I.
I was having a conversation with a conservative friend recently. She was upset that Penn State was changing the class year's names (freshman, sophomore, etc.) to be more inclusive and less hierarchical. Trying to follow the scout mindset, I asked her to continue that line of thinking. Why was this change bad? What did it portend? How does it affect her?
What I came to take away was that the Penn State change really was a low stakes battle. But it was a sign that her tribe was losing the war. It wasn't about the name change as much as it was liberals getting another W.
I've seen people on Twitter lose their minds over a presentation that begins with a land acknowledgment. I've been very critical of the coercive use of Critical Theory-inspired movements. But a land acknowledgment? Really? Who gives a shit?
But now I understand the resistance. It's a sign that the other tribe has won another battle and it feels like they are losing the culture war.
II.
In my worshiping and compression post, I described how progressives view the "default setting" of humanity:
"For example, I think Ibram Kendi, and the successor ideology at-large, think the default setting of America is racism. In How to be an Antiracist, he describes the birth of the "conjoined twins" (capitalism and racism) in 1450 Portugal, tracing it to the founding of the United States.
The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, that America was founded on protecting slavery. In this view, the only thing to save us from falling back into slavery, and allowing racism to grow like metastic cancer, is the constant practice of antiracism in the face of the institutions that uphold racism (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.)."
Looking back, I don't think I did a great job describing that viewpoint. For starters, that description doesn't align with how I described the other groups. I wrote that conservatives fear that losing the culture war means we descend to barbarism. Enlightenment liberals fear that losing the culture war means we descend to civil war. Libertarians fear that losing the culture/policy war means we descend into totalitarianism. (I don't feel confident in my ability to steelman Trumpism, but I would say they fear that losing the culture war means being replaced by socialist-loving immigrants.)
But what about progressives? Why does my description of a default setting and fear of losing sound so clunky?
First, I think a better description would be to say that their belief is that our default setting is for one group to accumulate power (eg White people) and use it to oppress everyone else. They fear losing the culture war means descending into total White Supremacy oppression.
I like that definition better because it works on both the cultural and policy level. This helps me understand the aggression toward capitalism; they conflate it with White Supremacy. In both instances they see that a bunch of white dudes have accumulated power/capital and are using it to assert their dominance/extract labor from everyone else.
The only thing that makes progressives different from all the other groups is that they don't frame the default settings as a "descent" to their greatest fear (ie White Supremacy). They think they already have lost. White Supremacy has been winning since time immemorial.
This helps me understand why it's so difficult to talk across ideological lines. Libertarians think the government is already too big. Enlightenment liberals think we are already too polarized. Conservatives think society is already too permissive and chaotic. So collectively, they are understandably confused when progressives lump all these groups together, based on most of them having white skin, and declare that not only are they the bad guys, but they're winning the culture war.
We're all living different narratives and in each version, someone else is winning.
(As an Enlightenment liberal, I just want to say that I do not think polarization is worse than racism. I just think that we cannot solve racism, or any major problem, until we solve polarization.)
III.
The Georgia voting laws dominated the news cycle for quite some time. Some people argued it was the worst thing ever and others said the hype was overblown. At first, I thought the different reactions was a decouple vs. contextual dichotomy. In other words, how you felt about the laws depended on whether you could decouple them from Georgia's history of racism and voter suppression or whether that context always played a role on how we should interpret them.
For instance, here is a breakdown of how the law is being overblown, with the exception being the part that takes power away from the Secretary of State. That part is actually scary overreach.
But even if a progressive reads the above link and believes every word, they will not be comforted. Because just like my friend hearing about the rather benign Penn State name change, the voter law is a sign that progressives are losing the war. No matter how much you downplay the effects of the law, it will always be interpreted as "My outgroup used their power to put into law something that takes power away from my ingroup." If you're a progressive, this reifies your fear that we are descending into White Supremacy.
IV.
I like the decoupling vs. contextualizing idea. It helped me understand why some people just talk past one another, why we can't even seem to agree on what we're arguing about. Decoupling is considering facts on their merits, irrespective of their context, while contextualizing says that true honesty must acknowledge cultural context.
However, I think the dichotomy is flawed. I don't think the world is made up of people who are decouplers OR contextualizers. I'm not even talking about a spectrum. I think the flaw is that the description is fluid. In some contexts, I'm a decoupler. In others, a contextualizer. The determining factor is how much skin me or my tribe has in the game.
Take the Masterpiece Cakeshop. Should a Christian baker be allowed to refuse a cake for a gay couple? As a straight, non-Christian, I don't have any skin in the game. So whatever my opinion, it is decoupled from the context.
Now consider the biracial student forced to confess his white dominance in his sociology class. This is the unnecessary race-baiting of Critical Race Theory that increases polarization and puts the culture wars in a pressure cooker. As an Enlightenment liberal who believes our default setting moves us toward civil war, I cannot decouple this scenario from it's context in the polarization culture war. I place it right within the context of the polarization problem. In this case, I am a contextualizer.
So if someone seems to be overreacting to a news story, ask yourself: Is it possible they view the world as a different war than the way I view it? Do they have a different belief about the default setting of humanity?
Is their biggest fear White Supremacy, civil war, barbarism, totalitarianism, or something else different than my biggest fear? If so, are they contextualizing this story as just a battle in a larger war they feel they are losing?
My point is that we all overreact to seemingly mundane news stories and that our reaction has less to do with the context of the story than with the overall feeling that our team is losing. If your response to this point is to justify why your war is more righteous than someone else's war ("Boo Hoo, Christians. You have to call it a Holiday Tree? Guess what? I'm fighting against White Supremacy, which has been oppressing black people for 400 hundred years!") then you're missing the point of living in a multicultural society. We have to make space for everyone, and, yes, that includes the antiracists.
I think an important step is for members of each tribe to ask themselves: Where do I draw the line? At which point do I concede a battle, knowing that any one group should not have too much power, even if it's my tribe in power?
As an Enlightenment liberal, the American Civil War is a good example. If keeping two factions from tearing one another apart includes allowing a violation of human rights (eg slavery) then I am going to sit this one out or align with whoever is on the side of human rights.
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