”Bad enough to be in a culture war; worse yet to be in somebody else’s culture war” said an article in a British newspaper and I can certainly relate. In the late 2000s I started using the internet in earnest as our family got broadband and since then I spend a lot of time on it most days. I am an aspie you know. Anyway, imagine the awful shock I got living in what used to be a 95% Catholic country and then running into people constantly dogpiling websites and spewing furious tirades against religion constantly (but on both sides of the culture war people use religion as a byword for anything they find irrational and that people furiously disagree over; even religious people will brand things a religion in this way! Sickening. Users of youtube, Yahoo! Answers and websites about that stupid boardgame Diplomacy shame on ye. Admittedly I shouldn’t have responded in kind but that’s what people are either too stupid to know or too nasty to care about when it comes to the culture war; if you treat people badly then of course they’re not going to like it and you’ll just turn them AGAINST you.
Trying to have it both ways
On the painfully and arbitrarily binary mentality of the culture war people think if you don’t agree with them then you hate their value(s) as well. If someone’s pro-life it has to be because they hate women and not because there are actually are very good reasons to think abortion is murder and doesn’t help anybody, if someone’s against capitalism then that must mean they’re lazy and have some doctrinaire love of government as opposed to they are hardworking but are having a hard time in an economic system that its defenders say over and over again works and is the only option. If we’re patriotic the other side hates our country, if we’re for equality the other side are all racist, sexist, homophobes etc.
Since the other side are bad people anyway and our side MUST win (because the culture war HAS to happen, God forbid we citizens of the same country get along) then it’s OK to treat them badly and to engage in fallacies and dirty tricks.
- Responding to any criticism with ”You’re the REAL thing you accused me of” (a lazy, kneejerk reaction that means one’s own side never has to be good; we can just throw any accusation back at the other side).
- Dogpiling.
- Nutpicking, to keep making one video after another about the nuttiest members of a group and not bother with the more moderate and sensible ones so everyone in the group is guilty by association (internet atheists and anti-sjws I’m looking at you and stop putting the same few women in your youtube video thumbnails) even though if the group had no nutty members the other side still wouldn’t join them.
- Repeating the same things over and over again hoping this will convince people.
- Asking gotcha questions, loaded questions, socratic method, asking questions just to take the heat off of you and asking questions just because they sound less confrontational than statements, constantly asking more questions when no amount of answers will satisfy you anyway (a humanist pulled this last one on me in a sort of impromptu IRC debate) and phrasing accusations as questions (one guy, again on a website about Diplomacy in the late 2000s asked me if I would be a different religion if I were born somewhere else when he could have just said that I’m only a Catholic because I’m Irish and on another website an atheist asked Christians if we didn’t go to Hell for not being Christian would we still be Christian when he could have just said that we’re only Christian because we’re afraid of going to Hell and not only that but these 2 questions were built on mistaken premises; I don’t mindlessly follow the Irish majority as hopefully you’ve seen from my thoughts on abortion and people are Christian because they believe in Christ’s message; we’re about what we have to gain and not avoiding punishment.) On the culture war ”People listen not with the intent to understand but with the intent to reply” as Stephen Covey said.
- Declaring someone’s entire argument invalid because they used one word incorrectly (an internet atheist pulled this one on me on a website about that awful boardgame Diplomacy wouldn’t you know. A moderator of the website too no less.)
- Ignoring the rest of someone’s argument and only concentrating on the weakest part (tis time a user on a different Diplomacy website. I had said that yes the Middle Ages were bad but not as bad as people think, that even out of the Crusades some good came like Europeans getting the idea to bathe once a week, a simpler system of numbers, 4 as opposed to IV etc. and oranges and what do you know someone made a sarcastic comment about oranges. What is it with internet atheists and sarcasm, and what was it with the late 2000s and smug neckbeards on the internet?)
The reality is if you treat people badly you’re going to put them off and if you have to engage in fallacies and dirty tricks your argument must be lacking. However good the arguments might be if a group of people are seen as dodgy bullies then people will be cynical about the arguments and will make people want to fight fire with fire. The incessant, furious polemics of the new atheists on the internet have just made me a fanatical opponent of theirs, which bad arguments alone wouldn’t have done. In trying to open the door and get as many people into the new atheist house they’ve just put 2 locks on it. With the feminists sure I agree that men and women are equal but if they’re going to smear blood on protest signs (which they did in the UK to protest tampons being taxed), act like a caricature of straight men (what is it with feminists’ obsession with having short hair and acting tough?) and assume anyone not agreeing with them is a sexist then, even though I technically am a feminist if you go by the most broad definition of feminism, I have severe reservations about supporting anything feminist other than Rehumanise International and New Wave Feminists etc. As well as bad behaviour there’s the tendency to make websites into hiveminds; Imgur an atheist leftwing hivemind, Imgflip an alt right hivemind to name 2 but this is self defeating; people will tend just stick to their own echo chambers and not see the other side’s arguments. The people already on your side don’t need further convincing; the people on the other side won’t be receptive to your arguments if they’re just going to get viciously dogpiled (websites about that stupid boardgame Diplomacy I’m looking at you).
You can’t think to yourself ”Ah well, we’re right so anything we do is fine. Our ideology is good so we’re good. We have to win and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs anyway.” Our ideology is good and we have to win are both highly debatable by themselves and even if they were true then machiavellian scheming and a nietzschean mentality of uber v untermensch is just going to alienate the other side even further and put the people in between off of joining. I may be harping on this but it’s such a basic point and people still either don’t get it or don’t bother to apply it. The golden rule is not ”only” the morally right thing to do; it’s good diplomacy as well. Both sides treat each other so poorly with snide memes, vile polemics and ranty videos that when I come across a youtube channel from either one of them I tend to downvote a lot of their videos. The nastiness of both sides makes me clicktivise against both of them.
A Monopoly Posing As A Duopoly
“A New York leftist and an Alabama Pentecostal may not agree on much, but too often they share a dislike of Catholics”
-Dana Gioia
If people were to take a step back and reevaluate the culture war (y’know if either side didn’t have an atrocious case of tunnel vision) they’d see how much of a false dichotomy it is. We’re told that it’s conservative Christians against (socially) liberal atheists and new age people but I don’t see why and on either side you’ll find anti-Catholic people so that’s plenty reason for at least the Catholic population to reject the binary.
If you look at what laws are actually passed you’ll see that America is a libertarian country; if someone fails economically they’re more or less on their own, I hardly need remind people of the greed and lack of oversight and regulation causing the 2008 recession which I doubt has gotten any better and abortion and gay marriage were legalised in all 50 states. The Republicans have religious conservatives among their ranks but capitalism is the party’s priority while the Democrats still have some working class leftwing supporters but social liberalism is its priority. The capitalist party v the social liberal party. The culture war is not egalitarian v traditionalist; it’s a civil war within libertarianism. The libertarians have the whip hand in either party; whoever’s in office they’re in power.
Both sides will complain about the other side’s supposed hypocrisy; that one side is pro-life about abortion but supports the death penalty and the other is pro-choice but opposed to the death penalty yet neither side will change its own stance to be more consistent. If a lack of consistency is the problem then both sides should either oppose both or support both. A number of people, myself included, hold to what’s known as a consistent life ethic or the seamless garment; an opposition to abortion and the death penalty as well as militarism and so on. The social liberals say about abortion ”Well I’m not pro-abortion, I’m pro-choice” but then do nothing to restrict access to abortion and think you can only be pro-woman if you’re pro-choice and the capitalists will say things like ”Capitalism is cruel but it works” and ”there is no alternative”. These ideologies that are supposedly about choice give people no choice; it’s either be pro-choice or you hate women or be pro-capitalist or the economy won’t work. One side says banning abortion won’t reduce the number of them but a ban on guns will while the other says banning abortion will reduce the number but banning guns won’t reduce the number of gun deaths and criminals don’t care about the law anyway. My angle is both of them are dangerous so ban both of them; there may still be illegal abortions and gun violence but not as much if abortion and guns are legal and we don’t have to send people to prison necessarily to punish them.
Even though one party is for social liberalism and the other for capitalism big business keeps churning out woke marketing and the sexual revolution was a gift to big business; sex is often used in advertising and the money for all of the condoms, pills, patches, shots and sex toys must make at least some industries a lot of money. Hollywood, the TV and the music industry obviously are big businesses and are full of social liberals.
The attitude of the social liberals is ”If you don’t like abortion then don’t have one” (as if that’s how it works, I doubt they’d be impressed if you said to them ”If you don’t like racism don’t be a racist”) and the attitude of the capitalists is ”Well those other people that are struggling aren’t me so hard luck and it’s their own fault anyway”. A doublethink results then; things are personal choices and we’re all islands unto ourselves but society has to collectively embrace the one ideology.
Lack of ideological consistency
The supposed conservatives made big changes to the American economy in the 1980s (the whole point of conservatism is to be against change) and claim that ”the government that governs least governs best” unless they’re the ones running it. Reagan lowered taxes but then raised them again, Bush Senior broke his no new taxes pledge (admittedly he had a Democrat congress to deal with) and Bush Junior spent more money than one would expect from a Republican president (if you go by how the party is perceived and not how they actually are). While on social policy they believe there’s an objective right and wrong and believe in the family, church and community on economics it’s every man for himself which undermines the family etc. Truly being pro family is not abandoning poorer families to their fate. If one party is pro gay marriage full stop and the other only opposes it until someone they know comes out of the closet then the culture war, a supposed real, necessary and ferocious clash over morality is to a big degree pointless.
Meanwhile with the Democrats on abortion and gay marriage they treat them as personal choices as if moral relativism makes any sense and in any case they’re no relativists about racism, wealth inequality and the environment and rightly so but they should be consistent about deciding whether there is an objective morality or not.
Red In The Face, The White Heat Of The Degeneration And Feeling Blue
America’s culture war reminds me of how in the cartoons 2 children would fight over the same stuffed animal and with one pulling the head and the other the feet between them they tear the animal in 2 and then neither of them want it. Worse yet what was a national disgrace has been spewed all over the internet in countless memes, blog posts, forum posts, videos (X or Y DESTROYS mindless communist/theist with FACTS and LOGIC and other such overcapitalised, annoyingly hyperbolic titles), articles and these all of course will reference American TV shows, films and music which often take a side (usually the socially liberal one) and so the culture war is instead an international shouting match with little coherence. Both sides try to reframe it to gain some advantage but this only restates the existing positions in a way they wrongly think sounds more appealling. That France and Northern Ireland would be relatively tolerant and peaceful societies and what was once the vanguard of the enlightenment a divided, violent vast ocean of barbarism is quite a turnup for the books. When America once again becomes a sober, levelheaded and rationally minded country well might we celebrate that return of so prodigal a son but while the 2 parties start acting like the Capulets and Montagues ”A plague o’ both their houses!”