April 2022. One surprising development is the rebirth of heresy. In Richard Westfall's biography of Newton, he notes that to remain a fellow at Trinity College, Newton had to avoid three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage. In the 1990s this sounded amusingly medieval; 20 years later it describes contemporary employment. There are ever-increasing opinions you can be fired for — structurally equivalent to heresy.

Two distinctive features: (1) heresy takes priority over truth; labels like "x-ist" end discussion without considering truth. (2) A heresy outweighs everything else the speaker has done. Historically punishment was death; now it's metaphorical firing.

Why has this returned? Two ingredients: intolerant people (always present) and an ideology. The aggressively conventional-minded enforce orthodoxy. When they unite behind an ideology with strict, arbitrary rules, a mob dynamic emerges. The Cultural Revolution is the notorious 20th century case. In the late 1980s a new ideology appeared in US universities with strong moral purity components, seized by the aggressively conventional-minded. The resulting intolerance wave resembles the Cultural Revolution, though smaller.

I've avoided specific heresies because heretic hunters accuse critics of being heretics themselves. This tactic detects witch hunts. The aggressively conventional-minded exist on both left and right; current wave comes from left because the ideology did. The window of expressible opinions has narrowed since 1985 after growing wider.