I would argue that we worked our way to the post cold-war golden age, and then destroyed it with greed, which led to financial pain, which led to political nonsense, which led to the rubbish we are in right now.
So the period we are in right now is not the "back to normal" phase, but an actual decrease of human evolution. Not dissimilar to things that happened in the past, for example with the collapse of the roman empire.
Greed is part of what humans are. It's part of what destroys societies. Building a society that can survive human nature long term is an unsolved problem.
You sound like you expected that, after the end of the Cold War, we had a perfect society, and then we fell from a state of grace and ruined it. No, after the end of the Cold War, the pressure was removed that had been keeping us from acting on our worst impulses. Turns out that many of us were worse than we expected.
This is debatable. In fact, the US culture war is absolutely about what American "morality" should be. It's what a lot of the Project 2025 Manifesto is about:
"The document spans a wide range of policy areas, but when it comes to culture, family, and morality, it emphasizes a return to traditional values, a rollback of progressive social policies, and an assertive use of federal power to reshape American culture"
There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.
Culture war at this point is more than a decade old. It did not start with Project 2025. It started on the Internet.
Also, GP said people do not change all that much morally. That much is true. Organizations change fast. Societies change slower. The acted on rules are a combination of three, but it's important to be aware of the distinctions and the dynamics.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#:~:text=1991%E2%80...
In short: "theft is bad" is something people are born with[1]; "pirating media is bad" isn't; the former will be universal wherever you go, the latter depends strongly on who you ask[2]; the former is constant throughout history, the latter can change within months or years.
On a more general point, human society is the poster child of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" - there's a lot of ideas and institutions in our lives that are purely abstract, and exist only in the shared, social sphere. Things like money, rule of law, countries or corporations - they exist as long as people expect them to exist, but ultimately they can disappear overnight - unlike the more fundamental concepts like self-preservation or reciprocity, which are anchored in our selves.
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[0] - If it weren't, we would have much more trouble understanding or relating to the past; the saying is that the past is a foreign country, not that it's an alien species!
[1] - Or at least it's as close to innate as we can get.
[2] - And, of course, the progress of science and technologies that made this question meaningful in the first place.
Not even close! Universalized morality (e.g., "stealing is wrong") is a product of the last couple thousand years, and it's only present in some modern humans. It is the foundation of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.
If you're curious about what other kinds of human experience can be like, I recommend checking out some ethnographies. Here's a summary of one: https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/1...
And they're sick of it, they're desperate, and now are just laying their cards on the table.
I grew up in an evangelical church in the 80s-- albeit in Canada -- attending "Focus on the Family" events, Bible studies, etc. that promulgated heavy socially conservative ethos -- so I feel like I have seen this narrative play out over a few decades ...
After the legalization of gay marriage they just collectively lost their shit. They see the stakes as being incredibly high. They see abortion as straight up murder. Winning the 2016 Trump presidency and taking over the US supreme court gave them a taste of blood, and a sense that they can finally reverse what they see as a profound descent into degeneracy. The trans rights stuff over the last few years has them totally incensed, as its a full-on assault (to them) on the ontological reality of family, body, identity, etc. that they consider intrinsic and holy and fundamental.
I think they're full of shit, but that's I think how this world view shakes down. It's a war because they feel the stakes are incredibly high.
People on the right or in boardrooms of various companies that are aligning themselves with these people for what they see are strategic ends are playing with fire.
Trying to redefine "woman" and "man", "female" and "male", "homosexual" and "heterosexual" - and then reengineering society by decree based on these controversial redefinitions - is going to get opposition across the board.
I think this is why it's become such a hot "culture war" topic, because it undermines the deeply-held views of many, many more people than just religious conservatives.
Take gay marriage for instance - this was fought both for and against on the basis of it being a same-sex union. But from the perspective of gender identity believers, if, for example, someone female merely identifies as male, then marries a male (who also identifies as male), then this is a "gay marriage" too. Despite this actually being a heterosexual pairing.
On top of this, where these beliefs have been forced into law and policy, it has caused actual physical harms. Women being raped and impregnated by male prisoners who identified their way into the female prison estate is amongst the worst of these. But lawmakers in states that have enabled this will claim it's progressive policy, somehow. Even though it's regressing back to over a century ago when mixed-sex prisons where commonplace and incarcerated women were at constant risk of sexual violence and exploitation from the men they were locked up with.
On the whole the freaking out about "trans" stuff is mostly a red herring or strawman used for strategic propagandistic purposes more than it is reflecting any real world problematic.
Making outlandish claims about how liberals are trying to do X, Y, and Z to their children's education or sports forces liberals onto the defensive forcing them to defend hormone therapy for 12 year olds or whatever when the actual number of real world incidents of this is vanishingly small.
I don't personally carry any kind of radical gender identity theory, but I care about the rights of minorities and it's none of my business what other people do and I see no problem with the public and corporate sphere accomodate pronoun usages or even bathroom accomodations, it's unlikely to cause harms and it doesn't hurt me in the slightest.
It's also somewhat ... interesting ... to bring up defense of female prisoner's rights and their conditions as some kind of demarcation point.
Is the socially conservative right concerned about humane prisons now?
Because that would be great. But unlikely.
> Because that would be great. But unlikely.
I don't know where I'm at on this, but this is ad hominem. You can't discredit an argument based on who's making it. If you're opposed to humane prisons, just say so. But that's not what I'm getting.
The person isn't making outlandish claims. You can search the web and validate all of them.
Liberals, as in new leftists responsible for the majority of purity spiral shaming we've seen on the internet for oh the last two decades now, are in fact responsible for their fair share of extremist ideologies that some folks have now taken as self-evident. This is despite the fact that many of us who once considered ourselves part of their ranks are completely sick of its absolutist language.
I've been pushed into what I guess must be a kind of center because it seems we can no longer have any discourse of any nuance around issues like trans people without being labeled a fascist or maniac neo-Nazi right-winger.
To take an example of this, I have a very close friend who is trans but even she is sick of how faddish transness has become. She insists she's a trans-medicalist, something I only recently learned about, which seems to set the bar appropriately high to being what global society (not the ultra-left view that dominates places like HN and Reddit) deems a woman.
I actually do believe in biological gender and even think the fact biological women are out there bleeding and suffering once a month in ways men can't even begin to understand does in fact separate them from other people stating they are now a woman. Or literally growing a human being inside them is both a privilege and a horror that marks someone so indelibly we call this person a woman.
Yet I can no longer reasonably even engage most of you in a nuanced discourse about this without likely getting downvoted to oblivion. There was a time once when you could, but now it seems that time has passed.
> but now it seems that time has passed.
I am glad. I have yet to see any form of actually nuanced discussion about this that involves a cis person so far.
Anyway, none of this is "center".
I am able to maintain friendships with people I disagree with, even on very fundamental things.
You capture exactly the drift that has occurred in discourse, where neither side is able to talk to each other with any level-headedness, but remains fixed in escalation, certain the other side intends their extinction.
It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the libertarian arguments of gay rights.
The movement is is inherently cultural and poorly suited for adjudication the legal/political sphere. Courts and laws can't make people love, accept, or believe someone is a given gender.
Some people still speak this way in North America but it is fringe. It wasn't fringe when I was a kid. It was the expected way of thinking about sexuality.
In the early 80s at least there was only two "mainstream" ways to talk about homosexuality, as far as I can recall:
1. what happens in people's bedrooms is none of my business, just don't talk about it in public and expect tolerance, or
2. this is total deviance and a mental illness and needs to be cured. (Oh, and they deserve HIV for such unnatural behaviour.)
That changed, but only in the 90s/2000s, to an understanding that homosexuality itself is "natural" ("born this way"), and the so-called iron-clad laws of natural behaviour were "allowed" to include homosexuality. And even gay marriage.
Appeals to laws of nature and assumptions about what is natural mask ideology, and often look completely ridiculous 50 years later.
That said, the battleground was about what they could do, so a live and let live compromise was possible. Gradual acceptance followed and continues increasing today.
With Trans, there battleground is belief, and even more critically, identity. Accepting homosexuals didnt require people to redefine themselves, their own gender, and that of the one they are attracted to. Self identity is incredibly important to people.
I agree that most of my trans coworkers and acquaintances seem satisfied with being treated the respect I give anyone, and keep any unflattering thoughts to myself. Meanwhile, there is a contingent of zealots on reddit that call me a bigot if I dont want to date a trans-woman or think biology should be considered in sports. Is that discrimination?
What is discrimination? Is it any delineation in treatment or perception from a cis-gendered person?
I have given a lot of thought to the topic because I support others having personal autonomy, but place value on my conceptions of gender.
No one is forcing you to date someone you're not attracted to.
Most of the time I see the argument that people feel pressured/forced to date someone they're not attracted to it's not about men being "tricked"
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028041752/https://www.bbc.c...
Their god considers gay sex a crime worthy of eternal torture. So anything they do to prevent people from having homosexual encounters is morally acceptable, up to and including torture & occasional execution via "conversion therapy".
Anyone who truly believes in hell is either morally bankrupt & willing to allow others to suffer for eternity, or a dangerous monster who will stop at nothing to prevent others from what they see as sinning.
Many of them don't go to the extremes they would if they actually believed they were saving others from hell. They're full of shit. But some of them do, and they're fucking terrifying.
To use federal power to reshape our culture is both arrogant and, since Project 2025 is how they want to do the reshaping, is against the New Testament principle of "live and let live". (another way to state this principle is: "Christian, mind your own business and stay in your lane.")
I guess more people notice it now that Republicans are doing this so openly but the use of federal power to reshape our culture is a well established process.
Also what does live and let live get them, especially with the other side pushing so hard? A slippery slope to an immoral society.
I've noticed that left leaning individuals tend to view their philosophies as neutral and when the federal government exerts its power in continuance of these philosophies it is viewed as a neutral application of the constitution. The right currently sees what they are doing in exactly the same way, a neutral application of the constitution.
I actually think we have two conflicting constitutions at this point. The rigid written one we are all familiar with, and a more flexible unwritten one that is based on precedent, regulation, and legislation. The right tends to prefer the former, the left the latter. As an example I think Roe v. Wade, ended up being a part of this unwritten constitution which conflicted with the written constitution. You then saw this culminate in the Dobbs decision where the left thinks a right has been taken away and the right thinks it was never a right according to the constitution.
This isn't a left/right thing, it's a British/French thing. And being a former British colony, America is very strictly a common law country. That's why we even have to care about the Supreme Court at all. The Constitution merely says that there is a thing called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it wants to. In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution, remembered how common law precedent actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial review".
So naturally, the Constitution always has an unwritten component; to get rid of that would be effectively making a new Constitution. What people are squabbling over is what should and shouldn't be in the unwritten component, not whether or not it exists. Originalism and textualism deny the unwritten component, but nobody is actually an Originalist or textualist. There's no historical justification for the people who wrote the Constitution to want a civil law interpretation of it. Remember, they were all British lawyers and politicians. What Originalists and textualists are actually doing is using their ideology as an excuse to overturn precedent they don't like. If they were really Originalists, they'd be shutting SCOTUS down.
[0] Sharia Law and Mao-style "We won't tell you what the law is" bullshit notwithstanding
"Except in matters governed by the Federal Constitution or by Acts of Congress, the law to be applied in any case is the law of the State. And whether the law of the State shall be declared by its Legislature in a statute or by its highest court in a decision is not a matter of federal concern. There is no federal general common law. Congress has no power to declare substantive rules of common law applicable in a State, whether they be local in their nature or "general," be they commercial law or a part of the law of torts. And no clause in the Constitution purports to confer such a power upon the federal courts."
There are matters of common law at the federal level, but they're not central to my broader point. When I say "unwritten constitution" I am referring to a set of laws, statutes, customs, and judicial decisions which together form an unwritten constitution that are non-binding to future legislative efforts. The Magna Carta and the 1689 English Bill of Rights still make up a part of the unwritten constitution of the UK, although the former is mostly symbolic at this point. However, no parliament can bind a future parliament in the UK. So if they wanted to repeal the 1689 Bill of Rights they could do so legislatively right now. The major advancement of the founding generation was the idea of a written constitution, one that could bind future legislators - and technically the other branches - so that the constitution itself had to be changed through a separate process. In other words Congress cannot repeal our Bill of Rights right now, it would have to go through the arduous amendment process. So when I speak of an unwritten constitution I am referring specifically to the non-binding nature of the laws and statutes that make up a set of foundational rules for a society. The phrases "unwritten constitution" and "written constitution" are fairly old and unfortunately are a bit of a misnomer in what they actually mean.
> The Constitution merely says that there is a thing called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it wants to.
That's actually a good place to start for an example. Chief Justice Roberts stated recently that "[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose." This highlights my point fairly well. The written constitution, the one that cannot be changed through normal legislative means, makes no such determination as to what is or is not appropriate and merely grants Congress the power of impeachment without even defining what high crimes or misdemeanors means. What I would argue has become a part of our unwritten constitution is as Roberts describes, a set of appellate courts with specific jurisdiction where the appropriate course of action for an unfavorable opinion is to appeal. However, Congress can add or remove inferior courts and determine their procedural rules and jurisdiction pretty much at will. In other words this set of courts, laws and customs developed by the legislator does not bar a future legislator from changing it to something wholly different if they so desire.
Another example would be independent agencies under the executive which has become a hot button topic lately. Article 2 Section 1 states that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." However, for a long time now we have had independent agencies which were created legislatively with a certain degree of insulation from Presidential control. I would argue that this is another example of a part of an unwritten constitution that does not bind any future legislator. It's also an area of extreme friction between the written one and the set of laws, customs, and precedent that we have developed over many decades.
Hopefully those two examples are more informative as neither are really central to common law.
> In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution, remembered how common law precedent actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial review".
That deserves a reply far longer than I can provide here. In general while I see the utility of judicial review I would argue it doesn't make sense when it comes to disputes between the federal government and a state, i.e. the federal government via the judiciary gets to have the final word over what is constitutional when a state challenges the federal government over the constitutionality of some federal action. I would also argue that Marbury v. Madison was one of the first bricks of an unwritten constitution being constructed as for the most part everyone just passively accepted it, but it is not explicitly called out in Article 3. However, there are good arguments against this.
The so called slippery slope is a worn out trope from the 80's, that has lost all meaning under the current administration. This is why live and let live works, as long as we all obey the law. We have to realize the rule of law is for everyone to adhere to, it doesn't matter how hard either side pushes, the only other option is jail.
The government we have is far from a libertarian "live and let live", regulating nearly every aspect of life and taxing one person to give to another.
It decides what children are taught, who can work jobs, what is a crime, and who pays for different services.
He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered:
It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.
It’s the next 30 years I’m worried about.
PS: ofc, I have no clue if he’s right or not. But I thought it’s an interesting take to share.
He can only extrapolate from events that already happened. Human made global warming is a first time, so difficult to say what will happen from a historical perspective.
Human-made global warming appears to go back to the advent of agriculture, though, so for all intents and purposes it has been a constant throughout the history of which we speak.
Maybe that's what you meant after all.
What was this based on?
Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution for example.
We see our history as a dot, because we live in it.
But people in the future will take a more long-term view and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.
The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.
Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.
We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.
Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.
This is a difficult time compared to what? The black plague? WW1?
This is the easiest time ever to be alive.
I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the internet has broke democracy.
The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.
This professor is still living in the unipolar moment that has passed.
I think it is more accurate to say it broke the power of the aristocracy by causing a labour shortage.
The black death happened in the 14th century, the reformation in the 16th
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
Do you have any links to any material/info on this topic? I'm sure some folks have begun talking about protocols.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.
What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela, South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much worse even for decently developed countries with democracy and a solid economic foundation.
Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people across multiple growing countries, and broad (sometimes related, sometimes not) anti-democracy trends, I really wouldn't be that optimistic.
What would make one think that e.g. the Coup Belt in Subsaharan Africa will some day get more democratic? The fundamentals aren't there - the populace is generally poor and poorly educated. Strongman rule over years/decades can erode the little civic society that existed, and then it's very very hard to get an effective democracy functioning.
There's a pervasive sense in online discussions these days that if it's cynical, dark or depressing, it has to be the truth. It's like Occam's razor for today's modern doomer: the bleakest explanation must be the correct one. And I'm not saying that things are easy or that democracy is guaranteed, but I am saying that pessimism isn't inherently more realistic than optimism.
Cynicism sells in the 21st century.
It's not really cynicism.
It's just that people today only care about the next 20 or 30 years. They don't really care if, over the course of the next 200 years, two nations can rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing concern for them.
Maybe this was your intention or maybe not, but this is kinda what I'm talking about. It presupposes that there will be nuclear exchanges and annihilation in the first place, because, well, why wouldn't there be? Life is shit, tensions are high, and that's the grim dark end we all see coming anyway?
Isn't that the human condition? Historically, it was no doubt an evolutionary advantage to always think that a lion is about to pounce, so to speak. That doesn't just go away. The instincts still need something to work with even after all the real threats are gone.
The cynicism comes from the fact that many people (including me) have decided to check out from what is going on in the world and instead focus on what we can control in our daily lives.
It also comes from the fact that in many countries the social contract is broken.
You are still expected to pay your taxes but the services provided are increasingly of bad quality such as schools,hospitals, judicial system and so on.
So much so in fact that it seems to me that this relationship that the people have with the state is becoming more and more one sided. Like in an abusive relationship of some sort.
Look at the number of people who don't bother to vote anymore because at the end of the day it does not make much difference to their lives.
There is profound sense of injustice in the world at the moment but it is being swept under the carpet.
And then it fell in the hands of radical islamists. Is this the outcome that everyone was hoping for?
This is not an assessment. It's the truth. Jolani is a former al-Qaeda member whose organization is still considered a terrorist organization. The US even had a prize on his head.
> Your response is that of a coward that would rather live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of their own lives.
You response to an opinion that is different than yours is to insult someone who is willing to engage with you. If you are not interested in debating, no point in commenting.
how do we define "normal" for society?
There really is no normal - things change over time. It would be more accurate to say it was the end of an period of unusual stability and security.
I agree its dangerous to be overly positive and naive, we humans are still just a notch above beasts, are easy to manipulate (always via negative emotions like greed, envy, inferiority complex and so on), but things can absolutely go to utter shit, we have more capabilities than ever to spread it across globe. Not just nuclear - drone warfare is absolutely maddening. Imagine 10 millions of them, each with their target, each going with absolute precision and on its own - thats what current armies aim for and within a decade they will get it.
What is (and always was) is that very few holds most of the decision power. Get one mental unstable vicious person there and it falls down like house of cards. Our current high tech civilization is pretty fragile to disruption. Sure, we can always revert to stone age, some would even be glad, but I strongly prefer not to.
It doesn't have to get worse. Conversely, it doesn't have to get better, either, but at this point, we've got a lot of history that shows us what has and hasn't worked. I think the measure of how people are doing worth focusing on is how much of their potential they've fulfilled. I'm not really interested in how generally well off someone is today compared to someone in some random point in history because there are too many outliers on both ends of that one.
Interesting take on "normal" by Canadian physician Gabor Maté.
Things get better, sometimes they get worse. Generally people are better off materially than they have ever been, but people do not change all that much morally.