I… hmm. I’d guess the basic thing going on is irrational defensiveness of the sort where any documentary about the Israel/Palestine mess is going to get blasted by both sides because it is clearly and obviously biased in favor of the other side, regardless of how balanced it actually is? Like, writing a story about cancel culture in the future that doesn’t condemn it is endorsing it? I’m trying to unpack my brain’s explanation and I’m really not finding it a very convincing explanation.
I think the best I can come up with, in defensive-mode not explanation-mode, is: If this was a news article today, it would be pro-cancel-culture. It is not the style of article Scott Alexander would write, which would be an elaborate analysis with lots of graphs, it is not the kind of article a right-wing source would write, which would be scornful and mocking; it comes across in style as resembling the sort of thing that is neutral on the face of it but Really We Know What Opinion The New York Times Has About This Sort Of Thing.
This still doesn’t look very convincing to me, to be clear! But I’m trying to explain my reaction. Which is not wholly reasonable but I will still defend as representative of a large portion of your target audience.
(And I don’t really see the middle-of-the-road people as all that middle-of-the-road, or all that portrayed-as-unambiguously-good. Everyone back in the past wasn’t all sorts of good things. If you had to put signs on all the past people of all the evils they didn’t condemn, you’ve got 1 bit of useful information and 99 bits that could be compressed down to ‘he was born in 1465 and had the standard opinions of his time and place except.’ So, in that case, I did read it differently.)
(And—I sort of assume that factory farming will disappear as soon as tasty cheap synthetic meat shows up? Everyone will convert to vegetarianism when that happens. Once tasty cheap synthetic cheese and eggs and milk show up, everyone will convert to veganism. Then they will forget that veganism mattered and we will end up with Cordelia Vorkosigan, who ‘doesn’t eat anything but vat-protein if she can help it’ and this comes up practically never because why would it? So that didn’t really read to me as ‘point of glory’ so much as ‘yup, plausible element of the future.’)
And—I sort of assume that factory farming will disappear as soon as tasty cheap synthetic meat shows up? Everyone will convert to vegetarianism when that happens. Once tasty cheap synthetic cheese and eggs and milk show up, everyone will convert to veganism. Then they will forget that veganism mattered and we will end up with Cordelia Vorkosigan, who ‘doesn’t eat anything but vat-protein if she can help it’ and this comes up practically never because why would it? So that didn’t really read to me as ‘point of glory’ so much as ‘yup, plausible element of the future.’)
I think it’s common in history for people to be extremely moralizing about a past economic necessity after the economic conditions change, even/especially if the same people would’ve acted just like their ancestors in history.
I… hmm. I’d guess the basic thing going on is irrational defensiveness of the sort where any documentary about the Israel/Palestine mess is going to get blasted by both sides because it is clearly and obviously biased in favor of the other side, regardless of how balanced it actually is? Like, writing a story about cancel culture in the future that doesn’t condemn it is endorsing it? I’m trying to unpack my brain’s explanation and I’m really not finding it a very convincing explanation.
I think the best I can come up with, in defensive-mode not explanation-mode, is: If this was a news article today, it would be pro-cancel-culture. It is not the style of article Scott Alexander would write, which would be an elaborate analysis with lots of graphs, it is not the kind of article a right-wing source would write, which would be scornful and mocking; it comes across in style as resembling the sort of thing that is neutral on the face of it but Really We Know What Opinion The New York Times Has About This Sort Of Thing.
This still doesn’t look very convincing to me, to be clear! But I’m trying to explain my reaction. Which is not wholly reasonable but I will still defend as representative of a large portion of your target audience.
(And I don’t really see the middle-of-the-road people as all that middle-of-the-road, or all that portrayed-as-unambiguously-good. Everyone back in the past wasn’t all sorts of good things. If you had to put signs on all the past people of all the evils they didn’t condemn, you’ve got 1 bit of useful information and 99 bits that could be compressed down to ‘he was born in 1465 and had the standard opinions of his time and place except.’ So, in that case, I did read it differently.)
(And—I sort of assume that factory farming will disappear as soon as tasty cheap synthetic meat shows up? Everyone will convert to vegetarianism when that happens. Once tasty cheap synthetic cheese and eggs and milk show up, everyone will convert to veganism. Then they will forget that veganism mattered and we will end up with Cordelia Vorkosigan, who ‘doesn’t eat anything but vat-protein if she can help it’ and this comes up practically never because why would it? So that didn’t really read to me as ‘point of glory’ so much as ‘yup, plausible element of the future.’)
I think it’s common in history for people to be extremely moralizing about a past economic necessity after the economic conditions change, even/especially if the same people would’ve acted just like their ancestors in history.
I agree completely.