Culture wars

1 As theatre

A cute model. Bright (Bright 2022) labels the racial culture wars a white psychodrama, and describes them as a conflict between two different ways of dealing with the frictions of the inequities of the modern world, the repenters (woke-ish) and the repressers (anti-woke-ish), plus an entrepreneurial market of Intelligentsia-of-Colour who sell homilies to one side or the other. No parties in this miniature intellectual economy are necessarily engaging in activities that are primarily about redressing inequity, or necessarily engaging with external factions (Actual neoreactionaries, bulk of communities of colour etc) at all.

This would be interesting if so, but I have no survey data to support it, so let us take it as a provocation for now.

Related: tokenism versus table stakes.

2 Incoming

• Things Fell Apart by Jon Ronson

• Thomas Frank’s liberalism of scolds.

• The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult

• Ian Leslie, MLK syndrome

  It is precisely the absence of existential risk and sacrifice in middle-class lives that leads some to adopt absurd and needlessly antagonistic positions. This is partly out of a hunger to experience the camaraderie of battle, albeit at many removes from actual battle, and partly so that the individual’s ethical credentials can gleam like jewellery at a ball, marking him or her out as a moral aristocrat.

  This stuff is mostly harmless, and in fact it may do some good. Some campaigns really do help people they claim to; motivations do not have to be pure for this to be the case. But MLK syndrome can also lead to the kind of grandstanding which sets progressive causes back and harms the very constituencies on whose behalf the activists claim to be fighting, as with “defund the police”[…]

  And there is always the risk of looking, and indeed being, ridiculous. Particularly when we can contemporaneously witness people who do not live in liberal democracies taking real risks, showing real courage, in the face of truly horrendous injustice.

• I would like to find a less triggering source than notorious internet rage-stoker Hanania for the following point. But he is what I have for now, so, here is the mixed-bag that is a Psychological Theory of the Culture War. The central argument does not rest upon his brusque ejaculations about sex and genetics. Useful bit:

  …the idea that the military-industrial complex influences foreign policy is potentially a good theory, because all you need to believe is that a handful of corporations have an incentive to take political action. In contrast, you should be very skeptical of any theory in which an “interest group” is composed of millions of people. To say Raytheon, a trial lawyer lobbying firm, or the CIA acts in its own interests makes sense; to attribute some common goal to “whites,” “blacks,” “the rich,” “the managerial class,” or “economic elites” does not.

  Special interest lobbying is driven by relatively small, concentrated interests. Voting and mass attitudes are matters of psychology, or more specifically a search for status and a way to express flattering narratives about one’s self. With that in mind, we can start to think about what a plausible theory of the culture war might look like.

• Tumblr Is Everything

• 5 flavours of racism disambiguated

• Segmentation faults: how machine learning trains us to appear insane to one another.

• Semi-counterpoint: Doctorow on Big Tech narratives.

• Noah Smith, The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis. Takes the oft-times conservative talking point which I might strawman as what is with these whingey arts majors urg and asks the historical question about what social and economic conditions make it reasonable for the world to have so many people with non-practical skillsets as it does.

• Rachel Kleinfeld, There Won’t Be a “Civil War”

• Spencer Greenberg, Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews

• Who can push back when wokeness overreaches?

• How USC’s Dr. Greg Patton Accidentally Ignited an Academic Culture War

3 References