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Good post. A point of clarification though: we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. Which of the two holds more instit

Good post. A point of clarification though: we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate, and of course either side is going to say that the other is the one with all the power.

dgellow 6y ago
Just to be sure we follow, could you name or describe those two orthodoxies?
- sneak 6y ago
  I think the cultural shorthand for the -ists in question at the moment is “anti-PC” opposed with “woke” (in the non-pejorative sense; predictably enough it has also become a slur when used by those who oppose it). These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    People want a political home. In countries without any type of per-capita representative voting system (where parties are split amount % of opinions like in MMP), they feel like they need to vote 'tactically.' At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle. Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it. This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Woke is a pejorative? Damn I really am in a bubble.
    - antepodius 6y ago
      It's widely considered comical.
  - clairity 6y ago
    the mapped ideologies are dynamic (leaky), but the historically enduring dichotomy is simply power and its disciples vs. the disenfranchised. "anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
    - mumbisChungo 6y ago
      The conflict between "anti-PC" and "woke" in its entirety is in service of power. A perpetual screaming match between poor and middle-class people, about topics that have little to no bearing on profits, is ideal for corporate elites.
      - clairity 6y ago
        yes, there's some truth to that, but the latter group isn't aligned with power, even if the discussion serves the powerful's aims.
        panzagl 6y ago
        What do you mean? "Woke" is all about people with privilege trying to shield that privilege behind their correctthink as they attempt to disenfranchise the lower classes of their political rivals. "Woke" people do to Arkansas rednecks the same thing they accuse their opponents of doing to inner-city minorities.
        clairity 6y ago
        "woke" people are more diverse than you claim, and certainly less privileged on average. perhaps the "privileged woke" people you speak about over-exert their privilege, but that's a conquence of privilege, not wokeness.
        antepodius 6y ago
        Wokeness and its methods are by their nature an amazing social shield and sword, so they attract the sort of people who want to cloak themselves in righteousness and tear into others.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  Not OP, but I will point out one example that should not be too controversial: "Science!". Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress. Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ). TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.
  - mumbisChungo 6y ago
    In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree. In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      > beyond a reasonable doubt This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences. And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research. Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us. Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was. Science is iterative.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  At a 50,000 foot level, you have: The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things. The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Scott Alexander describes this view as "blue tribe" and "red tribe" where blue has a subgroup "grey" that broadly follows blue but disagrees with a good portion of blue's more extreme actions.
    - tharne 6y ago
      There's also a "grey" subgroup in the red tribe. For instance, a lot of Trump supporters will privately admit that he's a bad guy and an ineffective leader, but preferable to a liberal president. The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
      - watwut 6y ago
        I find it hard to square Biden and Trump as supposedly same level of extreme. Or Clinton and Trump. They just are not the same level of extreme. Quite the opposite, the democratic party is significantly more choosing toward center figures. It also tend to choose less extreme tactics to get their way - there was no democratic goverment shutdown etc.
        antepodius 6y ago
        Yes. One tribe is a cornered, bleeding, broken animal, one isn't.
        watwut 6y ago
        Neither is bleeding broken nor animal. That is nonsense. The cornered tribe would not be among two most powerful parties. Having president, majority of supreme court, senate or house suggests you are not cornered. And both parties are represented in those.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  Not entirely, because I'm speaking very broadly. You could probably name one of orthodoxies as the one colloquially known as social justice. It's the worldview that has gained significant traction over the course of the last five years. The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview. In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations. Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
  - malandrew 6y ago
    > one colloquially known as social justice My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment. The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
    - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
      Yep, definitely. It's why it's colloquial. In my view, the usage of that term today carries the same descriptive weight as terms like "free market". It's more evocative than literal.
    - antepodius 6y ago
      The end is justice, so is justified the means. Sit down, shut up, your crown bequeathe.
- bob33212 6y ago
  Group A would say they are "Sex and Gender Positive and Inclusive". Group A would also say people who disagree with Group A are "Transphobic" Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists
throwawaygh 6y ago
Exactly. Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges. Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work. I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture). Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions: 1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin) 2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal. None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people. The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN. I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help. Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right". It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_. The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.
- andreilys 6y ago
  Except it spills over into other elite institutions like the NYT, so it’s not exactly self contained.
Uberphallus 6y ago
From the other side of the pond, I'd like to add, it gets tiring. It's absolutely impossible to have a meaningful exchange with 95% pf the Americans on the Internet these days. Rare are the days I'm not called antifa/communist/libtard/fag and racist/bigot/trumpette/transphobic, often in the very same thread. For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."
- soco 6y ago
  I can totally understand why (and by who) this comment got downvoted, but I happen to share its feeling. I won't say it cannot happen everywhere, but the interactions on USA politics have become (newly?) extremely polarizing.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    And two people can see the exact same event and read it two different ways. We're no longer in Plato's cave. We're literally watching the same movie, but seeing two different screens.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  I often go back to Brendon O'Neil's video about the right and duty to offend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    O'Neill is literally a professional troll, to the extent that whenever there's a tragedy people make sport on twitter of predicting exactly what his contrarian take will be.
martythemaniak 6y ago
I think this is broadly correct. In the old days when both the political and cultural spheres were conservative, it was clear what and who was unorthodox. Today, different institutions are both very liberal and very conservative so you can actually say anything you want and be considered both incredibly conventional and outrageously pointed, depending on who is listening and where you are saying it. For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired. Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.
- jes5199 6y ago
  what we currently call “liberal” is another form of conservatism. It’s just that it’s conserving a slightly different set of principles.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    Almost. What you'd call "conservatism" is just slowed-down progressivism, delayed by 10-20 years but otherwise indistinguishable, and both "sides" are squarely within the liberal political theory. Nothing is being conserved. Today's conservatives are espousing values that sound the same as 2005's liberals, and are not even as conservative as Bill Clinton.
    - TimTheTinker 6y ago
      ... except for their views on abortion, welfare, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc. Current public policy reflects the left’s view on these matters, and a new one joins the list every few years.
      - klyrs 6y ago
jojobas 6y ago
>Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  I tend to be on the conservative end of this issue, so I mostly agree with you. However there have been some notable instances of people getting fired for expressing left-wing viewpoints - the ones I can recall were college professors. So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Right-wing entities appear to sack people for left-wing views without external pressure, neutral entities are forced to sack people for right-wing views.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The paradigm example of right wing "cancellation" is probably "anti-BDS" laws.
    - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
      Yep
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    27% of transgender workers reported being fired, not hired, or denied promotion in 2016-2017 [2]. That's ~530,000 people [1], and really just the tip of the ice-berg. Until like 2 weeks ago that was completely legal federally, and in the states where it's most prevalent. Three of my high school teachers were fired for being gay. One of them was outed by a parent who lived next door. I was fired from my first job (at a secular for-profit company) for not tithing. High-profile social media blowups are really trivial compared to the work-a-day homophobia and borderline theocracy that pervades vast swathes of America's land mass. This is where I sort of miss the boat on the concern about cancel culture. Yes, those people shouldn't lose their jobs for expressing themselves. But also, where the hell has all this outrage been while LGBT people have been systematically excluded from any public-facing employment in huge swathes of the country? [1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/ https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad... [2] https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf
H_Pylori 6y ago
>Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate Easy, just track the opinions that can get you fired and unpersoned. Let's not kid ourselves on who holds the real power in America and the West.
cowpig 6y ago
I really can't stand statements like this. There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics. There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies. To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  > There is more than one dimension This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true. If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
  - dfxm12 6y ago
    If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. Yeah, why let reality get in the way of a made up dichotomy?
    - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
      My point is that reality gets in the way of everything we think. It's all made up.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Actually the argument is "why lose the forrest for the trees?". Every day you make abstractions to better understand reality. For example, you don't devote equal attention to every blade of grass, you sum it as "this is a lawn" and move on. If you didn't you'd be lost in the first few feet walking outside of your house, seeing everything as an equally important detail.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions" We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.
djsumdog 6y ago
I think you're falling into the fallacy described in Graham's article. You've also made a false dichotomy.
gosukiwi 6y ago
I'm from Argentina, and we have a "different but similar" thing going on here. Extreme, socialist left wing on one side, right wing on the other (note that our right wing could be considered left wing over there). So both could be considered orthodox, the country is basically 50/50, and it's like the article says: You are either X or Y. No middle ground. People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.
munificent 6y ago
> we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently. I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame. When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group. But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now. Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not. I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.

dgellow 6y ago

Just to be sure we follow, could you name or describe those two orthodoxies?

sneak 6y ago
I think the cultural shorthand for the -ists in question at the moment is “anti-PC” opposed with “woke” (in the non-pejorative sense; predictably enough it has also become a slur when used by those who oppose it). These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  People want a political home. In countries without any type of per-capita representative voting system (where parties are split amount % of opinions like in MMP), they feel like they need to vote 'tactically.' At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle. Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it. This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Woke is a pejorative? Damn I really am in a bubble.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    It's widely considered comical.
- clairity 6y ago
  the mapped ideologies are dynamic (leaky), but the historically enduring dichotomy is simply power and its disciples vs. the disenfranchised. "anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
  - mumbisChungo 6y ago
    The conflict between "anti-PC" and "woke" in its entirety is in service of power. A perpetual screaming match between poor and middle-class people, about topics that have little to no bearing on profits, is ideal for corporate elites.
    - clairity 6y ago
      yes, there's some truth to that, but the latter group isn't aligned with power, even if the discussion serves the powerful's aims.
      - panzagl 6y ago
        What do you mean? "Woke" is all about people with privilege trying to shield that privilege behind their correctthink as they attempt to disenfranchise the lower classes of their political rivals. "Woke" people do to Arkansas rednecks the same thing they accuse their opponents of doing to inner-city minorities.
        clairity 6y ago
        "woke" people are more diverse than you claim, and certainly less privileged on average. perhaps the "privileged woke" people you speak about over-exert their privilege, but that's a conquence of privilege, not wokeness.
        antepodius 6y ago
        Wokeness and its methods are by their nature an amazing social shield and sword, so they attract the sort of people who want to cloak themselves in righteousness and tear into others.
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
Not OP, but I will point out one example that should not be too controversial: "Science!". Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress. Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ). TLDR; "Science!" is one such orthodoxy.
- mumbisChungo 6y ago
  In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree. In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    > beyond a reasonable doubt This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences. And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research. Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us. Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was. Science is iterative.
Spooky23 6y ago
At a 50,000 foot level, you have: The "Progressive" camp, that has a few sub-genres that prioritize or disagree on different things. The "Conservative" camp, that is more consistent at a high level.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Scott Alexander describes this view as "blue tribe" and "red tribe" where blue has a subgroup "grey" that broadly follows blue but disagrees with a good portion of blue's more extreme actions.
  - tharne 6y ago
    There's also a "grey" subgroup in the red tribe. For instance, a lot of Trump supporters will privately admit that he's a bad guy and an ineffective leader, but preferable to a liberal president. The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
    - watwut 6y ago
      I find it hard to square Biden and Trump as supposedly same level of extreme. Or Clinton and Trump. They just are not the same level of extreme. Quite the opposite, the democratic party is significantly more choosing toward center figures. It also tend to choose less extreme tactics to get their way - there was no democratic goverment shutdown etc.
      - antepodius 6y ago
        Yes. One tribe is a cornered, bleeding, broken animal, one isn't.
        watwut 6y ago
        Neither is bleeding broken nor animal. That is nonsense. The cornered tribe would not be among two most powerful parties. Having president, majority of supreme court, senate or house suggests you are not cornered. And both parties are represented in those.
tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
Not entirely, because I'm speaking very broadly. You could probably name one of orthodoxies as the one colloquially known as social justice. It's the worldview that has gained significant traction over the course of the last five years. The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview. In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations. Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
- malandrew 6y ago
  > one colloquially known as social justice My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment. The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
  - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
    Yep, definitely. It's why it's colloquial. In my view, the usage of that term today carries the same descriptive weight as terms like "free market". It's more evocative than literal.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    The end is justice, so is justified the means. Sit down, shut up, your crown bequeathe.
bob33212 6y ago
Group A would say they are "Sex and Gender Positive and Inclusive". Group A would also say people who disagree with Group A are "Transphobic" Group B would say that they "Support Free Speech". Group B would also say that people who disagree with Group B are Maoists

throwawaygh 6y ago

Exactly. Insisting on politeness about guilt-free homosexuality or abortion isn't going to get you very far in many particularly conservative Presbyterian churches or Baptist colleges. Note well: those institutions explicitly instruct people to "love thy neighbor" and to "not cast stones". Those calls are just empirically only so effective and there will always be a significant percentage of people for whom those commandments don't work. I therefore believe that politeness is probably a similarly ineffective solution to newer forms of orthodoxy (e.g., cancel culture). Consider conservative college campuses. Not because I don't believe cancel culture exists at Harvard or wherever, but because it's a point of reference that is much more numerous and carries similar culture power within certain geographies/communities. In many of these institutions: 1. being an openly gay student can result in being expelled (or at least suspended and bullied into leaving by admin) 2. faculty need to submit statements of faith in their job applications. These statements of faith are not aptly named, since they're also political ideology litmus tests. E.g., supporting abortion publicly would definitely be cause for dismissal. None of this is to dismiss or deny that maybe Harvard has its own orthodoxy, but I just have zero percent trust in someone like Jerry Falwell waxing poetic about free speech or cancel culture. His university cancels gay people. The orthodoxy of silicon valley and elite college campuses exist in only a few relatively small parts of the country that are over-represented in places like HN. I'm pointing this out for a specific reason: stifling social norms are nothing new. If you leave those places where implicit restriction on speech is a relatively new phenomenon and go to places where unspoken norms about what can/cannot be said has been the de facto norm for hundreds of years, you see why "simply giving it a name" and calls to "being polite" aren't going to help. Try going to a conservative christian university and pointing out that "abortion is murder" is "orthodoxy" and that people who believe it are exercising an "orthodox privilege" not available to people who believe "abortion is a human right". It an _NOT_ saying that cancel culture isn't a problem. It's more that it's _always_ been a problem, for hundreds of years, just not from the left in the USA until recently, and _history is a good tutor_. The proposed solution probably isn't going to work.

andreilys 6y ago
Except it spills over into other elite institutions like the NYT, so it’s not exactly self contained.

Uberphallus 6y ago

From the other side of the pond, I'd like to add, it gets tiring. It's absolutely impossible to have a meaningful exchange with 95% pf the Americans on the Internet these days. Rare are the days I'm not called antifa/communist/libtard/fag and racist/bigot/trumpette/transphobic, often in the very same thread. For any American trying to figure out what I'm talking about, there's a couple of Facebook groups that routinely explore this and related effects: "Things only Americans think are debatable" and "oh great, now we have to explain it for the americans."

soco 6y ago
I can totally understand why (and by who) this comment got downvoted, but I happen to share its feeling. I won't say it cannot happen everywhere, but the interactions on USA politics have become (newly?) extremely polarizing.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  And two people can see the exact same event and read it two different ways. We're no longer in Plato's cave. We're literally watching the same movie, but seeing two different screens.
djsumdog 6y ago
I often go back to Brendon O'Neil's video about the right and duty to offend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA He talks about how it was once offensive to translate the Bible into English, or suggest God didn't exist, or suggest there was nothing wrong with homosexuality. People who suggested such things were deplatformed, and sometimes arrested or killed, but those who considered themselves enlightened and on the side of the righteous, the virtuous, the good.
- pjc50 6y ago
  O'Neill is literally a professional troll, to the extent that whenever there's a tragedy people make sport on twitter of predicting exactly what his contrarian take will be.

martythemaniak 6y ago

I think this is broadly correct. In the old days when both the political and cultural spheres were conservative, it was clear what and who was unorthodox. Today, different institutions are both very liberal and very conservative so you can actually say anything you want and be considered both incredibly conventional and outrageously pointed, depending on who is listening and where you are saying it. For example, you can be a powerful high-ranking advisor to the President and spew all sorts of nasty racist garbage, but you can inhabit a world of friendly media and cheering crowds and you'll never feel encumbered by anything. At the same time, you can be a regular Joe at a regular Office and say something mildly eye-brow raising and be fired. Choose your crowd and you can in fact say whatever you want and pretend you're both a victim and victor. Demanding that a crowd put up with you, well that's a hard sell.

jes5199 6y ago
what we currently call “liberal” is another form of conservatism. It’s just that it’s conserving a slightly different set of principles.
- core-questions 6y ago
  Almost. What you'd call "conservatism" is just slowed-down progressivism, delayed by 10-20 years but otherwise indistinguishable, and both "sides" are squarely within the liberal political theory. Nothing is being conserved. Today's conservatives are espousing values that sound the same as 2005's liberals, and are not even as conservative as Bill Clinton.
  - TimTheTinker 6y ago
    ... except for their views on abortion, welfare, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc. Current public policy reflects the left’s view on these matters, and a new one joins the list every few years.
    - klyrs 6y ago

jojobas 6y ago

>Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate In regards to opinion safety the answer is clear: you don't get fired in a twitter shitstorm for expressing left-wing orthodoxy.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I tend to be on the conservative end of this issue, so I mostly agree with you. However there have been some notable instances of people getting fired for expressing left-wing viewpoints - the ones I can recall were college professors. So the door does swing both ways, but I do agree that the majority of "cancellations" nowadays are coming from one side.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Right-wing entities appear to sack people for left-wing views without external pressure, neutral entities are forced to sack people for right-wing views.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The paradigm example of right wing "cancellation" is probably "anti-BDS" laws.
  - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
    Yep
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  27% of transgender workers reported being fired, not hired, or denied promotion in 2016-2017 [2]. That's ~530,000 people [1], and really just the tip of the ice-berg. Until like 2 weeks ago that was completely legal federally, and in the states where it's most prevalent. Three of my high school teachers were fired for being gay. One of them was outed by a parent who lived next door. I was fired from my first job (at a secular for-profit company) for not tithing. High-profile social media blowups are really trivial compared to the work-a-day homophobia and borderline theocracy that pervades vast swathes of America's land mass. This is where I sort of miss the boat on the concern about cancel culture. Yes, those people shouldn't lose their jobs for expressing themselves. But also, where the hell has all this outrage been while LGBT people have been systematically excluded from any public-facing employment in huge swathes of the country? [1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/ https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad... [2] https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/LGBT-Workers-3-Pager-FINAL.pdf

H_Pylori 6y ago

>Which of the two holds more institutional power is up for debate Easy, just track the opinions that can get you fired and unpersoned. Let's not kid ourselves on who holds the real power in America and the West.

cowpig 6y ago

I really can't stand statements like this. There is more than one dimension in American culture or politics. There are two political parties. That doesn't mean there are two groups, nor two orthodoxies. To try to compress American culture to one dimension is rarely useful and often a disservice to peoples' actual opinions or beliefs.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
> There is more than one dimension This is fundamentally true for everything in the universe. Every single category breaks down. Even if I were to drill down into, say, five dimensions, your basic argument would still hold true. If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. It's why I included caveats at both the beginning and the end of my statement.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  If we took the raw complexity of reality into consideration, we'd never be able to move forward because we'd be stuck in an endless debate over categorization. Yeah, why let reality get in the way of a made up dichotomy?
  - tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
    My point is that reality gets in the way of everything we think. It's all made up.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Actually the argument is "why lose the forrest for the trees?". Every day you make abstractions to better understand reality. For example, you don't devote equal attention to every blade of grass, you sum it as "this is a lawn" and move on. If you didn't you'd be lost in the first few feet walking outside of your house, seeing everything as an equally important detail.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

> "we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions" We have two loud extremes but, no, it's not a dichotomy. In particular, we need to distinguish between progressivism and old school liberalism since they have different core principles.

djsumdog 6y ago

I think you're falling into the fallacy described in Graham's article. You've also made a false dichotomy.

gosukiwi 6y ago

I'm from Argentina, and we have a "different but similar" thing going on here. Extreme, socialist left wing on one side, right wing on the other (note that our right wing could be considered left wing over there). So both could be considered orthodox, the country is basically 50/50, and it's like the article says: You are either X or Y. No middle ground. People distort it as if it was some kind of sport. You either like this team or the other, you are either with us, or against us. And they defend every little thing, even if they know it's wrong, because it's their team.

munificent 6y ago

> we are seeing (at least in America) the emergence of two orthodoxies/conventions. This is a good description for something I have experienced emotionally for some time, but couldn't put a finger on until very recently. I grew up in the South and moved out (escaped?) in large part to get away from people whose belief system didn't align with my own. I consider myself "liberal" in the sense that I am anti-hierarchical and think people with a diverse range of beliefs, preferences, and lifestyles deserve dignity and to live their lives unencumbered from shame. When I was younger, that's what the liberal side felt like. Gay, black, woman, atheist, trans, just, like, really into LARPing? Whatever, fly your freak flag and the liberal camp is happy to have you. Where the conservative tribe demanded that you must submit to the authority and ideally be white, Christian, straight, and male, the liberal side said all are welcome. It felt welcoming. There were no purity tests because the whole concept of purity tests was antithetical to the philosophy. The whole shtick was that there was no out-group. But that's not what it feels like now. If you are not sufficiently liberal/progressive in all the right ways, you risk being shunned. I think this is a reaction to the paradox of intolerance and the rise of the alt-right/authoritarianism/fascism/whatever the hell you want to call what's going on now. Once you have a tribe that clearly considers you to be the out-group relative to them, it becomes very hard to not close ranks and define them to be your out-group. When you are actually, literally, under attack by an enemy group, accurate tribal signifiers are a necessity to determine who is a threat and who is not. I don't know if there's an easy way to walk this back. Maybe if fascism and white supremacy die back things will settle down. It's a hard time for those of us who aren't naturally wired to be fighters.