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One strand of high modernism represented this anxiety. High modernism is a “merge to trunk” bias favoring convergent core of enlightenment inquiry. It has a high voice bias. You do not get to agree to disagree. You do not get to exit saying “willing to be misunderstood”
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Curiously it has both right and left versions. The right version is “debate me dammit why won’t you debate me? you hate truth” The left version is “exit is a privilege, continued dialogue is respect for goals of solidarity/collective action” Both are enlightenment hangovers.
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In the merge/fork metaphor, postmodernism accepts promiscuous forking without even bothering to make self-soothing noises about eventual synthesis. Fork away. If we go beyond each other’s light-speed horizons so be it.
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Where there is no unqualified reproducible outcome to a method of inquiry, even success or failure do not necessitate convergence. I fork from your project. You succeed, I fail. Do I have to agree you found a truth while I chased a lie and merge back with you, shamefaced? Hell no
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We can both make up accounts and stay on our forks. Even death is not a definitive resolution. I can go to my grave convinced I found the truth despite failing and that you’ve built success upon a lie that just hasn’t caught up with you yet.
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Now the consensus has unraveled further. There isn’t even loose agreement on legitimate methods of inquiry. We’re off ex-post legibilized bureaucratized “scientific method” as a gold standard. This is also fine, as far as I’m concerned. Methodological anarchy ftw.
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If you’re not solving for convergence anyway, and various degrees of exit are a legit option, do you even need agreement on methods? Nothing of consequence rests on people agreeing on conscious methods of inquiry, 90% of the time. Life is not a science. Why enforce a standard?
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I am not surprised left and right versions of enlightenment convergentism are good evil twins. A sufficiently classical liberal is indistinguishable from a fascist. A sufficiently clueless progressive is indistinguishable from a Stalinist. The culture war is among convergentists.
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It is 1760 vs 1850. Neither is postmodern. The postmodern resolution to the culture war would beceverybody declaring “happy to be misunderstood” and going their own way, trying to figure out solutions to material conflicts that take disengagement as a first principle.
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Divergentism is NOT centrism. It is epistemic exit via willingness to be misunderstood. It is similar to “courage to be disliked” except without courage as a default. You just go away to where being disliked is irrelevant.
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My fork point: death is the only truth. Everything else is compliance with standards and passing audit examinations. So long as you’re staying alive and retelling your story to your own satisfaction that’s your truth.
Replying to
The enlightenment was never more than like 0.1% of the population excitedly clustered around a single gloworm convinced they’d learned to stare into the sun and dreaming wishfully of eternal daylight for all.
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1700: world population ~600 million, and maybe a few hundred people in Europe convinced they’d become societally enlightened and the rest would soon think as they did. 2019: 7 billion, and maybe a few hundred thousand believe something of the sort.
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Somehow the entire world got along without “enlightenment” truth narratives until around 1700, and almost the entire world even after that. I’m not even sure it had much impact on the scientific/industrial revolutions. Much of the causation went in the other direction.
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Like read stories of Leibniz and Spinoza and both drawing scientific+philosophical inspiration from Galileo. Leibniz did calculus and other technical things. And philosophy. Spinoza was a lens grinder. And did philosophy. Chicken-egg perhaps but I think science egg came first.
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Ironically if you look at where the main trunk of enlightenment thinking ended, it landed on roughly a justification of postmodern divergence. Hume era argument that you can’t justifiably and rigorously believe very much with the kind of confidence modern convergentists crave.
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“Truth” is primarily a set of habits of thought that work for you, and a leap of faith concerning their validity as a mode of inquiry. This would be a very Humean view I think.
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Replying to
Is not death only a door? Not to get poetic but it’s a void that makes way for creating new life this thread is very much in the spirit of our ranging hari Krishna Brooklyn riffs
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