On facts

One difference I have noticed between young adults today (20-somethings) and those of my generation is that today's young people have a lot more raw knowledge in their heads than we ever had. It's as if their brains were a veritable closet of factoids. They know stuff. They know about climate change and can tell you how much sea-level-rise we'll have in 50 years. They know about bees, the cost of textbooks, the opioid crisis, horticulture, and Martian geology. It seems they can spew data-points on a thousand subjects, but especially those subjects that form the backbone of the contemporary critique of western culture. They learn the critique in college, and the data-points accumulate with every Google search.

In my generation, we knew a lot about rock n' roll, baseball players, and (some of us) the effects of various hallucinogenic drugs. Our critique of western culture was not essentially different than today's, but it was emotion-driven, while the kids today are all about the facts. We were often English majors and art majors, they're into STEM. We told stories, they plot graphs. 

People receive facts along with a built-in interpretation that they often don't recognize as something different than the facts themselves. In other words, the same set of facts might potentially lead to several different conclusions, depending on interpretation, but most of the time we reach the conclusion at the same time that we receive the facts (from a professor, a website, maybe even a book). Built into the presentation of the professor/website/book is an often unacknowledged viewpoint or interpretation. It goes unquestioned. It is received along with the data and is not treated any differently than the data.

"Interpretation" is the story we tell about the facts. It's how we weight particular facts as opposed to others, and that weighing of the facts often seems to be determined by an a priori preference for one conclusion over any other. This preference goes unstated, but is baked into the story we tell about the facts. Often, the whole point is to identify the proper villain, and from there on in everything is propaganda in favor of that conclusion.

That's why so much conversation today about almost any subject seems to involve firing back from entrenched positions. The idea of open-mindedness is often treated derisively. Try telling someone you're not sure about climate change, or that the president may not be a racist, or that the opioid crisis cannot be blamed entirely on Big Pharma.  

This way that the conclusion is baked into the presentation of the data resembles the way that political talk has always proceeded. In other words, political values and tactics have become widespread. Religion, for example, is treated as a political choice and the religious as an interest-group. Even commodity preferences (i.e. where you by your mocha latte) are treated as political choices. Leftists used to argue that everything is political. That notion has now won the day and need not be stated. It's simply a given. There is no alternative.

This point of view I am describing serves to give meaning and purpose to one's choices. If xyz is true, then we should all live this way or that way, and my purpose becomes to influence the culture in that direction by any means possible. Anyone who resents all this might opt for any number of alternative interpretations, and then choose to enter the political fray, the attempt to push the culture in one direction or another, on the side of that chosen alternative (this, of course, concedes the point that everything is political). The so-called "new nationalism" associated with Trump supporters is just such a reaction, I think.

These thoughts have been partially prompted by an interview with Scott Beauchamp in The American Conservative. Scott is the author of an upcoming book called Did You Kill anyone? Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a Critique of Modern Culture. Here's a couple of the  Q & A's.

AB: One reason why you enlisted was to escape the “nihilistic music” of consumer capitalism and to “confront the Real.” Is there room within contemporary conservatism to question capitalism, and what does it look like to do that without surrendering your conservative card?

SB: I think this is THE MOMENT for conservatives to question what John Paul II called “economism”, or the fetishization of unrestrained capitalism. I think the urge to do so is particularly strong in younger conservatives. Why? Well, we’ve seen the failures of neoliberalism both culturally and politically. Our entire lives have been defined by these failures: the decimation of the middle class, opioid and pornography addiction, etc. The market, unloosed to become the single most significant force in society, isn’t morally neutral. And it certainly doesn’t serve the common good. 

And:

AB: In your chapter on honor, you write that “contemporary moral nuance is about accumulation: of facts, data, plot points” whereas “the dynamics of honor move across the spectrum of narrative and are so grounded in the fundament of action.” How does a culture like ours that is so infatuated with technocracy and supposedly value-neutral assessments regain a sense of honor? 

SB: I wonder if we ever will. Any chance we might have at it would have to begin with detaching ourselves from the algorithms which are increasingly coming to run our lives. Honor is complicated. It resembles a market, of course. But it also can act as a sort of canvass which allows narrative development. What I mean by that is that it’s an existential commitment, which is the only thing strong enough to forge an identity. Facebook and Instagram can’t do that. It’s identity LARPing. They give you a seemingly infinite refraction of virtual solipsism where experiences become commodities and commodities are sold as experiences. Even your latest Twitter outburst is just content you’ve created for them. Ezra Pound wrote that “The temple is holy because it is not for sale.” I don’t think honor is for sale either. That’s why it’s so rare to find it online, when your very experience of being online is commodified.