When the pandemic hit in early 2020, expert and expert-like lay opinion were settled on scientific matters that were in reality quite unsettled, and there was aggressive moral censure of resulting questions and disputes that could be quite intimidating. At almost the same moment, we saw an unprecedented display of institutional unanimity and activism, using what seemed to be an approved set of phrases, in response to the killing of George Floyd. By May of 2020, it became impossible not to notice that we were living under a new dispensation, though it has remained difficult to understand how it came about.
Matthew B. Crawford, Archedelia.