Belief in witches is traditionally quite common, and most people in a modern society, on the right or the left, are glad to maintain the estrangement between their children and that particular traditional belief.
Perhaps a better left-targeted example would be usury: in traditional Christian morality, lending and borrowing money were prohibited (which is how Jews got many of the stereotypes they still carry, as their tradition had no such prohibition). I’m sure a good percentage of the Bernie types would love to go back to a world with no lending and borrowing of money. But we know that that world would suck because we can look at places where Islamic law continues to prohibit lending and borrowing, and the effects are as modern economic understanding would predict. Similar things can be said about private property, also traditionally absent, also continued much longer than it should in the Islamic world, and also has readily predictable negative effects.
I guess I don’t think there’s all that much for the average person to learn from the fact that an idea used to be extremely controversial. Dancing used to be extremely controversial. A lot of the controversy certain ideas generated as they changed is better off dead. It’s only the things that are still in the process of changing where it seems important. Even assuming it is important there, it’s still in the significant minority among all ideas that generated controversy as they were introduced.
While there’s a lot of anti-science on the modern left, my point was that the societies of the past just didn’t have access to things we know now. Whatever lies and failures of reasoning exist about sex and gender now don’t change the fact that there’s legitimately a lot more information about sex and gender now too. Tradition can tell us what a bunch of uninformed people thought about sex and gender. Is that more useful to the modern discussion of sex and gender than Pythagorean cosmology is to the modern discussion of astronomy?
A few points here:
One, I’m not defending any anti-science view. I think this again is an identity politics line. To show that modern science has produced insights unavailable from traditional sources, I don’t need to defend every bad idea that can be lumped into the left. One thing that modern sources have over traditional sources is access to modern science. That’s true even if some modern sources don’t make full or honest use of it.
Second, it seems relevant that there is a source of assumption-evaluating techniques that isn’t tradition. Modern rational and empirical techniques do in fact undermine assumptions.
And third, going along with my second point, it is often modern rational and empirical techniques, applied to uninformed traditional assumptions, that have led to the new replacing the old. Not always, but often (and perhaps more often in the recent past than currently).
Aren’t there rational, principled ways in which to distinguish between the ideas? Why should we assume that they are only accepting homophobia because they were taught to accept it? Isn’t it more likely that they e.g. know someone who’s openly gay and know that they aren’t going to contaminate the air with their existence?
And further to that point, I don’t think the methods being applied are the same. Homophobia seems a more appropriate term for the phenomenon it describes (or at least, it was when it was coined) than Islamophobia or even transphobia. If nothing else, the latter two were coined to borrow the political cache that homophobia already had, a cache it earned by appearing legitimate to the society into which it was introduced. Homophobia took hold because it seemed right, the others took hold because they seemed like homophobia. That’s an important distinction, and may well explain the differential reaction among the soft right of GamerGate (which, it seems to bear mentioning, borrows its cache from an earlier and more important scandal).
Is there a tension here? If the hypothesis is that it’s a difference in what we are exposed to when young vs. when old, shouldn’t the speed of bigotification remain constant?
Perhaps one point in your favor: as a result of technology, teenagers have a significantly bigger platform now than ever before, and probably the content to which people are exposed is produced by a younger author, on average, than ever before. This explanation would undermine the role of the social studies teacher and left academia generally, though.
Well, I think you and I polarize each other a bit. And tribally, I am on the left. They’re my ‘team’, so I root for them irrationally. And my speech and writing wears their colors, as it were. But I’m also often mistaken for a rightist by people on the left. As are Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers. And a lot of anti-Trump Republicans have been identified as lefties by parts of the right, while Trump himself has been identified as a closet lefty from other parts of the right. The term “regressive left” was created to refer to a section of the left that has abandoned almost all of traditional liberalism in favor of a certain set of dogmas, complete with tests of faith and believed for very tribal reasons. That’s antithetical to the enlightenment left, and yet it is the left.
So, point taken, “meaningless” is too strong. But I maintain that the terms are no longer usefully meaningful, in that saying only that someone is on the left or right tells you very little about their beliefs or political positions. Similarly, I don’t know that knowing even a significant part of a person’s constellation of beliefs and political positions will allow you to reliably place them left or right. I’m sure that many would describe me as on the right, and I imagine in some circles you could be mistaken for being on the left.