Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 October 29

= October 29 =

Looking for a word
I'm reading an archival copy of the International Herald Tribune from 1992 hosted by Internet Archive. I'm struck by the fact that all of the articles, topics, subjects, humor, criticisms, and popular cultural obsessions have not changed in more than thirty years. In fact, if you were to make the most minor of changes to certain details to bring it current with 2023, nobody would notice. What word or concept would best describe this unusual realization that not much has changed in human culture in recent history? Viriditas (talk) 20:19, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Language evolves, and in a shorter time span the evolution is less dramatic. I'd like to see an example or two. And I suspect that no one in 1992 was talking about Taylor Swift. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:26, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but I found it. It's "cultural stagnation" or alternately, "cultural stasis".  Other writers have touched upon this topic for decades, but I never saw it until now.  When I was younger, in the 1980s, I was fascinated by thirty-year-old copies of The Saturday Evening Post that my grandparents had in their basement.  I spent hours pouring poring through them, thinking about how different things were and how much had changed in the world.  But now, looking back to the 1990s, I see that very little has changed in the same amount of time. Viriditas (talk) 20:35, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * What did you pour on them? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:34, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Viriditas (talk) 00:38, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * It's an interesting thesis, but that doesn't mean it's true. Shells-shells (talk) 20:45, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * "Stagnation" sounds negative and "stasis" is at best neutral. More positively, it could also be called "cultural stability". --142.112.221.156 (talk) 23:59, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * It's a really interesting comment showing how different cultural views collide. If an extraterrestial came to Earth on a visit for the first time, arrived outside a hospital, and saw a woman giving birth, the alien might think this was a terrible thing—the woman is obviously in great pain and something terrible appears to be happening to her. But unlike the alien, we know the woman is giving birth to something new and somewhat different.  Cultural change and innovation are very much like the baby coming into the world.  This is why one of the secondary definitions of birth pangs is "the hardships and difficulties accompanying a major innovation, change, or new venture".  So while you view "cultural stability" as something positive, it can also be seen as something negative, since it suppresses the new and the different, and puts a stop to change. Viriditas (talk) 00:22, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * You aren't paying enough attention, then. The internet and cell phones alone have made massive changes to society in that span of time. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:31, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I feel this way but for, like, the printing press. Remsense  聊  20:46, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe you're unaware of the much-ballyhooed "culture wars" that are supposedly rampant in America. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:34, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * You mean the same culture wars from the 1960s onward? Kind of proves my point. Viriditas (talk) 00:39, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * You found references to Taylor Swift in 1992? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:18, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I have heard that the whole idea that decades had their own identity only started in the 1920's, merely being a hundred years old. In the centuries before that - except for wars and natural disasters - it wouldn't have been a strange notion that people generally would discuss the same things as a few decades earlier. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:35, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * @Viriditas: Don't think thirty years, think thirty centuries.  If you look at religions like Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and numerous others, behaviour and worship has barely changed in that time. 2A02:C7B:213:6B00:14E8:19D9:298E:7170 (talk) 15:23, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * 2A02:C7B:213:6B00:14E8:19D9:298E:7170, none of that is true at all and i'm losing my mind that you said it — Remsense  聊  15:40, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Take back your mind. 7170 is a banned user. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:08, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Baseball Bugs, I appreciate your retrieval very much.  — Remsense  聊  16:10, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Worship has probably changed more than the worshipers know (or, if they know, will admit). —Tamfang (talk) 18:20, 30 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Islam, of course, didn't even exist 30 centuries ago, while there was a significant transition in Hinduism from being based on animal-herders in the Punjab (as in the Rig Veda) to farmers along the Ganges. Jews built two temples and saw them both destroyed during that time.  As for "cultural stability" in general, relatively few people had even heard of gender ideology as little as 10 years ago, but now it's actively enforced in some schools, government agencies etc, and some people have lost their jobs for objecting to enforced pronoun usage, or biological males in women's sports etc. AnonMoos (talk) 22:26, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
 * relatively few people had even heard of gender ideology as little as 10 years ago,
 * I know I should ignore this comment and just go on with my day, but I can't. This popular meme on the right, that the left is "enforcing" new ideas on people and society in general, leading to the instability of society (as you infer in your comment) is not just wrong, it's false.  I first learned about what you call "gender ideology" in 1989 (based on literature going back to the 1960s and much earlier, particularly in terms of anthropology) became more acquainted with it in my circle of friends around 1993, and saw it go mainstream around 2000, which was 23 years ago.  That people are just now waking up to its reality is as shocking to me as people waking up to gay marriage as late as 2015.  I get the fact that 99% of society is living in the deep past, but the reality is that what you refer to as cultural instability is a meme, not a fact.  These things have been well known about and practiced outside of conservative circles for a very long time. They are not disrupting society or causing instability.  What is, in fact, causing problems are the culture warriors around the world, from the US to Hungary, from Russia to Turkey, who are insisting on turning back the clock on modernity and imposing a stasis field on progress and cultural change based on already existing norms and traditions that were previously ignored, shoved into the closet, and denigrated as deviant or antisocial behavior.  This is like a bad Star Trek episode. Viriditas (talk) 19:29, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * First of all, gender ideology has no connection with gay marriage whatsoever. I'm not sure what connection you're pretending to see (or why you even mentioned the subject at all), but there is simply no valid relationship.  Second, nothing you say casts any doubt on what I previously said -- gender ideology may have been germinating in corners of academia for a number of decades, but it did not remotely begin to impinge on the basic daily lives of those in the "Anglosphere" without any interest in academic fads or alternative identities until within the last ten years, since when it's had an abrupt sudden meteoric rise into a now-oppressive dominant hegemonic orthodoxy (in some institutions and areas of life) which can now ruin the careers of those who dare to dissent from or question it.  Even on Wikipedia, we have to say that Elliot Page starred in the film Juno (which is complete historical nonsense, but apparently fealty to gender ideology outweighs any concerns with factual accuracy), while many individuals and groups are labelled as "transphobic" on their articles, when they actually wish transgender people well, and have no objection to them living their best lives, but merely strongly object to some features of gender ideology which have negative impacts on other groups (such as coercive forced speech with respect to pronouns, biological males intruded into women's prisons and sports, etc etc etc).  P.S. I am not politically "right", and the assumption that those who object to some of the negative effects of gender ideology must be right-wing bigots is yet another annoying thing surrounding the miasma that is gender ideology.  California state senator Scott Wiener maintained an elaborate charade or role-playing game for many months (may still be keeping it up, for anything I know to the contrary) that all opponents to his gender-ideology-motivated bills were religious fundamentalists, no matter the disconfirming evidence (such as many of them being lesbians, atheists, or voting for Democratic candidates).  This attests to his rich fantasy life, but did nothing to foster any kind of productive or insightful conversation about said bills... AnonMoos (talk) 23:31, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Go back and reread what I said above. I wasn't drawing a connection between "gender ideology" and gay marriage, I was making a simile comparing the rise of the anti-gender movement in 2012 to the opposition to legalization of same-sex marriage in the states in 2015, and drawing a connection to the opponents, who are primarily right-wing and religious. Viriditas (talk) 23:55, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I never heard of the expression "anti-gender movement" before (the ones I know something about would be much more likely to refer to themselves as "gender-critical" or just "feminist"), but it's a funny thing how its rise in 2012 almost exactly coincides with what I said about the rise to power of the oppressive gender ideology hegemony starting about 10 years ago. And there are plenty of non-right-wingers (and right-wingers of libertarianish leanings, for that matter) who have no objection whatsoever to gay marriage (since it didn't come at the expense of others), while objecting strenuously to the zero-sum game of gender ideology (where somehow increased rights for group A always means a negative impact on group B).  Conflating these two issues together is the Scott Wiener fallacy. AnonMoos (talk) 21:06, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't think "culture wars" was a widespread thing until Fox News jumped on it and began railing about horrible things such as calling Christmas break "Winter Holiday". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:00, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The literature on the modern origin of culture wars in the US can be traced to small skirmishes here and there throughout the early twentieth century, but only reaches critical mass and gets started as a snowball effect in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. From there, virtually every current culture war issue or topic began.  There are other critics who take a much wider view, and point to the failure in the aftermath of the American Civil War to pursue efforts similar to denazification in WWII, which would have permanently disbanded the Southern power structures (from where almost every culture war topic originates) and rebuilt the defeated Confederacy much like the allies helped rebuild Europe after the war.  In many ways, the culture wars in the US are a re-litigation of the results of the Civil War because the South was never properly de-Confederated.  Today, we see the prospects of a GOP-led Project 2025 with a 2024 win bringing back the hopes, dreams, and values of the Confederacy, with the goal of turning the country into a theocracy and restoring the lost Southern aristocracy. Like I said when I started this discussion, nothing has changed. Viriditas (talk) 22:36, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Culture wars have existed coterminously with any body you could call 'the public' since at least since the printing press. If for some reason you're not willing to go to the 16th century, the term 'culture war' is very pointedly from the campaign Bismarck led to break the perceived cultural miasma of Catholicism over imperial Germany in the late 19th century. Remsense  聊  22:39, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia article Kulturkampf... AnonMoos (talk) 23:33, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Viriditas I think the impression that things haven't changed as much in your lifetime as immediately before it is probably an illusion. For example the International Herald Tribune doesn't exist any more. And as an international publication it would have ignored some local issues. On the other hand The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, argued that the end of history had already happened. TSventon (talk) 21:47, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not talking about the establishment or disestablishments of newspapers, the rise and fall of technology, nor the perception of gender. I'm talking about the "articles, topics, subjects, humor, criticisms, and popular cultural obsessions" that I read in an old newspaper from 1992.  Virtually every single one of these has remained the same.  This is why I have said we are living in some kind of cultural stasis, a global monoculture where new ideas, approaches, and ways of seeing the world are almost non-existent.  Great, you've got an Apple Watch, it hasn't changed anything.  One way I can illustrate this is to look at the most pressing problems on Earth.  None of them have been addressed or solved.  I can list them here for you:  poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation, inter-state war, civil war, genocide, proliferation of weapons, terrorism, transnational organized crime, controlling world energy resource and consumption, and disaster risk reduction.  That about covers all the subjects in the newspaper I read from 1992.  These same ideas are found in the news today.  How is it that 7.9 billion people can't so much as make a dent in a single issue facing humanity?  I'm at a loss understanding this.  I can only attribute it to cultural stagnation. Viriditas (talk) 22:10, 3 November 2023 (UTC)