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I can no longer tell unironically trad people apart from religious people 🤔 Seems like exactly the same mindset. Averred religious beliefs are just a cosmetic touch
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I suspect once you anchor on a historical era as a standard, it acts to slowly freeze all other attitudes in complementary, consistent ways. Like a dust particle in subzero water seeding the freezing/crystallization process.
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Replying to @RealREverton
I used to think trad was 1950s aesthetics and belief in traditional gender roles/family structure, but now it seems to have an expanding set of implications for political allegiances, local community involvement, attitudes towards anything foreign/culturally distant.
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It’s not necessarily a pathway to either straightforward reactionary positions, or full-blown purist retreat a la Amish, though those become highly likely. It’s more like a sort of unconscious pre-filtering of all novelty by aesthetic fit. A self-conscious mind-closing.
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What I notice about people who go trad is a genuinely deadened responsiveness to anything that doesn’t meet filter criteria. At some level it becomes invisible. It’s not “acting dead” in Bruce Sterling sense though, since they seem to come really alive within their sandbox.
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I suppose that’s why I have a qualified sympathy for people who go trad. It’s overall a life-positive turn, even if it seems to me like cutting off a leg to stay alive. Possibly from their point of view the leg is gangrenous or something. Would fit the disgust reaction angle.
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But it’s hard to stay interested even if I am interested in the particular historical era they anchor on. I’m not interested in history in the same way as trads seem to be. Like being interested in how an obsolete old engine worked rather than the colors/styles of old cars.
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There’s I think 3 ways of being interested in history: 1. Unironic Trad: how things were, what it was like to be there 2. Ironic trad: how things worked and why that was good/best 3. Philistinism: how things *could* work, given the existence proof of how things *did* work
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For the longest time I’ve had a visual image of “history” that sees the past as a single trajectory, the future as a garden of forking paths, and the present as a sort of 💥 explosion-break-point computation for which the past is an input but not a constraint.
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Every moment having revolutionary potential in a politically neutral sense, as in utterly unconstrained by the past that we imagine having a historicist shaping force on the future that necessarily must act, but... really doesn’t. And then breaks surprise us.
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The necessity of historical continuity is almost entirely in our heads. That’s a neutral operating assumption for me. Perpetuation of tradition is a choice. One that might have some Lindy merits going for it, but is never actually necessary.
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But my sense is that trads see it as necessary in a way, almost like flirtation with discontinuous futures is an unrealistic childish affectation/fantasy that they set aside when they turn trad. I suspect it feels like “growing up” into a tragic adult posture.
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I’m pretty much pure philistine in the Vonnegut sense. “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
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Carse: “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished.”
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The Carse version is a bit self-congratulatory, and I think his position is a bit more confused than Vonnegut’s, due to wanting to square theology with future-positivity. Vonnegut was a shitposter. His philosophy was mostly juvenile but with some insights scattered throughout.
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Unabashedly reactionary turns are in a way easier to deal with. My response is generally a straightforward opposition, since foundational axioms are so different. But trad turns make me slightly sad. I have the same reaction I do to friends retreating to deal with depression.
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I can also sense that they, in their turn, view me as being irredeemably lost to moral weakness and corruption 🤣 Deep kind of divergence
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I am only talking about soul-searching trads for whom it’s an end-point of a kind of spiritual quest/karma-trauma trekking. Not what I think of as “political trad” which feels like a calculated act aimed at elevation to blue-checkery. Like straight actors playing gay roles.
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I guess I’m thinking about this stuff because so many young people in their prime, like 20-35 seem to be turning trad, like 3x the % when I was that age. Feels like a bit of a tragic waste, since 20-35 is when you’re most cognitively capable, of being “prepared for surprise”
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I’m mostly prepared against surprise at this point, but as a function of basic aging, not choice. It genuinely pisses me off that I’m no longer as prepared for surprise as I once was.
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