As a liberal growing up in the 90s in a primarily conservative rural community, my view of how liberalism has shifted in my lifetime: in the 90s and early 00s, I identified liberalism as the free-thought side, pro-variety, pro-weirdness. One might say that the implicit argument would be: change does not mean progress, but progress has to be change, so it makes sense for the side of progress to open itself up to all the weird ideas, to look for the good ones.
Now it seems like the conservatives have become the free-thought coalition (pro-free-speech, anti-political-correctness, Q, flat-earth, and so on), and the liberal coalition has become authoritarian, pro-science, pro media control, etc.
(I’m not very politically informed, so these impressions could be quite mistaken.)
In other words, I think the connotation of “progress” has flipped to a more authoritarian and technocratic one in the past thirty years. (This is still consistent with your claim that there’s increasing skepticism about progress and technocracy, however.)
True, agreed. What I wanted to point to was the academic gatekeeping (legitimacy-manufacturing) machinery. In essence, ‘science’ as a sociological phenomenon (a group of people with a set of norms) rather than an epistemic practice.
It’s not that simple. One of the charges of Joe Rogan was that he invited scientists who have their own opinion on his podcast because the opinion derivates from institutional opinions.
When the media culturally appropriate the term scientific consensus few people in the left spoke up to defend the old sense of the term.
Facebook started even going against scientific journals for misinformation.
This is pretty tough to evaluate, but I would guess that media, and the interests of the elite generally, has a longstanding influence on the ‘scientific consensus’ as-viewed-from-a-sociological-standpoint (IE the average opinion of scientists).
Today we see Twitter going against scientific journals. In the 1900s, would we see conservative-leaning media going against scientific journals?
OK, maybe that’s not a fair comparison. The situation is complicated. Conservatives were ‘never’ (approximately?) allied with science, preferring religion as an authority-gatekeeper.
So one error I was making was conflating all authority structures with each other. It might possibly be that preference-for-authority-structures correlates (so that we can coherently point to “authoritarians”), but there are certainly some specific pairs of authority structures where adherence anticorrelates.
We had quite a while during which there was a consensus among climate scientists for global warming but a lot of doubt in the media about global warming. Elite opinion of course influences the scientific consensus but actual scientists are still partly bound by the empiric reality in their field and not just by whatever narrative elites want to push.
Most of the time the media just ignores scientific journals when they say things they don’t like. The thing that distinguishes social media companies is that they have users who do engage with scientific journals and at the same time want to control the information flow.
A lot of good scientists are heterodox thinkers because heterodox thinking is useful to make breakthroughs in science.
The modern left likes bureaucratic authorities in which individual people inside the system have relatively little power to turn their own opinion into policy.
As a liberal growing up in the 90s in a primarily conservative rural community, my view of how liberalism has shifted in my lifetime: in the 90s and early 00s, I identified liberalism as the free-thought side, pro-variety, pro-weirdness. One might say that the implicit argument would be: change does not mean progress, but progress has to be change, so it makes sense for the side of progress to open itself up to all the weird ideas, to look for the good ones.
Now it seems like the conservatives have become the free-thought coalition (pro-free-speech, anti-political-correctness, Q, flat-earth, and so on), and the liberal coalition has become authoritarian, pro-science, pro media control, etc.
(I’m not very politically informed, so these impressions could be quite mistaken.)
In other words, I think the connotation of “progress” has flipped to a more authoritarian and technocratic one in the past thirty years. (This is still consistent with your claim that there’s increasing skepticism about progress and technocracy, however.)
I tend to agree with that, except for “pro-science”. Only the science that doesn’t contradict the current narrative is allowed.
True, agreed. What I wanted to point to was the academic gatekeeping (legitimacy-manufacturing) machinery. In essence, ‘science’ as a sociological phenomenon (a group of people with a set of norms) rather than an epistemic practice.
It’s not that simple. One of the charges of Joe Rogan was that he invited scientists who have their own opinion on his podcast because the opinion derivates from institutional opinions.
When the media culturally appropriate the term scientific consensus few people in the left spoke up to defend the old sense of the term.
Facebook started even going against scientific journals for misinformation.
This is pretty tough to evaluate, but I would guess that media, and the interests of the elite generally, has a longstanding influence on the ‘scientific consensus’ as-viewed-from-a-sociological-standpoint (IE the average opinion of scientists).
Today we see Twitter going against scientific journals. In the 1900s, would we see conservative-leaning media going against scientific journals?
OK, maybe that’s not a fair comparison. The situation is complicated. Conservatives were ‘never’ (approximately?) allied with science, preferring religion as an authority-gatekeeper.
So one error I was making was conflating all authority structures with each other. It might possibly be that preference-for-authority-structures correlates (so that we can coherently point to “authoritarians”), but there are certainly some specific pairs of authority structures where adherence anticorrelates.
We had quite a while during which there was a consensus among climate scientists for global warming but a lot of doubt in the media about global warming. Elite opinion of course influences the scientific consensus but actual scientists are still partly bound by the empiric reality in their field and not just by whatever narrative elites want to push.
Most of the time the media just ignores scientific journals when they say things they don’t like. The thing that distinguishes social media companies is that they have users who do engage with scientific journals and at the same time want to control the information flow.
A lot of good scientists are heterodox thinkers because heterodox thinking is useful to make breakthroughs in science.
The modern left likes bureaucratic authorities in which individual people inside the system have relatively little power to turn their own opinion into policy.