This is what “eaten by culture war” looks like.
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.
Care to expand?
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.