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At that time, so many extraordinary things were found in the world, that to not believe might be more foolish.
Most of today's fruit and vegetables originated outside England (e.g. potato, corn, avocado, tropical fruits); consider Australian animals, like the Kangaroo and Platypus (thought a hoax!); consider inventions like gunpowder, noodles, hot-air balloons, steam engines. Some of these were late 18th century, but signs of the times.
If all these fantastical things were true, what other strange thing might also be?
> gunpowder, noodles, hot-air balloons, steam engine
Your examples are flawed. Gunpowder was known and used for centuries at that point. Hot air balloons were invented in France in the 17 hundreds. Steam engines were invented in Britain.
You might have something on noodles, but it’s a minor thing.
> At that time, so many extraordinary things were found in the world, that to not believe might be more foolish.
The time to believe something is after sufficient evidence of it. Before that point, it is definitely not more foolish to withhold belief.
> If all these fantastical things were true, what other strange thing might also be?
This reasoning is only as true as its opposite. Surely you'll accept that many other fantastical things were not true, so what other strange things might also not be?
Pascal’s wager applies, as it does in startups as well.
Not believing will make you right much of the time, but much of the value of being right lies in believing true things that others don’t (meaning have an obscured or otherwise inaccessible evidentiary basis).
I seem to remember English writers of that time period describing other nationalities as childlike, credulous, and superstitious on the regular so maybe everyone was just running around maligning the folks in other countries and seeing what stuck.
Also, the article title is clickbaity weird, why should people wonder if a common slur against a nationality from 3 centuries ago was true today?
Like how syphilis was always the <X> disease, where X is a group you consider immoral and licentious.
> why should people wonder
Between wondering and taking offense I think people should wonder more.
> Also, the article title is clickbaity weird, why should people wonder if a common slur against a nationality from 3 centuries ago was true today?
The publication is a (very nicely written) right-wing rag for Little Englanders who want to believe they're a cut above Daily Mail readers.
I was looking for the sneering comment like this by someone who believes they're a cut above people who read the Spectator....lol
>The rise of newspapers and magazines meant that tales of the bizarre and the outrageous could circulate widely and quickly, while the rapid increase in printed advertising made it easy to promote stunts and shams.
Yeah I gotta say I think we know how that might be.
>> The rise of newspapers and magazines meant that tales of the bizarre and the outrageous could circulate widely and quickly, while the rapid increase in printed advertising made it easy to promote stunts and shams.
Was it worse than millenia of unchallengable state-sanctioned bullshit that preceded it?
> Was it worse than millenia of unchallengable state-sanctioned bullshit?
Before the advent of mass media there was no "unchallengeable state-sanctioned" anything. The was a mix of local news and gossip, word-of-mouth, announcements from the local aristocrat or landlord, and more or less accurate rumours arriving from travellers.
True, but, state craft also had paid snitches to watch, and report on state/king/etc unfriendly talk, which would sit in pubs, or just wander around listening.
They also had people spreading state policy/thought, too.
Before wide scale monitoring, such as phones, then computers, then internet, massive numbers of people were paid to listen, even in modern times.
Mass media was surely an important change, but our ancestors didn't let things go uncontrolled, for, while all of the above was being done internally, external enemies were spreading propaganda to crush foreign kingdoms.
This sort of stuff has likely been happening since the dawn of humans, two villages rivaling over local hunting grounds or some such.
Religion definitely fits the criteria here.
Depends what you count as “unchallengeable” (how do you see the house of Tudor in the Kingdom of England alternating religious views at least some of which were very strongly enforced?) and “mass media” (do you count the Gutenberg press?)
I can't tell you the historical landscape except to say that I often find "the media" and similar sentiments are usually followed by <my own bullshit I believe in/>.
The common usage for "the media", "MSM", "the state" and so on just seem like filler folks use to prop up their own ill informed ideas.
So what caused things to improve between then and the advent of the Web?
Did they improve? Anecdotally, as a kid in the 80s, I can recall plenty of shams being published. They were limited by physical printing and word of mouth.
Going digital just made this information even easier to transmit faster and farther.
We all bought into the "razors/poison in the Halloween candy" bullshit.
"Poisoned candy myths - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoned_candy_myths#:~:text....
Publicly owned broadcasters and news agencies came into existence, in some countries, and unburdened by the need to compete primarily on gathering attention they could focus on quality.
The CBC and BBC, for example.
Not to be cynical but, what makes you assume it ever improved? I kinda assume it has just been getting worse and worse.
I'm somewhat young still, so I don't have a large personal memory of the times before The Web.
From my short pre-Web memory, I feel there was a "brief" (several decades) period when a small number of regulated (and after regulation ended, acculturated) neutral TV news channels provided a baseline common narrative. That was already eroding in the '90s, as the massive expansion of available channels through both cable and better over-the-air encoding created a similar publishing boom. Both cable and talk radio in the '90s-'00s presaged the greater impact the web and social media would have.
I too have that feeling, but it still feels somewhat misguided... I can't quite place why.
Perhaps I'm just being too pessimistic, that things could in fact be better again.
I wonder...
Many common narratives are themselves hoxes or scams. Many regulations exist to simply protect the scammers. So I'm not quite sure I agree with your implication. I do however agree that culture was more uniform which could cause the illusion of being taken for a ride a bit more appealing.
As for today, I'm amazed at how few people I know even half as pissed off as I am, so maybe they're all still happily on the ferris wheel too?
I think it's worse! Social media creates a bubble effect where nonsense gets amplified more efficiently and reaches a wider audience. It's having quite a detrimental effect on society right now.
I think the proliferation of it made people aware and learn quickly to proceed with caution on many fronts.
I wonder if a modern descendant of that credulity is a cause or an effect of the boggling dominance of UK tabloids.
Im not sure you've visited the UK but the general populace doesn't really believe the tabloids as much as people outside think they do. It's more a form of entertainment and mocking exaggeration. The average UK news reader is amongst the most distrustful of news in the world.
I don't think the UK tabloid press is as harmless as that.
Yes, sometimes the headlines can be funny but very often it seems they are about vilifying or bullying an individual or group. They mainly sell "outrage" but under the cloak of occasional humour, have no regard at all for truth.
Also to dismiss their influence as "entertainment" is not accurate either. Politicians, broadsheets and "respectable" media often take their cues from or respond to tabloid stories. This gives tabloids incredible power to frame the narrative outside of the realm of "entertainment" and "mocking exaggeration" and is why politicians have always tried to cosy up to tabloid editors and owners.
Some of the covers I've seen on tabloids - particularly the xenophobic or slyly racist stuff is quite shocking to be honest - I've never seen similar in the equivalent press of other countries.
People believed them enough to vote for Brexit.
And conversely, the idea that everyone who voted to leave the EU was a credulous xenophobic idiot was a similarly false narrative peddled shamelessly by other segments of the media. The red-tops do not have a monopoly on distorting the facts to fit a simplified worldview.
Nobody thinks that all brexiters are xenophobes and nothing as such has been written or said in any respectable media outlet (say the FT, Guardian, BBC, etc…), but denying that xenophobia played a significant role in the referendum campaign and that it influenced the result, is denying reality.
Not even sure its worth commenting on the irony of this, that ships long sailed
One year isn't that long especially when talking about geopolitics, the UK could join the EU as easily as it left all thats needed is the will. Democracies like the UK and US have no consistent political principles besides democracy, Brexit might be over but the UK flip flopping on EU membership will never end.
Alain De Botton (A British Philosopher) has a fascinatingly obvious book on The News: A User's Manual (2014) that I was lucky enough to read before the fake news cycles in MSM hit and became really pernicious. The book is much more about the archetypes of stories. It seems that when people find something that works (for them) in a story then they double and triple down on that style until all permutations of novel familiarity are exhausted, if ever.
Which reminds me of another concept about mass media creation: Loewy's "MAYA" (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) principle for successful artistic creation. It tends to get updated to Most Advanced Yet Familiar for our nostalgic times.
I think that's wishful thinking, to be honest.
Not sure it was only the Brits: I live close to Besançon in France, birth place of Charles Fourier, probably the first socialist.
He theorized that if people adopted his utopian socialist lifestyle, oceans would turn into lemonade!
Some people believed him, since he got funding to open a utopian community of a few thousand people where everybody was free to do as they please.
Riches of empire extracted from the 'colonies' plus the industrial revolution led to a huge increase in fools with money - with predictable results...
Why is 'colonies' in scare quotes?
I did not want to offend the USA/India whom eventually booted the brits
Why would Americans be offended? I’m fairly certain it is common knowledge that we used to be a British colony.
I’m not the person who posted that comment but I think the idea is that the phrase “colonies” diminishes those locations’ worth implicitly. It makes their role as a subjugated territory their defining identity and characteristic, rather than placing their individual sovereignty and identity first. I am guessing it’s not as much of a problem for America as for other colonized nations (non white, non European ones) where colonial rule lasted longer, was more brutal, and has had longer lasting impacts.
*several british colonies
You mean basically all of them.
If you don't know why it is in quotes, you shouldn't assume they are scare quotes.
It’s a single common word in the middle of the sentence. Doesn’t it have to be a scare quote? It wouldn’t make much sense to actually be quoting just a single noun with zero context.
They read like 'half scare quotes', not "scare quotes", to me -- 'mildly cautious quotes'.
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2014/06/scare-quotes.html
>Are scare quotes scary?
>[...] But the warning quotes you’re referring to, sometimes called “scare quotes,” should always be double quotes, not singletons, in American writing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/th...
>The Scare Quote: 2016 in a Punctuation Mark
>Doubled quotes developed as indications of a rational world. Now they’re developing as indications of the opposite.
>with predictable results...
Yet here we are in today's third world derived resource driven rush, where billions of dollars vanish and appear in the blink of an eye, unicorn startups come and go in a day and a fool(VC) is quickly parted from their money with a buzzword and some marketing.