= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gjm comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (289)
Apparently when the adherents of an ideological movement seize political power, they put a lot of effort into rewriting the story of the nation state's recent past which casts the previous order of affairs in a bad light compared to the allegedly improved way the new rulers say they'll run things. That explains why, for example, American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don't explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances, or whether King George III had a defensible case for maintaining and asserting his authority over the American Colonies. Americans have come to a collective decision to cut off inquiry into those questions, at least as far as indoctrinating the young goes, because certain kinds of answers throw into doubt the legitimacy of the way things actually happened.
I wonder how much of that has happened on a larger scale to Western civilization because of the political success of adherents to the Enlightenment. Since I discovered Neoreaction and it has poked at the splinter in my mind, I have engaged in crimethink about whether we have an impoverished understanding of social alternatives because the Enlightenment's intellectuals and their heirs have worked very hard, and very successfully, at making sure that we get a heavily biased view of how things worked in the before-times which makes it look terrible compared to its replacement. Yet the splinter in our minds remains. Just ask questions about whether we really benefit from democracy, equality or feminism, and the emotional reactions from some people (David Brin, for example) show genuine anxiety on their part. These excessively emotional responses resemble how reminders of death, called "mortality salience" in Terror Management Theory, activate people's anxiety buffers to try to suppress distressing thoughts.
Did our ancestors in the West invent the Enlightenment, with its emotionally soothing message about human nature, to manage some kind of terror we should confront directly instead of trying to hide from it?
For what it's worth, I've been in the UK since about age four and everything I learned about the American Revolution took the view that the Americans were basically in the right. I don't know how typical this is, but if it is then one explanation (not the only one but maybe the most plausible) is that actually that's the conclusion most reasonable people would come to when looking at the available evidence, and the most plausible explanation of that is that actually the Americans were (according to typical present-day values) in the right.
I don't think this sort of overheated language is helpful. No one is going to put you in prison (or even fine you, or even mock you gently) for thinking that current views of the Enlightenment may be misleadingly positive.
Emotional responses are also what one would expect if a thing has (really, truly) been established only with difficulty and much opposition and turned out to be extremely beneficial, and if the person making the response is worried that it's being attacked again.
It is usually best to determine that something is wrong before undertaking to explain the mental pathologies that produce it. (The idea described at the other end of that link is about doing this to beliefs, but I think one can say much the same about attitudes.)
This seems like one hell of a leap. There are things other than fear of death that lead people to respond emotionally to things. I already mentioned one above, but there are plenty of unflattering ones if NRx has already made it impossible for you to take seriously the possibility that admirers of "Enlightenment values" might be sincere and sane: for instance, maybe people like David Brin have so much of their personal identity invested in such values that criticism of them feels itself like a personal threat. Or maybe they don't really believe in the Enlightenment any more than you do, but they recognize (as you do) the extent to which present-day Western society is built on it, and fear the consequences if it's overthrown.
It's crimethink in the sense that people automatically downvote anything critical of the Enlightenment.
Evidence?
(It looks to me as if most of the unthinking downvoting on LW is done by neoreactionaries. But being not at all neoreactionary-minded myself, it's likely that it looks more that way to me than it is in reality.)
Of course, even if your claim were true that wouldn't suffice to make "crimethink" an appropriate word; the whole horror of the term in 1984 is that the Party tries (apparently quite successfully) to control not only actions, not only words, but thoughts, and did it by means a little more brutal than downvotes.
Backing up your general observation. Someone just went ahead and upvoted advancedatheist's original comment, upvoated Michael's comment, and then apparently downvoted every critical comment in this subthread. If they can give an explanation for why they think your responsed to advanced deserved a downvote I'd be really intrigued to hear it.
Nearly any political discussion has a few people downvoting on LW. If that's the standard every political discussion is crimethink.
There also the idea that policies should be judged on their merits and not based on whether or not they are enlightment policies and as such a post focusing on criticism a policy based on being an enlightenment policy might be downvoted for reasons having nothing to do with "crimethink".
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
Interesting: thanks.
applause