I know @corlin will be reading this, but if anyone else wants to reflect on the philosophy of our intellectual moment, the latest by Smith-Ruiu is excellent (if partially behind paywall).
He occupies an interesting position: a scholar of history and #philosophy, and a Christian "anarchist". This background puts him outside fealty to a lot of today's orthodoxies, but with great interest in what people are trying to achieve with them--and what challenges they face. #Essays
https://open.substack.com/pub/hinternet/p/neo-utilitarians-are-utter-philistines
@MLClark @corlin: And then how it rapidly began having effects on private and public behavior for individuals, groups, and entire communities. It went into overdrive, at least what I called it back then, in the mid-1990s. By my thirtieth birthday in 2000 I realized it was a repeating pattern, partly a generational thing, something used to make the youngers feel different from the olders and to allow them to feel superior in the arena of "modern ideas", i.e., reinventing the wheel by merely...
@MLClark @corlin: ...calling it something other than a wheel. "Wheel 2.0" or "The NeoWheel". The phenomenon also manifested with conservatives, who often lag behind in the eyes of the public *and* also who often do lag behind out of resistance to change, changing their language usage and angle of approach on ideas to "update", which is never an update but usually a rush to rally. It still affects their attitudes and practices because language does that naturally. To grossly oversimplify, I...
@MLClark @corlin: ...believe that it's a matter of an ego-centered rebellion against "the old" and a desperate, clutching, often clumsy but definitely concerted attempt at establishing or at least claiming a kind of maturity, i.e., "Look at me! I'm smart, efficient, effective, strong, and most importantly, I'm DIFFERENT!"
Generations do this. Demographics do this. Nations do this. Communities do this. Individuals do this. It's not unnatural, but when it's more than one or a few people doing...
@MLClark @corlin: I find the essay both on-point and intriguing, primarily because they're so similar as to be a slight variation, adjusted for elapsed time and tide, to what I saw when I was in my very latest of teens and early- to mid-twenties and expressed in speech and in writing to nays, poo-poos, and the like. I didn't think to label the folks "neo-utilitarians", though.
I began noticing the stuff as a kid in the early 1980s, political speech, newsspeak, and business and industry jargon.