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.
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.