For that matter, the world has also shifted "right" from soviet russia and 'khmer rouge' cambodia. The space of political views and ideologies is not one-dimensional!
Isn't that natural? The cone of possibilities is large when we know nothing. As we become more knowledgeable, we eliminate hypotheses. So, for instance, while you might have believed all sorts of nonsense about the size of people's heads and whatnot a hundred years ago, you no longer can.
Hell, a thousand years ago, maybe you could have hypothesized the existence of dragons. No, the space of hypotheses is massive, and we keep cutting into it, making small enclaves of things that resist falsification.
This necessarily reduces diversity. I'd be a fool today to believe in miasma theory.
This isn't really science where something can be proved or disproved in vitro but about things like "political sciences" which have taken their specific paths for social reasons.
The simple backpropogation approach is most common and IMO accounts for much less diversity in ideas. The idea that every choice was right/wrong based on the side that won ignores that with a different geography some of the choices and the winner would have been entirely different. It also tends to remove options that may have been superior but were not chosen by either the winner or loser of a historical conflict.
I find there is a lot of intellectual diversity today than 20 years ago, American intellectual imperialism is slowly - but surely - crumbling down. There is no Washington consensus anymore. But nothing has surged to replace it, yet. We are in a transition phase that it can go on for centuries. Our "observatory" over history and society is as tiny as our observatories to discover the universe.
A decrease in intellectual diversity is a natural consiquence of faster communication and wider availability of information. 30 years ago, it was much easier to live your life without much contact to opposing viewpoints. Now if you voice your opinion online, it can be challenged instantly by people from all different backgrounds all across the globe. Of course the result of that is that more controversial viewpoints face more resistance than they did in the past.
However I do think it's worth thinking about how the structure of online communication affects idea formation and the perception of consensus. The gamification and quantization of social interactions which exists on social media platforms does have an effect on which types of ideas are mainstreamed, and which ones are marginalized, and I think it can be argued that this has not always been for the better.
I disagree. Well its true global communication can homoginize culture (i think broadcast tv especially has this affect) it's never been easier than now to form your own community.
Look at the free software movement. By mainstream standards its very radical. Do you think it would have ever been able to take hold without the instant global communication of usenet and other computer networks?
Heck people are constantly talking about how social media is full of echo chambers where people are divided into groups that all have the same opinion and never get challenged.
That's a good point - it's probably a countervailing force that people who's ideas would have been "rounded off" in past generations because they could not find anyone to agree with can now find community online.
Probably it's possible for both of these things to be true.
Although I suspect it is true that we live in a deeply oppressive time that neither produces or tolerates ideas different from the liberal consensus, I find this argument and the frequency with which it is made to be part of this insufferable intellectual monoculture.
Did you learn anything new after reading this article? Where have you read the same argument? Is it even true that a 100 years ago there was more diversity of ideas? How would you even measure such a thing?
The best I can tell you is to stop thinking the old ideas if you want room for new ideas.
As someone sympathetic to the argument I found it useful since it summed up what felt odd to about modern socio-philosophy. I can use this as a springboard to look deeper and more constructively into the highlighted events. Too often these kinds of articles are simply a smokescreen for an underlying argument that is essentially a clever version of “left wing liberals are stealing your freedom”... and this wasn’t. Which is fantastic, because as an eclectic political centrist I can’t have meaningful discussion with either end of the any particular political axis as they tend to devolve into gibbering furby dolls parroting the talking points of their politicians of choice... for society to progress this has to end.
"German de-Nazification would be called an ideological tyranny if it were ever objectively described, and it brainwashed a generation of Germans. The German soul of romantic discomfort with the modern world was murdered, with disastrous consequences for European culture. Liberal democratic cosmopolitanism didn’t win any arguments; it won a war, and got to impose itself by force."
It reads like the writer is trying to say something, but isn't really concrete about what that is.
Without any concrete criticism of "Liberal democratic cosmopolitanism" it's hard to know what this is trying to say. As others have done in the comments, this vague language leads one to guess what they mean. The principle of charity should be used, but it's hard when the same complaints are often used as a dog whistle by the extreme right.
What exactly is the problem with de-nazification? Explicitly violent and genocidal isms like Nazism should not be tolerated in good faith discussions. They should not be "debated" as Equal viewpoints.
To call it brainwashing is a stretch. Nazism has lead directly to millions of deaths in the name of Nazism and not something else. If that's not something we can agree to fight, then what is?
I disagree, there are world wide debates going on about the cost and benefits of globalization, about the merits and failures of western liberal democracies, about the interaction of capitalism and the environment, about economic inequality, etc.
I'm always stunned by how many people fall for these false equivalences and lies.
My world view is not even remotely 'left wing', and yet I have no difficulty whatsoever in detecting neofascist propaganda. It's really not that hard, and yet it's prevalence seems to be driving us to the brink of chaos.
Sure, but then continues on to decry the de-nazification of Germany and the shadowy "cosmopolitans" who imposed that by force and not the suppression of leftists by the US military, CIA and McCarthyism.
That's the trick, you just gotta put half a sentence about "both sides" into your article and then suddenly you're a centrist and your right wing drivel is now serious intellectual writing.
It is an example of intellectual diversity even though nazis are monsters but I think the overarching point of the article is that despite the fact that monsters exist intellectual diversity is good.
If that's the point of the article, then its a pretty terribly argued article.
If the author wants to argue that we have less intellectual diversity now and its bad, finding some examples of ideologies that don't want to mass murder specific ethnic groups would go a long way to making the argument convincing.
[And i'm starting from a place where i believe intellectual diversity is a good thing, although i think we have more now than we did in the past. Its not like i disagree with the author on that point, I just don't think s/he actually cares about intellectual diversity and instead just likes nazis. ]
Indeed, there's no lack of good faith arguments for what you could call "intellectual diversity".
For example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky talk at length about how the way our media is interlinked with corporations and governments steers the discourse toward a narrow range of ideas approved by those groups in their book "Manufacturing Consent". Mark Fisher decries a climate in which most people consider markets as the only possible solution for all problems in "Capitalist Realism".
However, because these authors can just be upfront about what their beliefs are, they aren't forced to argue for vague concepts like "intellectual diversity" and can instead be specific about the type of restrictions that are occurring and in the case of Herman and Chomsky even track them with real numbers, making for a much better argument.
Curious, how the conclusion of the "intellectual diversity" argument is always that we should tolerate nazis more and never anything else, really makes you think.
(Cue the "I don't support nazis I just think that for the good of mankind, unfortunately, we need to do everything we can to support nazis, incidentally of course" script.)
I don't think we should tolerate nazis more, there's a wide range of intellectual diversity out there the problem is that people like you think anyone who slightly disagrees with you on anything must be a nazi. Unfortunately intellectual diversity includes people who think that way
Literal Nazis of the NSDAP, whose exclusion from the Overton window the article laments as a tyrannical suppression of diversity, are, I think, fairly described as “racist sexist antisemites”.
> The communists won World War II, and imposed an ideological purge of unprecedented savagery, universality, and thoroughness ... Liberal democratic cosmopolitanism didn’t win any arguments; it won a war, and got to impose itself by force.
That feeling when you’re so het up about the Modern World you conflate communism and “liberal democratic cosmopolitanism” as “tHE lEFt”.
The true travesty in intellectual diversity is the American right wing abandoning any semblance of intelligent debate. Cue Shapiro calling Andrew Neil a leftist, or almost anything written by Jordan Peterson.
I've only read one of Jordan Peterson's books - 12 Rules of Life.
Haven't reread recently, but it was interesting at the time, and sort of helpful for keeping me motivated to get myself out of a bit of a rut. What parts of his writing did you find to be indicative of abandoning intelligent debate?
I hope you're standing straight now, because... you know... "To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children."
As much as I love metaphors ("Metaphors of Movement" concept and therapy by Andrew Austin or in general metaphors explained by Lakoff in "Metaphors We Live by") - Peterson is simply fantasizing. It might seem to be deeply thought out, but it's not. Would love to share with you great article about his book, but it's unfortunately in Polish. If you care to know then google translator might help https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&u=https:/...
They're not the same of course but it's common to regard them both as left-wing ideologies. They are both descendants of the ideologies of those who sat to the left in the French National Assembly, as opposed to the conservatives who sat on the right. (Confusingly, the people who call themselves conservatives in the US are really mostly free-market liberals.)
> it's common to regard them both as left-wing ideologies
It definitely is common among people who want to advocate for far right beliefs but run into the slight issue of the most famous of those groups being culturally synonymous with evil. Simply defining the Nazis to the other side of the spectrum is a very convenient solution to that, and probably pretty convincing to most people who are usually not familiar enough with the history and politics of Weimar Germany to point out how utterly ridiculous of a statement that is. (The NSDAP was helped into power by the royalty-aligned conservatives to prevent a left victory, while the left fought the forces that would become the SS in the streets to try to stop them, before they were put into the first concentration camps. Coincidentally, they also sat on the furthest right side of parliament, opposite of the communists.)
As neo-Naziism and centre-right European movements both right wing ideologies, but you’d be a blockhead if you meaningfully tried to tie them together as the author has done.
Yep i'm 100% ok with the world shifting left from literal nazi germany. Left of nazi germany is still pretty far to the right.