Call any outré idea “out-of-touch” (until it reaches mainstream local culture)
Galileo Galilei was prosecuted by the Inquisition in 1633 for his “radical” heliocentric theory. Today, we know he was right.
Silicon Valley conservatives have long critiqued Housing First ideology and pointed to more immediate, affordable options. Only recently, SJ's started to catch on. Reason mag shines light on the historical precedent for outcasting revolutionary political thoughts—until they become vogue.
The term [“luxury beliefs”], coined by writer Rob Henderson, describes a set of ideas that he believes confer status on elites while imposing costs on everyone else. …
While this critique is more often levied against progressives, luxury beliefs are fascinatingly transpartisan. Like "virtue signaling" before it, the term is often used too loosely, simply indicating a set of beliefs with which the speaker disagrees and would like to associate with a villainous or hypocritical overdog. …
In the early 19th century, abolitionists were often portrayed as disconnected from the broader populace's economic interests and social norms. Critics argued that their calls for immediate emancipation threatened the established economic order. George Fitzhugh, one of history's truly grotesque antiabolitionists and one of President Abraham Lincoln's least favorite people, wrote of the dire consequences of "liberty and equality" in 1854's Sociology for the South. "Crime and pauperism have increased. Riots, trades unions, strikes for higher wages, discontent breaking out into revolution, are things of daily occurrence, and show that the poor see and feel quite as clearly as the philosophers, that their condition is far worse under the new than under the old order of things."
What's more, abolitionists were often entangled with other radical movements, such as the promotion of women's independence and the questioning of traditional marriage norms, which further alienated them from mainstream society. Critics viewed them as extremists pushing a broad agenda that threatened foundational structures for dubious and unequally distributed gains—the very charge levied against today's luxury belief holders. …
Not every outré idea is the moral equivalent of abolitionism, of course. Eugenicists were subject to many of the same criticisms, and were deeply harmful to the body politic. But a bad oyster is not a reason to eschew all bivalves as a source of fun and protein. It is a warning to carefully vet your suppliers of oysters and ideas, and to make sure they pass the sniff test before you swallow them.
Read the whole thing here.
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