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A good essay, and one that relates to a bigger idea, which I think you could summarize as: a major trait of modernity (or post-modernity?) is the insistence tha

A good essay, and one that relates to a bigger idea, which I think you could summarize as: a major trait of modernity (or post-modernity?) is the insistence that identifying and labeling things that happened in the past prevents them from happening today. You can see this play out with religious belief, politics, biology, on and on. We read about the Salem Witch Trials and laugh at those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I think studying the origins of popular contemporary ideas (in the way done by Nietzsche or Foucault) [1] is a good start. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_(philosophy)

23B1 3y ago
You're exactly correct on the solution, but allow me to take it down to a more fundamental level; the traditional liberal arts education! 1. Grammar to understand language 2. Logic to construct arguments based on reason 3. Rhetoric to articulate those ideas and refine them based on communicating with others. You're also correct in that it is post-modernism which is the root of much of this weird new orthodoxy. It has its place in academia, it's useful for deconstructing an idea or thing, but no place in running a society in which there must be standards of truth upon which we all agree.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yeah I wish the Great Books or a similar "classical liberal arts education" would make a comeback, but unfortunately it faces opposition from both the STEM set and contemporary liberal arts departments. Institutionally, I can't think of anyone doing this other than St. John's.
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
    > Yeah I wish the Great Books or a similar "classical liberal arts education" would make a comeback, Being a better citizen does not result (directly) in a bigger economy and all educational institutions are under pressure to demonstrate how they are better at preparing students for the workforce. The liberal arts education suffers for this.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      My engineering degree at my state school known for its liberal arts education required that a quarter of the classes I took weren't related to engineering or a classical liberal arts education - just random credits with no discernable cause other than to make the university money. If your theory was correct, then the vast majority of those classes would have been engineering-related, with the extras going to classical liberal arts.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There's a few other openly religious institutes doing a Great Books curriculum in the style of St John's.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    The good news is that all the stuff you need to start your own institution is "on chain" in the curricula itself!
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Worse, “classical liberal arts” has been hijacked by more reactionary types as a way to whitewash stuff in school.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      At my school, it was the opposite - "classical liberal arts" were hijacked by radical progressives to rewrite history and spread misinformation about human biology. So I guess it goes both ways.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  I fear the people most advocating for "liberal arts education" today are also likely to be among the most orthodox minded.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    Any cause or idea can be appropriated by people you don't like. Doesn't make the idea bad.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      But it makes it difficult to get a classic "liberal arts education" if the people running liberal arts programs don't believe in it.
      - 23B1 3y ago
        If you need the degree from an accredited institution, I suppose. But even then, it's not insurmountable to learn these concepts on your own and apply them in the real world.
  - deleted 3y ago
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waihtis 3y ago
Indeed, on one hand you have a convoluted modern caste system which can irrationally change form at any given time - and on the other hand, you have philosophical ideas that have matured over hundreds or even thousands of years. It's not difficult to choose which way to follow.
- keiferski 3y ago
  My point was more that the "irrational modern ideas" aren't just conjured from the ether, but can be traced through history back centuries, and that understanding this helps one recognize the issue.
contrarian1234 3y ago
> identifying and labeling things that happened in the past prevents them from happening today. I think to a degree it does? To me it made me think of Freud. I don't think you need to dissect the complex origins of things. Real life is too complicated and it doesn't give you clear answers. Instead you distill human behavior to some rough raw patterns that repeat and build a vocabulary to describe them. You can then short circuit conversations by calling out patterns.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  In order to establish an equivalence you have to develop a function that takes a modern situation and perfectly transposes it to a past situation. This way a person that believes that the past situation was bad will have to admit the present situation is also bad. Problem 1: it’s difficult to construct such an equivalence Problem 2: it’s difficult to communicate Problem 3: humans are not logical robots and can easily handwave it and ignore you
  - contrarian1234 3y ago
    Right, operating by straight analogy doesn't work. If you say "X and Y are acting like NAZIs" that's generally not effective. That's why it's critical to distill thing and create a new vocabulary. If you take the Salem Witch trials in conjunction with other historical events and distill some general conclusions about human (group?) behavior and give it a label - then you can use history indirectly to improve discourse To the Freud example .. "You're acting like John at the last birthday party" probably won't get through to someone. But saying "I think you're projecting right now" likely can - b/c you're using a term that describes a common phenomena that everyone is familiar with. Before Freud described the defense mechanisms, people probably had a much harder time "calling people out" on these patterns.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> We read about the Salem Witch Trials and laugh at those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves How many of those laughing know have seriously studied that event? I haven’t come across many who have who didn’t immediately see the parallels to Nazism, McCarthyism and modern scapegoating politics.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  You see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly. For example, "The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism". But there is a crucial difference between the witch trials and McCarthyism. Witches don't exist. Communists did exist. And by Communists, I mean members of and supporters of the Communist Party USA in the US government. The CPUSA was dedicated to the violent overthrow of democratic government in the US and its replacement with a dictatorship loyal to Stalin. After the release of Venona documents and Soviet archives, we know now with certainty that those Communists did exist - they weren't imaginary. They existed in high positions in the US government, they spied for Stalin, gave nuclear and other military information to the Soviets, they made government policy that favored Stalin, the US government knew many of their names, and did nothing about it for years, in some cases over a decade. When people pointed this out, they were called paranoid. I don't see the parallels to the Salem Witch Trials in that. I see gaslighting. I see blaming the messenger. I don't see a witch hunt.
  - orwin 3y ago
    Wow, so because a considerable minority of the CPUSA leaders and loudmouthes wanted to violently overthrow the US government, all their political overt allies needed to be removed from public jobs, the party was disbanded and all the leaders, even those not advocating for violence had to be put in prison. Imagine if they successfully stormed the Capitol, they would have been put to death.
api 3y ago
Identifying and naming doesn’t prevent things, but it makes prevention possible.
- heyjamesknight 3y ago
  Only if we’re actually capable of identifying and naming the right things. Calling everyone a Nazi because you don’t like them doesn’t prevent anything. The modern, cause-effect approach to history is great if you can actually identify all the causes and link them correctly to the proper effects. Medievalists would argue that each situation should be evaluated according to its place in a universal battle of good versus evil. I’m not currently sure which is better.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Took me a minute to catch that by "medievalists" you meant people living in the middle ages and not its contemporary meaning of people who study the middle ages. Anyway though I don't think it's true even adjusting for that. Good vs evil is a model of causes, but not mechanism. Even if you orient in terms of it (which people still do!) you must identify causes and act on them, which also middle ages people did.
    - heyjamesknight 3y ago
      Sure, but you're still using modernist language, which seeks to extract individual events from the larger chain of narrative history.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    You don't call someone a nazi because you dislike them, you do it to circumvent having to address the merits of their argument. It's a brilliant tactical ploy: repurpose the atrocities of the holocaust (which thereby cheapens and lessens the event and its victims) to sling at your opponent.
  - immibis 3y ago
    Calling everyone who calls someone a Nazi a person who calls everything they don't like a Nazi doesn't prevent anything, either. A lot, but not all, of the people I don't like are Nazis. And I'm uncomfortable saying that because it's unorthodox. And you're comfortable calling me out for saying it because it's unorthodox.
orwin 3y ago
>> studying the origins of popular contemporary ideas Isn't that part of postmodernism too? And the main critique of Marx's 'ideology' by postmodernism?
- keiferski 3y ago
  Postmodernism typically refers to the collection of thinkers and ideas, whereas I was referring to our current period in time (postmodernity.)
  - orwin 3y ago
    In that case i think you are exactly right. We need a better word than postmodernity though. Information age? Knowledge era?
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Not sure. Those both sound very 90s to me. We do need a new term.
      - singleshot_ 3y ago
        We live in the future. (Of course, we will need a new word to call the time after the present shortly but that’s the best one I can think of). Parenthetically, this whole idea of orthodox privilege is profoundly weak. The feature of our society should more aptly be called “normality incentive” and it’s profoundly valuable to the extent we don’t want a nation of hermits pulling in 340,000,000 different direction. If you’d like an example to this idea taken a bit too far, see Leo Strauss.
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      Modern era was cannons and muskets starting with the taking of Constantinople and ending with WW1. Postmodern era is machineguns, high explosives, tanks, planes, and now atomic bombs. Especially the last one plays a huge role in what wars even get started (think about the recent Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine + Iran, and how they would (not) have happened if the ownership of the atomic weapons was reversed) - so Atomic age seems fitting ? But then I am not sure why you would want to separate them : for instance I don't think that the postmodern relativistic physics and the ideas of moral relativism common in postmodern thinking are unrelated... I think that one issue is when people say "modern" to mean "current", rather than "more than a century old".
tejtm 3y ago
"those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves." Aside; The which trials were not irrational, they were institution sanctioned land grabs. The theater is a distraction. https://salemwitchmuseum.com/locations/border-disputes/ https://salemwitchmuseum.com/locations/border-disputes/
- immibis 3y ago
  The equivalent today is something like the homelessness crisis or the war on drugs. We (the whole society) could easily give everyone a basic home by changing some regulations and with a little patience, but we don't do that because we want the kinds of people who are homeless to go away. And the war on drugs was explicitly about locking up the hippies.
immibis 3y ago
Currently watching this play out in Germany.

23B1 3y ago

You're exactly correct on the solution, but allow me to take it down to a more fundamental level; the traditional liberal arts education! 1. Grammar to understand language 2. Logic to construct arguments based on reason 3. Rhetoric to articulate those ideas and refine them based on communicating with others. You're also correct in that it is post-modernism which is the root of much of this weird new orthodoxy. It has its place in academia, it's useful for deconstructing an idea or thing, but no place in running a society in which there must be standards of truth upon which we all agree.

keiferski 3y ago
Yeah I wish the Great Books or a similar "classical liberal arts education" would make a comeback, but unfortunately it faces opposition from both the STEM set and contemporary liberal arts departments. Institutionally, I can't think of anyone doing this other than St. John's.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  > Yeah I wish the Great Books or a similar "classical liberal arts education" would make a comeback, Being a better citizen does not result (directly) in a bigger economy and all educational institutions are under pressure to demonstrate how they are better at preparing students for the workforce. The liberal arts education suffers for this.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    My engineering degree at my state school known for its liberal arts education required that a quarter of the classes I took weren't related to engineering or a classical liberal arts education - just random credits with no discernable cause other than to make the university money. If your theory was correct, then the vast majority of those classes would have been engineering-related, with the extras going to classical liberal arts.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There's a few other openly religious institutes doing a Great Books curriculum in the style of St John's.
- 23B1 3y ago
  The good news is that all the stuff you need to start your own institution is "on chain" in the curricula itself!
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Worse, “classical liberal arts” has been hijacked by more reactionary types as a way to whitewash stuff in school.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    At my school, it was the opposite - "classical liberal arts" were hijacked by radical progressives to rewrite history and spread misinformation about human biology. So I guess it goes both ways.
jimbokun 3y ago
I fear the people most advocating for "liberal arts education" today are also likely to be among the most orthodox minded.
- 23B1 3y ago
  Any cause or idea can be appropriated by people you don't like. Doesn't make the idea bad.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    But it makes it difficult to get a classic "liberal arts education" if the people running liberal arts programs don't believe in it.
    - 23B1 3y ago
      If you need the degree from an accredited institution, I suppose. But even then, it's not insurmountable to learn these concepts on your own and apply them in the real world.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

waihtis 3y ago

Indeed, on one hand you have a convoluted modern caste system which can irrationally change form at any given time - and on the other hand, you have philosophical ideas that have matured over hundreds or even thousands of years. It's not difficult to choose which way to follow.

keiferski 3y ago
My point was more that the "irrational modern ideas" aren't just conjured from the ether, but can be traced through history back centuries, and that understanding this helps one recognize the issue.

contrarian1234 3y ago

> identifying and labeling things that happened in the past prevents them from happening today. I think to a degree it does? To me it made me think of Freud. I don't think you need to dissect the complex origins of things. Real life is too complicated and it doesn't give you clear answers. Instead you distill human behavior to some rough raw patterns that repeat and build a vocabulary to describe them. You can then short circuit conversations by calling out patterns.

Almondsetat 3y ago
In order to establish an equivalence you have to develop a function that takes a modern situation and perfectly transposes it to a past situation. This way a person that believes that the past situation was bad will have to admit the present situation is also bad. Problem 1: it’s difficult to construct such an equivalence Problem 2: it’s difficult to communicate Problem 3: humans are not logical robots and can easily handwave it and ignore you
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  Right, operating by straight analogy doesn't work. If you say "X and Y are acting like NAZIs" that's generally not effective. That's why it's critical to distill thing and create a new vocabulary. If you take the Salem Witch trials in conjunction with other historical events and distill some general conclusions about human (group?) behavior and give it a label - then you can use history indirectly to improve discourse To the Freud example .. "You're acting like John at the last birthday party" probably won't get through to someone. But saying "I think you're projecting right now" likely can - b/c you're using a term that describes a common phenomena that everyone is familiar with. Before Freud described the defense mechanisms, people probably had a much harder time "calling people out" on these patterns.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> We read about the Salem Witch Trials and laugh at those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves How many of those laughing know have seriously studied that event? I haven’t come across many who have who didn’t immediately see the parallels to Nazism, McCarthyism and modern scapegoating politics.

rufus_foreman 3y ago
You see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly. For example, "The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism". But there is a crucial difference between the witch trials and McCarthyism. Witches don't exist. Communists did exist. And by Communists, I mean members of and supporters of the Communist Party USA in the US government. The CPUSA was dedicated to the violent overthrow of democratic government in the US and its replacement with a dictatorship loyal to Stalin. After the release of Venona documents and Soviet archives, we know now with certainty that those Communists did exist - they weren't imaginary. They existed in high positions in the US government, they spied for Stalin, gave nuclear and other military information to the Soviets, they made government policy that favored Stalin, the US government knew many of their names, and did nothing about it for years, in some cases over a decade. When people pointed this out, they were called paranoid. I don't see the parallels to the Salem Witch Trials in that. I see gaslighting. I see blaming the messenger. I don't see a witch hunt.
- orwin 3y ago
  Wow, so because a considerable minority of the CPUSA leaders and loudmouthes wanted to violently overthrow the US government, all their political overt allies needed to be removed from public jobs, the party was disbanded and all the leaders, even those not advocating for violence had to be put in prison. Imagine if they successfully stormed the Capitol, they would have been put to death.

api 3y ago

Identifying and naming doesn’t prevent things, but it makes prevention possible.

heyjamesknight 3y ago
Only if we’re actually capable of identifying and naming the right things. Calling everyone a Nazi because you don’t like them doesn’t prevent anything. The modern, cause-effect approach to history is great if you can actually identify all the causes and link them correctly to the proper effects. Medievalists would argue that each situation should be evaluated according to its place in a universal battle of good versus evil. I’m not currently sure which is better.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Took me a minute to catch that by "medievalists" you meant people living in the middle ages and not its contemporary meaning of people who study the middle ages. Anyway though I don't think it's true even adjusting for that. Good vs evil is a model of causes, but not mechanism. Even if you orient in terms of it (which people still do!) you must identify causes and act on them, which also middle ages people did.
  - heyjamesknight 3y ago
    Sure, but you're still using modernist language, which seeks to extract individual events from the larger chain of narrative history.
- gosub100 3y ago
  You don't call someone a nazi because you dislike them, you do it to circumvent having to address the merits of their argument. It's a brilliant tactical ploy: repurpose the atrocities of the holocaust (which thereby cheapens and lessens the event and its victims) to sling at your opponent.
- immibis 3y ago
  Calling everyone who calls someone a Nazi a person who calls everything they don't like a Nazi doesn't prevent anything, either. A lot, but not all, of the people I don't like are Nazis. And I'm uncomfortable saying that because it's unorthodox. And you're comfortable calling me out for saying it because it's unorthodox.

orwin 3y ago

>> studying the origins of popular contemporary ideas Isn't that part of postmodernism too? And the main critique of Marx's 'ideology' by postmodernism?

keiferski 3y ago
Postmodernism typically refers to the collection of thinkers and ideas, whereas I was referring to our current period in time (postmodernity.)
- orwin 3y ago
  In that case i think you are exactly right. We need a better word than postmodernity though. Information age? Knowledge era?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Not sure. Those both sound very 90s to me. We do need a new term.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      We live in the future. (Of course, we will need a new word to call the time after the present shortly but that’s the best one I can think of). Parenthetically, this whole idea of orthodox privilege is profoundly weak. The feature of our society should more aptly be called “normality incentive” and it’s profoundly valuable to the extent we don’t want a nation of hermits pulling in 340,000,000 different direction. If you’d like an example to this idea taken a bit too far, see Leo Strauss.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Modern era was cannons and muskets starting with the taking of Constantinople and ending with WW1. Postmodern era is machineguns, high explosives, tanks, planes, and now atomic bombs. Especially the last one plays a huge role in what wars even get started (think about the recent Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine + Iran, and how they would (not) have happened if the ownership of the atomic weapons was reversed) - so Atomic age seems fitting ? But then I am not sure why you would want to separate them : for instance I don't think that the postmodern relativistic physics and the ideas of moral relativism common in postmodern thinking are unrelated... I think that one issue is when people say "modern" to mean "current", rather than "more than a century old".

tejtm 3y ago

"those silly irrational people from the past...and then act in extremely similar ways ourselves." Aside; The which trials were not irrational, they were institution sanctioned land grabs. The theater is a distraction. https://salemwitchmuseum.com/locations/border-disputes/ https://salemwitchmuseum.com/locations/border-disputes/

immibis 3y ago
The equivalent today is something like the homelessness crisis or the war on drugs. We (the whole society) could easily give everyone a basic home by changing some regulations and with a little patience, but we don't do that because we want the kinds of people who are homeless to go away. And the war on drugs was explicitly about locking up the hippies.

immibis 3y ago

Currently watching this play out in Germany.