A random thought I had: Perhaps the culture wars are actually natural and necessary. Or are they unnatural and dangerous? Any thoughts? :/

@Angle I would certainly assert they're natural. (See the conflicts at the age of steam). I would assert they're dangerous. Necessary is a big word though, and I'm going to say "very human" instead.

@Angle The other thing to ponder is that wars, traditionally, caused fairly significant resource allocation due to war deaths.

I *would* say that our culture wars have, as one of their factors, our absolute suppression of risk in our economy. Not only GFC, but the mentality which made it possible means that there's few corrective outlets and there are few feedback loops. And that's... terrifying.

@Angle While it's dangerous to look at history and go "Well, that happened then, so that will happen now." Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialisation we can see the range and look at wars during that time and go "huh."

The *other* thing we can look at is the family structure changes and the urbanisation changes and go ... "huh."

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution there are some interesting date parallels (and my colleagues in my department would start shouting now)

@Angle But, from a philosophy of tech standpoint: new techniques *and* new tools are a hallmark of a (::grumble::) paradigm shift (sorry Kuhn), and represent a break from normal science. That break, in science, is achieved through the retirement or death of those "elder scientists" who defend (quite ably) the old paradigm.