Comparing epistemic conditions over time is very hard because different communities have different epistemic conditions.
I found the Robert Moses biography The Power Broker by Robert Carovery informative when it comes to understanding how an epistemic environment was shaped in the past. Robert Moses effectively collaborated to get any opposition to himself censored while he build parks and bridges in New York.
He had his bloodhunts that digged out dirt on his critics and ended up without anybody speaking up against him for decades. Of course Robert Moses only cared about a more narrow area and didn’t prevent people from speaking outside of that field but it still impressive how much power he managed to weld in the supposedly democratic New York in the middle of the last century.
Caro writes that being against Moses and being against parks was like being against motherhood. It wasn’t a tenable position even when it might have made more sense to build other infrastructure then parks with the same money.
Being against parks is a bit like being against equality in our times. Parks are nice and equality is valuable, but it’s always a question of the price that’s payed.
The notion of Straussian knowledge that can’t be expressed directly is older then this recent debate but it’s hard to accept for previous times because the official narrative of a time conveniently leaves it out. It’s very hard to reason about it.
One great feature about our times it’s that it’s much easier to get the knowledge of what happens. The internet gives us a way to reason about what’s happening with us that wasn’t available in the same way for someone dealing with Moses in the 40′s or 50′s.
Comparing epistemic conditions over time is very hard because different communities have different epistemic conditions.
I found the Robert Moses biography The Power Broker by Robert Caro very informative when it comes to understanding how an epistemic environment was shaped in the past. Robert Moses effectively collaborated to get any opposition to himself censored while he build parks and bridges in New York.
He had his bloodhunts that digged out dirt on his critics and ended up without anybody speaking up against him for decades. Of course Robert Moses only cared about a more narrow area and didn’t prevent people from speaking outside of that field but it still impressive how much power he managed to weld in the supposedly democratic New York in the middle of the last century.
Caro writes that being against Moses and being against parks was like being against motherhood. It wasn’t a tenable position even when it might have made more sense to build other infrastructure then parks with the same money.
Being against parks is a bit like being against equality in our times. Parks are nice and equality is valuable, but it’s always a question of the price that’s payed.
The notion of Straussian knowledge that can’t be expressed directly is older then this recent debate but it’s hard to accept for previous times because the official narrative of a time conveniently leaves it out. It’s very hard to reason about it.
One great feature about our times it’s that it’s much easier to get the knowledge of what happens. The internet gives us a way to reason about what’s happening with us that wasn’t available in the same way for someone dealing with Moses in the 40′s or 50′s.