/pt/ – Petrarchan

I've got a culture-war hook for you: Mainstream center-left culture has a self-imposed deliberate ignorance on certain topics. There are "correct" explanations on several issues that are cliched and unexamined. Item 1: Right-Wing Backlash on Immigration Observation: Every developed country (with a few noteworthy examples) has a right-wing anti-immigration party that has surged in popularity over the past decade. Acceptable center-left explanation: We are facing actual Nazis! This is actually German National Socialism on the rise! Item 2: Gerontocratic Debt Observation: Social transfers in economies throughout the developed world have allowed pensioners to accumulate historically exceptional wealth at the generational scale. Acceptable center-left explanation: The rich need to pay their fair share! Item 3: The Male Loneliness Crisis Observation: Men are so unwanted they will shoot themselves in the brain (a lot!) Acceptable center-left explanation: Patriarchy is the problem! Men need to dismantle patriarchal expectations about vulnerability and sexuality. Men need to give up their "hyper" independence! Item 4: Cratering Educational achievement Observation: Throughout the developed world, school-aged teenagers are showing declining achievement at graduation. Acceptable center-left explanation: It's No Child Left Behind! It's COVID! It's social media! It's "Sold a Story"! Before you suspect that I'm picking on the center-left because I'm a rightoid -- think again! I'm using politics for engagement bait, and I'm picking on my own side, but I wanted to use this example because the social function of the center-left is to serve as the complaints department for both the left and the right. Everybody gets away with picking on the center-left because that's the social function of the center-left. The problem I want to raise about each of these is that it is a feature, not a bug, that they are cliched and unexamined. They are responses that are meant to shut down dialogue, not contribute to it. I want to highlight that these are "explanations," as opposed to stories, justifications, etc. And the thing about an explanation is that it implies a degree of necessity. EG The water froze into ice because its temperature was cooler than 0 C. A story is about something that didn't necessarily have to happen -- Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand because he thought it was a good idea. An explanation is the end of a discussion because there is some kind of universal law that necessitates the movement from input to output. But there's nothing necessary about Leopold Lojka stalling the engine of the Crown Prince's car directly in front of Gavrilo Princip. Explanations are uniquely ill-suited for human affairs. Why did the Golden Horde turn back before it conquered Europe? You could explain it by saying that the early spring thaws in Hungary prevented the Golden Horde from pushing through. If you want such an explanation, you have to make it seem like the Golden Horde is determinate, like a machine or a natural mechanism. But of course the truth of the situation is that the Golden Horde turned back because Ogodei Khan died and it seemed like a good idea to the leaders that they should go pick a new Khan. It was a choice. It's precisely the chosen-ness that makes this event stick out in the history textbook, just like the Chinese decision to stop exploring the Pacific. It didn't have to be that way, but it was. What the ideologue doesn't see, or maybe doesn't want to admit, is that we're at a decision point for all of the above. The things that the center-left would have us do (decriminalize migration; support inter-generational transfer as socialist incrementalism; adapt male socialization to fit feminine models; socially engineer a multi-cultural society) are merely *options* among others. I realize that this might sound banal but it's really quite important. A typical person with explanations truly does not face up to the reality that they need to convince *everybody* that their way is better. Politicians don't even bother saying to the electorate, "I have a plan for X and I think you should choose it over the alternatives because of A, B, and C." Instead, it is simply assumed that they know best, and once the electorate / consumer / society is exhausted from a tantrum then everybody will be lead by a (captured) technocratic elite into a golden dawn of pre-selected options. To stake out one farther claim, I think that this kind of thinking is based on analytics-driven demographic analysis. Hollywood, for instance, knows the demographics of their ideal four-quadrant movie and they'll reverse engineer everything else about the movie to hit that demographic. Politicans, likewise, have a target electorate that they'll synthesize by twisting the dials of turnout and persuasion. The basic premise of applying statistics to human affairs rests on this kind of thinking: *When we analyze the success of A, we look at demographics B1, B2, B3... . So now we will generalize across demographics and predict that the same trends will hold true for C.* I will concede that maybe this kind of thinking works for getting ad-click conversion rates for margarine or whatever. But the problem is in transferring it over to other forms of human affairs. We are a lot freer than the marketers acknowledge! We really can choose a different world!