There have always been competing social visions of society within Western civilisation. This is a regular feature of human civilisations. There is not

The systematic attack on sense-making - by Lorenzo Warby

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2024-10-31 12:30:07

There have always been competing social visions of society within Western civilisation. This is a regular feature of human civilisations. There is nothing new in this.

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What is new is a systematic attack on the mechanisms for adjudicating reality, an attack that is coming out of the universities and spreading through media and other institutions. The loss of a common “sense-making” apparatus is disorienting contemporary Western societies and undermining accountability.

Some of this is the disruptive impact of new technologies. Historian Sir Niall Ferguson’s comparison of the impact of the personal computer and the internet with the disruptive effect of the printing press on Europe is an apt one.

Yet, it is also something of a misleading one. For the printing press had nowhere near the disruptive effect on China, several centuries earlier. This was because, in China, the printing press was used to help perfect the channelling of Chinese human capital—via mastering the complexities of Confucianism—towards the service of the emperor. 1 The printing press became a prop of bureaucratised autocratic rule—China pioneered the bureaucratising of autocracy, as distinct from more personalist regimes elsewhere.