4 ms·

If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology Does this not seem c

If we want to live in a pluralist society we have no choice, but to embrace narratives that bind us together through morality and ideology Does this not seem coercive and borderline orwellian to you? We have to embrace narratives sounds an awful lot like 'accept things which are not true'. It is hardly any different to a religion in this sense. Abstract ethics class morality plays itself out in my opinion. It is a platonic ideal that can be used as a model for behaviour but not as some kind of absolute. It deconstructs ways of life and papers over real differences. It promises us a sterile world that noone actually wants to live in. We want progress, but we (in my opinion) manifestly don't want eventual the destination the 'end of history'. As such like the business cycle there may well be a morality cycle that we cannot banish. There is a similarity with technology. What if we as a society demand and enjoy change, but our actual happiness is reduced in the long term (you can imagine modeling this as happiness a function positive in progress - rate of change, but negative in the overal level of enlightenment - or whatever progress accumulates as).

hacknat 9y ago
I definitely didn’t mean that in a statist way, as in enforced morality. I just meant that societies that don’t use kinship bonds inevitably use something else to maintain cohesion in society, religion has been used, founding myths (American republicanism, etc), and now it seems there’s a backlash against it all. My only point was that maintaining social cohesion in a pluralist society is no mean feat. As a side note, short of making sure everyone gets a strong foundation in philosophy, I don’t see how you can maintain an agreed upon set of values in a pluralist society without some sort of myth. You call it “accepting things that aren’t true”, but myth goes beyond truth, IMO. Most values are untestable hypotheses, so they don’t really fall into a modern definition of knowledge or truth, at least as I learned them in my undergrad science courses. Humans are wired to think in narrative terms so inevitably the process of transmitting values across generations is going to generate some distracting cruft that is patently absurd, but that doesn’t mean the attempt at transmitting values is absurd.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  Note that you can read the current fight between the more enthusiastic members of right vs. left as a struggle over which sets of foundational myths take precedence. The fight over political correctness (especially in academia) can be seen as the attempt to establish a new sacred narrative that is not allowed to be questioned, at the risk of an individual being cast out from the community. This narrative is a replacement for the earlier understanding of the sacred rooted in Christianity, which no longer holds force with many people today in an age of technology and science.

hacknat 9y ago

I definitely didn’t mean that in a statist way, as in enforced morality. I just meant that societies that don’t use kinship bonds inevitably use something else to maintain cohesion in society, religion has been used, founding myths (American republicanism, etc), and now it seems there’s a backlash against it all. My only point was that maintaining social cohesion in a pluralist society is no mean feat. As a side note, short of making sure everyone gets a strong foundation in philosophy, I don’t see how you can maintain an agreed upon set of values in a pluralist society without some sort of myth. You call it “accepting things that aren’t true”, but myth goes beyond truth, IMO. Most values are untestable hypotheses, so they don’t really fall into a modern definition of knowledge or truth, at least as I learned them in my undergrad science courses. Humans are wired to think in narrative terms so inevitably the process of transmitting values across generations is going to generate some distracting cruft that is patently absurd, but that doesn’t mean the attempt at transmitting values is absurd.

smallnamespace 9y ago
Note that you can read the current fight between the more enthusiastic members of right vs. left as a struggle over which sets of foundational myths take precedence. The fight over political correctness (especially in academia) can be seen as the attempt to establish a new sacred narrative that is not allowed to be questioned, at the risk of an individual being cast out from the community. This narrative is a replacement for the earlier understanding of the sacred rooted in Christianity, which no longer holds force with many people today in an age of technology and science.