If, according to this Unherd piece by Martin Gurri, we are living in an ideological graveyard, will libraries be the birthing places of new ideas? Will they incubate a set of coherent ideas that move society forward, or will they hop aboard the identity express? From Gurri:
We might ask how such a deformed and unsatisfying creed as the cult of identity has come to achieve the status of an established church. The answer isn’t hard to tease out. Identity justifies control by those who have lost authority. The institutional elites are held in contempt by the public. Their advice is rejected and their commandments ignored.
By wielding that fuzzy and mutable ideal, equity, the elites aim to regain control of policy and prosecutorial decisions — but also of the education of children, the research of scientists and scholars, the persons and opinions that will be tolerated online, the treatment of the poor and homeless, and ultimately, the words in the mouths and thoughts inside the heads of the common herd. As a bonus, they get to surf a wave of puritanical smugness. They can call dissenters “deplorables” and treat their dissent as a form of racism or homophobia. What could be better?
It may appear far-fetched to portray elite embrace of identity as a 2020s take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers — and in a way, it is. The digital realm is virtually infinite; that’s a lot of territory to conquer and hold down. My point, however, is that the ragged engine of identity has an open road ahead and will continue its suicidal rampage through American life until opposed by a coherent set of ideas.
Top image: Graveyard At Bethlehem Chapel - geograph.org.uk - 4377445.jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
Like this: "moral vacuum of online politics."
If they hop aboard that express I fear they will change into something unrecognizable, and perhaps ultimately cease to exist at all.
A lot of organizations going down that path it seems.