Grand Narrative Truth Wars

 A few years ago I had a four part post on Grand Narratives (policy meta-fables).  Here's a great example of their memetic fitness issues.  Hannah-Jones is the founder and pusher of the 1619 trope (America's founding was fundamentally oriented and based on slavery and racism).

Ellen Carmichael

@ellencarmichael

I’m still marveling at the defense of Nikole Hannah-Jones over this tenure stuff. A core tenant of journalism should be, I think: “Don’t make stuff up,” and yet every historian actually trained on the topic she writes about said that’s exactly what she did.

There's obviously a lot of push back, and push forward, on this idea.  From a broader lens what is happening is a fight between meta-narrative truth and objective truth.  From some perspectives, meta-narrative (or in this case post-factual truth) is actually more accurate than objective truth. That's because meta-narrative truth encodes "balancing information" that insists interpretation done in modern contexts.

It's as if there is a complicated and subtle math function that most people will get wrong, in well known ways, when they try and use it. Objective fact leaves those issues for the user to worry about.  Grand Narratives (or post-factual truth) includes a bunch of "balancers" that ensure the average use of the complicated and subtle function will produce the desired result.

Another analogy is engineering.  Meta-narrative truth is akin to engineering a bridge to minimum strength standards by doing the minimum strength calc and then doubling its value. If the minimum strength function really produces a "minimum" strength number, then why double it? It is by definition illogical (assuming of course your minimum strength function is accurate).  That's the meta-narrative truth of 1619 and Critical Race Wokesim.  The meta-narrative is always more accurate than the facts.  

That's why hate hoaxes and more true than actual hate crimes. They reflect the deeper reality of the "real" levels of trauma.  Only the super-marginalized need to personify their trauma in order for it to even be heard.  It is a Kafka trap. The only way to truly signify marginalization starts to become to hyper-sensationalize it so even the most minor problems are personified as huge.  New religions and religions undergoing normal inquisitional cycles do this too. Soon it's not just sexual misconduct that's a sin, it is the mere thought of it that is. It's not alcohol that is a sin, the use of grapes themselves becomes a sin.

This is a classic purge dynamic. Costly commitment displays and faith tests are an adaptive way to clean house and install a new, purified, ruling class and norm enforcement protocols.  That's also why there is so much push back to this stuff, and why the only adaptive solution to counter this push back is to form resistance to it as a Kafka trap.

Critical Race Theory has done this beautifully.  US wokeism is a disease akin to Nazism, 1900's marxism. But it's also just as much a disease as 4th century Christianity, Christ era Christianity, or any  axial age religion.  Trying to judge things on an objective - factual basis misses the point.