{"id":32717,"date":"2018-03-23T12:12:29","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T17:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32717"},"modified":"2018-03-23T12:15:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T17:15:18","slug":"the-twilight-of-authority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32717","title":{"rendered":"The Twilight of Authority"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Twilight of Authority<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the need for a rhetorical education\u2014that is, an education that doesn\u2019t presume to lay down the law about what\u2019s true and what\u2019s false, but instead teaches each individual how to understand and assess claims about truth and falsehood. That\u2019s a concept many people find challenging these days. We live in the last phases in an era of abstraction, and the notion of truth in most people\u2019s minds these days follows suit:\u00a0 when people talk about truth, they generally mean some set of generalizations dunned into their heads that are supposedly always true in the abstract, even though they may not work all the time (or at all) in the irreducibly grubby and complex world we actually inhabit.<\/p>\n

Think about the things that the people around you consider to be truths. (I\u2019d ask you to think about the things that you consider to be truths, but as that guy from Nazareth noted, it\u2019s usually a lot easier to spot the mote in your brother\u2019s eye than the beam in your own.)\u00a0 Unless you run with an unusually philosophically literate crowd, most of these supposed truths can be expressed neatly in sentences of the form \u201call X are Y\u201d: \u201call white people are racists,\u201d \u201call people on welfare are lazy,\u201d and so on. That\u2019s the kind of abstract generalization I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

People get very defensive about their favorite abstract generalizations. If you question the logic behind them, you can expect to be told that you\u2019re ignorant, and quite probably that you\u2019re evil as well.\u00a0 For that matter, if you encounter realities that don\u2019t fit the generalization and have the bad taste to mention that in public, you can expect to be told that the plural of anecdote isn\u2019t data. Now this may be so in an abstract sense, but the plural of anecdote is also one of the very few ways you can find out that the abstract generalizations you\u2019ve constructed out of your data are hopelessly out of touch with the real world.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Twilight of Authority I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the need for a rhetorical education\u2014that is, an education that doesn\u2019t presume to lay down the law about what\u2019s true and what\u2019s false, but instead teaches each individual how to understand and assess claims about truth and falsehood. That\u2019s a concept many people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2860,67,15417,1247,19422,1758,1250],"class_list":["post-32717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-authority","tag-beliefs","tag-ecosophia","tag-education","tag-generalizations","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32718,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32717\/revisions\/32718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}