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In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

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Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#61

Post by Nomentatus »

taylodl wrote: post #7

If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal' which I interpret as saying there is no metric by which we can measure the 'goodness' or 'effectiveness' of a culture. So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current…

"Good and bad is in the eye of the beholder and what you value." - Now put your hand on a hot stove and say that again. Nature forces some values. (quote from apoverton but the principle, vs Hume, applies to many other comments here.)

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#62

Post by bcoates »

wildmusings wrote: post #4
random023987 wrote: post #2

I think underlying many of these discussions is a fundamental question: "If not all cultures and values are equally successful in modern society, should we (as a society) encourage people to adopt a more successful values, or should we adapt society to make all cultures and values equally successful?" (edit: obviously I have biases, but I tried to phase this in a way that masked my biases. If there's a more neutral w…

The only way to accomplish the latter is to pull the excellent down to the level of mediocrity or worse. How do you propose to raise up a culture that doesn't value creativity and hard work, for example, to the level of success of one that does. Culture is much more than what food you eat and music you listen to. This reminds me of a famous Tocqueville quote: There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equali…

Culture and society engage with one another. To take an extremely concrete example, our society takes every possible opportunity to treat young unwed mothers like absolute shit.

"Raising up" the culture of people who are unsurprised that people at the peak of their fertility tend to get pregnant even in an environment where marriage is increasingly unattainable to that population is more about not going out of our way to kick people while they're down than hobbling the excellent.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#63

Post by weberc2 »

taylodl wrote: post #7

If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal' which I interpret as saying there is no metric by which we can measure the 'goodness' or 'effectiveness' of a culture. So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current…

> I bet most people would claim C(now) > C(slavery)

Without defending slavery, the obvious problem with your line of reasoning is that most people (implicitly most people alive today) are influenced by C(now). Even if you identify a group of values that are relatively constant across cultures (including bygone cultures), the best you can do is say "culture X better conforms to the majority values than culture Y". It's probably worthwhile to be able to make such a statement, but it's still not an objective statement. If you want to make objective statements about morality and cultures, you need to subscribe to a philosophy of moral absolutism, which is antithetical to liberal tradition prior to a few years ago.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#64

Post by narrator »

taylodl wrote: post #7

If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal' which I interpret as saying there is no metric by which we can measure the 'goodness' or 'effectiveness' of a culture. So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current…

It's been almost 90 years since Antonio Gramsci designed the culture war in his prison notebooks[1], so things have morphed a bit and the centrally planned communism he advocated is out of favor as an end goal, but the blueprint is still pretty much the same.

To quote Wikipedia a little: "Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting."

In his theory any culture C (!Hegemony)>C (Hegemony). When he refers to Hegemonic culture he was talking ato the time about what he called "Fordism" which was the state of the art in enlightened capitalism at the time meaning treating and paying workers well with the workplace working in tandem with the family to re-enforce the traditional family unit.

Gramsci was trying to figure out a way to cause communist revolution at the time and he said that in order to attack Fordism they must get together everyone who is opposed to the dominant culture, including socialists as well as all cultural minorities including civil rights activists, feminists, libertines, homosexuals, radical islamists, some criminals, etc who felt they had some greivance with the dominant culture. It really didn't matter if they were morally justified or not by any philosophy. The point was is that they were opposed to the hegemony and that's all that mattered. Thats because the point of their activity was not to change laws within the current system, but to create discontent to foment a socialist political revolution by any means.

Now these days this strategy has morphed into something that is not a communist plot, but just a general strategy to seize power in organizations. The reason you can't say any culture is better than any other except the hegemonic culture is because it ideologically undermines the means of political revolution that has been picked up by several generations of political opportunists who use this strategy to build and maintain a powerbase.

[1].https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Notebooks

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#65

Post by dmurray »

manofstick wrote: post #50
darawk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to compare a country like NZ to the US in a fair and meaningful way. NZ is a small, ethnically (and therefore more importantly culturally) homogenous country. Now, it's not completely homogenous, but it is much more so than the US. Being a democracy, the policies of the country are inseparable from its culture and demographics. You say universal healthcare might stem the tide of cultural breakdown. But we c…

>> NZ is a small, ethnically (and therefore more importantly culturally) homogenous country Not according to the CIA Factbook it isn't: NZ: European 71.2%, Maori 14.1%, Asian 11.3%, Pacific peoples 7.6%, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African 1.1%, other 1.6%, not stated or unidentified 5.4% USA: white 72.4%, black 12.6%, Asian 4.8%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.9%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2%,…

Moreover, the Maori population was just as downtrodden and oppressed as the blacks of the USA, 50 or 100 years ago, and is still on the whole poorer and less educated than the white majority.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#66

Post by jxramos »

I think this is a key motivational paragraph from the article...

"The students are certainly correct that claims by a professor about the value of bourgeois culture could be misused by racists to say that one race is inherently superior to another. But does that make any discussion of cultural differences taboo? Does that make Wax a white supremacist for saying that culture matters for poverty-related outcomes, that not all cultures are equally good for escaping poverty, and that the 1950s American “bourgeois cultural script” was particularly good for that purpose? No, and here’s why."

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#67

Post by briantakita »

colanderman wrote: post #40
rhizome wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this should all be short-circuited by the fact that cultures are not a fixed value that can be compared for equality. Congruence, perhaps, but there are too many moving parts in culture to be able to rank them, which is an implication of solving for a single (imaginary) term.

Right. For example, there is no one "white culture". I'm white, and there are plenty of white people in my home town with whom I share little to no cultural values. Any conversation about relative values of "cultures" is probably better cast as a discussion about cultural memes (in the original Dawkins sense [1]), with the understanding that the flow of memes tend to follow social contours as clusters, and interact w…

"White Culture" only exists in the domain of Identity Politics. Remove Identity Politics & you remove the notion of "White Culture", among other socially divisive memes.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#68

Post by kareemsabri »

apoverton wrote: post #44
taylodl wrote: post #7

If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal' which I interpret as saying there is no metric by which we can measure the 'goodness' or 'effectiveness' of a culture. So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current…

Good and bad is in the eye of the beholder and what you value. Is American culture (a loaded term because American culture is the product of numerous sub-cultures) better than all other cultures because of our economic strength? If not, then what are the objective measures that define a "good" culture. I'm very glad slavery doesn't exist, because I value equality and freedom. Yet still, I'd ask who is the authority t…

That's called moral relativism. It does't get you very far, because it is a belief system with no values, and therefore nothing to aim at.

There are some tools for objectively judging morality aka "good and bad". One is the principle of universality. So an outcome is moral if you can reasonably state that you would be equally happy to be on either side of the table. Slavery generally fails this test, since most people would prefer not to be slaves. Virtually everyone on either side of the slavery divide (slave/free) valued freedom, some of them just didn't value the freedom of other people.

Re: In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values

#69

Post by Retric »

colanderman wrote: post #40
rhizome wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this should all be short-circuited by the fact that cultures are not a fixed value that can be compared for equality. Congruence, perhaps, but there are too many moving parts in culture to be able to rank them, which is an implication of solving for a single (imaginary) term.

Right. For example, there is no one "white culture". I'm white, and there are plenty of white people in my home town with whom I share little to no cultural values. Any conversation about relative values of "cultures" is probably better cast as a discussion about cultural memes (in the original Dawkins sense [1]), with the understanding that the flow of memes tend to follow social contours as clusters, and interact w…

Your own culture tends to be invisible. I would say hot dogs are part of white culture in the way that say 'pro life/pro choice' is not.
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