Religion was never a problem. The same people who 'seized control of religion because they believed they knew how to manage other peoples lives better' are now doing it in the new power structure. sort of. They always used the universities. religion also gets a lot of the blame from the vomit coming from universities.
> The same people who 'seized control of religion because they believed they knew how to manage other peoples lives better' are now doing it in the new power structure.
Religion was always about managing other people's lives and making sure some of them endure the teaching to propagate the dogma.
It's not a new power structure. It has split directly from it, and it's been there for centuries.
A useful concept might be John Rawls‘ "comprehensive doctrine": a belief system that covers a wide range of values and ideas, providing a framework for understanding the world and guiding one’s behaviour.
Rawls did not just apply this definition to traditional religions but also to ideologies such as communism. I think it’s not hard to think of modern examples.
The point is that a liberal pluralistic society needs to learn to accommodate people with different worldviews. A key part of that is getting people to understand that their own worldview is subjective, and that other worldviews are possible and acceptable.
>The point is that a liberal pluralistic society needs to learn to accommodate people with different worldviews. A key part of that is getting people to understand that their own worldview is subjective, and that other worldviews are possible and acceptable.
Yes, however that liberal pluralistic society can't abide incompatible hegemonic worldviews, as they will seek to destroy that liberal pluralistic society using the very mechanisms that make it viable - freedom of speech, equality, a belief in freedom, value of diversity, etc.
Look at what people like Mike Johnson believe about politics and society. Look at project 2025. These are people who are so absolutely convinced of their worldview and societal ideal (an ideal compatible with a liberal pluralistic society) that they will use and abuse all levers of power available to them to forcibly foist that worldview upon the rest of us.
> The point is that a liberal pluralistic society needs to learn to accommodate people with different worldviews. A key part of that is getting people to understand that their own worldview is subjective, and that other worldviews are possible and acceptable.
And, to state the obvious, this is specifically why the "outrage engagement economy" incentive models that drive almost all of our at-scale communications channels (Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, FoxNews) are inherently dangerous to that liberal pluralistic society. For all of the lip service that these players pay to values like, "civic discourse" and "the town square," they only exist by subdividing their users into "affinity groups," and then pushing them content that triggers maximum emotional response and affirmation of group identity.
The platforms don't simply reinforce commitment to particular worldviews; over the last few decades, we have seen them create worldviews to increase user engagement and ad revenue.
The polarization of modern politics, especially within academic humanities, casts all who disagree with one side into an undifferentiated collective on the other side, ripe to be held accountable for the worst acts of the enemy. The sin of the skeptic is not in what they say but their willingness to say it, and for that they now get labeled “reactionary” or the like.
The problem is, people in the humanities are often intelligent, and as a result know how insignificant their impact on humanity is compared to the sciences (barring the top 0.001% of those in the arts), thus these modern essentialist narratives are about raising the stakes, casting humanities and arts purists as more important, and constructing a "hero narrative" around now commodified intellectual pursuits.
I wouldn't say they are insignificant, just that as a pure informational discipline the cost to actually implementing the discovery (in this case, spreading the information) is close to zero (and much less than even the spreading of software or even pure algorithms in some cases, which in our current environment is so often encumbered in some way), the low hanging fruit is gone. Especially in history, where until new methods of looking in the past are discovered most things are already well trod, the effort to contribute something actually new and noteworthy seems very high, leading to shortcuts such as this.
When you hire according to which candidate has worked hardest to fight against oppression, it isn't surprising when their academic work is about gathering evidence for the fight against oppression.
Is it because of academic historians, or because medias like the discourse around racism these days? When we know that science publication is not exempt of human greed (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02192 for a recent exemple), it's better to look for articles that make consensus.
I also think the discipline won't die, plenty of bad research have been made and forgotten later. The title is a bit dramatic.
“We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category […] but we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study.”
The flip side of refusing the idea of objective truth is losing the ability to reject objective lies.
I remember reading the article about black women and the plague in England and laughing out loud. Certainly you're at an advantage if so many people are that blindingly stupid.
The author criticises a historian for jumping to conclusions from a very small sample and then does exactly the same thing himself. It seems like the first people to yell bias are biased themselves.
The history of history is littered with some very questionable theories promoted by very questionable people. It’s not some new phenomenon and it’s not confined to one political affiliation or agenda.
> The author criticises a historian for jumping to conclusions from a very small sample and then does exactly the same thing himself.
Are they? They're responding to a paper that seems flawed based on the evidence presented. Even if the paper is ultimately correct in its assertion, I see no problem calling out false reasoning and shoddy logic in what is ultimately an academic endeavor. Being right for the wrong reasons can sometimes be much more harmful than not making the assertion in the first place. We're much less likely to build upon faulty foundations when we don't allow poor foundations to persist in the first place.
> They're responding to a paper that seems flawed based on the evidence presented.
No, they're probably right about the papers they mention—they both seem pretty bad. But the "jumping to conclusions from a very small sample" refers to saying that "historians are destroying their own discipline", because of these bunk papers.
I think the conclusion is not just from the papers, but from what appears to be widespread support regardless of criticism. The sampling is not one or two papers in that respect, it's multiple well known historians and at least one well known group of historians coming our strongly in support publicly.
Honestly, this blog post reads just like really whiney culture war "pc culture has gone amok!" than an actual attempt at criticising academic history.
Refusing to even engage in the slightest with the theories and methodologies and doing the equivalent of standing with your hands on your hips and saying "its just wrong!" is lame.
Stuff like this:
>> But, c’mon. To state the obvious - and it seems we must - there were vanishingly few black people in London in the mid-fourteenth century ... I haven’t been able to find hard data/evidence on non-white people in London in the fourteenth century. I think the consensus is there were only a handful. David Olsuga’s history of black Britons doesn’t mention any.
Okay, so you feel confident enough that you build up this claim about "having to state the obvious" but then end up with afootnote of "oh yeah so, cant find anything to back this up but uhhh like...I think consensus is this.".
or even more egregious, stuff like this:
>>Look, I haven’t carried out a full investigation of this paper
>>It is just obviously bullshit
>>As for “African cosmologies” - I don’t know, and I suspect they don’t either.
Really just highlights how much the blogger here cares about actually engaging with the scholarly work and how much he's more interested in just playing up the culture war nonsense for viewership.
Getting all snarky about esoteric jargon in a field and claiming its "all bullshit" really just highlights ones disdain for having even the slightest bit of humility and maybe finding out what it means.
One Google search and you can find a lengthy Encyclopedia.com article about African cosmologies, explaining the concept and what it means. Rolling your eyes at technical jargon you don't understand is really childish.
You are doing what you are accusing the author of this piece of doing.
Do you have anything to add about the total lack of evidence of the Bulstrode piece?
Are you claiming that the 18% number the Museum of London piece is claiming is anything less than fantastical? Can you engage with the argument with any evidence?
The reason the author couldn't find hard evidence about the number of black people in London in the 1300s is because there were so few that in this context it is a silly question.
Structural racism actually exists and we need to work to eliminate it. The problem is that when patently false stories like the one referenced in TFA are surfaced and receive acclaim, the people who don't believe structural racism exists will use it as ammunition for their cause, which is to throw out all reforms that might eliminate structural racism.
Lying about incidents of racism that never happened gives aid and comfort to racists.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 53.2 ms ] threadIts the same people doing the same shit.
Religion was always about managing other people's lives and making sure some of them endure the teaching to propagate the dogma.
It's not a new power structure. It has split directly from it, and it's been there for centuries.
Rawls did not just apply this definition to traditional religions but also to ideologies such as communism. I think it’s not hard to think of modern examples.
The point is that a liberal pluralistic society needs to learn to accommodate people with different worldviews. A key part of that is getting people to understand that their own worldview is subjective, and that other worldviews are possible and acceptable.
Yes, however that liberal pluralistic society can't abide incompatible hegemonic worldviews, as they will seek to destroy that liberal pluralistic society using the very mechanisms that make it viable - freedom of speech, equality, a belief in freedom, value of diversity, etc.
Look at what people like Mike Johnson believe about politics and society. Look at project 2025. These are people who are so absolutely convinced of their worldview and societal ideal (an ideal compatible with a liberal pluralistic society) that they will use and abuse all levers of power available to them to forcibly foist that worldview upon the rest of us.
> The point is that a liberal pluralistic society needs to learn to accommodate people with different worldviews. A key part of that is getting people to understand that their own worldview is subjective, and that other worldviews are possible and acceptable.
And, to state the obvious, this is specifically why the "outrage engagement economy" incentive models that drive almost all of our at-scale communications channels (Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, FoxNews) are inherently dangerous to that liberal pluralistic society. For all of the lip service that these players pay to values like, "civic discourse" and "the town square," they only exist by subdividing their users into "affinity groups," and then pushing them content that triggers maximum emotional response and affirmation of group identity.
The platforms don't simply reinforce commitment to particular worldviews; over the last few decades, we have seen them create worldviews to increase user engagement and ad revenue.
Of course the people they reference are anthropologists.
I also think the discipline won't die, plenty of bad research have been made and forgotten later. The title is a bit dramatic.
The flip side of refusing the idea of objective truth is losing the ability to reject objective lies.
The history of history is littered with some very questionable theories promoted by very questionable people. It’s not some new phenomenon and it’s not confined to one political affiliation or agenda.
Are they? They're responding to a paper that seems flawed based on the evidence presented. Even if the paper is ultimately correct in its assertion, I see no problem calling out false reasoning and shoddy logic in what is ultimately an academic endeavor. Being right for the wrong reasons can sometimes be much more harmful than not making the assertion in the first place. We're much less likely to build upon faulty foundations when we don't allow poor foundations to persist in the first place.
No, they're probably right about the papers they mention—they both seem pretty bad. But the "jumping to conclusions from a very small sample" refers to saying that "historians are destroying their own discipline", because of these bunk papers.
Refusing to even engage in the slightest with the theories and methodologies and doing the equivalent of standing with your hands on your hips and saying "its just wrong!" is lame.
Stuff like this:
>> But, c’mon. To state the obvious - and it seems we must - there were vanishingly few black people in London in the mid-fourteenth century ... I haven’t been able to find hard data/evidence on non-white people in London in the fourteenth century. I think the consensus is there were only a handful. David Olsuga’s history of black Britons doesn’t mention any.
Okay, so you feel confident enough that you build up this claim about "having to state the obvious" but then end up with afootnote of "oh yeah so, cant find anything to back this up but uhhh like...I think consensus is this.".
or even more egregious, stuff like this:
>>Look, I haven’t carried out a full investigation of this paper
>>It is just obviously bullshit
>>As for “African cosmologies” - I don’t know, and I suspect they don’t either.
Really just highlights how much the blogger here cares about actually engaging with the scholarly work and how much he's more interested in just playing up the culture war nonsense for viewership.
Getting all snarky about esoteric jargon in a field and claiming its "all bullshit" really just highlights ones disdain for having even the slightest bit of humility and maybe finding out what it means.
One Google search and you can find a lengthy Encyclopedia.com article about African cosmologies, explaining the concept and what it means. Rolling your eyes at technical jargon you don't understand is really childish.
Do you have anything to add about the total lack of evidence of the Bulstrode piece?
Are you claiming that the 18% number the Museum of London piece is claiming is anything less than fantastical? Can you engage with the argument with any evidence?
The reason the author couldn't find hard evidence about the number of black people in London in the 1300s is because there were so few that in this context it is a silly question.
Lying about incidents of racism that never happened gives aid and comfort to racists.