discoursedrome:

bambamramfan:

The “mythical core” of civilization, by contrast, describes that aspect of our experience “not revealed by scientific questions and beliefs.” It encompasses the “nonempirical unconditioned reality” of our experience, that which is not amenable to confirmation or disconfirmation. As will become clearer below, the mythical core describes our most fundamental relation to the world. It is our metaphysical background, the elements prior to our manipulation and control. For Kołakowski, the failure to distinguish between the mythical and technological cores leads to a failure to understand many social trends and events.

Kołakowski brackets the question of whether “nonempirical unconditioned reality” actually exists — that is, of whether metaphysics is fictional. He is interested, rather, in the impulse toward connecting with such a reality, which he says is persistent in human civilization, though it takes many forms.

…

To describe wokeness in relation to the mythical core helps us understand why it is so fruitless to reply to the passionate student protesters with the commonplace distinction between means and ends: “Yes, I agree that racism (or sexism, or homophobia, or transphobia, or all of them considered intersectionally) is an enormous problem, but I don’t think you’re addressing it in the most constructive way.” The person who says this may think of himself as a friendly, sympathetic, even supportive questioner, one who completely accepts the ends for which his interlocutors stand but has some questions about the best means for achieving them. He is therefore surprised when his questions meet with outrage and resentment.

This article is fantastic, in that particular sense where it contains no actionable advice or information whatsoever but is incredibly satisfying to read because it lays out a poorly-formed intuition in a clear and compelling way.

I’m kinda confused why this article has been well-received by so many people I know on here.  To me it seems like it’s advancing two claims that are individually banal and mutually inconsistent.

First, Jacobs uses Kołakowski’s technological/mythic distinction.  It’s possible that there is more to this in its original formulation than gets across here, but as presented by Jacobs, it seems like the same basic “rational / a-rational” distinction we are all very used to from modern-day discussions of religion.

In those discussions, we have a distinction like: there’s one realm where all the “normal” truth-claims live and can push/pull on one another via chains of reasoned argument, and then there’s a special cordoned-off realm where things live that either aren’t quite truth-claims, or are truth-claims but can’t be connected via reason to “normal” truth-claims, even ones that seem very closely related.  For better for for worse, we’ve established a general cease-fire between science and religion by tacitly agreeing to some theory like this, or to talking as though some theory like this is true.

Now, it may be useful to have words for that sort of theory (the closest named thing I’m familiar with is Gould’s NOMA, which actually isn’t the same, drawing the distinction instead between truth-claims about the natural world and those about values etc.)  But as far as I can see, Kołakowski-via-Jacobs is just this very familiar idea, and Jacobs has achieved at best a rhetorical triumph by essentially saying “social justice is a lot like a religious creed” without inviting the groans that would attend that sentence if said verbatim.

Even that sentence isn’t necessarily wrong, but once we remove the appearance of philosophical fanciness it’s easy to notice potential problems with it.  Is the use of overly simplistic chanted slogans, say, really something that distinguishes these student protesters from virtually any other protest movement?  If not, are all protest movements “mythic” in this way?  Is it really the case that the (sort of) claims made by these protesters are not subject to the usual push-pull of reason (if only in internal discussions)?  Can’t this all be more simply explained by saying that people often assume bad faith of their critics?  (Cf. the idea of the “concern troll”; Jacobs almost seems to be saying that if someone can accuse others of concern trolling, then they were not making truth claims to begin with.)

Then we have some stuff about Haidt and perceived degradation.  This actually seems true and useful to me, although I’ve heard it before.  But sure, this is a relative high point in the article.

Finally, though, Jacobs introduces “lossy compression.”  To me this seems like an entirely different theory of what’s going on, inconsistent with the myth theory.  Here, Jacobs seems to be saying that the protesters are performing “normal” reasoning, just with a relatively small set of relatively large categories.

One of Jacobs’ examples is a protest chant against Charles Murray, “racist, sexist, anti-gay” – when, Jacobs says, Murray supports gay marriage.  Let’s leave aside the issue of whether this is sufficient to negate “anti-gay” (itself not obvious!), and grant Jacobs the example.  Initially, Jacobs explains the contradiction by saying that the protest chant is not a “normal” truth-claim, but part of that special realm that faith lives in:

When students at Middlebury College shout that Charles Murray is “racist, sexist, anti-gay,” to reply that Murray, after previously opposing gay marriage, has publicly endorsed it for several years would be to misconstrue the students’ mode of speech. Chants and curses, like beating on windows and rocking cars, don’t arise from the discursive rationality of the technological core; they arise from the symbolic order of the mythical core, and are a response to its disturbance.

But in the final part he offers a “lossy compression” theory, in which (putting it in my own words) the students have simplified their concept of Murray to “member of the ‘reactionary bigot’ category,” and thus imagine him as having all the characteristics of a prototypical reactionary bigot, such as being anti-gay:

Thus, when Charles Murray voices support for gay marriage, but does so in the analytical language of social science rather than through ritual affirmation, he becomes “racist, sexist, anti-gay” — simply a member of the outgroup.

This explains it as the bog-standard operation of ordinary reasoning, which must always do some degree of conceptual lumping (“lossy compression”) even at the loss of fine details.  (Indeed, that is what concepts are; without some degree of “lumping” there would be no people or things, just this or that completely distinctive constellation of traits existing at this or that time – some atoms and void here, some different atoms and void there, no notion of say “table” to lump them together.)

Jacobs believes that there is no contradiction here, because in fact myth is (or involves) a bunch of especially lumped concepts:

Whether or not Marzen and DeDeo have made a compelling argument about the evolution of consciousness, they have at least provided a strong set of metaphors to help us understand how the power of Kołakowski’s mythical core can be renewed and intensified in a cognitively complex environment. […]

In circumstances of cognitive stress, the need for lossy compression drives us back toward the mythical core of culture. […] The discursive complexities of the technological core are more than we can manage; the comparative clarity and immediacy of the mythical become appealing as refuge.

But this just seems baldly at odds with the characterization of myth as a-rational and immune to the usual process of inference.  (Instead he is talking about how simple and broad concepts are comfortably amenable to easy inference, and explaining “anti-gay” here as an inference from such a concept.)  In the quotes from Kołakowski, myth seems not like a set of comfortably simple concepts, but like a seamless whole which appears endlessly complex if we (wrongly) try to parcel it out into conceptual parts:

The Gospel phrase, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” appears to an eye accustomed to rudimentary logical distinctions a jumble of words justified at best as metaphor translatable into several distinct utterances: “I am offering you proper directives,” “I proclaim the truth,” and “If you obey me I guarantee that you shall have eternal life,” and so on. In fact, these sorts of conjectured metaphors are literal, do not demand to be understood and to be translated into the separate languages of values and information. One can participate in mythical experience only with the fullness of one’s personality, in which the acquisition of information and the absorption of directives are inseparable. […]

[Both religious and nonreligious myths] attempt to describe something that will give a noncontingent value to our perception and our practical contact with the world; they attempt to convey what cannot be literally conveyed, since our linguistic instruments are incapable of freeing themselves from the practical employment which summoned them to life. They therefore speak mainly through successive negations, doggedly and infinitely circling round the kernel of mythical intuition which cannot be reached with words. They are not subject to conversion into rationalized structures, nor can they be replaced by such structures.

In the end, we have a string of rather familiar ideas (“some statements live outside of the usual sphere of reasons,” “even liberals and leftists have a purity heuristic,” “concepts can perform useful ‘compression’ but this can go too far”), presented with much erudite fanfare but no extra illumination, and with their mutual contradictions left not just unreconciled, but unrecognized.

ETA: having gone through the process of writing this post, I think I understand the myth concept better than I did when I started.  It’s not just about some ideas being a-rational, but about them being tightly bound wholes, so that pointing to necessary-but-not-sufficient parts of them feels wrong.  There may be something to this in the present case, although the article makes this point much less sharply than it could – protest chants don’t tend to be defeasible-by-counterargument for obvious reasons unrelated to myth, and it would be more helpful to look at whether “wokeness” is treated as a “tightly bound whole” in ordinary conversations (which I think it is).

nostalgebraist:

This is very much worth reading (and more serious and materially grounded than the image/headline/subtitle make it sound)

BTW, I found this article by Googling the book under review because Current Affairs magazine had quoted an excerpt on twitter.  The excerpt is worth reproducing here:

This is very much worth reading (and more serious and materially grounded than the image/headline/subtitle make it sound)