Tribal Epistemology
I’m trying to understand the point of this NRx post from 2015, so maybe some defenders of this perspective can explain.
It seems to say as trust in a cynical Cathedral collapses, then people have no source of knowledge but tribal ingroup beliefs. This leads to cynical nihilism and blind allegiance to your social division.
Which, true, but how is this different than before? As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities. You’ve traded one authority for another, but how did things get worse and why would you want to go back?
“As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities.” The piece definitely does not acknowledge this, not in the way you’re framing it, which is kind of the critical point.
As the theory goes –
* Objective truth is an accessible and relevant thing. (In your language: science, and similar methodologies, provide some level of access to the Real.) There is an important difference between listening to your doctor and listening to your priest, which is that your doctor actually knows complicated facts about the actual goddamn universe that will allow him to solve your medical problems, whereas the priest is mostly just an expositor of local ideology.
* “Rational ignorance” is the practice of deferring to the expertise of those who know Science! that you don’t, because you can’t know all the Science! yourself.
* Scientific experts can “sell out to the Cathedral” by lacing their allegedly-scientific recommendations with ideology, or even by outright dropping the science wholesale and purveying uncut ideology. This can pay dividends for them in terms of social power, cognitive assonance, etc. However…
* …it’s a self-destructive strategy in the long term, because you can’t fool all the people all the time. Eventually, your patients are going to notice that your “medical advice” is no longer doing any better than priestcraft in terms of getting them results.
* At which point they abandon you and start listening to whichever set of priests they like best anyway. Faith in Science! as an objective, neutral, supra-ideological methodology has been destroyed.
You can feel about that however you want, but I’m pretty sure it fairly describes the content of the post.