Culture War 2.0

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Typology

Peter Boghossian:

This first culture war was mostly fought over issues of religious faith and morality, such as whether creationism was a viable alternative to the theory of biological evolution and whether limits should be placed on institutionalizing Christian values in the public sphere. In Culture War 2.0, the supernatural, metaphysics, and even religion more broadly have become irrelevant. The demands of Christian faith and morality have been replaced by something far more threatening to a society founded on Enlightenment principles. Culture War 2.0 rotates around three axes: 1) the new rules of engagement, 2) the correspondence theory of truth, and 3) the role intersectionality ought to play in everyone’s worldview. Let’s examine each of these features to see how Culture War 2.0 has made allies out of former ideological enemies. Call this The Great Realignment.” (https://americanmind.org/salvo/welcome-to-culture-war-2-0/)


Discussion

Jordan Hall:

"From this point of view, Culture War 2.0 is rather simple. We might say that under conditions of accelerating change, humanity is now rapidly approaching a “phase transition.” We are moving from one way of being human to another, rather different, way of being human.

If we try to track it at the micro level, watching as the old coherence of the Blue Church dissolves into increasingly unfamiliar micro-tribes mutating at an increasingly disorienting pace, we are overwhelmed in the chaos. But we don’t have to focus on the micro. If we can recognize that we are quickly approaching a phase transition, we can reach for an entirely different set of tools to help us make sense of and respond to the situation.

A set of tools that is as old as humanity itself.

As it turns, out, this kind of phase transition isn’t entirely novel to the human experience. In fact, the moment we find ourselves in is somewhat familiar. In a deep sense, we have been here before. In fact, every time that our most distant ancestors faced a catastrophe of enough peril to force them to leave the security of home to venture through the hostile wilderness in search of a new place, we, humans, had to navigate this kind of transition.

Bret Weinstein once shared with me that the specific adaptation that made us most fundamentally human might have been the evolved capacity to navigate niche transitions in much faster than biological time. Throughout our species’ developmental history, we found ourselves pushed to the edge of extinction many times. Over and over again, our survival depended on becoming capable of leaving one niche and adapting to a new one. Ultimately, this problem itself *became* our fundamental niche. Evolution finally found a way to create a species whose niche is niche transition.

Evolution did this by moving almost all of our adaptive specialization from the biological (hardware) layer into the cultural (software layer). And it coded (at a very deep level) a capacity to shift from “culture mode,” where we are limited to using the tools in our given cultural toolkit, into a creative “liminal mode,” where we can form collective intelligence to navigate complex reality directly and with remarkable fluidity. From my perspective, then, the resolution of Culture War 2.0, and the broader War for Collective Intelligence, settles into a simple choice. We either endeavor to make sense and choices on the basis of our existing cultural toolkit and, ultimately, battle into self-extinguishing chaos as lived reality accelerates beyond the bounds of those tools. Or we listen to our deepest humanness and allow ourselves to become sensitive to creative liminality. From here (and, I propose, only from here) we are capable of a coherent collective intelligence that is fully adequate to the novelty and magnitude of our present reality.

Letting go of everything that we think we know, indeed, letting go of a mode we might call “knowingness,” is no joke. Mystery and novelty are unspeakably dangerous. Letting go of certainty and expertise in the context of what appears to be a building threat in every direction is even more alarming. It only makes sense to melt into the crucible of liminality when the only way out is “up”.

Nonetheless, I’ve noticed that over the past few years this choice is beginning to show up more and more. I’m noticing an an increasing willingness, even urgency, for moving away from the simulated thinking of “knowing” into liminal space. A new kind of humanity wants to emerge and, for those with ears to hear, it is calling “from the future”." (https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2019-aoc-edition-b6e31897f35c)