Essays like this are always enticing to people who consider themselves “reasonable”, “logical”, or “intellectual” because they seem to defend the virtues of reason on the surface—flout convention—ally yourself with reason, science!
Then you start to realize that while the slef-aggrandizing, implicit, unstated analogy is to someone like Galileo—the mytho-legendary figure of “unconventional wisdom”—the sage that rose us out of the muck—the actual analogy falls apart very quickly because the stances being defended, generally when people rage against “cancel culture” are not progressive, scientifically backed, or methodologically carefully won informed positions, but rather regressive values, such as arguments for the subordination or mistreatment of certain classes of people, the objectification of people, etc.
Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression.
If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.
pg seems to want to ascribe some inherent moral value in being heterodox without actually questioning the contents of that heterodoxy—which is really foolish. It’s a view that abuses history by viewing it in the abstract in order to, at worst, build up extremely flimsy defenses of bad behavior, and at best, state nothing more than the extremely obvious “some people in history were right when the majority of people were wrong”
I also think right and wrong are the completely incorrect categories to use in this context—going back to Galileo—it makes sense to say he was “right” in matters of science while the church was “wrong” because science is rigidly defined, verifiable, etc.—politics and moral questions are not rigidly defined and there is no completely agreed upon system for working out binary categories of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to political and ethical matters—people subscribe to tons of different moral systems many of which yield incompatible views over the same issue—pg seems to assume everyone operates using the same moral/political calculus—it would be different if we were discussing matters of science but its very clear that the intended topic zone here is political—pg just never states these things explicitly since being concrete about it would demolish his position and reveal how ridiculous it is.
> Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression.
> If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.
Replace "whiners about cancel culture" with "counter revolutionaries" or "reactionary forces" and this could have been written during the stalinist purges or the cultural revolution.
Then you start to realize that while the slef-aggrandizing, implicit, unstated analogy is to someone like Galileo—the mytho-legendary figure of “unconventional wisdom”—the sage that rose us out of the muck—the actual analogy falls apart very quickly because the stances being defended, generally when people rage against “cancel culture” are not progressive, scientifically backed, or methodologically carefully won informed positions, but rather regressive values, such as arguments for the subordination or mistreatment of certain classes of people, the objectification of people, etc.
Galileo was a progressive flouting conventional regression—most (not all) whiners about cancel culture are regressive flouting conventional progression.
If you think about the broader context in which this article was written you really have to wonder what the so-called “unconventional views” being defended are. As many views that are positive, progressive, evidence based, and generally in service of a more equitable world are in this period finally reaching the status of being “orthodoxy”.
pg seems to want to ascribe some inherent moral value in being heterodox without actually questioning the contents of that heterodoxy—which is really foolish. It’s a view that abuses history by viewing it in the abstract in order to, at worst, build up extremely flimsy defenses of bad behavior, and at best, state nothing more than the extremely obvious “some people in history were right when the majority of people were wrong”
I also think right and wrong are the completely incorrect categories to use in this context—going back to Galileo—it makes sense to say he was “right” in matters of science while the church was “wrong” because science is rigidly defined, verifiable, etc.—politics and moral questions are not rigidly defined and there is no completely agreed upon system for working out binary categories of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to political and ethical matters—people subscribe to tons of different moral systems many of which yield incompatible views over the same issue—pg seems to assume everyone operates using the same moral/political calculus—it would be different if we were discussing matters of science but its very clear that the intended topic zone here is political—pg just never states these things explicitly since being concrete about it would demolish his position and reveal how ridiculous it is.