Coining phrases is hard, but here’s a few thoughts about a particular thing.

A lot of people try to name the social blob currently eating academia and journalism. There’s the “successor ideology”, there’s “social justice”, there’s “cultural Marxism”, and so on. Sorry, thread.

Thinking about this the other day, I came up with Fanatic Scholasticism.

Scholasticism because, like medieval scholasticism, it’s an epistemology and ethics premised on the idea that all moral and factual knowledge comes from approved sources, written and directly taught.

Scholasticism because it is a religion where truth and goodness is derived from manipulating and disputing words, in an academic setting, reasoning and dialectic and sophistry, with, on the contrary, evil being defined philologically and by association to proscribed sources.

The essence of scholasticism is the notion that a person who spends more years in religious training (college) has a fundamentally different and more correct set of morals and beliefs than anyone else, assuming they’ve studied the good word instead of heresy.

The reason it’s hard to pin down a single coherent morality or even set of consistent, useful vocabulary is because, in the setting of scholastic dialectic, the way you gain power is to come up with new interpretations and new terms, memes competing purely virally.

In the purely verbal environment of scholastic debate and disputation, what a phrase really “means” is nothing compared to how punchy it is, or how effectively it distinguishes the cutting edge in group from the less sophisticated. Hence “racism is power plus prejudice”

One pathology of this belief system is, because everyone in it has spent 16-24 years in an environment of pedagogy, they think the source of all beliefs is teachers and books and words.

Hence the constant newspeak, the constant haranguing, and the constant guilt-by-etymology.

Finally we come to the fanaticism. This is where we get from “Marx was right”, which is a fundamentally scholastic opinion, debated and detached, to “and everyone needs to agree with this claim, by force if necessary.”

Scholastic fanaticism encompasses, Corbusier’s high modernism, lysenkoist agricultural practices, the Great Leap Forward, housing projects, “diversity is our strength.”, denial of genetic variation in humans, various attempts to medically treat women without ever seeing one, etc

Aristotle’s error is the belief that women have a different number of teeth than men, based on “reason”.

Scholastic Fanaticism is when you make Aristotle’s error and then compound it by starting a dentist practice that removes teeth based on gender. Then you make it mandatory.

Scholastic thinking is not useless. I think it can legitimately lead to all sorts of correct and interesting ideas. But when the correctness of ideas is measured purely by whether you have convinced people, this leads to certain obvious problems.

I think this coinage kind of sucks, but I also think it points to certain key traits of the phenomenon in a way that many attempts to describe it miss.

One of the key things you learn if you study the history of theology and religion in Europe is that, be the originating ideas never so airy and distant from practical life, the ethics, Once installed, come to be believed wholeheartedly and can divide and destroy nations.

Sorry this is rambling and kind of thinking aloud more than anything coherent.

The modern flat earth meme is another example of a fundamentally scholastic error. It can only be made because people’s “knowledge” of the topic is purely verbal, guessing the teacher’s password.

We have spent 70 years or so indoctrinating millions into the idea that a persuasive lecture is where you’re SUPPOSED to get the truth from.

The absolutely LEAST trustworthy thing is a punchy persuasive lecture.