The Hazard of "a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff"

September 21, 2005

There is, in the wake of the wake of Katrina, a lot of practical talk...

...about shoring up the reliability of communication facilities that may be called on during crises.

There is asatisfyingly direct piece of practical talk about keeping urgent discourse on track.

And there is an important linked series that engages in pointed discussion about whether noise has overwhelmed information in certain important sectors of our shared life. Understanding is elusive, but vital.

The shift is, as Meera Nanda points out, citing Ernest Gellner, from political equality to hermeneutic equality: the careful elimination of every possible social, cultural or intellectual pretext there might be for saying any idea is better than any other.

Rediscovered by The Anchoress