So, having been looking this post over a few times and discussing it offline for the past several days, I've come to believe that the central theme really is not correct - it doesn't pass my bullshit detector. For one thing, it exists in a state of tension with your post on ideas:
Either ideas are mostly bullshit, or they are mostly useful; I believe they are mostly useful, not mostly bullshit.
Now I can see a way to resolve the tension between these two positions: bullshit and ideas need to be two different things. Maybe we can agree that bullshit is primarily lies, while ideas are genuinely held. Or, maybe we can agree that bullshit is ideas that exist in the social, philosophical, or religious sphere, while ideas exist in the technical, practical, or economic world. This would allow for a bullshitting caste that basically just peddles nonsense that keeps people together, while others (workers?) generate ideas that move society forward.
But I don't think efforts to separate ideas from bullshit works - or at least, I don't believe ideas and bullshit are separate.
Take the idea that bullshit is deliberate lies, as opposed to ideas, which are sincerely held. It's true that there are people who frantically peddle bad ideas, or people who grit their teeth and latch onto one good idea and insist that all other good ideas are wrong. But the idea that all these people actually "get it," that they really know exactly how ridiculous they're being, and are just bullshitting everyone, violates Hanlon's Razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'll grant that your idea of a bullshitting caste full of liars is going to be at least partly true. But I think it's abundantly obvious that there are at least a significant minority, and more likely an overwhelming majority, who aren't bullshitting at all - they're just clueless. This is why bullshitting works at all, because there are enough people who sincerely don't get it that they can be fooled by bullshit. So saying all the bullshitters are just lying doesn't make sense to me.
Or take the idea that bullshit exists in the social, philosophical, or religious realm, where useful ideas are found in the technical, practical, or economic realm. This matches my observations even less well. One of your best posts argued about why ladies have breasts: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-women-have-breasts . That post really seems much more to answer "How did things end up this way?" than "What are practical solutions to problems in the here-and-now?" Meanwhile Freudianism, Communism, and Cold Fusion seem to me to offer clear, actionable strategies for improving life, all of which have been shown to be basically bullshit.
So this is what I think: If our thinking class today has descended into superstition, virtue-signalling, and bullshit, it is something new, different, and bad about our civilization today, not something that always existed, or necessarily exists among the priests and medicine men. Once upon a time, our media was credible. Once upon a time, our scientists, doctors, and humanities departments were credible. Once upon a time, our governments were credible. Not always, but sometimes. Alas that this does not seem to be one of those times.
First of all, I'm feeling genuinely flattered that my bullshit is being discussed on the other side of the Atlantic.
1. I have also thought about the opposition between those two blog posts: In one post I claim most ideas are worth saving, in another post I claim most things that are said in public are bullshit. My solution is, as you predict, to claim that there is a significant difference between ideas and bullshit: Bullshit tends to consist of surprisingly few ideas. Those few ideas are combined and applied almost infinitely. The two samples of hard-core bullshit you linked to in a comment here nearby followed that pattern: It was only the idea that some groups are oppressed by everyone everywhere that found yet another application.
I think I can afford to collect all seriously meant ideas I encounter while simultaneously condemning most public talk I hear as nonsense just because there are so few ideas embedded in that nonsense.
2. Is the bullshit that surrounds us something new or something as old as humanity? I have thought a lot about that question. When political correctness hit my home country with full force in the early 2010s, I was alarmed and thought a disaster had struck us. Now I am not so sure anymore. The more I learn about the rest of the world and about history, the more I start to believe that the comparative openness of the 1990s and the early 2000s was the historical exception while current times are rather normal. On rare occasions in history, there has been a rather open exchange of ideas. But I fear that low-key mass hysteria is a more normal state of things.
I used the rather blunt term "bullshit" to describe talk that sounds good and might increase social cohesion, but that doesn't actually make sense in relation to the material world. In that sense, I don't propose a very strong historical evolution from more bullshit towards less bullshit. I think people have both talked both about the world as such and said things that only sound good since the beginning of times. The special thing with Western society is that it tried to officially separate the two phenomena: Science was supposed to be explicit non-bullshit. In theory, Western society should be better equipped than any previous society to resist bullshit, because we have the theoretical framework to separate talk about the material world from talk that only sounds good and keeps people together. Sadly, in spite of that historical advantage, I don't think we are doing very well.
Wish me luck; pretty soon your blog may be discussed on the other hemisphere. (Don't worry. They have apples there, too.)
"On rare occasions in history, there has been a rather open exchange of ideas. But I fear that low-key mass hysteria is a more normal state of things."
This is rather different from your position as described in the body of the article - especially since it is generally the "bullshitting" priests and academics who most suffered when trying to exchange their ideas openly. If this is your argument, then... I could get behind it more easily if you described the workers and warriors as enforcing conformity on the priests. This is a well known phenomenon; even in the literal sense, preachers today are generally more liberal and secular in outlook than their congregations, and take care not to deviate too far from the simplistic message their flock wants to hear. In the corporate world, this plays out somewhat differently depending on the day, but, well, here's a fair example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Seen through this lens, darker moments in history would occur when the thinkers became corrupt and stifled their own. This was the experience of Socrates, or Martin Luther, or Semmelweiss.
As for Western society being better equipped to resist ideological bullshit because of science, that's not an idea I share - especially since Western society is today quite nutty, but also because science arose in North Africa with experimentalists like Hasan Ibn al-Haytham before making its way into Europe. My sense is that societal manias have generally been largely philosophical, and thus rather impervious to empirical tests. And let's face it, human beings are not as good at philosophy as they are at making apple pie. In a sense, this a shame, since it means people say and do crazy things all the time... But on the other hand, apple pies are much tastier than philosophy!
I totally agree that pressure for simplicity and groupishness very often comes from below. I don't think the bullshitting class is malicious or dictatorial. They are often servants of the people's immediate wishes. Populists, if you wish.
Let's be philosophical. Basically, language can be used for two purposes: Descriptive and social. Philosophers in the middle of the 20th century thought that was a thing to point out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act
What I call "bullshit" is when people ostensibly use language in the descriptive sense, but really use it in the social sense. Science is supposed to help us distinguish the descriptive from the social. It is supposed to channel the descriptive use of language, while the social sides of language are supposed to be channeled to politics, poetry, literature… That way, in contrast to most other societies, modern Western society has institutions for separating descriptive talk from social talk. That should make us better equipped to do so, I think. Sadly, we are not very good at using those tools built up by previous generations.
In the middle of the essay we're discussing, you do pivot towards this more recent description of bullshit as speech acts or social talk under the heading "Words with meaning." "Societies that made people actually build a boat together got the colonies, while those that could only bullshit about boats got no colonies." But that's not the way you introduce the term.
Your first example of bullshit contains descriptive claims about the world: "[Bullshitters] could claim that the sun and the moon were brothers, that the rains wouldn't come without human sacrifice or whatever." Your next example has "monotheism. Bullshit about one god that everyone had to follow and obey..." The Bible is the best known example of a monotheistic text, and it's filled with descriptions about the past and the present world. What makes it bullshit is not that it is merely a collection of speech acts or social language, but that much of it is *wrong.* That wrongness is what most nonbelievers would say makes it bullshit.
You can define bullshit as speech acts and social talk, or, as factual claims that are wrong, or even as both of those things. But no matter what, the gist of this essay doesn't really match my sense of the world. May you have good luck in attracting other commenters with more favorable reactions!
My intentions with the text was more or less the following:
1. Language has two functions: Descriptive and social.
2. I believe that in the private sphere, both the descriptive and the social function of language have been in use since the beginning of language. Language has been used to say things like "the bananas are in the corner" and "the gazelle went behind the shrubs over there" as long as it has existed, as well as "my intentions are peaceful".
3. In the public sphere, however, I think language has been used predominantly in its social function. Public talk has centered around social cohesion. "It will not rain unless we sacrifice some people" might sound like a descriptive sentence, but I interpret it as social. If nothing else, it was social in relation to the imagined gods who decided about rain.
4. Step by step, and hesitantly, some societies developed ways to use language in its descriptive sense in the public sphere. I think this was done with difficulty and half-heartedly. Most public talk is still motivated by an urge to socialize much more than an urge to share descriptions. People find it easier to talk sweetly than to describe accurately. The descriptive use of language in public is constantly under threat by the social use of language, because the latter sounds better and can be practiced by many more people.
I appreciate your unfavorable reactions a lot, because they force me to clarify my thoughts. Maybe I can write something more serious on the subject later on. I have the impression that you disagree more with my imprecise use of terminology than with the underlying thoughts.
...Now perhaps I wonder if I'm simply not understanding you. Definitely your use of "descriptive," "social," and "science" is challenging for me. I'll say more on this.
Priests have always blended important social and academic functions with bullshit. Predicting the flooding of the Nile was not bullshit. Keeping records for Roman civilization was not bullshit. Redistributing tithes to the medieval poor was not bullshit. Instructing the Mayan nobility in reading, writing, and astronomy was not bullshit. Teaching modern Americans to code is not bullshit.
Even more, much of what we take today as solid science was pioneered by people who were absolutely full of shit, even if they may not have specifically been shoveling bullshit to maintain group solidarity. Kepler and Newton, two of the most important figures in what is known as the scientific revolution, spent an inordinate about of time concerned with mysticism. The same is true of Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution. The Curies were less mystics than they were enamored of seances. What we see when we look back across history is the way in which bullshit has been entwined throughout the thinking of learned men, and indeed entire societies.
People across history have had trouble figuring out what is real, and what isn't. Sometimes they swallow things that are wrong; other times that can't figure out what's right. The obvious implication is that people today are exactly the same. Much of modern thought is gold mistaken as bullshit and vice-versa.
So yes, agreed - modern academians are essentially priests, just as the Neoreactionaries insist. And yes, as you point out, priests have always been in the bullshitting business. But most people who aren't priests are still involved in the same. Babysitters, advertisers, HR personnel, customer service representatives, journalists, military officers, anybody who talks for a living pedals a certain amount of bullshit. When you get them alone and off the record, things do improve... slightly. Unfortunately for most people most the bullshit isn't even deliberate; it's totally intertwined with everything they believe.
I think you are right to point out that people, or priests, in primitive societies probably didn't bullshit more than we do today. They just lacked the institutions for non-bullshitting: They were never explicitly expected not to bullshit (like, for example, modern American coding instructors).
Bullshit is an inevitable part of human nature. When you mention that babysitters bullshit I can't help recognizing that I spend a certain part of a normal day bullshiting with a 9 month old baby. The challenge for us, and for society, is to sometimes, somehow keep the bullshit at bay when things are actually important. I think the success rate is worryingly low.
For example, I find the climate disaster talk clearly worrying. I'm not a climatologist, so I can't hold an educated opinion about the technical aspects of it. But I notice that IF some part of the climate disaster talk is bullshit with the purpose of holding society together, then it is indeed very much up to the task.
Previous environmental threats were rather technical and limited to their nature. The ozone layer destruction, for example. After it was discovered and accepted, it took a rather limited number of experts to solve the problem during a limited amount time. In contrast, the climate threat requires the participation of everyone, everywhere, with no solution in sight. A secular society gets no closer to the concept of sin.
I read Unsettled by Steven E Koonin last autumn and saw no reason to disbelieve it. I think such a book could deserve some more attention.
The idea of climate disaster doesn't hold anyone together in the US; it's profoundly dividing. I will say that this is something I know a good deal about, and I can say two things.
Firstly, ignoring anything we know about temperatures on Earth, it is abundantly obvious that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Carbon is chemically similar to Silicon, and literal greenhouses are built of SiO2, which is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared. This is how heat is trapped inside a greenhouse - blackbody radiation cannot easily escape through the glass. The absorption curves for CO2 show the same characteristic transparency to visible light and opacity to long wavelengths; it's inevitable that it will trap heat. And the solar system provides a natural experiment in this regard: Mercury is closer to the sun, but Venus, with its thick CO2 atmosphere, is hotter.
Secondly, the only dangers to polluters in wealthy nations lie in unknowns, not in knowns. Thus far we've seen warming of around 1 degree C, which has been verified in numerous ways. Given that it takes time for heat to build up or dissipate in a system, it will not be plausible even to maintain current temperatures. Yet, what can be clearly established is that the primary losers in a warming Earth are going to be nonhuman species, with some secondary losers in the poorer nations. Environmentalists have much reason to be saddened by this, but it's only the unknowns that present possible reasons for genuine worry. For instance, no one knows for sure that methane trapped in Arctic ice won't flood the atmosphere after warming breaks up the ice there. The possibility exists that this will create a feedback loop that results in enormous warming - but there's no clear evidence that this is what will happen.
I wish more people could face this issue out of a sense of responsibility or personal sentiment. I think it's a global tragedy that the coral reefs are threatened by ocean acidification caused by the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. But we can't in all honesty go from that kind of concern for the long-term consequences of our actions on others, into the common claims that our own civilization is doomed.
My sense is that the political left has found alarmism useful in trying to raise interest in the issue, but that, at least in the United States, this has absolutely not unified anyone.
I think the idea of climate disaster unites the American left, just as it unites the European left. Socially cohesive ideas grow as much from below as from above.
When it comes to the technical aspects I will try to wake Anders up instead of answering myself, because he is the one of us who knows anything (he actually has a degree in climatology). For the last 17 years, he has told me almost exactly the same things that Koonin writes in his book: That nobody knows. We know that humans affect the climate of our planet. But we don't know how much. We don't know whether it is a disaster or even a net positive.
I am very much a proponent of alternative energy sources for another reason: Geopolitics. It would be great to be less dependent on Saudi Arabia and Russia, regardless of how much climate disaster it causes or doesn't cause.
That's very interesting; I'll wait to see what he says.
As far as environmental concerns uniting the left, I haven't even noticed that. Here in the United States, the left is an uneasy coalition based on identity politics, focussed on race, gender, and social equality. Environmentalism, secularism, drug freedoms, and lately even economic equality have fallen by the wayside once it was discovered that principled, ideological leftism makes various groups within the Democratic coalition uncomfortable.
When in doubt, to maximize unity on the American left, find some racist, transphobic nazis to blame for your collective problems. If none can be found, not to worry! Just accuse whomever is to hand (Donald Trump has very useful here). Or even better, blame the nebulous, sinister, and totally nameless nazis who are surely lurking somewhere within the system.
A person like Greta Thunberg is clearly a religious figure.
It is strange how this madness goes in cycles. In the early 2010s, I think Sweden was even worse than America is now. Almost no one dared to speak. People were afraid for real. Speaking something else than political correctness in public required great skill and most often a high dose of pigment. It peaked around 2013. Then the left-establishment had its way too much: It welcomed hundreds of thousands of third world immigrants, some of them didn't behave very well, rather few of them got jobs. Meanwhile, the children of previous immigration waves kill each other and some bypassers over illegal drug markets. So people got pissed off enough to talk openly about it. Now I even write a blog in my own name, something I wouldn't even dream of ten years ago.
"When I first started getting involved in activism, I recognized almost immediately the lack of diversity present within many sectors. One of them was the environmental community. I have been working in environmental justice for around three years. The rhetoric many white environmentalists use to push their agenda is not only racist, but ableist as well."
"Wanting to hear the voice of the earth, the notion that nature is crying out in pain, has a limited potential for reaching and touching many people who are living much more prosaic lifestyles than those who think about these matters only in an intellectual and philosophical way. People of color often view alarmist predictions about the collapse of the ecosystem as the latest stratagem by the elite to maintain political and economic control."
Earlier this year, I met with a white faculty member in my department of environmental sciences and policy to discuss my future as an environmental scholar... The professor began the conversation by asking my perspective on why it was so difficult to recruit students of color to the department."
> Now I even write a blog in my own name, something I wouldn't even dream of ten years ago.
Tove, I have long been predicting a change in United States politics somewhere between the years of 2026 and 2031. Until then, let me tell you that you have no *idea* how scrumptious a well-baked crab-apple pie can be!
So, having been looking this post over a few times and discussing it offline for the past several days, I've come to believe that the central theme really is not correct - it doesn't pass my bullshit detector. For one thing, it exists in a state of tension with your post on ideas:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-order-of-thoughts
Either ideas are mostly bullshit, or they are mostly useful; I believe they are mostly useful, not mostly bullshit.
Now I can see a way to resolve the tension between these two positions: bullshit and ideas need to be two different things. Maybe we can agree that bullshit is primarily lies, while ideas are genuinely held. Or, maybe we can agree that bullshit is ideas that exist in the social, philosophical, or religious sphere, while ideas exist in the technical, practical, or economic world. This would allow for a bullshitting caste that basically just peddles nonsense that keeps people together, while others (workers?) generate ideas that move society forward.
But I don't think efforts to separate ideas from bullshit works - or at least, I don't believe ideas and bullshit are separate.
Take the idea that bullshit is deliberate lies, as opposed to ideas, which are sincerely held. It's true that there are people who frantically peddle bad ideas, or people who grit their teeth and latch onto one good idea and insist that all other good ideas are wrong. But the idea that all these people actually "get it," that they really know exactly how ridiculous they're being, and are just bullshitting everyone, violates Hanlon's Razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'll grant that your idea of a bullshitting caste full of liars is going to be at least partly true. But I think it's abundantly obvious that there are at least a significant minority, and more likely an overwhelming majority, who aren't bullshitting at all - they're just clueless. This is why bullshitting works at all, because there are enough people who sincerely don't get it that they can be fooled by bullshit. So saying all the bullshitters are just lying doesn't make sense to me.
Or take the idea that bullshit exists in the social, philosophical, or religious realm, where useful ideas are found in the technical, practical, or economic realm. This matches my observations even less well. One of your best posts argued about why ladies have breasts: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-women-have-breasts . That post really seems much more to answer "How did things end up this way?" than "What are practical solutions to problems in the here-and-now?" Meanwhile Freudianism, Communism, and Cold Fusion seem to me to offer clear, actionable strategies for improving life, all of which have been shown to be basically bullshit.
So this is what I think: If our thinking class today has descended into superstition, virtue-signalling, and bullshit, it is something new, different, and bad about our civilization today, not something that always existed, or necessarily exists among the priests and medicine men. Once upon a time, our media was credible. Once upon a time, our scientists, doctors, and humanities departments were credible. Once upon a time, our governments were credible. Not always, but sometimes. Alas that this does not seem to be one of those times.
First of all, I'm feeling genuinely flattered that my bullshit is being discussed on the other side of the Atlantic.
1. I have also thought about the opposition between those two blog posts: In one post I claim most ideas are worth saving, in another post I claim most things that are said in public are bullshit. My solution is, as you predict, to claim that there is a significant difference between ideas and bullshit: Bullshit tends to consist of surprisingly few ideas. Those few ideas are combined and applied almost infinitely. The two samples of hard-core bullshit you linked to in a comment here nearby followed that pattern: It was only the idea that some groups are oppressed by everyone everywhere that found yet another application.
I think I can afford to collect all seriously meant ideas I encounter while simultaneously condemning most public talk I hear as nonsense just because there are so few ideas embedded in that nonsense.
2. Is the bullshit that surrounds us something new or something as old as humanity? I have thought a lot about that question. When political correctness hit my home country with full force in the early 2010s, I was alarmed and thought a disaster had struck us. Now I am not so sure anymore. The more I learn about the rest of the world and about history, the more I start to believe that the comparative openness of the 1990s and the early 2000s was the historical exception while current times are rather normal. On rare occasions in history, there has been a rather open exchange of ideas. But I fear that low-key mass hysteria is a more normal state of things.
I used the rather blunt term "bullshit" to describe talk that sounds good and might increase social cohesion, but that doesn't actually make sense in relation to the material world. In that sense, I don't propose a very strong historical evolution from more bullshit towards less bullshit. I think people have both talked both about the world as such and said things that only sound good since the beginning of times. The special thing with Western society is that it tried to officially separate the two phenomena: Science was supposed to be explicit non-bullshit. In theory, Western society should be better equipped than any previous society to resist bullshit, because we have the theoretical framework to separate talk about the material world from talk that only sounds good and keeps people together. Sadly, in spite of that historical advantage, I don't think we are doing very well.
Wish me luck; pretty soon your blog may be discussed on the other hemisphere. (Don't worry. They have apples there, too.)
"On rare occasions in history, there has been a rather open exchange of ideas. But I fear that low-key mass hysteria is a more normal state of things."
This is rather different from your position as described in the body of the article - especially since it is generally the "bullshitting" priests and academics who most suffered when trying to exchange their ideas openly. If this is your argument, then... I could get behind it more easily if you described the workers and warriors as enforcing conformity on the priests. This is a well known phenomenon; even in the literal sense, preachers today are generally more liberal and secular in outlook than their congregations, and take care not to deviate too far from the simplistic message their flock wants to hear. In the corporate world, this plays out somewhat differently depending on the day, but, well, here's a fair example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Seen through this lens, darker moments in history would occur when the thinkers became corrupt and stifled their own. This was the experience of Socrates, or Martin Luther, or Semmelweiss.
As for Western society being better equipped to resist ideological bullshit because of science, that's not an idea I share - especially since Western society is today quite nutty, but also because science arose in North Africa with experimentalists like Hasan Ibn al-Haytham before making its way into Europe. My sense is that societal manias have generally been largely philosophical, and thus rather impervious to empirical tests. And let's face it, human beings are not as good at philosophy as they are at making apple pie. In a sense, this a shame, since it means people say and do crazy things all the time... But on the other hand, apple pies are much tastier than philosophy!
I totally agree that pressure for simplicity and groupishness very often comes from below. I don't think the bullshitting class is malicious or dictatorial. They are often servants of the people's immediate wishes. Populists, if you wish.
Let's be philosophical. Basically, language can be used for two purposes: Descriptive and social. Philosophers in the middle of the 20th century thought that was a thing to point out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act
What I call "bullshit" is when people ostensibly use language in the descriptive sense, but really use it in the social sense. Science is supposed to help us distinguish the descriptive from the social. It is supposed to channel the descriptive use of language, while the social sides of language are supposed to be channeled to politics, poetry, literature… That way, in contrast to most other societies, modern Western society has institutions for separating descriptive talk from social talk. That should make us better equipped to do so, I think. Sadly, we are not very good at using those tools built up by previous generations.
OK: You have been using "bullshit" in two ways.
In the middle of the essay we're discussing, you do pivot towards this more recent description of bullshit as speech acts or social talk under the heading "Words with meaning." "Societies that made people actually build a boat together got the colonies, while those that could only bullshit about boats got no colonies." But that's not the way you introduce the term.
Your first example of bullshit contains descriptive claims about the world: "[Bullshitters] could claim that the sun and the moon were brothers, that the rains wouldn't come without human sacrifice or whatever." Your next example has "monotheism. Bullshit about one god that everyone had to follow and obey..." The Bible is the best known example of a monotheistic text, and it's filled with descriptions about the past and the present world. What makes it bullshit is not that it is merely a collection of speech acts or social language, but that much of it is *wrong.* That wrongness is what most nonbelievers would say makes it bullshit.
You can define bullshit as speech acts and social talk, or, as factual claims that are wrong, or even as both of those things. But no matter what, the gist of this essay doesn't really match my sense of the world. May you have good luck in attracting other commenters with more favorable reactions!
My intentions with the text was more or less the following:
1. Language has two functions: Descriptive and social.
2. I believe that in the private sphere, both the descriptive and the social function of language have been in use since the beginning of language. Language has been used to say things like "the bananas are in the corner" and "the gazelle went behind the shrubs over there" as long as it has existed, as well as "my intentions are peaceful".
3. In the public sphere, however, I think language has been used predominantly in its social function. Public talk has centered around social cohesion. "It will not rain unless we sacrifice some people" might sound like a descriptive sentence, but I interpret it as social. If nothing else, it was social in relation to the imagined gods who decided about rain.
4. Step by step, and hesitantly, some societies developed ways to use language in its descriptive sense in the public sphere. I think this was done with difficulty and half-heartedly. Most public talk is still motivated by an urge to socialize much more than an urge to share descriptions. People find it easier to talk sweetly than to describe accurately. The descriptive use of language in public is constantly under threat by the social use of language, because the latter sounds better and can be practiced by many more people.
I appreciate your unfavorable reactions a lot, because they force me to clarify my thoughts. Maybe I can write something more serious on the subject later on. I have the impression that you disagree more with my imprecise use of terminology than with the underlying thoughts.
...Now perhaps I wonder if I'm simply not understanding you. Definitely your use of "descriptive," "social," and "science" is challenging for me. I'll say more on this.
Priests have always blended important social and academic functions with bullshit. Predicting the flooding of the Nile was not bullshit. Keeping records for Roman civilization was not bullshit. Redistributing tithes to the medieval poor was not bullshit. Instructing the Mayan nobility in reading, writing, and astronomy was not bullshit. Teaching modern Americans to code is not bullshit.
Even more, much of what we take today as solid science was pioneered by people who were absolutely full of shit, even if they may not have specifically been shoveling bullshit to maintain group solidarity. Kepler and Newton, two of the most important figures in what is known as the scientific revolution, spent an inordinate about of time concerned with mysticism. The same is true of Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution. The Curies were less mystics than they were enamored of seances. What we see when we look back across history is the way in which bullshit has been entwined throughout the thinking of learned men, and indeed entire societies.
People across history have had trouble figuring out what is real, and what isn't. Sometimes they swallow things that are wrong; other times that can't figure out what's right. The obvious implication is that people today are exactly the same. Much of modern thought is gold mistaken as bullshit and vice-versa.
So yes, agreed - modern academians are essentially priests, just as the Neoreactionaries insist. And yes, as you point out, priests have always been in the bullshitting business. But most people who aren't priests are still involved in the same. Babysitters, advertisers, HR personnel, customer service representatives, journalists, military officers, anybody who talks for a living pedals a certain amount of bullshit. When you get them alone and off the record, things do improve... slightly. Unfortunately for most people most the bullshit isn't even deliberate; it's totally intertwined with everything they believe.
I think you are right to point out that people, or priests, in primitive societies probably didn't bullshit more than we do today. They just lacked the institutions for non-bullshitting: They were never explicitly expected not to bullshit (like, for example, modern American coding instructors).
Bullshit is an inevitable part of human nature. When you mention that babysitters bullshit I can't help recognizing that I spend a certain part of a normal day bullshiting with a 9 month old baby. The challenge for us, and for society, is to sometimes, somehow keep the bullshit at bay when things are actually important. I think the success rate is worryingly low.
For example, I find the climate disaster talk clearly worrying. I'm not a climatologist, so I can't hold an educated opinion about the technical aspects of it. But I notice that IF some part of the climate disaster talk is bullshit with the purpose of holding society together, then it is indeed very much up to the task.
Previous environmental threats were rather technical and limited to their nature. The ozone layer destruction, for example. After it was discovered and accepted, it took a rather limited number of experts to solve the problem during a limited amount time. In contrast, the climate threat requires the participation of everyone, everywhere, with no solution in sight. A secular society gets no closer to the concept of sin.
I read Unsettled by Steven E Koonin last autumn and saw no reason to disbelieve it. I think such a book could deserve some more attention.
The idea of climate disaster doesn't hold anyone together in the US; it's profoundly dividing. I will say that this is something I know a good deal about, and I can say two things.
Firstly, ignoring anything we know about temperatures on Earth, it is abundantly obvious that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Carbon is chemically similar to Silicon, and literal greenhouses are built of SiO2, which is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared. This is how heat is trapped inside a greenhouse - blackbody radiation cannot easily escape through the glass. The absorption curves for CO2 show the same characteristic transparency to visible light and opacity to long wavelengths; it's inevitable that it will trap heat. And the solar system provides a natural experiment in this regard: Mercury is closer to the sun, but Venus, with its thick CO2 atmosphere, is hotter.
Secondly, the only dangers to polluters in wealthy nations lie in unknowns, not in knowns. Thus far we've seen warming of around 1 degree C, which has been verified in numerous ways. Given that it takes time for heat to build up or dissipate in a system, it will not be plausible even to maintain current temperatures. Yet, what can be clearly established is that the primary losers in a warming Earth are going to be nonhuman species, with some secondary losers in the poorer nations. Environmentalists have much reason to be saddened by this, but it's only the unknowns that present possible reasons for genuine worry. For instance, no one knows for sure that methane trapped in Arctic ice won't flood the atmosphere after warming breaks up the ice there. The possibility exists that this will create a feedback loop that results in enormous warming - but there's no clear evidence that this is what will happen.
I wish more people could face this issue out of a sense of responsibility or personal sentiment. I think it's a global tragedy that the coral reefs are threatened by ocean acidification caused by the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. But we can't in all honesty go from that kind of concern for the long-term consequences of our actions on others, into the common claims that our own civilization is doomed.
My sense is that the political left has found alarmism useful in trying to raise interest in the issue, but that, at least in the United States, this has absolutely not unified anyone.
I think the idea of climate disaster unites the American left, just as it unites the European left. Socially cohesive ideas grow as much from below as from above.
When it comes to the technical aspects I will try to wake Anders up instead of answering myself, because he is the one of us who knows anything (he actually has a degree in climatology). For the last 17 years, he has told me almost exactly the same things that Koonin writes in his book: That nobody knows. We know that humans affect the climate of our planet. But we don't know how much. We don't know whether it is a disaster or even a net positive.
I am very much a proponent of alternative energy sources for another reason: Geopolitics. It would be great to be less dependent on Saudi Arabia and Russia, regardless of how much climate disaster it causes or doesn't cause.
That's very interesting; I'll wait to see what he says.
As far as environmental concerns uniting the left, I haven't even noticed that. Here in the United States, the left is an uneasy coalition based on identity politics, focussed on race, gender, and social equality. Environmentalism, secularism, drug freedoms, and lately even economic equality have fallen by the wayside once it was discovered that principled, ideological leftism makes various groups within the Democratic coalition uncomfortable.
When in doubt, to maximize unity on the American left, find some racist, transphobic nazis to blame for your collective problems. If none can be found, not to worry! Just accuse whomever is to hand (Donald Trump has very useful here). Or even better, blame the nebulous, sinister, and totally nameless nazis who are surely lurking somewhere within the system.
A person like Greta Thunberg is clearly a religious figure.
It is strange how this madness goes in cycles. In the early 2010s, I think Sweden was even worse than America is now. Almost no one dared to speak. People were afraid for real. Speaking something else than political correctness in public required great skill and most often a high dose of pigment. It peaked around 2013. Then the left-establishment had its way too much: It welcomed hundreds of thousands of third world immigrants, some of them didn't behave very well, rather few of them got jobs. Meanwhile, the children of previous immigration waves kill each other and some bypassers over illegal drug markets. So people got pissed off enough to talk openly about it. Now I even write a blog in my own name, something I wouldn't even dream of ten years ago.
I agree that Greta Thunberg is a religious figure. However, she has limited relevance to the leftist coalition in the United States:
https://www.womensrepublic.net/the-problem-with-white-environmentalism/
"When I first started getting involved in activism, I recognized almost immediately the lack of diversity present within many sectors. One of them was the environmental community. I have been working in environmental justice for around three years. The rhetoric many white environmentalists use to push their agenda is not only racist, but ableist as well."
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/236/environmentalism-and-the-mystique-of-whiteness
"Wanting to hear the voice of the earth, the notion that nature is crying out in pain, has a limited potential for reaching and touching many people who are living much more prosaic lifestyles than those who think about these matters only in an intellectual and philosophical way. People of color often view alarmist predictions about the collapse of the ecosystem as the latest stratagem by the elite to maintain political and economic control."
https://qz.com/877447/the-overwhelming-whiteness-of-the-us-environmentalist-movement-is-hobbling-the-fight-against-climate-change/
"The overwhelming whiteness of US environmentalism is hobbling the fight against climate change"
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2018/06/22/how-environmentalism-academe-today-excludes-people-color-opinion
Earlier this year, I met with a white faculty member in my department of environmental sciences and policy to discuss my future as an environmental scholar... The professor began the conversation by asking my perspective on why it was so difficult to recruit students of color to the department."
> Now I even write a blog in my own name, something I wouldn't even dream of ten years ago.
Tove, I have long been predicting a change in United States politics somewhere between the years of 2026 and 2031. Until then, let me tell you that you have no *idea* how scrumptious a well-baked crab-apple pie can be!