Heresy

True. But trying to prevent further expression of those ideas, or retaliating against those who express them ("cancel culture" IIUC), isn't necessarily the best type of opposition. For example, disability rights isn't an academic issue for me and some of my friends. But when someone expresses opposition to the idea that websites should be required to be accessible, I don't try to silence them; I try to engage with them for the purpose of changing either their mind or mine.

I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my life. Swimming with her, making a fire and cooking our own food, laughing the days away. When she had to leave, we sobbed our eyes out at the airport in front of everyone. I was 16.

This experience enriched my life. Ditto for the years leading up to it.

Today, the universal conclusion would be that I was groomed, taken advantage of, manipulated, and so on. In a word, she’d committed heresy.

I don’t think most people would want to have an open discussion on the merits of teenagers dating older women. The teen’s feelings don’t matter; whether the teen initiated it and pursued them doesn’t matter; the question of whether it’s a net benefit for their life certainly doesn’t matter. What matters is the power imbalance.

Do you see what happened? This is equivalent to saying that certain truths aren’t allowed to matter. The question of truth becomes irrelevant. You can’t have public conversations about it without summoning a thunderstorm.

Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.

The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.

I can think of at least five other heresies. But I wouldn’t dare point them out publicly.

It’s worth trying to force yourself to think of some. I say “force” because the ideas are uncomfortable by definition. And if the ideas you think of are also very popular, that should worry you — what are the odds that we happen to live in the precise decade when we got our morals exactly right? Or even a little bit right?

There’s a reason pg started with fire as a metaphor. We’re fortunate to live in a time where it’s merely a metaphor. And I think we should worry whether we’re burning people for the right reasons, the same way you’d worry if your neighbors set fire to a house while arguing that it’s okay —- the people inside really deserved it, right?

Sometimes they do. But if your moral compass just so happens to point in the same direction as all of your peers, it’s important to occasionally ask ourselves whether we might be mistaken.

I don’t think truth is something that people should obsess over, but it is very important to seek and hopefully gain understanding.

I remember reading 1984 and the breaking of people to admit that “2+2=5” was an interesting way that people accepting false things as true is very bad.

I think intent matters a lot as judging people for being mean is different from someone saying “the sky is blue today” and the listener is harmed because they hate blue or whatever.

That’s a completely made up example, but I think real, although dangerous, example is trans issues. There are bigots who say things like “women aren’t men” or whatever to hurt people and I don’t think that’s right. But then someone will say “men are generally stronger than women” to discuss some scientific principle and people feel harmed there because they don’t want any differences to exist.