Great. Tech industries to enforce a ‘common set of facts’. Curious that the long march through the institutions should take us from ‘critical theory’ right back to industry-enforced positivism. https://twitter.com/fboversight/status/1329528947068055553

The point is that though there is indeed an objective world beyond our opinions about it, there is always greater or lesser disagreement about how that is among us. Even the most settled ideas about what is true can be modified by new theories and findings.

And where the subject is not natural science, but human society, the argument about what is or is not the case is greater, because competing interests are at stake. That doesn’t mean that there is no objective truth, but that you would expect there to be arguments over what it is

The old positivist ‘facts is facts’ argument was seen to smuggle decidedly biased interpretations into the body of factual knowledge, like the ‘objective science’ of neo-classical economics and balanced budgets, or the claimed intellectual superiority of white people (Eysenck).

Positivist social theory from the 1950s was assailed by ‘critical theory’ which sought to show that often what was claimed to be unassailably true (like the nuclear family) was not uniformly so, and those who claimed it were passing off sectional interests as universal truths.

The curious thing about today’s demand for subservience before ‘the facts’ is that it’s coming from people who were arguing an opposite, extremely relativistic account of human knowledge only yesterday.

At college, he tells us, Obama read Foucault - to impress a girl. Foucault and other post- structuralists were the French foundations of what Americans made into ‘standpoint theory’: the claim that there were different truths from different standpoints.

What seemed terribly clever at college, the dissolving of fixed certainties by the application of ‘critical theory’ was the intellectual project of a new emerging elite that was remaking society in its own image: less patriotic, more liberal, tech industry-based.

That new elite was succeeding in the transition from opposition to mainstream, shaping social values through colleges, CNN, Disney, and in time the White House. But it was leaving large swathes of society behind - the people who were not enjoying the New Economy boom.

Those people are open to a different appeal, one that Donald Trump and the Vote Leave campaign have tried to articulate.
The new elite are shocked to find their own bedrock of beliefs open to criticism. Yesterday’s ’critical theorists’ are today’s fact-policing posititivists.

Claims by rightists that they would ‘make their own reality’ or querying climate science have sent the liberally-minded elites into a sudden disavowal of critical- and standpoint-theory. Now they fear debate and want to police what is and is not fact, like the 1950s positivists.