I am an indifferent student of history, which is a polite way of saying that I’m really crap at it and don’t know all that much. So, rightly or wrongly, my view of The Enlightenment is that, spurred on by the enthusiastic adoption and spectacular successes of the scientific method, it brought about a culture that possessed the mechanism to escape from ideological tyranny.
It, ideally, brought about a way of establishing a metric, or metrics, by which various ideologies could be judged that was a bit better than “My God is way harder than your God, and I have a bigger army to prove it”.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Dunno - depends on how big the pin is. Or maybe the angel. This one, for example, can barely fit on the back of a unicorn
But, as we saw during covid, unscrupulous people will exploit whatever ideology happens to be available. Our own ideological leanings towards compassion were exploited to try to guilt-trip us all into doing the government’s bidding. We relied on an Expertocracy and called it “science”. Of course, you had the be the right sort of expert to be included in this sainted class of credentialed influencers. Only the right sort of people were allowed to tell you what the “science” was.
The current thing seems to be to vigorously promote only that “science” which supports one’s political viewpoint. We have, thereby, allowed what are cultural judgements and faith-based positions to creep back in.
It’s using a façade of Enlightenment to undermine enlightenment.
I have my own prejudices too. For example, I do not currently believe that transgenderism is anything other than a mental condition that one suffers from. It would take a fair bit of pretty reliable and concrete evidence to sway me from that view. Indeed, I am uncertain as to what form that evidence could possibly take anyway.
I have not yet seen any evidence that would convince me of the existence of something akin to a ‘gendered soul’, or that transgender is an ‘innate’ property, and the evidence I have seen leads me to suppose that we’re dealing with something that is a mental health condition.
I really shouldn’t have to point out the bleedin’ obvious, but none of this implies that we should treat transgender people badly, or with hate, or be discriminatory, or in any way different to the way we would treat any other human being. Disagreeing with someone’s deeply-held convictions is not hateful.
But that in itself is an ideological position that is at odds with an ideology that does, indeed, view such a disagreement as an act of hate.
On “our” side, we’re forever pointing out the illogicality, the absurdities, the baffling and meaningless word salad, of much of the ‘woke’ positions on things. It makes not one jot of difference to those deeply embedded in that different ideology, just as their arguments make not one jot of difference to us, embedded in a wholly different ideology.
Each ‘side’ looks at the other and thinks “how could they possibly think that?”
This division is explored in the excellent article by Arty Morty
There’s another dichotomy. I do not view the acceptance of the scientific method as being the only way to gain knowledge of our physical world (which it is), and the best way to get insight into other areas of our existence, as an ideology, as such. The method works as the only way to tell us about the properties of electrons, say, and it’s also a great way of getting more insights into social dynamics, say.
If, for example, you have the hypothesis that poverty tends to cause other social problems (higher crime, more drug use, etc) you can test that (to some extent) with the tools provided by the scientific method. You may not be able to pin down all the properties like you can with an electron, but you can get some way into understanding.
But, spurred on by the PoMo nonsense, those on the ‘woke’ side do very much view the scientific method as a kind of ‘ideology’ - and a corrupt one at that. They argue it’s something imposed by the dreaded white man as a tool of colonialist (or sumfin) oppression. For them, practice of the scientific method is not, therefore, a neutral methodology aimed at investigating the truth (or otherwise) of a matter, it’s an act of oppression that upholds things like ‘whiteness’ or ‘white supremacy’ or ‘structural racism’, or whatever words the random buzzword generator throws up next.
For them, there isn’t one truth (the way things actually are) whether or not we can find out what that truth might be. No, there are zillions of different ‘truths’ all equally valid (as long as they haven’t been generated by the scientific method - those truths must remain suspect because of its oppressive connotations).
Nothing about the ‘woke’ canon has to be rational, or coherent, or to make logical sense. Indeed, if you read the statements of the Queer Theorists, rational thinking and the like is very much seen as a societal ‘norm’ and Queer Theory is all about destroying those norms altogether. The ‘normal’, you see, is just another tool of oppression. Queer Theory goes way beyond doing strange things with one’s genitalia.
For me it’s a curious world these days where some people have been swayed into thinking a perception of the truth (or reality) is the same thing as truth (or reality).
People’s experiences and perceptions are not ‘valid’ in the same way that the statement that the charge of an electron is 1.60217663 × 10-19 Coulombs is valid. Personal and subjective experiences, the interpretation thereof, and the perceptions one has may contain some degree of validity, but it’s not ‘knowledge’ in quite the same way.
People’s feelings and perceptions are ‘valid’ in the sense that, yes, they probably really do feel that way, or see things that way. Although when someone claims ‘trauma’ (as some DIE trainer recently did) upon hearing the N-word spoken (in a very innocent and not abusive context) by a non-authorised person (i.e. not black) you do have to question somewhat the validity of that claim. Or when students are offered counselling for ‘trauma’ for attending a lecture on free speech, you kind of have to wonder whether we’re going just a tad too far.
Trauma is what you might get if your child dies, or if you fight in a war. What you get in a lecture on free speech is a hissy fit. Not trauma.
But how do we square this circle, or as Arty Morty says, how do we stop the Circle of Horror?
We basically have two sets of people, broadly speaking, who have entirely different and non-compatible ways of viewing the world. Each ‘side’ is operating from a completely different set of foundational ‘axioms’.
The two sides can’t even agree what truth is, and that’s a serious problem.
And, if we didn’t have problems enough, there’s a further sneaky little bugger of a problem in even framing things this way. “Oh, we’re just talking about competing ideologies here” which gives rise to the implicit (subconscious) perception that we’re just talking about equally valid ideologies. We’re not. Just as Creationism (or Intelligent Design) is not an equally valid perspective on the origin of species. It’s not a competition between two things that could both, with equal probability, be right.
The recent focus on Katherine Maher is quite instructive. One side reads her statements with a kind of “what the absolute fuck is she blathering on about?” whilst the other reads them and thinks “this makes perfect sense”.
To Maher the idea of Wikipedia adopting a “free and open” approach in the way it was implemented was merely
“recapitulating many of the same power structures and dynamics that existed offline prior to the advent of the internet”
People’s reputations, their ‘notability’, is problematic because of
“the way in which we ascribe notability which comes from this white male Westernized construct”
It would take several essays to even to attempt to unpick all the assumptions and philosophy that underpins even these 2 short statements, but ultimately it’s your basic “white man bad” way of viewing the world.
One wonders how, say, the centuries old historical1 practice of selecting the best candidates, by merit, for public office in China, based on written examinations, would fall within the current ‘woke’ disdain for anything that smacks of merit. Indeed, Maher emphasizes cultures which do not have a written tradition as being examples of things which are ‘excluded’ by Wiki’s approach to “free and open”. Presumably, recording things in one’s head is different to recording things on bits of paper in some moralistic sense.
Those dynastic Chinese folk were just implementing some “white male Westernized construct”, clearly.
I understand the Egyptians also wrote stuff down, although they used pictures, which probably meant something a bit more than “strange bird-headed man thing has just landed on the roof”.
And, let’s face it, Islam is predicated on the supreme importance of a written tradition, the Qu’ran. Yet another “white male Westernized construct”?
But despite knowing all this - the same “white man bad” mantra will be endlessly repeated ad nauseum because that’s the faith position that had been adopted. Facts, reason and logic do not matter in this culture war on one side. They are pretty much the whole schtick of the other side.
It is very much a culture war, but the missiles each side lobs at one another don’t even come close to being on target. It’s almost like a war being fought by inhabitants of two completely different dimensions.
Arty Morty’s article focuses on the Cass report and the various responses to it. It’s clear that each side (we might label these as pro or against) are operating from an entirely different set of precepts to one another - different ways of viewing the world and different methodologies for attempting to understand the world.
Again, note the poor framing I’ve used here. It seems to be implicit that we’re talking about a clash of two different perspectives that have equal validity. This is not the case. The anti-Cass side have made attempts to discredit the report by (a) lying about the methodology employed2 and (b) smearing the team who did the work to produce the report3.
Although the pro/anti sides are operating from within two entirely different intellectual paradigms I do not see any real symmetry. And the reason for that is bound up with the philosophy of the scientific method.
Ideally (but not always in practice, at least not as quickly as we might like, because humans are flawed and fallible creatures), the scientific method is self-correcting. This is the fundamental difference. There is no ‘self-correction’ mechanism within the woke canon because its tenets are largely unfalsifiable.
If we draw an analogy between the whole evolution vs creationism debate there’s little difference between these propositions
It was God wot dunnit
It was Structural Racism wot dunnit
Both ‘propositions’ view some effect (diversity of species and structures like the eye, various inequalities in society) and posit the existence of some ‘mechanism’ by which these effects have come about. The hypothesised mechanism is, in both cases, invisible, elusive, and somewhat universal.
Ask what are the properties of God, or Structural Racism, and you’ll get a zillion different answers. Ask where, precisely, the Hidden Hate Monster of Structural Racism lives in the various systems and structures of society and you’ll mostly be met with a blank stare.
You might, if you’re lucky, get some blather about how demographic X is, on average, poorer and so this new law that is being proposed impacts demographic X more than other demographics, for example. It’s a strange argument that then turns this on its head and cries ‘racism’, or whatever.
For example, suppose a government wanted to cut mental health services and demographic A represented 60% of the users. Demographics B, C being 20% each of the users. The cut, then, might be described as A-ist because it impacts demographic A more. If the cut is distributed evenly (which it might not be and then we might re-examine claims of A-ism) you’ll find that demographic A is still taking up 60% of the resource, albeit a lower amount of resource after the cut.
Or take, for example, a law effectively mandating a switch to EV in pursuit of a green agenda. One argument might posit that this affects poorer people more because they are least likely to be able to afford the more expensive electronic vehicles. Another argument might suggest that it impacts wealthier people more because they are the demographic with more cars. Which way does the “structural racism” go in this case?
This is the kind of idiocy you get into when you mix up PoMo nonsense about power differentials into your ‘understanding’ of racism.
I don’t know how we break the Circle of Horror, but break it we must.
The scientific method is not an ideology, but a methodology. It is, and demonstrably so, better than any other methodology at getting us closer to the truth of a matter. In the matter of understanding our physical world (as opposed to any more emotional, artistic, or spiritual aspects of it) it reigns supreme. It removes belief, as much as possible, from the equation.
Even the ‘woke’ implicitly agree, because they’ll quote ‘studies’ and statistics when it suits. They implicitly accept the scientific method when they do so, even if they do so in a half-arsed way.
There is a place for faith, but there’s an even bigger place for facts. And maybe that’s how we’re going to get out of the current mess. Keep promoting ‘enlightenment’ values and the pursuit of truth through rational analysis of the evidence. Highlight wherever this occurs (even if the conclusions drawn are daft). Get people to accept implicitly that evidence and reason are the best way to approach difficult problems. Point out where arguments are almost entirely emotive.
The more sense-making is practiced, the more things will make sense.
We’ve let the PoMo retards hold sway for far too long. We need to reclaim rationality.
I have no idea whether such a system pertains in some form today in China
They have claimed, for example, that at one point the report dismisses 100 out of 102 studies, which it simply not true.
It was a very careful and detailed systematic review of all of the available evidence that took a team of researchers over 3 years to complete. But, because the report disagreed with the ‘woke’ position on trans, those producing the report have been dismissed as “transphobes”
All this seems so bloody obvious and yet getting any of this through to the woke-tards is nigh impossible. I suspect it’s a case of not being able to wake a man who is pretending to be asleep.
Stop committing Genocide!
🙄