I actually have a lot things to say about the epistemology, to say nothing of the history, here. Just too tied up to give you a serious response. And I thought the Persuasion piece really philosophically problematic-- even though I like the actual political focus on antitrust. More anon, I hope. And even when I disagree, very fond of your writing and impulses.
The death of expertise wasn't murder, it was suicide. The institutions that American's have lost faith in to the extent that they elected a man overtly declaring he will upset the status quo have only themselves to blame.
To some extent that's true, but I'd really point the finger at changes in communicative technologies, at turbo-charged communication on the Internet, and the slowness of the establishment to react
The institutions have had just as much time as the rest of us to adapt to changes in communication technology, and don't lack for resources. Their slowness is on them. And the lack of trust is not just a matter of speed. It's also a lack of trust in sound policies and decisions.
People keep saying things like this but I think it's murder. Much like stabbing someone who's bleeding from the wrist and trying to get to the hospital is murder. Maybe they would have died anyway but surely, in the case of e.g. anti-vax doctors, the individuals spreading lies for the sake of engagement and money are also morally culpable. I don't buy that this is a situation we'd see ourselves in without bad actors. Maybe Joe Rogan is dumb enough to believe his guests, but a significant proportion of his guests aren't dumb enough to believe their own bullshit. They just can't be. Not in a sober state undistorted by incentives. I imagine they rationalize it for themselves somehow. Play up the uncertainty. Tell themselves something about the importance of dissenting voices. But they will not see the light of heaven.
Looking at the COVID fatality rates by sex, age, and heath condition, the response to COVID recommended by the health institutions (shutdowns, closed schools, universal vaccination (or else!), masking, plexiglass, 6 feet, etc) seemed to be nonsensical (certainly in Los Angeles County where I live). People were right to question and lose trust. The institutions could have recommended a less extreme path and society would not have been worse off.
As an aside I'm beginning to think that Trump won because he had a far superior media strategy. He embraced "the border" with his message; Harris did not.
The science I care deeply and selfishly about is medicine. And while certainty is absent, one can play the odds by both trusting and verifying. Being knowledgeable about health still confers a tremendous advantage, at least on the individual level. Vaccines may have been oversold but on an individual level it made sense for most to get them.
I think the big losers in all this are people on the border who now don't trust the experts and lack the tools and the time and the access to make their own informed decisions.
David, do you have the tools to make informed decisions if you can't trust the CDC or, say, the American Medical Association, or any other institution body that is meant to confer authority? Winning debates on podcasts does not sound like a better world to me. One might well ask which fallibility is preferable -- Fauci's or the raving horde's.
I’m writing from my individual position of privilege, which includes healthcare access, an education about statistics and probability, and time to devote to staying healthy. I get that many people now do not trust the CDC or the AMA. But if they substitute “raving hordes” then they are going to be probabilistically worse off.
I suppose this is the part of Sam's prognosis that I find difficult to accept. A medical degree needs to mean something. For it to mean something, there must be a shared definition of medical expertise across the profession, certainly among faculty at a degree-granting institution. The scientific method is not obsolete, even if we are facing a crisis of public trust. Needing better messengers does not mean that the whole epistemology has collapsed.
I think we are in violent agreement. The damage to credibility of the "Center" institutions, particularly in healthcare, is going to cost lives.
One of the greatest medical miracles of our lifetime was the invention of the Covid vaccine. That was the Center. Everything else about Covid was to me a footnote (although if I had school age kids, I might feel differently).
If they substitute the raving hordes, they have to analyze for themselves what the best course of action is. That doesn't necessarily make them worse off. Some, for sure, due to a bad decision. But what percentage? It's impossible to say. But if there are good reasons to not trust the institutions, what else can people do? Why keep trusting the institutions that - to put a specific action on it - didn't let people visit their dying loved ones during Covid? And for what?
The stack was about how people frame the world. Now if you were the 50 percent who had good enough reason to distrust the precautions, you needed then, as for The next 4 years, to insist on visiting your dying person. You passively aggressively strap on a mask and you walk into the room where your person is. We all are going to need to do the similar now. Just 2 instances: Trump will remove those with a car from the foodstamps rolls. You will need to throw one of these a 20 spot . Another is the Dept of Ed to be defunded. A child will need some food and words of advice. No morning breakfast and a hunger for understanding. Which you will supply in your way.
I think that's absolutely right about Trump embracing the Border. The Dems used to be good at that! - FDR in particular was a genius at it - but they seem to have just totally lost the touch. And I do agree that the breakdown of Authority in science leads to a degree of chaos in the society at large - although I'd argue that lack of trust in the experts may be less important for people on the Border than the fact that they can't really afford access to the experts' services anyway.
But that disguise won't work with me! I can recognize the Dread David Roberts anywhere!
Great insight David. The left over indexes expertise and credentials and institutions. They’re paying a long game while most people on the border just want food on their table and their emotions validated. I worked for years in philanthropy and I often wondered wtf are we doing with billions of dollars? We give to the think tanks and the experts thinking their research papers on high quality ECE will trickle down to people who can’t afford to watch their own children in America. It made me feel so sad.
Sam, I left policy adjacent research and funding almost 5 years ago because I realized I wasn’t actually as left as I thought. I’d be sitting with Brookings but reading Heritage foundation papers. I was ideologically not faithful to anything but the truth. I found your analysis deeply moving and eye opening; thank you. The question becomes what do you do with yourself when you move ideologically like this away from what you originally knew as the truth? Covid changed my worldview completely.
"The extent of the epistemological crisis is hard to overstate. It has touched every institution that I can think of. None have emerged particularly well from it. It is based not in the fecklessness of individual administrators or policy choices — although that is not to be underestimated — but from a structural shift in the interaction of the Center and Border, which is only going to heighten as the internet continues to develop."
I agree with this. I do not agree that we are in a better place now or that the authorities, such as they are/were, have such a checkered past. When my ex and I were weighing all the thousand decisions that new parents must make, we wondered about all the recommended vaccines. We had questioned the standard medical response to birth, arming ourselves with a birth plan to stave off interventions. So it was not automatic to trust the standard approach to pediatrics.
But friends with MDs who had worked in Third World countries rightly told me that if most Americans could witness what life was like without herd immunity, they would realize how lucky we are (or have been). Most people don't understand how rigorous the testing for vaccines is or how reckless a mix-and-match approach (which has not been tested) can be.
If we turn back the clock on scientific medicine, we'll see the physician become a figure of suspicion again. Ambrose Bierce wrote in his "Devil's Dictionary" that the grave is a place a body is laid to await the coming of the medical student. Oliver Wendell Holmes hashed this kind of thing out in public -- there does have to be a public case made -- but not without a strong foundation of institutional science. If you are right about this, heaven help us. It's back to the Dark Ages.
Well, I think the ship has already sailed on this. The physician has already become a 'figure of suspicion again.' That's coming from many different directions - it's the new age and wellness community being deeply suspicious of 'Western medicine' at the expense of more holistic approaches; it's virtually anybody in America recognizing that the health care system is hopelessly broken and that all the advances in medicine really add up to nothing if it's so difficult to get access to basic, affordable medical treatment; it's significant concern with the pharmaceutical industry's capture of the regulatory process for medications and a recognition that so much of modern medicine is just writing out prescriptions whether they're really needed or not.
I wouldn't say it's 'back to the Dark Ages.' Applied science is capable of making all kinds of wonderful inventions and doing so at an industrial scale. But I think it's been clear for some time that science and social welfare are kind of moving in different directions - and Big Pharma in particular pushes all kinds of medications that benefit their bottomline but without necessarily contributing to human welfare. That's not to say that 'science is bad' - just that we're in a different era with different sets of challenges.
As an example: the childhood vaccine schedule now includes 15 different vaccines. I don't think it's all unreasonable for parents to wonder if all those are truly necessary or if any have unwanted side-effects. Maybe the answer is that any risks are negligible and outweighed by the benefits, but for decades that conversation really couldn't have been raised at all in the public sphere - it was considered to be 'settled science.' When I say that the authority for science is weakening - which seems to be inarguably the case in the West right now - it's not that science disappears; it's just that more people are "doing science," using web resources, etc, that are available to them.
Good points about Big Pharma. I actually feel that the oversized influence of money is the Occam's Razor explanation for the epistemological shift you describe. If there's no integrity to a system other than its earnings, then there's no reason to believe in it. But that does not mean that the scientific method is compromised.
It might not be unreasonable for parents to wonder about vaccines, but misinformation abounds. The autism myth (which prevented my parents from vaccinating me properly) has proven perniciously persistent. I still feel that I'm getting better information from the CDC than I am by trying to cobble together loud voices on the Internet.
I'll save more of my thoughts for next week's post. But I have no idea how one "does science" on the web. I don't think we're actually talking about science in that case.
I have a friend who is 23 and voted for Trump. She is not trans herself, but I think she is lesbian. She frequently posts online with transgender people and cross-dressing men.
She clearly does not fit the conventional left-right axis.
The Second Reformation (begun in 1945) is re-organizing categories and will create new institutions in the coming years.
The fault line is gender simply because, when you strike any rock with a crystalline structure, it breaks the way the lattice is organized.
Why gender?
Perhaps because gender is fundamental even if, biologically and genetically, gender appears to be a continuum.
In other words, there’s only one place you’re going to get the babies from.
I’m 56 years old. My generation will not create the new institutions.
My sons, and perhaps their children, will be the ones to create new categories of people, political parties, states and institutions that govern our lives.
I'm skeptical that Joe Rogan doesn't have a toilet under his podcast seat because nothing indicates he doesn't take a bathroom break during his 3hr+ podcasts.
I’ve been a big fan for a long time, Sam, but this one is glaringly oversimplified and as guilty of overreach as the fraudulent scientists you quote. Science began because magic wasn’t working. By turns, careful observation, experimentation and application grew mankind’s life expectancy, lessened pain and averted death. However many snake oil salesmen there were, and continue to be, scientists continued to make life better. Now that dissidents have the tools to pick apart every theory and broadcast their “findings” (some of which may actually be findings), science is about to collapse?
At best, these critiques can only keep the scientists who have been corrupted by big bucks more honest.
You might be right about the Centre’s arrogance but you’re wrong about the wisdom along the Border. Unfortunately, we’re about to see that play out in real time.
Trump won because the Centre made the massive error of adopting some of the Border people’s dumbest ideas, or seeming to. Then they ran an unvetted candidate with a woke history who kept saying what a great listener she was when applying for the job of final talker. A giver-of-orders. I wonder if she would have won if she’d been more arrogant (trans: “more Presidential”).
When I say that science is in danger of collapsing - I'm actually not exactly saying this, I'm quoting Justin Smith and find it interesting what he's putting forward - I'm not saying that, like, the stethoscope is no longer a useful way of measuring the human heartbeat. I'm saying that the communicative consensus around science which over the centuries calcified into 'authority' is being chipped at from so many different directions that science as a domain may need to reestablish its authority and points of consensus. RFK as Secretary of Health is going to be unbelievably interesting, because he truly disputes so much of what has been scientific consensus - the origin of AIDS, the basic efficacy of vaccines, etc, etc - and there's never been a skeptic in anything like that position of power.
I agree with you that it's not necessarily as if the Border is so much wiser. The Border can be well-positioned to spot the hypocrisies and lies coming from the Center, but that certainly doesn't necessarily translate into effective governance. I'm with you that having the Border in positions of power, as is about to happen, is likely to be an enormous shit show.
I should clarify with this post - I probably should have done it in the piece - that there really are no normative judgments here. The piece is meant to be purely descriptive/analytical. I am not saying that the 'Border' is right, let alone that the Border is better at governing. I am trying to offer a history and structural analysis of how the Border found its voice over the past decade and put the Center on the defensive. To the extent that I am casting any value-judgments, it would be my frustration that the Center - with all of its credentials and ostensible analytic firepower - just keeps failing to understand these fundamental dynamics i.e. why the Border is intrinsically resentful of the Center; and why the Internet alters the balance of power between Border and Center. I'll respond to individual comments a bit later!
The fact that you refer to the center’s analytic firepower as ‘ostensible’ suggests that you have a bias and that this piece isn’t purely ‘descriptive’.
I responded to Sam's Castalia in my comment below. If Castalia had taken their real estate seriously, they wld have heeded Jon Haidt who said 50 percent of everybody makes political decisions based on their affinities and inclinations, which statement here in Kahn's piece is the only wrongly weighted sttmnt in there. After Haidt showed those bloodily strong motives to vote to approve your tribe in one half the pop versus voting to vaguely approve a platform of progress on the other, the party of L. Johnson should have draped themselves in the flag. They failed miserably. That is the Amrca we are trying to see, are they unable to defy the deskclerk at t hospital ward? Then this next 4 or 6 years are going to be difgicult to stomach.
So I should say that in a discussion of epistemology, there is no such thing as 'objectivity.' Everybody has biases somewhere or other. I'm of course pretty incensed by various lies that the Center has told over the years - to a great extent, those in the Center just think the Border is stupid - and I believe that the Center's loss of credibility is very much a fault of their own making.
But what I'm not saying is that the Border is better or smarter. It's just that the epistemological base of the two is very different. The Center is speaking the language of power and aims to reach, or impose, consensus above all. The Border is speaking the language of critique and can delight in picking apart the lies and hypocrisy of the Center; although that doesn't necessarily qualify the Border for leadership. For instance, some of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard's to be really interesting, but my suspicion is that they'll be awful when they're in positions of actual power.
What I mean is that my writing here is descriptive not prescriptive.
I think it's a chaotic thing for sure. We're in a very challenging period where modes of communication are changing so rapidly that people's epistemological bases are really thrown off. That undermines 'authority,' which means that all kinds of weird people from the fringe end up having voices or even positions of power - and with chaotic results. But it's also a good period for thinking and for challenging our own prior conceptions. So, some good. Lots of bad. But definitely interesting.
Republic of Letters. Soldiers of letters there are none. Bravery by itself in looking at accomplished history, we have met a few. S Kahn. Liberality lost. Soldiers of battalions without a name voted Rump. Afficianadoes of Ron Reagan. Now we are asked to maintain our households while 6 or more million day laborers are returned to unsanitary conditions with drug addled teenage sherrifs controlling their local imitation of total situational awareness...we will accept it. Because such soldiers as we be have been trained to accept the I.c.e. In 1940 there were books of revisionist history " the Revolution is Now" in which the anschluss lost in Belgium. Very convincing, and in plain fact the English without Churchill sent every member of their armed forces to defend the battle line. They lost because the luftwaffe had levelled towns the Brits needed structures to house their armory/ ammunition, and so had to caravan that ammunition around like protecting human babies?! We lost. And the liberal project has as its precondition non violence and chagrined but submissive populations. Simplication would be like the song Universal soldier to blame the Guardsmen at Kent State University Dayton Ohio 1905 for firing live rounds into the bodies of soft, unsoldiersy adult in size but childish in drug use hippies. They should not have pulled those triggers? Everybody show us what they should have done, those students were eating the colleges neighbors' dogs. Not one capital d democrat will Die in the next 4 years. But millions of Our yard maintenance Engineers will return to Honduras to be starved and bored of stimulation. Let's give up and Occupy a state park. For fun and no profit, maybe. Yes, let us continue quiet quitting until Muss becomes tired of winning.
About that Rainbow family gathering. Maybe with the help of the Internet Archive? And then we would dangerously assiduously need to look for syncretists to read to stay uptodate even for one month? Because parks are just wild enough to be dangerous to books. Thinking of your house i presume in future, 2 things: know that very many houseproud people really do stare into the screen of the verge of trees, it is a legitimate reason for buying....and maybe contrariwise Asking myself what level of civics happrns in t woods? T. Will seem to be the Drunken Boat! Mercy on our souls, if you were in woods wld you have remembered to word scramble Gurry? Becuz, you make good nudges when you use those wrote-skills of yours, still more Virgil than Warriors. Soldiers are fingering their rosaries they say...
I think this is exactly right (as someone who grew up on the literal border with the Global South). I think one can trace a parallel dynamic in the mythopoetic realm. The Center went hard on materialism in both the anti-spiritual and the money-grubbing sense. But as you've pointed out, the old gods have never really gone away - Jung for one brought them back as archetypes. And while the Center turned its nose up at Jung, his ideas spread like wildfire across the Border: from Jordan Peterson and the renewed interest in astrology and altered states to the fact that all the problematic figures on the Right have suddenly found Jesus (all, more or less, as John Pistelli has foretold). I remember when Yascha Mounk interviewed Alexandre Lefebvre about his book which I affectionally call LAAWOL, they were sceptical of the Integralists' plan of shaping the culture by means of gaining political power since practising Catholics are a small percentage of the population (this was before Vance was the VP pick). Well it seems like something like a regime change may indeed be taking place - and bloodlessly, you have to give them that.
Yeah, there's a lot here that would be worth talking about more. I think that's right, that Jung as become kind of the underlying psychological reality of the Border (with the Center maybe something else), and that there's a lot to talk about - which I don't get into here - about how the Border is organizing itself.
I don’t usually re-read Substack pieces, but I’m re-reading this one. Nice work Sam, I think you’re touching on something really important here that I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve hewn so closely to the Center for so long it hurts to see that the Center is not currently looking like it can hold. But the Border? Oy, it makes so little sense to me.
Thanks Tom! Well, I could say this: any one of us has identities that are on the Center and Border. In our lives - and sometimes, interestingly, at the same time - we criss-cross between them. So I suppose part of the reconciliation is just looking into our own experiences - if we find ourselves in the Center, we think a bit differently than we do if we find ourselves on the Border - and seeing that these aren't so much fixed identities as different modes of thought that each have their own logical basis.
I do think you're right that each of us can exist in both areas, Center and Border. For example, I'm a fairly committed Democrat/progressive, but I never embraced identity politics and some of the gender and social justice issues (white man problem? maybe.) It feels very easy for me to be "easy going" about these issues. But the "Center" idea that is most critical to me, the one that I hold central to my being, is this idea that education and expertise should be at the heart of our collective decision making. That's the epistemological part of this that is most troubling to me, because it's so central to my own conception of both self and society. I think that's why this election has troubled me so, because I fear it signals a movement away from, well, rationality.
'And here, actually, we might be able to identify the fundamental loci of epistemological division — for the center, it is Consensus; for the border, Critique (or, if you like, Inquiry). It’s almost better to say, rather than being opposed, that the two simply have nothing to do with one another." I really liked this until the last phrase. not that I know enough to disagree, but I think that critique cannot exist in the way you describe without consensus as its 'ground'. Thank you for such a Thought-Provoking piece!
Thanks TJ! And happy to hash this out a little more. I guess what you're saying is that, in my construct, the Border can only exist in opposition to a Center, which I guess is true - they're like Thesis and Antithesis. I would just say that what I mean is they operate through fundamentally different modes of discourse - the Center tends to operate through hierarchy, the Border through equality, for instance, and that generates two very different epistemologies - with 'Consensus' and 'Critique' being, I think, useful shorthands.
Adding to the noise: it irks me that this is a topic in politics. "Fake news." "Alternative facts." "Status quo." To say it is a battle between consensus and critique is generous. If the shoe was on the other foot (so to speak) they'd still scramble for the same old piece of cheese: power. These people have stumbled in the back door of your mind when it comes to epistemology, I'm afraid. They simply have no idea about placebo effects, the carbon cycle, or good philosophy of any kind. They *know* not.
Nicely done, Sam! Keep up the good work.
Thanks David!
I actually have a lot things to say about the epistemology, to say nothing of the history, here. Just too tied up to give you a serious response. And I thought the Persuasion piece really philosophically problematic-- even though I like the actual political focus on antitrust. More anon, I hope. And even when I disagree, very fond of your writing and impulses.
The death of expertise wasn't murder, it was suicide. The institutions that American's have lost faith in to the extent that they elected a man overtly declaring he will upset the status quo have only themselves to blame.
To some extent that's true, but I'd really point the finger at changes in communicative technologies, at turbo-charged communication on the Internet, and the slowness of the establishment to react
The institutions have had just as much time as the rest of us to adapt to changes in communication technology, and don't lack for resources. Their slowness is on them. And the lack of trust is not just a matter of speed. It's also a lack of trust in sound policies and decisions.
People keep saying things like this but I think it's murder. Much like stabbing someone who's bleeding from the wrist and trying to get to the hospital is murder. Maybe they would have died anyway but surely, in the case of e.g. anti-vax doctors, the individuals spreading lies for the sake of engagement and money are also morally culpable. I don't buy that this is a situation we'd see ourselves in without bad actors. Maybe Joe Rogan is dumb enough to believe his guests, but a significant proportion of his guests aren't dumb enough to believe their own bullshit. They just can't be. Not in a sober state undistorted by incentives. I imagine they rationalize it for themselves somehow. Play up the uncertainty. Tell themselves something about the importance of dissenting voices. But they will not see the light of heaven.
Looking at the COVID fatality rates by sex, age, and heath condition, the response to COVID recommended by the health institutions (shutdowns, closed schools, universal vaccination (or else!), masking, plexiglass, 6 feet, etc) seemed to be nonsensical (certainly in Los Angeles County where I live). People were right to question and lose trust. The institutions could have recommended a less extreme path and society would not have been worse off.
As an aside I'm beginning to think that Trump won because he had a far superior media strategy. He embraced "the border" with his message; Harris did not.
The science I care deeply and selfishly about is medicine. And while certainty is absent, one can play the odds by both trusting and verifying. Being knowledgeable about health still confers a tremendous advantage, at least on the individual level. Vaccines may have been oversold but on an individual level it made sense for most to get them.
I think the big losers in all this are people on the border who now don't trust the experts and lack the tools and the time and the access to make their own informed decisions.
Sincerely,
Ravid Doberts
David, do you have the tools to make informed decisions if you can't trust the CDC or, say, the American Medical Association, or any other institution body that is meant to confer authority? Winning debates on podcasts does not sound like a better world to me. One might well ask which fallibility is preferable -- Fauci's or the raving horde's.
I’m writing from my individual position of privilege, which includes healthcare access, an education about statistics and probability, and time to devote to staying healthy. I get that many people now do not trust the CDC or the AMA. But if they substitute “raving hordes” then they are going to be probabilistically worse off.
I suppose this is the part of Sam's prognosis that I find difficult to accept. A medical degree needs to mean something. For it to mean something, there must be a shared definition of medical expertise across the profession, certainly among faculty at a degree-granting institution. The scientific method is not obsolete, even if we are facing a crisis of public trust. Needing better messengers does not mean that the whole epistemology has collapsed.
I think we are in violent agreement. The damage to credibility of the "Center" institutions, particularly in healthcare, is going to cost lives.
One of the greatest medical miracles of our lifetime was the invention of the Covid vaccine. That was the Center. Everything else about Covid was to me a footnote (although if I had school age kids, I might feel differently).
If they substitute the raving hordes, they have to analyze for themselves what the best course of action is. That doesn't necessarily make them worse off. Some, for sure, due to a bad decision. But what percentage? It's impossible to say. But if there are good reasons to not trust the institutions, what else can people do? Why keep trusting the institutions that - to put a specific action on it - didn't let people visit their dying loved ones during Covid? And for what?
The stack was about how people frame the world. Now if you were the 50 percent who had good enough reason to distrust the precautions, you needed then, as for The next 4 years, to insist on visiting your dying person. You passively aggressively strap on a mask and you walk into the room where your person is. We all are going to need to do the similar now. Just 2 instances: Trump will remove those with a car from the foodstamps rolls. You will need to throw one of these a 20 spot . Another is the Dept of Ed to be defunded. A child will need some food and words of advice. No morning breakfast and a hunger for understanding. Which you will supply in your way.
I think that's absolutely right about Trump embracing the Border. The Dems used to be good at that! - FDR in particular was a genius at it - but they seem to have just totally lost the touch. And I do agree that the breakdown of Authority in science leads to a degree of chaos in the society at large - although I'd argue that lack of trust in the experts may be less important for people on the Border than the fact that they can't really afford access to the experts' services anyway.
But that disguise won't work with me! I can recognize the Dread David Roberts anywhere!
Great insight David. The left over indexes expertise and credentials and institutions. They’re paying a long game while most people on the border just want food on their table and their emotions validated. I worked for years in philanthropy and I often wondered wtf are we doing with billions of dollars? We give to the think tanks and the experts thinking their research papers on high quality ECE will trickle down to people who can’t afford to watch their own children in America. It made me feel so sad.
Sam, I left policy adjacent research and funding almost 5 years ago because I realized I wasn’t actually as left as I thought. I’d be sitting with Brookings but reading Heritage foundation papers. I was ideologically not faithful to anything but the truth. I found your analysis deeply moving and eye opening; thank you. The question becomes what do you do with yourself when you move ideologically like this away from what you originally knew as the truth? Covid changed my worldview completely.
"The extent of the epistemological crisis is hard to overstate. It has touched every institution that I can think of. None have emerged particularly well from it. It is based not in the fecklessness of individual administrators or policy choices — although that is not to be underestimated — but from a structural shift in the interaction of the Center and Border, which is only going to heighten as the internet continues to develop."
I agree with this. I do not agree that we are in a better place now or that the authorities, such as they are/were, have such a checkered past. When my ex and I were weighing all the thousand decisions that new parents must make, we wondered about all the recommended vaccines. We had questioned the standard medical response to birth, arming ourselves with a birth plan to stave off interventions. So it was not automatic to trust the standard approach to pediatrics.
But friends with MDs who had worked in Third World countries rightly told me that if most Americans could witness what life was like without herd immunity, they would realize how lucky we are (or have been). Most people don't understand how rigorous the testing for vaccines is or how reckless a mix-and-match approach (which has not been tested) can be.
If we turn back the clock on scientific medicine, we'll see the physician become a figure of suspicion again. Ambrose Bierce wrote in his "Devil's Dictionary" that the grave is a place a body is laid to await the coming of the medical student. Oliver Wendell Holmes hashed this kind of thing out in public -- there does have to be a public case made -- but not without a strong foundation of institutional science. If you are right about this, heaven help us. It's back to the Dark Ages.
Well, I think the ship has already sailed on this. The physician has already become a 'figure of suspicion again.' That's coming from many different directions - it's the new age and wellness community being deeply suspicious of 'Western medicine' at the expense of more holistic approaches; it's virtually anybody in America recognizing that the health care system is hopelessly broken and that all the advances in medicine really add up to nothing if it's so difficult to get access to basic, affordable medical treatment; it's significant concern with the pharmaceutical industry's capture of the regulatory process for medications and a recognition that so much of modern medicine is just writing out prescriptions whether they're really needed or not.
I wouldn't say it's 'back to the Dark Ages.' Applied science is capable of making all kinds of wonderful inventions and doing so at an industrial scale. But I think it's been clear for some time that science and social welfare are kind of moving in different directions - and Big Pharma in particular pushes all kinds of medications that benefit their bottomline but without necessarily contributing to human welfare. That's not to say that 'science is bad' - just that we're in a different era with different sets of challenges.
As an example: the childhood vaccine schedule now includes 15 different vaccines. I don't think it's all unreasonable for parents to wonder if all those are truly necessary or if any have unwanted side-effects. Maybe the answer is that any risks are negligible and outweighed by the benefits, but for decades that conversation really couldn't have been raised at all in the public sphere - it was considered to be 'settled science.' When I say that the authority for science is weakening - which seems to be inarguably the case in the West right now - it's not that science disappears; it's just that more people are "doing science," using web resources, etc, that are available to them.
- Sam
Good points about Big Pharma. I actually feel that the oversized influence of money is the Occam's Razor explanation for the epistemological shift you describe. If there's no integrity to a system other than its earnings, then there's no reason to believe in it. But that does not mean that the scientific method is compromised.
It might not be unreasonable for parents to wonder about vaccines, but misinformation abounds. The autism myth (which prevented my parents from vaccinating me properly) has proven perniciously persistent. I still feel that I'm getting better information from the CDC than I am by trying to cobble together loud voices on the Internet.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/how-developed-approved.html#:~:text=testing%20in%20people.-,Testing%20the%20vaccine,the%20quality%20of%20the%20vaccine
I'll save more of my thoughts for next week's post. But I have no idea how one "does science" on the web. I don't think we're actually talking about science in that case.
I have a friend who is 23 and voted for Trump. She is not trans herself, but I think she is lesbian. She frequently posts online with transgender people and cross-dressing men.
She clearly does not fit the conventional left-right axis.
The Second Reformation (begun in 1945) is re-organizing categories and will create new institutions in the coming years.
The fault line is gender simply because, when you strike any rock with a crystalline structure, it breaks the way the lattice is organized.
Why gender?
Perhaps because gender is fundamental even if, biologically and genetically, gender appears to be a continuum.
In other words, there’s only one place you’re going to get the babies from.
I’m 56 years old. My generation will not create the new institutions.
My sons, and perhaps their children, will be the ones to create new categories of people, political parties, states and institutions that govern our lives.
Thanks for the comment. I haven't heard the phrase "Second Reformation" before.
I'm skeptical that Joe Rogan doesn't have a toilet under his podcast seat because nothing indicates he doesn't take a bathroom break during his 3hr+ podcasts.
Lol! I've never thought about that. Now that's an image that's seared in my mind!
well, he generates skepticism so often I thought it would be fair to give him a taste of his own medicine :)
I’ve been a big fan for a long time, Sam, but this one is glaringly oversimplified and as guilty of overreach as the fraudulent scientists you quote. Science began because magic wasn’t working. By turns, careful observation, experimentation and application grew mankind’s life expectancy, lessened pain and averted death. However many snake oil salesmen there were, and continue to be, scientists continued to make life better. Now that dissidents have the tools to pick apart every theory and broadcast their “findings” (some of which may actually be findings), science is about to collapse?
At best, these critiques can only keep the scientists who have been corrupted by big bucks more honest.
You might be right about the Centre’s arrogance but you’re wrong about the wisdom along the Border. Unfortunately, we’re about to see that play out in real time.
Trump won because the Centre made the massive error of adopting some of the Border people’s dumbest ideas, or seeming to. Then they ran an unvetted candidate with a woke history who kept saying what a great listener she was when applying for the job of final talker. A giver-of-orders. I wonder if she would have won if she’d been more arrogant (trans: “more Presidential”).
Thanks David and all good to disagree!
When I say that science is in danger of collapsing - I'm actually not exactly saying this, I'm quoting Justin Smith and find it interesting what he's putting forward - I'm not saying that, like, the stethoscope is no longer a useful way of measuring the human heartbeat. I'm saying that the communicative consensus around science which over the centuries calcified into 'authority' is being chipped at from so many different directions that science as a domain may need to reestablish its authority and points of consensus. RFK as Secretary of Health is going to be unbelievably interesting, because he truly disputes so much of what has been scientific consensus - the origin of AIDS, the basic efficacy of vaccines, etc, etc - and there's never been a skeptic in anything like that position of power.
I agree with you that it's not necessarily as if the Border is so much wiser. The Border can be well-positioned to spot the hypocrisies and lies coming from the Center, but that certainly doesn't necessarily translate into effective governance. I'm with you that having the Border in positions of power, as is about to happen, is likely to be an enormous shit show.
I should clarify with this post - I probably should have done it in the piece - that there really are no normative judgments here. The piece is meant to be purely descriptive/analytical. I am not saying that the 'Border' is right, let alone that the Border is better at governing. I am trying to offer a history and structural analysis of how the Border found its voice over the past decade and put the Center on the defensive. To the extent that I am casting any value-judgments, it would be my frustration that the Center - with all of its credentials and ostensible analytic firepower - just keeps failing to understand these fundamental dynamics i.e. why the Border is intrinsically resentful of the Center; and why the Internet alters the balance of power between Border and Center. I'll respond to individual comments a bit later!
The fact that you refer to the center’s analytic firepower as ‘ostensible’ suggests that you have a bias and that this piece isn’t purely ‘descriptive’.
An anti-Castalian bias, in fact.
I responded to Sam's Castalia in my comment below. If Castalia had taken their real estate seriously, they wld have heeded Jon Haidt who said 50 percent of everybody makes political decisions based on their affinities and inclinations, which statement here in Kahn's piece is the only wrongly weighted sttmnt in there. After Haidt showed those bloodily strong motives to vote to approve your tribe in one half the pop versus voting to vaguely approve a platform of progress on the other, the party of L. Johnson should have draped themselves in the flag. They failed miserably. That is the Amrca we are trying to see, are they unable to defy the deskclerk at t hospital ward? Then this next 4 or 6 years are going to be difgicult to stomach.
Ha!
So I should say that in a discussion of epistemology, there is no such thing as 'objectivity.' Everybody has biases somewhere or other. I'm of course pretty incensed by various lies that the Center has told over the years - to a great extent, those in the Center just think the Border is stupid - and I believe that the Center's loss of credibility is very much a fault of their own making.
But what I'm not saying is that the Border is better or smarter. It's just that the epistemological base of the two is very different. The Center is speaking the language of power and aims to reach, or impose, consensus above all. The Border is speaking the language of critique and can delight in picking apart the lies and hypocrisy of the Center; although that doesn't necessarily qualify the Border for leadership. For instance, some of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard's to be really interesting, but my suspicion is that they'll be awful when they're in positions of actual power.
What I mean is that my writing here is descriptive not prescriptive.
- Sam
So maybe this isn’t a “bad” thing?
I think it's a chaotic thing for sure. We're in a very challenging period where modes of communication are changing so rapidly that people's epistemological bases are really thrown off. That undermines 'authority,' which means that all kinds of weird people from the fringe end up having voices or even positions of power - and with chaotic results. But it's also a good period for thinking and for challenging our own prior conceptions. So, some good. Lots of bad. But definitely interesting.
Please find two references which provide a somewhat different understanding of the nature of populist politics.
http://beezone.com/current/stresschemistry.html Stress Chemistry
http://beezone.com/current/frustrationuniverdisease.html Frustration the Universal Disease
Thank you for these!
Republic of Letters. Soldiers of letters there are none. Bravery by itself in looking at accomplished history, we have met a few. S Kahn. Liberality lost. Soldiers of battalions without a name voted Rump. Afficianadoes of Ron Reagan. Now we are asked to maintain our households while 6 or more million day laborers are returned to unsanitary conditions with drug addled teenage sherrifs controlling their local imitation of total situational awareness...we will accept it. Because such soldiers as we be have been trained to accept the I.c.e. In 1940 there were books of revisionist history " the Revolution is Now" in which the anschluss lost in Belgium. Very convincing, and in plain fact the English without Churchill sent every member of their armed forces to defend the battle line. They lost because the luftwaffe had levelled towns the Brits needed structures to house their armory/ ammunition, and so had to caravan that ammunition around like protecting human babies?! We lost. And the liberal project has as its precondition non violence and chagrined but submissive populations. Simplication would be like the song Universal soldier to blame the Guardsmen at Kent State University Dayton Ohio 1905 for firing live rounds into the bodies of soft, unsoldiersy adult in size but childish in drug use hippies. They should not have pulled those triggers? Everybody show us what they should have done, those students were eating the colleges neighbors' dogs. Not one capital d democrat will Die in the next 4 years. But millions of Our yard maintenance Engineers will return to Honduras to be starved and bored of stimulation. Let's give up and Occupy a state park. For fun and no profit, maybe. Yes, let us continue quiet quitting until Muss becomes tired of winning.
Look forward to occupying a state park! Sounds fun.
About that Rainbow family gathering. Maybe with the help of the Internet Archive? And then we would dangerously assiduously need to look for syncretists to read to stay uptodate even for one month? Because parks are just wild enough to be dangerous to books. Thinking of your house i presume in future, 2 things: know that very many houseproud people really do stare into the screen of the verge of trees, it is a legitimate reason for buying....and maybe contrariwise Asking myself what level of civics happrns in t woods? T. Will seem to be the Drunken Boat! Mercy on our souls, if you were in woods wld you have remembered to word scramble Gurry? Becuz, you make good nudges when you use those wrote-skills of yours, still more Virgil than Warriors. Soldiers are fingering their rosaries they say...
I think this is exactly right (as someone who grew up on the literal border with the Global South). I think one can trace a parallel dynamic in the mythopoetic realm. The Center went hard on materialism in both the anti-spiritual and the money-grubbing sense. But as you've pointed out, the old gods have never really gone away - Jung for one brought them back as archetypes. And while the Center turned its nose up at Jung, his ideas spread like wildfire across the Border: from Jordan Peterson and the renewed interest in astrology and altered states to the fact that all the problematic figures on the Right have suddenly found Jesus (all, more or less, as John Pistelli has foretold). I remember when Yascha Mounk interviewed Alexandre Lefebvre about his book which I affectionally call LAAWOL, they were sceptical of the Integralists' plan of shaping the culture by means of gaining political power since practising Catholics are a small percentage of the population (this was before Vance was the VP pick). Well it seems like something like a regime change may indeed be taking place - and bloodlessly, you have to give them that.
Yeah, there's a lot here that would be worth talking about more. I think that's right, that Jung as become kind of the underlying psychological reality of the Border (with the Center maybe something else), and that there's a lot to talk about - which I don't get into here - about how the Border is organizing itself.
I don’t usually re-read Substack pieces, but I’m re-reading this one. Nice work Sam, I think you’re touching on something really important here that I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve hewn so closely to the Center for so long it hurts to see that the Center is not currently looking like it can hold. But the Border? Oy, it makes so little sense to me.
Thanks Tom! Well, I could say this: any one of us has identities that are on the Center and Border. In our lives - and sometimes, interestingly, at the same time - we criss-cross between them. So I suppose part of the reconciliation is just looking into our own experiences - if we find ourselves in the Center, we think a bit differently than we do if we find ourselves on the Border - and seeing that these aren't so much fixed identities as different modes of thought that each have their own logical basis.
I do think you're right that each of us can exist in both areas, Center and Border. For example, I'm a fairly committed Democrat/progressive, but I never embraced identity politics and some of the gender and social justice issues (white man problem? maybe.) It feels very easy for me to be "easy going" about these issues. But the "Center" idea that is most critical to me, the one that I hold central to my being, is this idea that education and expertise should be at the heart of our collective decision making. That's the epistemological part of this that is most troubling to me, because it's so central to my own conception of both self and society. I think that's why this election has troubled me so, because I fear it signals a movement away from, well, rationality.
There is a lot that's valuable here
But in the immortal words of Bruce Lee you are looking at the finger
Not where it's pointing
Interesting. Want to say more about where it's pointing?
'And here, actually, we might be able to identify the fundamental loci of epistemological division — for the center, it is Consensus; for the border, Critique (or, if you like, Inquiry). It’s almost better to say, rather than being opposed, that the two simply have nothing to do with one another." I really liked this until the last phrase. not that I know enough to disagree, but I think that critique cannot exist in the way you describe without consensus as its 'ground'. Thank you for such a Thought-Provoking piece!
Thanks TJ! And happy to hash this out a little more. I guess what you're saying is that, in my construct, the Border can only exist in opposition to a Center, which I guess is true - they're like Thesis and Antithesis. I would just say that what I mean is they operate through fundamentally different modes of discourse - the Center tends to operate through hierarchy, the Border through equality, for instance, and that generates two very different epistemologies - with 'Consensus' and 'Critique' being, I think, useful shorthands.
Adding to the noise: it irks me that this is a topic in politics. "Fake news." "Alternative facts." "Status quo." To say it is a battle between consensus and critique is generous. If the shoe was on the other foot (so to speak) they'd still scramble for the same old piece of cheese: power. These people have stumbled in the back door of your mind when it comes to epistemology, I'm afraid. They simply have no idea about placebo effects, the carbon cycle, or good philosophy of any kind. They *know* not.