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”Let me tell you what’s going on” - My take on the culture war as of today
479 sats \ 10 comments \ @SilkyNinja 28 Jun culture
The culture war has been something entangled with my attention since about 2011 or 2012. I don’t want to claim that I understand absolutely everything about it; however, earlier this week, between bicep curls of Surveillance Capitalism, Means of Control, and The Foucault Reader and meditating on what my mostly social science and liberal arts undergraduate education was actually about, I came to a rather sobering conclusion. I even started sleeping better.
For some time, out there in the history department, there has been increasing consensus about a shadow of the Enlightenment - that there is a historical precedent that scientific progress can backfire and hurt people, even in situations of good intention, such as better governance. My current shorthand for this is “Sometimes, fire burns.”
Historians might be in the oldest club in the world. Something I’ve joked with myself a lot this week is I wonder what sort of hazing goes into getting a PhD in history. That said, even if there is major consensus among historians, my impression is that they are the most careful of any scholars to introduce radical ideas to young people. In an introduction to modern world history, while we were assigned a singular “big” textbook that every historian agrees on, we had a number of primary and secondary sources assigned - the most pungent effect of contemporary education is the necessity of “more than one book.”
My professor nor TA had no lecture nor commentary regarding this idea of the shadow of the Enlightenment. I can’t remember it coming up in any discussion hours. But as I thought about this concept coming out clearly in my readings this week and I remembered this class, I realized that our most important supplementary primary source was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
This is my offered solution to what might be a more sobering conclusion we can take from the "softer" disciplines. Am I right? I have no clue. But I wonder about the standards of historians; I wonder if the discipline is as honorable as my mind figures it to be, and I wonder what we could learn about the culture war and how things are playing out with Big Tech1 and Big Pharma if we take the historians seriously.

Footnotes

  1. Does anyone else consider how easily history could be rewritten if we had no paper books and only communicated through electronic means? ↩
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171 sats \ 2 replies \ @freetx 28 Jun
shadow of the Enlightenment
Is the idea that the rise of science has led to "scienceism", and thus led to a lack of objective value?
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121 sats \ 1 reply \ @SilkyNinja OP 28 Jun
Really articulating this is something found at least around the perspectives of Nietzsche and Foucault. I've heard this topic discussed as the "limits of rationality." I am not such a strong abstract thinker to definitively make conclusions such as "scienceism," but here are some quotes from my reading yesterday:
What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? (...) In addition, if it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality.
[W]hat interests me more is to focus on what the Greeks called the techne, that is to say, a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal.
Both from "Space, Knowledge, and Power" from The Foucault Reader.
Personally, the best shorthand way that I have come to think about this topic from a shared sociocultural perspective is that certain forms of knowledge-progress are like a fire, and here we are reconciling scientific progress as a fire - fire is very powerful, but it burns us at times.
The best shorthand way that I have come to think about this topic from a deeply personal perspective are the limits applying discipline on yourself in the pursuit of an ideal (self-domination toward a goal) - and all the parts of yourself that may be lost along the way in the conception and pursuit of a singular, idealized goal.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 28 Jun
God is dead ☠️
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @plebpoet 28 Jun
Hey what's up I have a liberal arts undergraduate education as well 👋 and read some Foucault. I wonder if you could state again what your solution is? I kind of lost your thread a little. Do you mean to suggest that fiction is an adequate teacher? I also wonder if the discipline of academic history is as honorable as I once thought it. Certainly it was once, but my liberal arts education taught me to rewrite history to suit my sensitive feelings....I did it and it was not honorable....so I am in the position now to denounce much of what I was taught. I was radicalized, not by historians, but linguists.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @SilkyNinja OP 29 Jun
There is historical evidence to suggest that there was a dark side to the Enlightenment. This thought might need to be reconciled with in our world today. Foucault helped to unearth this in his histories of the asylum and the prison. I argue that the history department is one of the oldest institutions on the planet, and likely has standards that we cannot even imagine. And I have faith in its integrity.
Do you mean to suggest that fiction is an adequate teacher?
No.
My professor offered Frankenstein as a living perspective of the time in which it was written in form of a fiction novel. He offered no commentary as to why or what it meant. This week I had an insight that it was assigned as muted way of offering to the student the idea professed in the first sentence.
my liberal arts education taught me to rewrite history to suit my sensitive feelings....I did it and it was not honorable....so I am in the position now to denounce much of what I was taught.
I'm sorry to hear that. I was encouraged to write on what I thought was important, from whatever perspective I wanted, given I use evidence and create a coherent argument.
I was radicalized, not by historians, but linguists.
I'm sorry to hear that. The history and art history and anthropology classes that had the greatest effect on me were all preoccupied with evidence, with recognizing personal bias, and with preservation of the record - "provenance" in art history, the origin and history of ownership of any particular item.
Why then does the sentence "There is historical evidence to suggest that there was a dark side to the Enlightenment" matter? We are living in a time in which technology has rapidly transformed the way we learn, communicate and live in the world. There is current evidence to suggest that this is not inherently for the best and that there is little to no accountability. We can perhaps see this more plainly with developments and consequences in science and medicine in the form of "Big Pharma."
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34 sats \ 1 reply \ @ditto 29 Jun
I find it interesting that many refer to The Age of Reason as The Enlightenment. Just quibbling. ;-)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SilkyNinja OP 29 Jun
Based on your slang, I’m guessing we have an ocean between us :)
Although now I’m fascinated why we have the difference!
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 28 Jun
The university system is broken. We can’t fix it. We have to burn it down and start over.
Mary Shelley was post enlightenment, I think she is part of the Romantic period
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @SilkyNinja OP 28 Jun
Mary Shelley was post enlightenment, I think she is part of the Romantic period
Was that meant to invalidate the idea that Frankenstein is a story about the Enlightenment?
Who burns down the history department; who rebuilds it and how? Who decides those things and how?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 29 Jun
No
BLM is a good candidate for arson
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