fazer said:
Looks to me like we all belong to a variety of mutual admiration societies.
Tribes - yes, generally true. This has been and always will be a fact of life. But due to interconnectedness (rapid travel & instant communication), tribes have been thrust together over the past few decades.
Your free to listen to your own narrative 24 hours a day.
I'm trying to do the opposite. Are you listening to a narrative outside your own? How?
And what specifically in this view of Peterson / Paglia rings true to you?
One thing I notice is that when they are talking about the 1950s/1960s, they feel the social protest/change was appropriate
then but not
now. Consider these two are 60-70 years old, they are following the classic pattern of seeing change appropriate when they were young (progress) , but wanting things to stay the same now that they are old (conserve).
boji said:
Non-subjective data.
Look, I get the sense we share many of the same values, but I don't buy the assertion that people who speak on tenuous topics have it out for the destruction of progressive thought. No synthesis without antithesis..but...'Kill the canary!', says the person in thrall with a pleasing worldview.
I like to trust that people who try out dangerous or unpopular ideas, if they are wrong, will be, in ever-quickening succession thanks to the internet, marginalized and made irrelevant by the body politic. I'm sorry to say this isn't what's happening. The market of ideas is wickedly efficient at routing out charlatans. But the initial review, intuitive distaste for JP is not unique. I among many I know were guilty of this same first-pass distrust of his ideas, which I think tends to point to a left-leaning bias in need of inspection.
Edit: By non-subjective data, I mean personal data.
The opposite of subjective is objective. I'm sure everyone with curiosity presumes their view is objective or strives for it to be .
Critical thinking is a learned process to evaluate ideas to move from subjective, biased views to objective truths. That is the main value one obtains in a good English major program.
The foundation of science is a method to distinguish truths (as livingsounds just posted), and the same thing applies to the humanities.
Again: I'm curious if you have read the writers that they are talking about? Have you had a similar experience in academics?
What rings true to you in what they say - specifically?
The process to finding common ground and agreement depends on discussion in good faith. The vague references of 'values', 'unpopular ideas' etc.... aren't moving this along at all. Peterson goes much further than free speech in his viewpoint.
As I said: western superiority, male dominance, and the value of individualism (but ignoring the inherent advantage some have over others).
Note that there is a big difference between what they are saying and controversies like the gender gap/IQ etc ( like Lawrence Summers controversy at Harvard). Sometimes science creates controversies. That is fundamental to progress.
Tenuous: weak, insubstantial??
Analysis leads to dead ends sometimes. But it's also responsible for nearly every complex idea we take for granted as being true. When analyzing something we may overdo it. But under analyzing can lead to bridge collapses. I don't see a way around risking over analysis so to make headway.
