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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

#181

Post by stinkytaco »

briantakita wrote: post #67
colanderman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes me wonder how many cultures only exist in the realm of identity politics. Certainly there is "culture" that white people are the predominant part of (I'm thinking of the church basement Lutheranism of my childhood as an example), but no one would call that "white culture". What other cultures are a political construction as opposed to a "natural" one?

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

#182

Post by Blackthorn »

nyolfen wrote: post #175
Blackthorn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is black culture , which I literally just said existed in the USA. So what exactly are you disagreeing with?

the way your original comment is phrased sounds exactly like you're saying 'there is no black culture in the USA'

Wow, my bad. My mistake for bad phrasing! I edited it to hopefully be more clear.

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

#183

Post by stinkytaco »

kareemsabri wrote: post #68
apoverton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

As an interesting aside, this statement shows the massive impact Kant has had on modern thought. To the point that it's difficult to overestimate his impact. The principle of universality is a relatively modern phenomenon. For much of recorded history that was not the dominant value.[1]

[1]: There's several good texts exploring how people may have thought at various times in history (because it's all speculation, of course), but one I enjoyed was A Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England.

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

#184

Post by stinkytaco »

kelnos wrote: post #150
weberc2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

That might be technically correct (as we know, the best kind of correct), but it's not a useful argument to make, outside of pedantry. You may not be defending slavery, but you are suggesting that we cannot make a definitive statement about whether slavery is good or bad. If we can't do that, then what's the point of practical discussion about the direction of our civilization?

Perhaps with the best of intentions, the left seems to be silencing the discussion, or at least attempting to. It's a paradoxical defense of cultural relativism with a morally absolute position (saying x is bad and should be institutionally censored). I don't have an easy way to resolve that dilemma, but sometimes it seems the left is more concerned with appearance than with discussion.

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

#185

Post by zhemao »

drawkbox wrote: post #96

From the original article: These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period. [1] People attach happy ideas during this time because during good economic time…

Thank you. I wondered if anyone else could see why the original essay is so ridiculous. It assumes that bad culture is the cause of poverty, and not the other way around. It's pretty obvious that the decision to get married and stay married is affected by material conditions. One consequence of the decline in manufacturing jobs is that less-educated men have pretty low employment rates. Since they can't hold down a stable job and be the primary breadwinner (as "bourgeois culture" expects them to), there's little reason for them to stick around (or for their partners to keep them around). This also explains the data Haidt and his group turned up on the correlation between parents' marriage status and children's future success. The couples that managed to stay together were the ones that had a better financial/employment situation. There's no reason to believe that a deadbeat dad would improve his child's future competitiveness that much just by staying married to the child's mother.

There's also the fact that single moms on welfare would lose their benefits if they married the father of their children. As one astute internet commenter on a similar article remarked, "Only an ivory tower egghead could think that poor people don't make rational economic decisions."

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

#186

Post by StephenMelon »

kareemsabri wrote: post #68
apoverton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

The capitalism system itself fails the universality test, because a person wouldn’t be equally happy to be on either side of a table with Jeff Bezos on one side and an unskilled immigrant on the other.

Arguably slavery never went away, it’s just that the slavery franchise was disguised/rebranded and then extended as social mobility was slowly rolled back.

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

#187

Post by wildmusings »

spaceseaman wrote: post #100
gras wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this at all controversial? The American Jewish minority of 6% of the population owns 25% of American wealth. They've done well. Are the downvotes about attributing it to their values? What else? Their skill at (((accidental))) eugenics? The selection pressure put on them by other groups? Other theory: KGB or Mossad votebots that want to suppress discussions about Jews not only being victims.

It's likely being down-voted because it is brought up in the context of black Americans. In this context a quite frustrating argument familiar to black Americans often follows: "If the Jews are okay, then how come you couldn't figure it out? HMMMMMM? That's what I thought." is heard often when bringing up the American Jewish within the context of this discussion. While I don't agree with down-voting a comment that sm…

>Unlike the Jewish, however, African-Americans' culture was systematically annihilated when they were enslaved.

Yes, Black Americans have suffered a truly horrible history of oppression that has caused cultural problems. If anything, you're agreeing with Wax that culture matters.

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

#188

Post by kansface »

typomatic wrote: post #57
danfolkes wrote: post #18

Here is a follow-up article written by one of the 33 members of the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty to sign a letter criticizing Amy Wax: Don’t Care if Amy Wax Is Politically Incorrect; I Do Care that She’s Empirically Incorrect https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/09/03/i-dont-care-if-amy-w...

Thanks for posting. The original article is clearly hyper-racist--how unbelievable that the only cultural tradition suited for the 21st century also just happens to be the one which you hail from--but also just weirdly certain about things that deserve no certainty.

How does one distinguish hyper-racism from the more quotidian variety?

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by StephenMelon »

chickenfries wrote: post #21
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…

> But maybe that's not what the phrase actually means: maybe what they really intend to say is we've yet to identify unbiased metrics by which we can use to measure cultures and thus correlate them. > If that's what's actually meant by the phrase 'all cultures are equal' (and I've never heard of anyone presenting it that way) then it should be stated as such because then we can work toward identifying those metrics s…

I think that the belief that all cultures are equal is usually a mistake based on fuzzy thinking. The underlying thought is that “all cultures have value”, which mutates into “all cultures have equal value in terms of increasing insight into how humans interact with the world and each other” and this gets universalised via a mental shortcut into “all cultures have equal value” and then anyone who questions it gets shouted down.

Additionally, cultures are porous, overlapping aggregations of chaotic, abstract and mutating human created concepts which resist analysis almost by definition.

Assessing a culture based mainly on its economic expediency seems like a startlingly narrow criteria?

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