Thread by @interstar

@wokal_distance This is a good thread but you miss the point about the post-modernists. The PoMos were not ADVOCATING we abandon truth. They were diagnosing and WARNING US, that the media and language were like this. That no cultural institution or language could guarantee objective truth \1

@wokal_distance Neither media nor our langauge etc. could play the role of a kind of a court to give us a definitive verdict.

People complain about PoMo as though PoMos inflicted this problem on us. But that's shooting the messenger.\2

@wokal_distance The Enlightenment tradition said give everyone "freedom of speech" and the good will drive out the bad. But PoMo theorists were cultural studies people, linguists, anthropologists. They KNEW culture and communication didn't work like that. And they tried to tell us. \3

@wokal_distance And now the evidence is in. Social media, Twitter etc. gave everyone a voice. And we didn't get a rational process that converged on a better approximation to truth. We got a cacophony of divergent, inconsistent "truths" foisted by those who could should loudest \4

@wokal_distance Exactly as the PoMos would have predicted.

Power shapes what people believe.

The phenomenon you describe on Twitter is absolutely real and terrible. And it's empirical corroboration that what the PoMos were saying is right. \5

@wokal_distance Our task now is to take the PoMos seriously.

Not rail against the loss of consensus and truth and demand it back. But to figure out how to go forward and make society work, given this terrible discovery that we all believe different things. \6

@wokal_distance Because if we can't figure that out, we're going to end up like Rwanda and the Rohingya. People will fight and kill each other to demonstrate that their truth is right and the other's truth is wrong.

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@wokal_distance @threadreaderapp unroll

@wokal_distance (Of course I meant "shout loudest". Thread continues in the other branch.)