In this excellent essay, Paul Graham writes about the resurgence of heresy. Back in the ’90s, he observes, heresy sounded “amusingly medieval.” Today, however, it’s back in force.
The author writes, “There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.”
Exactly.
Why is this happening? I think Graham misses the elephant in the room — namely, the rise of hyperpartisan, ideologically loaded education. For the last few decades, students, from their earliest years in school, are taught that certain ideas are right (climate catastrophism and the imperative of striving for social justice) and that anyone who disagrees is bad. Thus, students come to see the world the way church officials used to: black and white. Bad people are not to be reasoned with; they are to be punished. If you speak up for, say, constitutionally limited government, you’ll find out what it was like to have questioned the Bible a few centuries ago.