On the Culture War
In my review of David Chapman’s Better Without AI, I fundamentally agreed with his assessment that recommender engine AIs are “deliberately”1 whipping up the culture war for ad clicks, and we need to somehow prevent this.
However, unlike Chapman, I can make no claim to be neutral in the culture war. I am clearly on one side of the divide.
It isn’t necessary to be neutral towards culture war issues, to be against the culture war. The key, if you are roused by some event linked to the culture war, is to think, “what can I practically do about this”.
Lets say, for instance, that I wish that The Rings of Power had been written to be as nearly true to Tolkien’s vison as The Fellowship of the Ring, and not an excuse for a load of left-wing propaganda.
What can I practically do about it?
Pretty obviously, nothing. I can refuse to watch the one they made, except that it never occurred to me to watch it in the first place. I can cancel my Amazon subscription, but that won’t mean much to the people who made the show, and again I will probably be doing that anyway once I’ve finished Clarkson’s Farm 2 because there isn’t really anything I watch on it any more.
I could write to Amazon explaining that I don’t find their programming relevant to me any more. That actually makes sense, but the cost/benefit ratio is very high.
What most people do is bitch about it publicly on social media. That is surely completely ineffective, and might even be counterproductive.
An anonymous2 voice shouting in public is not persuasive to anyone. In private, with people I know (whether they are likely to agree or not), I will share my feelings. That might help, and is a natural form of communication anyway. It also doesn’t generate ad clicks for the AI.
The reason I say it might be counterproductive is that by the behaviour of the leftist agitators, stirring up opposition is obviously their aim. As I said a while ago, In the case of the drag shows, the only credible motivation behind it that I can imagine is desire to upset the people who are upset by it.3 Yes, there are some perverts who want to actually do this stuff, but the public support for it comes from people who want to make it a hot public issue. Getting involved is playing into their hands.
Should we just let all this stuff happen then? Mostly, yes. The exception is, again, “what can I practically do about this”. If this is happening in some school in North London I have no connection with, the answer is nothing. Still more if it is happening in another country. I wrote in 2016: I consider local stories from far away as none of my business and refuse to consider them4. There is no reason anyone who is involved should care about my opinion. On the other hand, if it is happening somewhere I do have a connection, I should act — not to express my feelings, but to have an actual effect. This is similar to the recommendation that Chapman has for companies — not that they should launch into the culture war, but that they should drive it out. “Take this out of my office”.
This isn’t a clear route to victory. Nothing is that easy. But playing the culture war game, screaming in public, is no route to victory either. Take only measures that actually help, and those will generally be private and local.
From my biased viewpoint, the culture war is very asymetrical. One side is trying to overturn cultural standards, and the other is resisting and retaliating. In that sense, I think even Chapman’s call to drop it is actually a right-wing position. I think without a loud public clamour, most of the recent excesses would be quietly rolled back in private by people who care about reality. Unfortunately, the loud public clamour is not going away any time soon, but playing the recommender AI’s game by joining it, even on the “right” side, is helping to maintain it rather than stop it.
Once you rule out participating in the culture war, the next step is to stop consuming it. A family member watches Tucker Carlson regularly. The presentation of his show disgusts me slightly. Not because I disagree with Carlson; I think he is right about practically everything. But then what? All he is doing is getting people outraged about things they can’t do anything about. What is the effect on them of watching this show? They make noise on social media, which is harmful, and they vote for right-wing politicians, which is the thing that has been proved by experiment to not do any good.
- if that means anything
- and even if I used my real name, I would still be practically anonymous, since my real name doesn’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t know me
- comment on Post_Liberalism
- Outrage
A Nonny Mouse says:
An American lady of my acquaintance performed on stage, in one of the more rural American states, in an operatic interlude which involved her wearing some sort of heroic male garb like William Tell. Her father, whose previous exposure was entirely to the ‘redneck’ style of entertainment, came to see her perform and to her great embarrassment made some audible uncomplementary remark about Lesbian garb.
The problem is that the European dramatic tradition takes a completely different view of cross-dressing to the present day American one. As women who performed on stage invariably became involved in prostitution, the Church banned them altogether, and female parts were taken by boys. (This seems to be universal: In Japan the Noh plays operated the same convention)
At a later period, women were admitted to the stage, and did practise in the same line as prostitution, but as it was way beyond the pockets of the average theatre-goer it is better known as courtesanship, with well known courtesans such as Nell Gwyn and Mrs Jordan attracting the King’s eye, and others being snapped up by Dukes and the like. The Paris Opera was run by the “Jockey Club”, the singers of which doubled as mistresses to the aristocratic members of the Jockey, who came to the Opera solely to see their mistresses perform, or perhaps scout around for a replacement.
Under these circumstances, males who performed female parts were perfectly respectable and preferable to the alternative.
While there does seem to be a considerable overlap between homosexuals and the transvestite inclination, they are not actually the same thing. Some of the most famous cross-dressers in entertainment are definitely not gay. Brendan O’Carroll in Mrs Brown’s boys, Barry Humphreys as Dame Edna Everage, Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie, and going back all the way to 1958, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in “Some Like it Hot” all can be placed, by their wives and children, in the heterosexual camp.
Rupert Grint, asked to name his 7 favourite drag acts, did so. I couldn’t name one. Rupert, as most people know, has recently become a father. The drag artists he named, such as ‘Sharon Needles’, were definitely gay.
That ship has already sailed. Among today’s youth—and Rupert is 34—it is not considered inappropriate for heterosexuals to be entertained by ‘drag acts’.
I must single out your strange statement “the only credible motivation behind it that I can imagine is desire to upset the people who are upset by it” This is to ascribe a centrality to yourself which does not in fact obtain. If I make it my life’s ambition to sing on stage ‘Non piu andrai’ in the Marriage of Figaro, it is entirely about my own inclinations and the possibility of pleasing others who appreciate such things: it is nothing to do with upsetting the Taliban, who hate music and the stage, or low class East Enders who can’t abide singing in foreign languages, or the Austrian Emperor who hated fiction which showed the nobility in a bad light and the lower classes in a good one.