Monolith Faction Quotes

The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.

the relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole. In a way, it’s a late-twentieth-century postmodern analogue of the nineteenth-century imperialist romanticization of the “exotic”. Are all Native Americans literal creationists? Are most of them? Has anyone bothered to ask them?

You could see it happening by the increasing use of the term narrative to describe news reporting. The word suggests an absence of verifiable fact and objective truth; there is only a story, experienced subjectively, or constructs that may or may not correspond to reality. Everyone can have his or her own version of the facts, whatever they are. The upshot is that news journalists are free to look for stories that fit their conception of reality. For some, this means forcing the facts into preferred narratives, even if they don’t admit—to themselves or anyone else—that that’s what they’re doing. For others, it’s a justification for distorting the truth in the cause of righteousness. For still others, it’s a license to lie. Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French statesman and author, and the greatest chronicler of American democracy, hoped that the institution of the free press might check the natural despotic tendencies of democracy. This was not because Tocqueville believed that the American press did a good job of elevating the public’s understanding and discourse; he did not. Rather, he thought the saving grace of the press was that it was highly fragmented and reflected a wide diversity of voices and localized opinion. In his view, it was precisely the wide variety of diverse voices in the press that made it hard, in a large country such as the United States, to galvanize a consolidated national faction that could impose its views on, and lord it over, the rest of the country. It was when the press consolidated into fewer voices and presented itself as a monolith, he held, that it ceased to act as a bulwark against tyranny and instead enabled it. Once press organizations begin to “advance along the same track,” wrote Tocqueville, “their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.” This is what I saw happening. The