It preys on the worst impulses of many. It enables the best of the best, and the worst of the worst.
It feels like a race: Will we be able to constructively adapt to it, before it destroys us.
It's not just the Web. We would be where we are without the Web. The Web is an amplifier of something that is already there.
The key problem is, we're raising a generation that is being taught to despise its own country, and to repeat things that it doesn't believe. (Not every child, but a significant number, and of that number, it's the "intelligentstia" -- the ones who will become teaches, journalists, etc -- for whom despising their country will have the greatest effect, and they're the ones most affected.)
And it's more than that. It used to be that it was the Left who exalted Reason and Science, and the Right who balked at this, and emphasized tried-and-true Custom and Tradition.
Both sides quickly came to approve of Reason and Science as applied to the physical world -- after all, if a capitalist wants to make money, he'll want the latest and best results from the labs, the brightest engineers, time-and-motion studies to get the most out of his workers, etc. It was the question of applying Reason and Science to the structure of society that was the problem. But that's another discussion.
Now, the Left is moving in the direction of exalting backwardness and superstition. [
Minnesota medical students vow to 'honor Indigenous ways of healing']
This isn't new. The Portland Oregon Board of Education pioneered the idea of teaching nonsense to its Black students thirty years ago. [
Magic Melanin: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy Among Minorities: Part II | Skeptical Inquirer ]
And it should be said that the people doing the best job of exposing this b.s. are the secular humanists, mostly men and women of the Left. Good for them.
And it should also be said that the Right has plenty of people who exalt irrational thinking and careless exaggeration as well -- just on different subjects. (I could fill a screen with links to this crap.)
There are certain personality types who are just nasty, unpleasant, dishonest people. You find them on both sides of the barricades. It's just the human condition.
Each side would like to think that the people with undesirable personality traits are all on the other side. We rightwingers have to put up with periodic discoveries by academics that we are more likely to be fearful and dogmatic than liberals ... sometimes this is put down to a shrunken anterior singulate cortex, or a swollen amygdala. (Here's a relatively neutral appraisal from a liberal source: [
Who Are More Biased: Liberals or Conservatives? | Skeptical Inquirer ] (It may be behind a paywall. If you want to read it, and it is, PM me.)
What these psychological studies don't take into account is historical/social context: a few decades ago, the bottom half of society was on the Left, and the top half, on the Right. (As a broad generalization. ) If you went to university in 1925, you were probably a Republican. The Hitler Youth took power in the German Student Association a year and a half before Hitler took power in the state.
And they also assume that 'openness to new ideas' etc. is a uniform virtue under all circumstances. But it was the stubborn conservatism of the Italian and French peasantry after WWII that kept these countries from falling into the hands of the Communists, who had great support among the industrial urban working class, and even more among the European intellectuals and were certainly proposing new ideas for organizing society.
Anyway, Mac, let's keep arguing with each other, and invite the rational people from each of our sides to join in. And ignore the ones who just want to exhibit their personality disorders online.
