The Epistemic Divorce
The Mechanism of Balkanization in the 21st Century
It’s Valentine’s Day, and we need to talk. This is not working. Not only do we not want the same things, we can hardly even understand each other—it’s almost like we speak different languages. We’ve been living in separate worlds for a long time now, and it’s time to make it official.
On a recent episode of Kulture Dads we spoke with Thomas777 and the question came up as to why the left loves word salad. We took a few cracks at it, but when I mentioned the “epistemic divorce”, I saw T777’s eyes light up and we arranged an interview on his Substack about it. This is a companion piece to that interview.
Liberalism is perhaps the ultimate propositional identity. To be a liberal is not to have what David Goodhart calls ‘ascribed’ identities.1 It’s not to be a 5th generation Scottish farmer or a Pennsylvania Dutch or the son of so-and-so. Liberalism is something you can adopt. As a Lululemon yoga pant wearing wine aunt, your tribe is your belief. The problem with propositional identities, as anyone who has read this Substack for the past few months knows, is that they exclude no one, because a belief is open to anyone. But any identity needs boundaries to be meaningful (and especially, to confer status). Since liberals only exist epistemically, they have to erect epistemic boundaries to maintain their ontological integrity, and they do this by way of language.
Most people think language is a tool for conveying information. This is only one thing language does, and maybe not even the main thing—it also marks the outsider from the insider. When the liberal—say, a literary studies professor—walls himself off in a labyrinth of jargon, he’s not trying to make his ideas clear. He’s not trying to express difficult concepts with technical language. Mostly he’s engaging in an ersatz ethnogenesis—he’s imposing a barrier to entry. In order to be of his tribe, you have to put in the hours, you have to do the reading, you have to learn his language. Otherwise, he can spot you right away.
This is not confined to liberalism or the left, not by a long shot. The right—even the radical right—is still mostly a constellation of propositional communities. This is of course by necessity, and one would hope that when we win, we’ll discard ideological tribes for organic ones. For now, we use jargon for folkbuilding purposes too. When you talk about your “frens”, the Cathedral, the Kosher Sandwich, or the Longhouse, you’re signalling much more than something ‘in the world’—you’re signalling something about yourself and where you fit into it. We’re splintering into discrete spaces not just of shared values, but of shared concepts—this is the epistemic divorce.
Jonathan Haidt wrote about something similar in his book The Righteous Mind,2 except he had in mind a moral rather than an epistemic divorce. He found that of the five major moral foundations,3 conservatives are balanced in all five whereas liberals really only care about one or two. The left can’t grasp why the right cares about loyalty any more than you can grasp why an autistic kid cares that his train is pointed the wrong way around—you and the liberal live in discrete moral worlds. And because of the death of mass media, we’re starting to live in discrete epistemic worlds too.
The left understands the epistemic divorce in its own crude and hysterical way as the ‘post-truth’ era, which it thinks was inaugurated by Trump talking about “alternative facts”. In reality the epistemic divorce has been a long time coming, and the Trump presidency was simply when the differences became irreconcilable. At this point it became clear that divorce was inevitable, and the ‘post-truth’ era has been one prolonged spasm of a dying civilization, an animal twitching at the side of the road. A ‘post-truth’ world is an epistemically pluralistic world, and liberalism is right to be worried about it for a number of reasons.