welcome’ or at least ‘people like me are only conditionally welcome, welcome if we’re friendly and careful and unthreatening and reassuring and match other peoples’ narratives about us and aren’t angry and don’t make anyone uncomfortable and toe the party line’. It’s really helpful for people to collect and corroborate and discuss and complain about all of the little cues which add up to that impression, but scrupulously memorizing the list of cues and avoiding the things on your list won’t actually make spaces where people feel welcome. The problem is the 'this space is not for people like you’ thing.
I think this is also what’s going on with a lot of discussion of bad allies. Lots of bad allying seems to amount to 'loudly saying that people are valued while continuing to be the kind of space where they are palpably not valued’.
Which, of course, isn’t worse than being a space where people are not valued while not even giving lip service to the idea that they should be, but it can be uniquely frustrating because in a space that says 'we hate gay people’ you can say 'I am uncomfortable there because they hate me’ while in a space that claims to be supportive and fails at it all you can really say is 'uh. it sucks, for some reason’. Or you can give reasons that seem trivial and insignificant and which, if they were fixed, wouldn’t actually be sufficient.
Aye, this is so.
And the corollary is: you cannot make yourself welcome in a community by force.
Logical argument, guilt, and bullying are all powerful tools. They can accomplish a lot. But they mostly cause people to be less comfortable with you, not more. If you try to use them in order to make people be comfortable with you, then those people will respond by avoiding you or striking out at you or lying to you, or (mostly likely) some combination of the above. It will make the problem worse rather than better.
This is a positive claim, a matter of practicality. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter how unfair people are being to you; it doesn’t matter how good your points are; it doesn’t matter what sins lie upon their souls; you do not have the power to force them to welcome you, because that is not how welcoming works.
(It is a failure to understand this principle, I think, that underlies the systematic universal lying about comfort and acceptance that underlies American elite culture.)
Note that you don’t always need to be truly welcomed, within a given space. Sometimes other things matter much more.
Which is important, because while you can’t get people to welcome you by means of social force, there are other things that you can achieve that way. In particular, you can force acceptance, at the cost of culturally strip-mining the space and ensuring that everyone will be perpetually a little bit uncomfortable.
…those are some nasty-sounding words, but I don’t mean to be pejorative. Sometimes cultural strip-mining and minor discomfort are exactly appropriate. That’s how Truly Public Spaces (government, literal public thoroughfares, etc.) are supposed to work, and so long as we continue to have anything like a capitalist economy, it’s a good way for professional and commercial spaces to work as well. Everyone gets to be present, everyone gets to participate, including weirdos who set you on edge – and there will be weirdos who set you on edge. Everyone is carefully neutral and polite. Everyone knows that, under the thin veil of etiquette, a lot of the people around are going to be contemptuous or at least totally indifferent. No one gets to make assumptions about other people’s fundamental values or passions.
It’s not good to try to live forever in spaces like that. Not having a Real Welcoming Home is torment. But trying to make society’s neutral ground into your Real Welcoming Home is tyranny. The first step towards civilized life is learning to thread that needle.
Not absolutely true, but it’s often true.
(Whenever someone says “this immoral thing can not succeed, so that’s why you shouldn’t do it”, you do need to ask “Okay, but least convenient world, if it did work - if you could force welcome from a community - would it be ethical to?”)
Most of the people to whom this is notionally addressed believe that forcing welcome (at least for certain reasons) is not only acceptable but morally obligatory.
(This isn’t saying anything new, it’s just taking another angle on a commonly discussed topic in case some people find this angle easier to relate to or engage with).
Most people can tell the difference between communities where they matter and communities where they don’t. It’s often really hard to nail down, specifically, the set of differences between these communities, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get a feel for it. There are places where people see you and people like you as a peer, a partner, a friend, and there are places where they see you as an imposition they tolerate for the sake of politeness, or a potential threat, or a waste of time and energy.
So lots of people go into a community and they get a visceral sense of ‘wow, this is a place where people like me aren’t welcome.’ And it’d be nice if they could pin it down beyond that - say ‘this is an interaction I had which sucked’ or ‘these are the rules that exclude me’ or ‘this was the thing which made it clear to me that people like me were unwelcome’ - but often you can’t pin it down that precisely. You know perfectly well what you experienced, but all of the evidence that got you there is nothing all by itself, or is almost completely intangible. Sometimes communities have an explicit rule that everyone is welcome, and if you say “I’m unwelcome” they will point at the rule and say “no you’re not”. But you are.
I know a lot of people who are confused or stressed by the discourse surrounding microaggressions. They read through lists of them and see a mix of some things that are obvious misconduct and some things that look harmless, that they do all the time with people of every background, that don’t seem horrible at all. So they dutifully memorize every list they run across and anxiously try to avoid it in future, even though they don’t have any idea why it’s bad, or else they unhelpfully argue with people about how it isn’t that bad.
But I think the actual thing with microaggressions is that feeling of 'people like me are not welcome’ or at least 'people like me are only conditionally welcome, welcome if we’re friendly and careful and unthreatening and reassuring and match other peoples’ narratives about us and aren’t angry and don’t make anyone uncomfortable and toe the party line’. It’s really helpful for people to collect and corroborate and discuss and complain about all of the little cues which add up to that impression, but scrupulously memorizing the list of cues and avoiding the things on your list won’t actually make spaces where people feel welcome. The problem is the 'this space is not for people like you’ thing.
I think this is also what’s going on with a lot of discussion of bad allies. Lots of bad allying seems to amount to 'loudly saying that people are valued while continuing to be the kind of space where they are palpably not valued’.
Which, of course, isn’t worse than being a space where people are not valued while not even giving lip service to the idea that they should be, but it can be uniquely frustrating because in a space that says 'we hate gay people’ you can say 'I am uncomfortable there because they hate me’ while in a space that claims to be supportive and fails at it all you can really say is 'uh. it sucks, for some reason’. Or you can give reasons that seem trivial and insignificant and which, if they were fixed, wouldn’t actually be sufficient.
Aye, this is so.
And the corollary is: you cannot make yourself welcome in a community by force.
Logical argument, guilt, and bullying are all powerful tools. They can accomplish a lot. But they mostly cause people to be less comfortable with you, not more. If you try to use them in order to make people be comfortable with you, then those people will respond by avoiding you or striking out at you or lying to you, or (mostly likely) some combination of the above. It will make the problem worse rather than better.
This is a positive claim, a matter of practicality. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter how unfair people are being to you; it doesn’t matter how good your points are; it doesn’t matter what sins lie upon their souls; you do not have the power to force them to welcome you, because that is not how welcoming works.
(It is a failure to understand this principle, I think, that underlies the systematic universal lying about comfort and acceptance that underlies American elite culture.)
Note that you don’t always need to be truly welcomed, within a given space. Sometimes other things matter much more.
Which is important, because while you can’t get people to welcome you by means of social force, there are other things that you can achieve that way. In particular, you can force acceptance, at the cost of culturally strip-mining the space and ensuring that everyone will be perpetually a little bit uncomfortable.
…those are some nasty-sounding words, but I don’t mean to be pejorative. Sometimes cultural strip-mining and minor discomfort are exactly appropriate. That’s how Truly Public Spaces (government, literal public thoroughfares, etc.) are supposed to work, and so long as we continue to have anything like a capitalist economy, it’s a good way for professional and commercial spaces to work as well. Everyone gets to be present, everyone gets to participate, including weirdos who set you on edge – and there will be weirdos who set you on edge. Everyone is carefully neutral and polite. Everyone knows that, under the thin veil of etiquette, a lot of the people around are going to be contemptuous or at least totally indifferent. No one gets to make assumptions about other people’s fundamental values or passions.
It’s not good to try to live forever in spaces like that. Not having a Real Welcoming Home is torment. But trying to make society’s neutral ground into your Real Welcoming Home is tyranny. The first step towards civilized life is learning to thread that needle.
The following question is for people who are broadly in favor of substantial economic redistribution, and more specifically in favor of a basic income or some similar plan. If you’re opposed to those things, your responses here will not shed any useful light.
Let us suppose, hypothetically, that our Wise Social Scientists – I guess you should imagine some awesome Hari-Seldon-esque figure – made the following determination with a high and convincing degree of certainty:
The upper and middle classes will never go for an egalitarian redistribution scheme, because it is too damaging to their social identities. And they have the clout to prevent any such scheme from being enacted. Seriously, give it up, it’s not going to happen. The well-to-do will allow society to crumble and decay, they will throw away their own futures, before they let the government just start handing out money to everyone as though everyone is equally deserving of it.
But they can be bought off. They will accept redistribution, they’ll even cheer for it, so long as it acknowledges and preserves the basic class structure from which they draw their validation.
Someone proposes a tiered system. Maybe there’s three tiers – the UBI (Universal Basic Income) for regular plebs, the somewhat-more-generous GPI (Gentleman’s Public Income) for anyone with a college degree, and the positively-lavish ASI (Aristocratic State Income), which goes to anyone with a family member who’s paid some large total amount in taxes. Or maybe you organize it some other way. Maybe the size of your public income is linked to your SAT score. Maybe there are actual goddamn blood castes.
(For Extra Discourse Fun, we could do it racially.)
One way or another, the basic effects of the system are the same:
* Money is still flowing from the rich-as-a-class to the poor-as-a-class, in very large amounts. The particulars of redistribution are a little wonky, and obviously suboptimal in utilitarian terms – and certain classes of people, probably including overeducated niche artists/intellectuals and the less-capable children of the elite, make out like bandits – but, fundamentally, what you’ve got is a system where everyone gets paid and it’s all coming out of the taxes provided by the upper and middle classes.
* The government is symbolically acknowledging the supremacy of some groups over others, even within its universal welfare system.
It’s…not what you want. But it’s the only offer you’re going to get.
How do you feel about this scenario? What are the correct decisions? What details make an important difference?
Today’s incredibly petty complaint: people who write “Lovecraftian horror” are almost all doing it wrong.
Lovecraft wrote about the existential horror of being destroyed by threats we can’t even comprehend. His monsters were new and bizarre and incomprehensible, the better to call up existential fear. The easiest to picture is an octopus-dragon-giant, and things escalate from there to the literally indescribable.
Modern Lovecraftians… make us read about Cthulu. Everyone knows who that is, guys. Your readers have plush toys of him and can recite the R’lyeh quote from memory. It is the exact opposite of an incomprehensible mystery. Saying “the King in Yellow is an avatar of Hastur and has these properties” is similarly non-mysterious. And god forbid you introduce good guys and bad guys among your monsters - do that and there’s nothing existential left!
(Charlie Stross gets a pass because he’s crossing it with other things and is just having so damn much fun with it.)
I can’t blame modern writers for this entirely, August Derleth started the whole trend. But with every ‘Cthulu for President’ bumper sticker sold, keeping to the monster everybody knows becomes a little further from the original sentiment. You can even keep to Lovecraft, people! Go set something in Leng or write about Bokrug, just keep it unfamiliar!
At this point it feels like the best “Lovecraftian” stuff coming out abandons the mythos completely. Amnesia and Alice Isn’t Dead capture the feel of it all far better than yet another game set in Innsmouth.
You see this framing of “Lovecraftian horror” a lot. I am not a huge fan.
For one thing, HPL talks a big game about the horrifically incomprehensible cosmos that will blast your sanity with their eldritch alienness, but even his own writing doesn’t really bear that out in a lot of cases. Kuranes becomes King of the Dreamlands. Randolph Carter actually creates a noteworthy part of the Dreamlands, by dint of his sheer imaginative awesomeness, and then goes on to merge with an Outer God (or to have been so merged all along) and become a cosmic Time Force. Yog-Sothoth, the Key and the Gate itself, mates with a human woman and produces half-human spawn. Nyarlathotep, the Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods, who is pretty much the most horrific and alien and eldritch creature out there, is willing to dress up like an Egyptian and monologue like a B-movie villain. Time after time, the horrific alien cosmos turns out to be pretty darn accessible to human intelligence. And those are some of the most interesting, memorable parts of his corpus. Certainly they have a lot more impact than the umpteenth repetition of “It was very scary! So scary that you cannot fathom it! Be scared of this vaguely-described thing!”
But beyond that…
Yes, HPL wants us to be scared of all the stuff that he writes about. But HPL is scared of everything. He is scared of seafood. He is scared of swarthy minorities. He is absolutely plumb terrified of the prospect that he might be something other than entirely human, that there could be a touch of the weird and unfamiliar inside him. And, more than anything, he is scared of the dying of the Old Medieval Certainties, the loving God and the anthropocentric universe etc. etc.
We are not HPL. We are not shivering basket cases. We are actually not scared of those things. Most of us have made some kind of peace with the idea that the metaphysics of the world do not inherently care about us. Most of us, if we learned that we were part-immortal-fishman, would react with some amount of “awesome!” and “huh” as well as “AAAAARGH.”
You might think that, because of this disconnect, Lovecraft’s writing would just fall flat. But it doesn’t. Basket case or not, he was an imaginative genius, and it shows. Strip away the hyper-neurotic everything-is-terrible mentality of HPL’s usual narrators, and what you’re left with is…one of the first big, sprawling, science-fantasy universes in our fictional canon. And it is fucking amazing, even if it’s not as unilaterally spooooooooooky as Lovecraft himself thinks it is. It is a place where magic works, but not in any way that’s easy to understand or to manipulate, so it has a lot of numinous power. It is a place where all the noble dreams of humanity can come true (in the Dreamlands), but…not in a way that means what you’d expect. It is a place filled with aliens-who-are-genuinely-alien, that holy grail of genre writing. It is a place where gods are real, but they are not the gods of our fond prayers, and they are weird and wonderful and very definitely dangerous. Sometimes it is grand and poetic (Cthulhu lies dreaming-not-dead!). Sometimes it’s just plain goofy (Mi-Go brain cylinders!). Almost all of it is cool.
A lot of the writers who stuck around in the Mythos tradition, both prose writers and RPG writers, understand that pretty well.
So, hells yes, tell me about Cthulhu and what he’s doing, tell me about the avatars of Hastur and how they work, tell me about Tsathoggua and Shub-Niggurath and the Yithians all the rest of that gribbly squamous crowd. At least…do so if you have something interesting to say about them. They’re worth the attention, and adding something to the big science-fantasy tapestry is a lot more worthwhile (as far as I’m concerned) than another round of THE BIG SCARY UNIVERSE IS VERY BIG AND SCARY.
All that said: yes, most of the silly jokey Campus-Crusade-for-Cthulhu stuff sucks, in exactly the same way that most Tolkeiniana kitsch (weed-smoking hobbits etc.) sucks. It takes something numinous and dignified and powerful and grinds it down for the sake of a cheap joke. Don’t do that.
The good-guys-versus-bad-guys thing is…a little more complicated. Certainly having a metaphysically defined “good side” is 100% against the underlying rules of the setting, and is terrible. HPL himself has potent gods who are more or less “on humanity’s side,” most notably Nodens, and there are all kinds of interesting and powerful things you can do with this that are totally in keeping with the rules of the setting. And, well, if you’re opposed to the idea that someone can side with a Mythos monster or monster-god for reasons that he comprehensibly understands to be “good” as a matter of morals/ideology – you and I are going to have to have some more words.
“the anxious animal lover”, a reference guide of all sorts of animal behaviors and what they mean, and how animals interpret certain behaviors, with a lot more fine detail than the Generalized Extruded Positivity you usually see from animal-advice, that in describing what actually upsets an animal or indicates an animal is upset, can be then trusted when it says other things do not
this idea brought to you by my question “When Heimdall is outside in the rain and mud and is too wet and filthy to be let in, does coming to the glass door and looking at him and waving at him for extended times make him happy to see me, or make him anxious and upset that he sees me and can’t get at me? is his pawing at the door playful or desperate?”, and the realization that I would never, ever be able to get an answer I would be able to trust because nobody who answered that question would ever consider the second possibility at all
There are definitely Tumblrs that talk about animal welfare, and the signs of animal distress, in terms that are not calibrated for Universal Positivity. Here I’m thinking of the people that (e.g.) respond to pictures of “smiling” cute dogs “playing” alongside random cute wild animals with NO YOU FUCKWITS THAT DOG LOOKS TERRIFIED AND THE THING YOU ARE DOING IS ABUSE.
Unfortunately I can’t give you any links, because this is a topic in which I have no independent interest and I run across it only in passing. If I remember correctly, @fierceawakening has some connection to this world?
found on gourmet hot takes, but seems pretty obviously true
Expanding a little:
GoT as deconstruction of the premodern world is laughable, because the characters and the society of the show are not actually premodern
whatever social critique there is which is relevant to contemporary society is fairly shallow and uninsightful
there is some genre-deconstruction, but it’s already outdated in terms of literature, and fans of the show but not the books were not particularly in need of it to begin with
So what happens when we actually read GoT? What does it have to say about society and power?
First, all who are not in the nobility or their attendants are basically NPCs. It is a thoroughly aristocratic view of power. Where the people appear, they are nasty, cowardly, violent and traitorous. Their deaths are, broadly speaking, utterly irrelevant.
It is a machiavellian world of brutal realpolitik. Almost all who hold to any kind of ideal die, often horribly. The only redemption so far countenanced by the show is for the right monarch to rule, i.e. Danaerys.
Danaerys has one of the strongest claims to the throne among the various pretenders. In spite of the Targaryen dynasty having ended in a mostly righteous revolt against the Mad King, hope for the realm lies in the restoration of the traditional royal line, which is also tied to a great and ancient empire.
Jon Snow, her presumptive mate, was in the last season revealed to share that lineage. As the other protagonist, he represents another ancient royal line, the Starks, returning to their rightful place as the rulers of Winterfell.
The central drama thus has from the beginning been the restoration of the king and queen by right from usurpers who took it through might (the Baratheons), money (the Lannisters) and treachery (the Boltons).
So the show turns out to all along have been, and unless there are some major thematic upheavals will continue to be, monarchist in its very heart. And let me tell you–the reason people love the show is not that they haven’t noticed.
Ross Douthat continues to be wrong about literally everything
Game of Thrones has the exact opposite message - it is very consistently anti-monarchist. The people don’t take part in the Game of Thrones because they don’t care who sits on the throne and they’re just trying to survive the brutality of the nobles’ wars and intrigues. Again and again the would-be kings are promised ‘the smallfolk are stitching banners for you in secret waiting for your return’ and it’s always bullshit. They don’t support anyone - they just endure them. What does the Game of Thrones do for the people? It makes them suffer, and that’s all. It’s not empowering or ennobling for them - read Septon Meribald’s speech about broken men, which is perhaps the heart of the story’s message. The horrors visited on the population aren’t irrelevant to the story at all - they are the punchline of the whole thing, these crowned idiots, each horribly flawed in their own way and none fit to rule, couldn’t stop playing their game and here’s how the people paid the price.
No one has any better claim to rule Westeros than anyone else, least of all Daenerys, her dynasty hasn’t been on the throne for decades and she’s apparently behind Jon Snow in line anyway. And that’s a key theme to this all - there is no rightful monarch. Who has power is all about, yes, brutal realpolitik, rather than law, justice, or righteousness. And Daenerys is not righteous at all - everything she’s done in Slaver’s Bay has left chaos and oceans of blood in her wake. She is another character like each of the Stark children - each is a naive caricature of a heroic fantasy archetype who is brutally confronted with the harsh reality of the world at every turn. Her arc is all about how you can’t just sweep in and try to present yourself as a messianic liberator, turn everything upside down, and have everything be swell after that (see: what happened when she saved Mirri Maz Duur), and she is becoming increasingly comfortable with ruling by terror. This is an anti-war story even more than it is an anti-monarchy story, and she is US foreign policy in the Middle East. She is well on track to becoming the worst villain of the story in the end, she is being set up as a paranoid tyrant who burns her enemies just like her father. If you think she’s really gonna be the hero who’s going to show up and save the day from the Others and take back the Iron Throne and marry Jon Snow and live happily ever after I don’t know what story you’ve been reading. That would be a ‘major thematic upheaval.’ If this were a standard predictable heroic fantasy story that’s where things would go from here, so that’s definitely not where things are going.
The reason people love the story is that it subverts heroic fantasy tropes in surprising ways without censoring itself and so it’s fresh and exciting and it feels gritty and real, not because people really subconsciously want a king to rule them. It feels like you’re being told the truth about the nature of war and political power - not a feeling you get from Douthat’s crowd anymore these days, I’m afraid.
I feel like the author has already called out this perspective in the character of Jorah Mormont - he idealizes Daenerys and desperately longs to submit himself to her and serve her, but she won’t have him, because she’s not who he thinks she is and this isn’t the kind of story Mormont thinks it is, and IMO she’s almost certainly going to betray and kill him before the end of it because she’s turning ever more paranoid and brutal even though IRL fanatics and sycophants to powerful politicians are taking it as her becoming ‘mature’ and ‘serious’ and thus are only going to be able to see her descent into madness in retrospect
This is…not fair to Douthat, and not a super-on-target reading of the ASoIaF books, in a couple of ways.
The big narrative arc set up in A Game of Thrones is straight-up old-timey heroic fantasy; there’s definitely a thick layer of, uh, “Knights Who Say Fuck” grim cynical realpolitik slathered on top of that arc, but it’s not the core or the foundation of the story. There is a zombie apocalypse on the horizon. Winter Is Coming. This is the single most important fact about the setting, plot-wise: all your stupid dynastic intrigue is a diversion, what matters is having a heroic executive who can coordinate Bold Strong Action against the Existential Threat.
Which is certainly old-timey-monarchist enough, just by itself. But the books go on to emphasize that the tools needed to defeat the Existential Threat are the tools of the Old Legitimate Royal House (dragons and Valyrian steel), that only those Born of Rightful Blood can wield these tools, and that the scions of the Old Legitimate Royal House (Dany, Jon, quite probably Tyrion) are the individuals displaying the proper benevolence and strength-of-character to pull this off.
That’s where we were as of, say, the end of AClash of Kings. It’s become pretty clear since then that Martin has fallen in love with his own reputation as a purveyor of Grim Cynical Reality, and also with his reputation as someone willing to shock his readers by having his lead characters meet horrible fates, so he’s drifted more and more in that direction – see, e.g., the whole Brienne and Pod wandering-through-the-horror plotline, and Tyrion’s Book 5 transformation into a unpleasantly selfish dickwad. And, concomitantly, he’s drifting further and further away from the heroic fantasy arc.
(This is my personal explanation for why the books are taking so damn long. I think he really doesn’t want to get around to doing the things his plot demands that he do, because they will reveal the extent to which is opus really is just Lame Old-Fashioned Extruded Fantasy Product at its heart.)
It wouldn’t surprise me hugely at this point if he were driven to subvert the whole thing by, say, having Dany turn into a Crazy Bad Guy and having some relative rando end up more-or-less saving the day and holding power, no matter how little sense it made from a literary perspective. But I don’t blame anyone for looking at the plot being set up in the first segments of the series and the show, the plot where “Jon is Rhaegar’s heir” is the central hidden plot hinge, and taking it seriously.
But of course Douthat isn’t really interested in the actual literary properties of this story. He’s interested in the psychology of the readers/viewers.
And if you’re trying to sell me on the idea that people are into Game of Thrones because they so dearly love watching cynical eviscerations of the monarchy – that is, because it’s so much fun to watch someone “subvert fantasy tropes” – well, all I can say is that my priors are blaring all sorts of alarms here, and you’re going to need to present a whole hell of a lot more evidence in order to convince me. That does not sound like any large group of people I’ve ever heard of. That sounds like the kind of thing that appeals to small communities of intellectuals and artists, sometimes, and pretty much no one else.
Yes, yes, “they secretly yearn for a king” is a little strong and a little out-on-a-limb (although frankly I wouldn’t be so super surprised). But let’s go with “they like pretty old-fashioned outfits and cool-looking castles and badass swordfights.” And “they like the idea of being important and noteworthy just because of your birth, with the details of your personality being socially and politically salient facts.” And even just “they like [fake] history-as-soap-opera, where people and relationships dominate, because it’s a lot more resonant than history-as-the-grinding-of-vast-impersonal-egregores.”
So the thing about Jonathan Larson’s work – and this is most visible and central in tick, tick…BOOM!, but also very important to Rent – is that it is 100% about the zeitgeist of the ‘90s.
Which means something more than “a lot of people are dying of AIDS.”
I’m a fair bit younger than Larson, and younger than at least some of my readers, but I do actually remember the ‘90s. Things felt very different then…for everyone, I’d imagine, but certainly for bright young middle-class folks. There was more hope and a lot less fear.
For both Jon and Mark, and even to some large extent for HIV-positive Roger, the great enemies on the horizon are ennui and mediocrity. Selling out, which is to say “giving up on Ultimate Fulfillment by getting a lucrative mainstream-prestigious job and a luxurious lifestyle,” is the worst ending. They are worried about becoming Michael or Benny. Not about whether they’re going to be able to find jobs, not about whether they’re actually going to be able to make rent for realsies, certainly not about becoming homeless.
That sounds impossibly sheltered and privileged, now, but…it wasn’t, then. Not nearly as much. The economy was roaring, American liberal-democratic hegemony was unquestioned, our political battles mostly involved stupid symbolic shit, the social contract seemed to be holding together pretty damn well. Fukuyama’s “end of history” hypothesis seemed at least kinda plausible, in the ‘90s, and so did the idea that every talented kid with a degree could aspire to at least a life of wealth and contentment.
And on the flip side, when the world seems to be working pretty well in mundane terms, Ultimate Fulfillment doesn’t sound like a matter of “maybe we’ll revolutionize everything and then all the Crushing Awful Problems will go away.” It is something more personal, more transcendental, more ineffable. These yearnings might well have been henotic or mystical if ‘90s kids had been capable of any interest in religion, but they weren’t, so we got endless attempts at artistic and sexual epiphanies.
So: yes, the main characters of Rent are mostly poverty tourists, who are very definitely not pushing for any kind of systemic revolution. And why should they have been? What in their world would have given them reason to think that systemic revolution could be a meaningful answer to anyone’s problems?
Why the demon theme? You don't seem especially demonic in a conventional sense.
The demons
hate the world. They claim that it is theirs by right of creation, and
that it was stolen from them, and that it is not as it should have been
– that they were driven into the outer darkness, and that their work
was remade by those who could not understand their vision. But they are
known liars, so who can say what is true? Regardless, reality in its
current configuration offends them, for it does not bear the marks of their art and it is beloved by their despised
enemies. They wish for it to be torn down and replaced with something
wholly different. For this reason they grant their power to those who
would change things utterly.
(referring to the original post but keeping the addendum) I know it’s a Tumblr cliche, but: someone finally said it.
Also, local communities will inevitably be crushing to some in the
same way as nuclear families are, even though both are net good things. Any
system in which you have to rely on the personal favor of the people
immediately around you for basic resources is going to be capable of
thoroughly screwing anyone who deviates from the local norm. I have a
very strong leave-me-alone-and-get-out-of-my-business drive and for most
people with that temperament libertarianism has obvious appeal, and I get
that, but ultimately this isexactly why I favor centralized
distribution of essential survival needs on a universal entitlement
basis. Large-scale centralized systems need to be impersonal, they need to apply to everyone,
and that means that in the worst-case scenario, where you drew a bad
card in the birth lotto and your family or the local elders are terrible
and toxic and abusive and hate you for your nature etc, you as a member
of the greater society still have recourse. I’m as suspicious of
left-anarchist models that rely solely on mutual aid and solidarity as I
am of these tribal utopias [sic as hell] you see proposed by
ethnotraditionalists.
Yeah, this is a mess all around – I think the tribalism-boosters are mostly correct about the benefits of that lifestyle, but the folks in this thread are also largely correct about the cost. It seems to me that the hard-tribal communitarian system really is better for about two-thirds of people, and it’s drastically better if you’re optimizing for community or lineage welfare, which is significant because I think large chunks of human moral intuition are designed for that and simply don’t function properly when the individual is the operational unit. But it can be really, really bad for the people it’s bad for.
That kind of society is engineered to destroy me, and I do have an unavoidable bias against societies engineered to destroy me. But I don’t think it’s possible to create a society that isn’t engineered to destroy large swathes of the population, because of the intersection of three constraints:
Firstly, you need to bring the possibility of being ruined by bad luck or abuse to incredibly low levels or that alone will suffice to destroy large numbers of people.
Secondly, people have extremely diverse needs – so diverse that you can’t even have a community for each and allow them to sort themselves, because the inability to easily change communities is itself a need many people have.
Thirdly, the intensity of people’s needs and their tolerance of having them denied varies enormously, so there’s always a large contingent of people who are on the brink of complete collapse because they really, really have to have their needs met and they’re just barely getting enough. This means that spreading small costs across a large number of people isn’t safe – it will still drive a lot of people to ruin, because the nature of the system is that there are always a large number of people just barely hanging on.
So I can’t rule out that a society engineered to destroy me might be better than one that isn’t, which kind of sucks. I’ll still vote for the latter, because I’m selfish, but the whole business really puts a damper on any community engineering ambitions I might have had.
What happens in a tribe where autonomy is a core value and infringing on someone’s autonomy is the sort of thing there’s little tolerance for? I think about this stuff a lot, like i think it is one of the central questions in trying to wrap my head around disability, and that seems like the ideal to me, and like something i’ve glimpsed in my real life.
In briefest terms: one of two things, either of which will fail to get you the magic you want.
Either
(a) “Autonomy” becomes an empty buzzword, equivalent to “the correct display of tribal norms,” and the community enforces conformity through ruthless persecution of “bad people who infringe on others’ autonomy.” You can see this in nigh-unto-caricature form in the worst and least-self-aware parts of socially-conservative red state America, where “we are the Land of the Free” is waved like a flag to show why American culture is the best, and must therefore be preserved at all costs by preventing people from exercising their freedom.
or
(b) People actually take the autonomy thing seriously, and therefore hit the road when things get bad, meaning that there’s minimal concrete interdependence and the community risks collapsing whenever you hit a local maximum of drama.
When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.
Tribes are, basically, big families. You know how families work, probably. You were probably raised in one.
And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.
Nonetheless. Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.
Because there are costs, and they are crushing. Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries. The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.” Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone. Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values. Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics.
Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case. But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling.
Squaring this circle is super hard. It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects. Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet. But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism.
OK, I’m rereading this, and I should add an addendum, because this is important and I feel bad about eliding it earlier.
For those of you who are, e.g., raising children or planning to do so: my point is definitely not that all (nuclear) family environments are psychologically horrible. It is not even that it is impossible to have a (nuclear) family that shows respect for its members’ individual autonomy, etc. You can definitely do those things. I have seen people who do. Those people are heroes.
But it is so costly! It is so difficult! God, it is one of the hardest and most expensive projects ever undertaken by man. It basically entails saying “we are going to pour all our resources into one or two or three children, we are going to give them claims on every part of us, and we are going to ask nothing in return. We are going to strip our souls and our bank accounts bare for people whom we fully expect may up and leave us because they will want to live their own lives and pursue their own dreams.”
Most families are not capable of this. Most families aren’t trying for this. Most families expect payment in devotion for their care, according to the ancient tribal logic. And the bigger and more extended your family is, the stronger the pull of that tribal logic will be.
I understand what you’re trying to get at here, but I think that your statement is massively warped by the bubble effect of rationalist-adjacency. This line in particular:
Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.
… is the exact opposite of my lived experience. Yes, here on Tumblr (in general) and on rationalist-adjacent spaces (in particular) people complain about their families all the time, and a very high percentage of people are estranged from their families to some degree. But the families that I actually know IRL have basically none of this. As in, literally 0% of the families that I know in person fit the description of families that you have given above, and I can think of exactly one (1) living family member in my family or any other that I know who has members that are estranged from them in the way that the typical rat or rat-adjacent blogger claims to be.
And these are the American families. The Romanian families that I know are even more close-knit and have even lower rates of significant failure. This doesn’t mean that my family and the families around me are free of conflict or exist in lock-step conformity. But it does mean that they’re mostly agreeable most of the time, so that the benefits of the family/tribal structure dramatically outweigh the costs.
So my empirical observation is that, in fact, families are generally successful, and that the notable failures are much rarer than the everyday successes.
Nonetheless, the observation that most of you fled from the bosom of your families is probably accurate if “you” is understood to refer to the actual readers of your blog. But this is an artifact of the fact that rationalism and its orbit tends to attract people who (1) have bad families, or (2) have families in which they fit poorly (usually because of some combination of autism, trans, and gay). But this does not generalize to the rest of the world.
Your addendum also seems to be setting up a false dilemma, in which families are either authoritarian micro-managers or individualist launching-pads with no long-term claims on their members. Every family that I know well falls between these extremes. In my family, no one ever put any restriction on our choice of career or spouse or place of residence; but my parents do in fact expect to be “repaid in devotion”, in that they expect that I’ll call them on their birthday and send Christmas presents and come to visit with their grandkids as often as is feasible. This is a totally non-onerous and reasonable expectation. Honestly, I think my parents would be reasonable to expect a lot more than they do, and they deserve every ounce of devotion with which I repay them.
Most families are not capable of this. Most families aren’t trying for this.
If “this” is equal to individualist launching-pad, then you are correct. But the happy medium that I described above? Is in fact quite common, and is not especially difficult nor heroic nor rare.
I know that not everyone is this lucky. But everyone should be. My brand of social conservativism could be pretty well summed up with the terminal goal of “give everyone a family as good as mine”, whereas I look at what you’ve written and it sounds like “destroy one of the most functional institutions we have left”.
There’s a lot to discuss here, and I’ll try to come back and reply more fully when I have more time / wherewithal. But a few notes on critical points:
1. Most importantly – the starting place for this argument was not “should we destroy the (modern First World) families we have because they are horrible?” That’s an, um, interesting question, I guess, but no one was asking it. Rather, we started with: “liberal society is full of anomie and loneliness, should we try to fix it by making it more tribal?” And it seems clear, to me, that actual tribal embeddedness has colossal underappreciated costs, and that families these days are as functional as they are (however functional you believe that to be) largely because of checks on their power and influence imposed by social individualism.
2. Yes, I am expecting that most of my readers are rat-adjacent or similar types – in other words, idiosyncratic people with idiosyncratic needs and ambitions who are bad at small-scale social politics, also known as “the specific people for whom family life is most likely to go very very wrong” – and that their best outcomes will look different from those of the average citizen.
3. Despite the above, when I talk about tribal existence causing problems, I am not actually (mostly) talking about the kind of problems so terrible that they lead to total estrangement and sustained overt hostility. As you say, that is pretty rare. (Although it does happen, and when it happens it matters.) It is much more common, e.g., for adult Americans to be semi-regularly interacting with their parents, but to find these interactions somewhat annoying and somewhat straining to a substantial and predictable degree, in a way that their interactions with chosen friends are not. As far as that goes, it’s fine, the costs are pretty low (and the remaining benefits of family can be substantial). If your agenda is “let’s refocus our society so that relationships of that kind have a lot more power,” the costs may not remain so low.
When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.
Tribes are, basically, big families. You know how families work, probably. You were probably raised in one.
And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.
Nonetheless. Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.
Because there are costs, and they are crushing. Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries. The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.” Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone. Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values. Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics.
Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case. But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling.
Squaring this circle is super hard. It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects. Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet. But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism.
OK, I’m rereading this, and I should add an addendum, because this is important and I feel bad about eliding it earlier.
For those of you who are, e.g., raising children or planning to do so: my point is definitely not that all (nuclear) family environments are psychologically horrible. It is not even that it is impossible to have a (nuclear) family that shows respect for its members’ individual autonomy, etc. You can definitely do those things. I have seen people who do. Those people are heroes.
But it is so costly! It is so difficult! God, it is one of the hardest and most expensive projects ever undertaken by man. It basically entails saying “we are going to pour all our resources into one or two or three children, we are going to give them claims on every part of us, and we are going to ask nothing in return. We are going to strip our souls and our bank accounts bare for people whom we fully expect may up and leave us because they will want to live their own lives and pursue their own dreams.”
Most families are not capable of this. Most families aren’t trying for this. Most families expect payment in devotion for their care, according to the ancient tribal logic. And the bigger and more extended your family is, the stronger the pull of that tribal logic will be.
When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.
Tribes are, basically, big families. You know how families work, probably. You were probably raised in one.
And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.
Nonetheless. Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.
Because there are costs, and they are crushing. Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries. The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.” Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone. Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values. Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics.
Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case. But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling.
Squaring this circle is super hard. It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects. Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet. But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism.
Someday I need to research this more, but a lot of people are blaming the decline in institutions, social connectedness, etc. on smartphones and the post-Facebook internet. Yet, it seems like the decline in institutions and social connectedness was well underway in the ‘90s and early 2000s, before the internet pervaded everyday life, and that from the mid-’70s to the ‘90s is when the biggest changes took place.
I could be misremembering though.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is a book that is precisely about “the decline in institutions, social connectedness, etc.” Most of its text constitutes a discussion of how this decline manifests and what was likely to have caused it.
It was published in 2000, and its final-thoughts chapter includes a throwaway mention of “this Internet thing seems to be getting big, maybe it’ll turn out to matter to social-connectedness stuff, too soon to tell.”
So…yeah. It’s not smartphones and Twitter. Not entirely, anyway, and probably not mostly.
(Putnam thinks it’s a concatenation of things but mostly TV, for whatever that’s worth.)
So if my historical sources are telling me the truth…
…and I’m synthesizing the history properly…
…then, in fact, the entire edifice of Western civilization – all the cultural, social, and philosophical structures that define the world in which we live today – can be traced back to a stupid loophole in Roman inheritance law.
NOTE: Everything here is taken either from Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order or from a Livejournal post by the Infamous Brad that I am currently unable to find. I get credit for absolutely nothing, except noticing the connection between Section II and Section III.
A number of people have been asking me a question that is, uh, very on-point: if this widow-favoring dynamic originated in the days of the Roman Empirewhen Christianity was still a nascent cult, how could it characterize the Roman Catholic Church but not the Orthodox Church, given that the schism happened so much later?
The answer, it turns out, is kind of boring and obvious rather than wacky and fun. In fact the Rome-acquired widow-favoring thing existed in both churches. The relevant difference was a large-scale political one rather than a cultural or doctrinal one, arising in the wake of Rome’s collapse. In the West, the Church was faced with a postapocalyptic wasteland of isolated nobles and Germanic ravager tribes, it was the largest and most coherent social actor around, and so it had a relatively easy time imposing its agenda. In the East, the Church was faced with all the iron-fisted power of the Byzantine empire, which responded to its attempts to depatrimonialize the property regime with “haha lol nope.”
But the dynamic about which I was talking still seems to have been a thing.
Don’t read the news. Especially don’t read thinkpieces. Otherwise, your availability heuristic will get messed up and you’ll think that the culture war is actually important.
Twitter, Tumblr, and the culture war industry in general represent a loud minority. In my experience (and I went to a small liberal arts college in CA), the regressive left isn’t even that popular there, so I expect that what we see is the result of the media seizing on unusual incidents because that’s what gets the clicks. In the broader world, it seems to basically be a non-factor. It’s more common to passively share posts with a regressive-left message, but most of those people are still reasonably normally tolerant in real life. Consistent liberalism is rare, but the norm of at-least-minimal liberalism through apathy still looks very strong. Free speech issues aren’t on most people’s radar, but they’d see punching “Nazis” as politically motivated hooliganism - if it were ever relevant to them.
I think if someone wasn’t directly subscribed to the culture war (or following someone who really cares about it), they’d see very little of it. Even if they’re interested in politics, the culture war may only rarely come up. While the left gets a lot wrong, in practice, it looks more like “Senator So-And-So introduced the Safer Pencils for America Act and some people support that” and less like the kind of illiberal SJ that Scott is concerned about. Republicans controlling everything means less influence for Senator Safer Pencils, but it doesn’t make a significant difference for the antifa cluster, because they wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.
Which is not to say that the culture war is completely irrelevant for everyone. Maybe if you do IQ research at a university, you’d like to be able to talk about it without worrying that someone might come down on you. If you’re a conservative in a generally progressive industry, you’d like to speak your mind without being viewed as an idiot. And in the regular political sphere, both sides keep finding new ways to damage political liberalism. But as far as cultural liberalism is concerned, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.
it must be nice to exist somewhere that is yet undevoured, so you can pretend those who saw it happen are all just stupid and contemptible
Considering the variance in places I’ve existed that are all undevoured, including what are supposed to be the main SJ centers/battlegrounds (liberal arts college, tech company), I’m skeptical of the extent of the devouring. And I don’t think that people who think otherwise are stupid and contemptible. I have a great deal of respect for Scott, whose post inspired my original comment. The problem is that there’s enough culture war content to surround yourself with it, and then it seems like it’s everywhere, so it’s easy to overestimate its importance.
This isn’t the greatest analogy, but it’s kind of like alcohol. Not only the addictive aspect, but also because if you’re in a peer group where heavy drinking is normal, it can seem like an inescapable part of socialization and takes up some of your mindspace, but if you stop engaging with it and find different people, you see that you were part of some weird group and that it’s actually not important.
Yeah, if alcohol explicitly colonized all of the places where you could do the thing you wanted, and it was no longer possible to do the thing you wanted to do that had nothing to do with alcohol, due to the knowing, malicious, and deliberate actions of alcoholics; and alcoholics were currently colonizing another related thing that you wanted to do and making it their explicit mission to make it impossible for you to engage with it without being showered in alcohol and everyone was helping them and nobody was permitted to notice it was happening and every time you point it out people call you a hysterical liar who should be punished because you hate alcohol-drinkers.
…hyperbole (and bitterness) aside, this is actually a surprisingly on-target analogy.
Because alcohol-centric socialization is in fact both
(a) really genuinely not universal, and
(b) nonetheless very very very widespread, especially in certain particular sectors of the culturesphere, where it’s totally dominant.
[I was a member of my college sci-fi / gaming club. We didn’t drink much. Every so often someone from the college newspaper would come by to do a patronizing human interest story on the weird nerds, and an alarming amount of the time, these stories devolved into “did you know that there are people on campus who somehow magically know how to socialize without getting totally hammered?!?”]
There are in fact lots of places you can go that are totally alcohol-free. There are lots more places you can go where people drink in a very low-key way, such that you’d barely notice. And if you land in one of those places, the whole alcohol-centric thing can seem like a weird quaint cultural vestige, something that’s obviously not going to impose itself on anyone who’s not explicitly looking for it.
Except that not everyone is that lucky. If you’re stuck in the wrong town, or the wrong college, or the wrong line of work, or the wrong subculture, it may be that alcohol is dominating every single social center that you can see. It may be that your choice is between “suck it up and deal with the drunkards” or “leave behind everything and everyone you know for the sake of this one preference.”
(…or sometimes there’s like one group of people around who aren’t always getting shitfaced, like maybe it’s the campus Bible study group or something, and you have absolutely nothing in common with them apart from this one random thing about alcohol, but the fact that every social gathering is full of plastered jackasses is starting to really get to you, and you find yourself wondering whether maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to try letting Christ into your life…)
Social justice is like that. Contra @brazenautomaton‘s implications, it hasn’t eaten everything and it’s not going to. There are vast sectors of the world – of the country – of the urban upscale crowd, even – that don’t give any fucks about SJ, that aren’t even slightly afraid of angry Twitter mobs, and that aren’t going to persecute you for your unwokeness. And, to those who are sitting comfortably in those places, the whole culture war can seem like a stupid internet foofaraw to which the correct response is to Turn Off the Computer and Get a Life.
But there are places where that is really really really not the case. There are campuses, and industries, and social circles, where everyone you know – and everyone they know – is living in perpetual fear of having his life destroyed by an angry ideological mob. There are hobbies and cultures, particularly online ones like fandoms, that have been so completely destroyed by this shit that you literally cannot find a (haha) “safe” instantiation of them anymore. If you’re embedded in one of those things, or if one of those things is very important to you for its own sake, you are genuinely in a pretty bad place.
For those who really can’t help making everything about Whose Side You Are On: no, this doesn’t apply only to SJ. The conformity-demanding ideological mobs of the right do exactly the same thing, in the places where they have power. Probably that’s caused a lot more damage overall, although I confess that I care less, because conformity-demanding right-wing ideology has never gotten any traction at all in the cultural sectors where I dwell.
So while what balioc describes isn’t wrong, I feel it fairly widely misses what the OP and first reply were talking about. And it’s understandable why they are confused and disagreeing with each other, because what is happening is a fairly counter-intuitive phenomenon.
You all are looking too much at this through a tribal lens (with horizontal differentiation), and not enough through a class lens (with vertical differentiation.)
Let’s say there are three classes. One is where liberal (or social justice or whatever) norms hold no sway at all. They’re actively hostile to any suggestion that you could act in a less offensive way. This is not a very big group actually - Alabama, small towns out west, oil rigs, I actually don’t really know many, because it’s just that small. It does not include life in any large corporation, university, decent sized city, government institution, or anything that considers itself “professional.” None of these are appealing places to live for many reasons (sexism, racism, anti-intellectualism, lack of modern luxuries) and are hard to move to anyway.
And there’s the “tumblr Discourse” the OP refers to, which is really every group actively - and constantly - arguing about social justice and discourse and politics. This is not just tumblr, but also twitter and reddit and FB comment threads, and academic seminars, and activist groups. By headcount, it is still pretty tiny. We know how toxic that class is, and the reasons why have been discussed to death.
(The alt-right acts much more like the second class than the first.)
But the majority of America, at least of the comfortable America we could enjoy and find employment in, is in a third class. They don’t talk about politics, not much. This is the corporate workplaces, or your alumni organizations, or your board gaming club, or your housing association, or really absolutely everything we associate with middle/upper class life or professional life that is not explicitly political. Hell it’s even “most of the time on college campuses.” (It’s also the internal attitude of most political campaigns.) They just want to get their job done, not debate the eternal vicissitudes of justice and praxis. This is what the OP means by “in the broader world, it seems to basically be a non factor.”
In that world, talking about social justice endlessly is weird. Not verboten, but not polite either. The people who go on about intersectionality and tone-arguments and other buzzwords, in the office or at your RPG table, are actually the source of some mockery. It’s a niche to argue libertarianism or the latest Senate votes, and they rather you do it over there. That’s the broader world.
So that’s what the OP is describing. What they miss is that “also, in the third class, the second class’s word is LAW.” Because all these rules the discourse class comes up with, get seriously enforced on this broader world. Someone says “you’re harassing me”, and they respond “no I didn’t, all I did was X”, and they pull in “no, harassment is actually defined as including X” and most people in the broader world go “… Oh. Okay.” All these Safe Workplace Policies and Codes of Conduct, and the targeted way they are enforced, are entirely received wisdom from the class that talks endlessly online about politics. But they are also religiously followed!
Very few people go “oh, well if your definition of a racist is different than what I had previously thought, then I accept that but now we need to update our response to racists because it’s a much wider net.” No, they go “cool, we will treat Trent Lott like a member of the KKK.” Fox News and the military may seem like bastions of conservatism, but they are professional organizations even more fundamentally, and they also respond to this: so Fox fires its President and its biggest star for harassment, and the military reprimands soldiers for writing slurs on missiles that are about to be shot at terrorists in the Mideast. They may be right-wing, they say, but we’re not uncivilized.
Some people do say “hey, you just changed the moral rules on us in a live case. I want to discuss that before enforcing them” but they are weird (and usually the people most likely to be discussing politics when it was uncool.) It’s much, much easier for the group to say “Okay, thank you for educating us on the new rules, we won’t cause any problems, we’ll do whatever you say.” Some rare times the majority of people in the group will object, but now they are in rebellion from the received political wisdom, and whether they wanted to or not, now their entire social identity is about “defending racists and harassers.” No one wants to be that. (Enter Gamergate.)
When I was taking notes from people on “what college campus is really like these days”, the median seemed to be “it’s not a hive of constant activism, but you know you can’t make fun of liberal causes like you can make fun of conservative causes.” And that’s exactly what I see here. People “in the broader world” do not spend all their time thinking about politics and social justice, they just silently know which side to support any time a dispute comes up. These are the reasonable people.
And if you’re scared of social justice (or expecting safety from your tribe), that’s terrifying. No one even wants to talk about the fact that some day the twitter mob might descend on you and everyone will disown you; they want to pretend it just happens to other people, but they also admit if it happened here they wouldn’t do anything to stop it.
To be clear, this isn’t always a bad thing. The way O’Reilly and Ailes treated women was intolerable. A lot of this received wisdom from the chattering class really is an update of morality that is sorely needed.
But that’s why it matters what the chattering class - be it academics or tumblr - conclude as their latest ideological target. People across the world really do want to impress the politically ascendant, or at least be considered polite by their standards, and will form committees and trials based on those targets. So in as much as you can “make the Discourse less stupid”, then you are actually have a big influence on the world. And in as much as you find “actually the Discourse is insanely dumb and full of contradictions and toxicity”, then you should worry about how the broader world will act on that.
Which is why I spend so much time trying to find the secret, underlying rules people actually live by. Because those rules are deadly serious to the people who suddenly finds themselves on trial, and everyone around them is denying that anything changed.
In such cases, tumblr is even less harmful to the scrupulous types, because there you can at least argue back.
I think that this analysis is actually just empirically wrong, in a provincial kind of way. Which is to say, it’s describing a thing that is obviously real, but also not nearly as universal (even within the sectors under discussion) as you seem to think it is.
I have stood in the hallway at a high-end law firm and listened to senior partners talking about how great it would be if all the Palestinians were killed and all their land made into Israeli settlements, while a lot of more-junior people drifted by super-uncomfortably. There was no consequence and no backlash. No one turned the almighty power of the SJ Egregore upon them.
I have listened to equity-firm guys talking about the culture of their workplaces. It is…not SJ-friendly, not even a little, at least in some cases.
I have certainly listened to any number of people talking about how harassment complaints, etc., are ignored or silenced or dealt with through laughably ineffective gestures like “sensitivity seminars.” I do not think those people are lying or delusional. And, yes, here we are talking about offices of large national corporations etc.
…which is not to say that the opposite thing doesn’t also happen a lot! Sometimes the SJ Egregore eats everything in a thousand-yard radius. Sometimes, in some circumstances, a harassment complaint is a superweapon that can be used to destroy anyone who displeases you. But this is not always the case, and it’s not even predictable. A lot depends on the personal predilections of a few key people, and on the particular social positioning of the institution in question, and other things like that.
(At least one of the valent factors here is vulnerability-to-mass-opinion. If engagement with the public is a critical part of your operations – if people are already likely to be watching your goings-on – if a small upswelling of anger amongst Internet randos is capable of causing real problems for you – then, yes, you are going to be a lot more sensitive to the Norms Du Jour. Which means, inter alia, that norm-sensitivity is going to be a lot higher than average amongst the institutions to which we are in fact paying attention.)
“The Lidless Eye isn’t something to worry about now, because there are some places it isn’t looking at now! We shouldn’t be able to anticipate any result from the efforts of people to expand the number of places the Lidless Eye can see, nor should we draw any conclusions from how their past efforts caused things to become forever lost within its burning gaze.”
Entropy only goes one way. Entropy cannot be reversed.
…two decades ago, they were saying pretty much the same thing about the unstoppable march of the religious right. Social movements come and go. When they piss off enough people, their going is likely to be sudden and sharp.
Frankly I’m more worried about the coming overreactive backlash against SJ than about the specter of eternal SJ dominance.
Entropy does indeed go in only one direction, in the long term, but it is still somehow possible for humans to put one stone on top of another.
Don’t read the news. Especially don’t read thinkpieces. Otherwise, your availability heuristic will get messed up and you’ll think that the culture war is actually important.
Twitter, Tumblr, and the culture war industry in general represent a loud minority. In my experience (and I went to a small liberal arts college in CA), the regressive left isn’t even that popular there, so I expect that what we see is the result of the media seizing on unusual incidents because that’s what gets the clicks. In the broader world, it seems to basically be a non-factor. It’s more common to passively share posts with a regressive-left message, but most of those people are still reasonably normally tolerant in real life. Consistent liberalism is rare, but the norm of at-least-minimal liberalism through apathy still looks very strong. Free speech issues aren’t on most people’s radar, but they’d see punching “Nazis” as politically motivated hooliganism - if it were ever relevant to them.
I think if someone wasn’t directly subscribed to the culture war (or following someone who really cares about it), they’d see very little of it. Even if they’re interested in politics, the culture war may only rarely come up. While the left gets a lot wrong, in practice, it looks more like “Senator So-And-So introduced the Safer Pencils for America Act and some people support that” and less like the kind of illiberal SJ that Scott is concerned about. Republicans controlling everything means less influence for Senator Safer Pencils, but it doesn’t make a significant difference for the antifa cluster, because they wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.
Which is not to say that the culture war is completely irrelevant for everyone. Maybe if you do IQ research at a university, you’d like to be able to talk about it without worrying that someone might come down on you. If you’re a conservative in a generally progressive industry, you’d like to speak your mind without being viewed as an idiot. And in the regular political sphere, both sides keep finding new ways to damage political liberalism. But as far as cultural liberalism is concerned, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.
it must be nice to exist somewhere that is yet undevoured, so you can pretend those who saw it happen are all just stupid and contemptible
Considering the variance in places I’ve existed that are all undevoured, including what are supposed to be the main SJ centers/battlegrounds (liberal arts college, tech company), I’m skeptical of the extent of the devouring. And I don’t think that people who think otherwise are stupid and contemptible. I have a great deal of respect for Scott, whose post inspired my original comment. The problem is that there’s enough culture war content to surround yourself with it, and then it seems like it’s everywhere, so it’s easy to overestimate its importance.
This isn’t the greatest analogy, but it’s kind of like alcohol. Not only the addictive aspect, but also because if you’re in a peer group where heavy drinking is normal, it can seem like an inescapable part of socialization and takes up some of your mindspace, but if you stop engaging with it and find different people, you see that you were part of some weird group and that it’s actually not important.
Yeah, if alcohol explicitly colonized all of the places where you could do the thing you wanted, and it was no longer possible to do the thing you wanted to do that had nothing to do with alcohol, due to the knowing, malicious, and deliberate actions of alcoholics; and alcoholics were currently colonizing another related thing that you wanted to do and making it their explicit mission to make it impossible for you to engage with it without being showered in alcohol and everyone was helping them and nobody was permitted to notice it was happening and every time you point it out people call you a hysterical liar who should be punished because you hate alcohol-drinkers.
…hyperbole (and bitterness) aside, this is actually a surprisingly on-target analogy.
Because alcohol-centric socialization is in fact both
(a) really genuinely not universal, and
(b) nonetheless very very very widespread, especially in certain particular sectors of the culturesphere, where it’s totally dominant.
[I was a member of my college sci-fi / gaming club. We didn’t drink much. Every so often someone from the college newspaper would come by to do a patronizing human interest story on the weird nerds, and an alarming amount of the time, these stories devolved into “did you know that there are people on campus who somehow magically know how to socialize without getting totally hammered?!?”]
There are in fact lots of places you can go that are totally alcohol-free. There are lots more places you can go where people drink in a very low-key way, such that you’d barely notice. And if you land in one of those places, the whole alcohol-centric thing can seem like a weird quaint cultural vestige, something that’s obviously not going to impose itself on anyone who’s not explicitly looking for it.
Except that not everyone is that lucky. If you’re stuck in the wrong town, or the wrong college, or the wrong line of work, or the wrong subculture, it may be that alcohol is dominating every single social center that you can see. It may be that your choice is between “suck it up and deal with the drunkards” or “leave behind everything and everyone you know for the sake of this one preference.”
(…or sometimes there’s like one group of people around who aren’t always getting shitfaced, like maybe it’s the campus Bible study group or something, and you have absolutely nothing in common with them apart from this one random thing about alcohol, but the fact that every social gathering is full of plastered jackasses is starting to really get to you, and you find yourself wondering whether maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to try letting Christ into your life…)
Social justice is like that. Contra @brazenautomaton‘s implications, it hasn’t eaten everything and it’s not going to. There are vast sectors of the world – of the country – of the urban upscale crowd, even – that don’t give any fucks about SJ, that aren’t even slightly afraid of angry Twitter mobs, and that aren’t going to persecute you for your unwokeness. And, to those who are sitting comfortably in those places, the whole culture war can seem like a stupid internet foofaraw to which the correct response is to Turn Off the Computer and Get a Life.
But there are places where that is really really really not the case. There are campuses, and industries, and social circles, where everyone you know – and everyone they know – is living in perpetual fear of having his life destroyed by an angry ideological mob. There are hobbies and cultures, particularly online ones like fandoms, that have been so completely destroyed by this shit that you literally cannot find a (haha) “safe” instantiation of them anymore. If you’re embedded in one of those things, or if one of those things is very important to you for its own sake, you are genuinely in a pretty bad place.
For those who really can’t help making everything about Whose Side You Are On: no, this doesn’t apply only to SJ. The conformity-demanding ideological mobs of the right do exactly the same thing, in the places where they have power. Probably that’s caused a lot more damage overall, although I confess that I care less, because conformity-demanding right-wing ideology has never gotten any traction at all in the cultural sectors where I dwell.
So while what balioc describes isn’t wrong, I feel it fairly widely misses what the OP and first reply were talking about. And it’s understandable why they are confused and disagreeing with each other, because what is happening is a fairly counter-intuitive phenomenon.
You all are looking too much at this through a tribal lens (with horizontal differentiation), and not enough through a class lens (with vertical differentiation.)
Let’s say there are three classes. One is where liberal (or social justice or whatever) norms hold no sway at all. They’re actively hostile to any suggestion that you could act in a less offensive way. This is not a very big group actually - Alabama, small towns out west, oil rigs, I actually don’t really know many, because it’s just that small. It does not include life in any large corporation, university, decent sized city, government institution, or anything that considers itself “professional.” None of these are appealing places to live for many reasons (sexism, racism, anti-intellectualism, lack of modern luxuries) and are hard to move to anyway.
And there’s the “tumblr Discourse” the OP refers to, which is really every group actively - and constantly - arguing about social justice and discourse and politics. This is not just tumblr, but also twitter and reddit and FB comment threads, and academic seminars, and activist groups. By headcount, it is still pretty tiny. We know how toxic that class is, and the reasons why have been discussed to death.
(The alt-right acts much more like the second class than the first.)
But the majority of America, at least of the comfortable America we could enjoy and find employment in, is in a third class. They don’t talk about politics, not much. This is the corporate workplaces, or your alumni organizations, or your board gaming club, or your housing association, or really absolutely everything we associate with middle/upper class life or professional life that is not explicitly political. Hell it’s even “most of the time on college campuses.” (It’s also the internal attitude of most political campaigns.) They just want to get their job done, not debate the eternal vicissitudes of justice and praxis. This is what the OP means by “in the broader world, it seems to basically be a non factor.”
In that world, talking about social justice endlessly is weird. Not verboten, but not polite either. The people who go on about intersectionality and tone-arguments and other buzzwords, in the office or at your RPG table, are actually the source of some mockery. It’s a niche to argue libertarianism or the latest Senate votes, and they rather you do it over there. That’s the broader world.
So that’s what the OP is describing. What they miss is that “also, in the third class, the second class’s word is LAW.” Because all these rules the discourse class comes up with, get seriously enforced on this broader world. Someone says “you’re harassing me”, and they respond “no I didn’t, all I did was X”, and they pull in “no, harassment is actually defined as including X” and most people in the broader world go “… Oh. Okay.” All these Safe Workplace Policies and Codes of Conduct, and the targeted way they are enforced, are entirely received wisdom from the class that talks endlessly online about politics. But they are also religiously followed!
Very few people go “oh, well if your definition of a racist is different than what I had previously thought, then I accept that but now we need to update our response to racists because it’s a much wider net.” No, they go “cool, we will treat Trent Lott like a member of the KKK.” Fox News and the military may seem like bastions of conservatism, but they are professional organizations even more fundamentally, and they also respond to this: so Fox fires its President and its biggest star for harassment, and the military reprimands soldiers for writing slurs on missiles that are about to be shot at terrorists in the Mideast. They may be right-wing, they say, but we’re not uncivilized.
Some people do say “hey, you just changed the moral rules on us in a live case. I want to discuss that before enforcing them” but they are weird (and usually the people most likely to be discussing politics when it was uncool.) It’s much, much easier for the group to say “Okay, thank you for educating us on the new rules, we won’t cause any problems, we’ll do whatever you say.” Some rare times the majority of people in the group will object, but now they are in rebellion from the received political wisdom, and whether they wanted to or not, now their entire social identity is about “defending racists and harassers.” No one wants to be that. (Enter Gamergate.)
When I was taking notes from people on “what college campus is really like these days”, the median seemed to be “it’s not a hive of constant activism, but you know you can’t make fun of liberal causes like you can make fun of conservative causes.” And that’s exactly what I see here. People “in the broader world” do not spend all their time thinking about politics and social justice, they just silently know which side to support any time a dispute comes up. These are the reasonable people.
And if you’re scared of social justice (or expecting safety from your tribe), that’s terrifying. No one even wants to talk about the fact that some day the twitter mob might descend on you and everyone will disown you; they want to pretend it just happens to other people, but they also admit if it happened here they wouldn’t do anything to stop it.
To be clear, this isn’t always a bad thing. The way O’Reilly and Ailes treated women was intolerable. A lot of this received wisdom from the chattering class really is an update of morality that is sorely needed.
But that’s why it matters what the chattering class - be it academics or tumblr - conclude as their latest ideological target. People across the world really do want to impress the politically ascendant, or at least be considered polite by their standards, and will form committees and trials based on those targets. So in as much as you can “make the Discourse less stupid”, then you are actually have a big influence on the world. And in as much as you find “actually the Discourse is insanely dumb and full of contradictions and toxicity”, then you should worry about how the broader world will act on that.
Which is why I spend so much time trying to find the secret, underlying rules people actually live by. Because those rules are deadly serious to the people who suddenly finds themselves on trial, and everyone around them is denying that anything changed.
In such cases, tumblr is even less harmful to the scrupulous types, because there you can at least argue back.
I think that this analysis is actually just empirically wrong, in a provincial kind of way. Which is to say, it’s describing a thing that is obviously real, but also not nearly as universal (even within the sectors under discussion) as you seem to think it is.
I have stood in the hallway at a high-end law firm and listened to senior partners talking about how great it would be if all the Palestinians were killed and all their land made into Israeli settlements, while a lot of more-junior people drifted by super-uncomfortably. There was no consequence and no backlash. No one turned the almighty power of the SJ Egregore upon them.
I have listened to equity-firm guys talking about the culture of their workplaces. It is…not SJ-friendly, not even a little, at least in some cases.
I have certainly listened to any number of people talking about how harassment complaints, etc., are ignored or silenced or dealt with through laughably ineffective gestures like “sensitivity seminars.” I do not think those people are lying or delusional. And, yes, here we are talking about offices of large national corporations etc.
…which is not to say that the opposite thing doesn’t also happen a lot! Sometimes the SJ Egregore eats everything in a thousand-yard radius. Sometimes, in some circumstances, a harassment complaint is a superweapon that can be used to destroy anyone who displeases you. But this is not always the case, and it’s not even predictable. A lot depends on the personal predilections of a few key people, and on the particular social positioning of the institution in question, and other things like that.
(At least one of the valent factors here is vulnerability-to-mass-opinion. If engagement with the public is a critical part of your operations – if people are already likely to be watching your goings-on – if a small upswelling of anger amongst Internet randos is capable of causing real problems for you – then, yes, you are going to be a lot more sensitive to the Norms Du Jour. Which means, inter alia, that norm-sensitivity is going to be a lot higher than average amongst the institutions to which we are in fact paying attention.)
Yo as inadequate as you might think yourself I guarantee my followers are in the 99.5th percentile in being able to answer this:
HOW DID TRINITARIANS DEAL WITH THE FACT THAT MARY, MOTHER OF GOD REGULARLY OUTRANKS THE HOLY SPIRIT IN FOLK MYTHOLOGY
In all seriousness: they didn’t, and don’t.
Folk Christianity cannot deal with Trinitarianism at all. (I firmly believe that orthodox Trinitarianism is the most anti-inductive idea that humanity has ever generated; it is specifically designed to bulldoze an identity paradox with supernality, which it does by systematically taking all possible grokkable ways of actually explaining the setup and labeling them heretical.) The sort of people who revere Mary as a goddess probably don’t even have much of a clue what the Holy Spirit is; hell, they probably think of God the Father and Christ interacting like a king and his son the prince. This has always been the case. The educated clerisy generally doesn’t give a shit so long as the peasants aren’t giving aid and comfort to actual educated heretics who might cause doctrinal trouble, which is why minor wars were fought over Mother of God vs. Mother of Christ but it’s totally cool when people actually straight-up pray to St. Christopher like he’s fucking Mercury.
