Let me lay out the line of thought I've been following. I do not think this is de novo. In particular, the author's contention that this is new is both right and wrong. It's right in how it identifies the use of electronic media to enable this, but it's wrong in saying we've never been here before.
In particular, this situation reminds me a great deal of how Europe was prior to the Enlightenment. In particular, the Church and its statist allies used contra-factual narrative (religious in nature) to undermine reason, fragment opposition, and so on. Substitute your favorite Medieval Pope for Putin and the picture doesn't look all that different, I think. Back then it was preachers from the pulpit; now it's a web of fake news sites. The creation of a self-referential, internally self-reinforcing narrative, requiring people to believe things that are plainly contradicted by their experience. If that's not organized hierarchical religion in a nutshell I don't know what is.
If you buy that analogy then the question is what caused the Enlightenment to rise and displace the previous orthodoxy and secondarily whether this is part of a pendulum or cyclical behavior, just with a periodicity we measure in centuries. Remember that Reason and fact had a pretty good run in parts of the world before the rise of Catholicism. Even under the Mohammedan religions, scholarship and logic fared not too badly.
Mind you this is far-fetched and I'm handwaving a lot and haven't really thought this through - see my earlier note about how many brain cycles I have to put into this - but I think it's probably mostly right.
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Date: 2017-04-06 06:16 pm (UTC)In particular, this situation reminds me a great deal of how Europe was prior to the Enlightenment. In particular, the Church and its statist allies used contra-factual narrative (religious in nature) to undermine reason, fragment opposition, and so on. Substitute your favorite Medieval Pope for Putin and the picture doesn't look all that different, I think. Back then it was preachers from the pulpit; now it's a web of fake news sites. The creation of a self-referential, internally self-reinforcing narrative, requiring people to believe things that are plainly contradicted by their experience. If that's not organized hierarchical religion in a nutshell I don't know what is.
If you buy that analogy then the question is what caused the Enlightenment to rise and displace the previous orthodoxy and secondarily whether this is part of a pendulum or cyclical behavior, just with a periodicity we measure in centuries. Remember that Reason and fact had a pretty good run in parts of the world before the rise of Catholicism. Even under the Mohammedan religions, scholarship and logic fared not too badly.
Mind you this is far-fetched and I'm handwaving a lot and haven't really thought this through - see my earlier note about how many brain cycles I have to put into this - but I think it's probably mostly right.