Commenter SFG responds to my argument that contemporary intellectuals tend to have a hard time dealing with questions of whether a glass is more full than empty or vice-versa, such as whether males evolved to do more of the hunting than females.
I’d say it’s more complicated than that. They can deal with it in relatively neutral settings. You see lots of things about how some tax policy is good and bad for cities for instance … at least until a sacred group gets involved.
A lot of Haidt’s stuff about moral foundations hasn’t really held up (if the right has stronger disgust circuitry, why were they less afraid of COVID?), but I think he had a good point about how once beliefs become sacred it short-circuits thinking.
Every group does this (look at how many people are going to respond to this to complain about my COVID stance), but the heavy set of taboos the left has these days makes it difficult to associate any Good outcome with a Bad group or vice-versa, which severely limits thinking, since given the huge numbers of groups listed as Good and Bad, some Good group is going to have a Bad outcome or the other way around. If you can blame it on systemic cisheteropatriarchy, fine, but that’s not always believable even for leftists.
This happens on the right too (in religion it’s actually appropriate in some cases), but the left runs the academy, and it’s poison for intellectual work.
As well as Sacralization of some identity groups, we also see in recent decades a tendency toward Demonization of skeptics.
