Tiger Beatdown makes a good case that LOST is pure bulldada: that which is brilliant because its unintentionally stupid.
I mean seriously: if Ben Linus wanted someone to pass the salt, he'd manipulate Locke into stealing the salt and hiding it, Sawyer into following him and stealing the salt, Juliet into seducing Sawyer and stealing the salt out of his pocket, and wait 20 years to manipulate Miles into traveling back in time and tripping Juliet so some of the salt spills on his food.
God fucking forbid he would just say, "Pass the salt."
Showing newest posts with label Postmodernism. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label Postmodernism. Show older posts
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Friday, March 27, 2009
Lies and libel
Evolved Rationalist apparently finds lies and libel objectionable only when written by Christians and Scientologists; libel is perfectly okay when directed at people she doesn't like:
And what must we do to not just "leave them alone"? Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity? It's one thing (quite objectionable) to assert that Gambians should not be criticized for their actions; it's quite another thing to argue that their actions, abhorrent as they are, do not justify imperialism or military aggression.
While all this despicable lunacy [persecution of supposed "witches" in Gambia] is going on around the world, the postmodernists still claim that we must leave them alone; and rant about how it is AWWRIGHT because their culture is different...or something fucktarded like that.ER names postmodernists, not even some postmodernists (which would be intellectually dishonest in another way: you can find some members of any group that endorse almost anything; such a claim demonstrates nothing) so she would have to show that this was a majority of opinion. She also claims that that they still claim that we must leave the Gambians alone, so she would have to show the majority opinion exists and has been expressed after these news reports were widely known.
And what must we do to not just "leave them alone"? Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity? It's one thing (quite objectionable) to assert that Gambians should not be criticized for their actions; it's quite another thing to argue that their actions, abhorrent as they are, do not justify imperialism or military aggression.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
99%
Philosophers and communists are like lawyers: 99% of them give the other 1% a bad name.
Butterflies and Wheels mentions (presumably approvingly) Norman Geras' denunciation of postmodernism. On the one hand, having read a fair amount of postmodernist philosophy, I understand Geras' frustration: 99% of it really is complete bullshit (even granting that we should be taking epistemological advice from professors of English Literature in the first place). But Geras' denunciation of Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler's defense of postmodernism is intellectually dishonest, and I'm frankly disappointed that Ophelia Benson would even bother to mention it.
Geras' intellectual dishonesty is explicit, "This would-be defence is either postmodernism in retreat or a postmodernism that has forgotten the claims of some of its best-known protagonists." Geras is demanding that postmodernism be dogmatic. Geras could make precisely the same claim that current evolutionary biology or physics is in retreat from or has forgotten the claims of its best-known protagonists, such as Darwin or Newton. Geras simply dismisses the Lucy & Mickler's arguments because they contradict what he — as an outsider — privileges as objectionable postmodernist dogma.
Geras' problem, of course, is that there are only three choices:
A serious intellectual faces Sturgeons Law in evaluating any school of thought, especially one without the rigorous internal controls of modern science: 90% of everything is crap. (90% of science is crap too, but scientists have become practiced in keeping the crap out of the public eye. Well, most of it.) If 90% of something is crap, why shouldn't that overwhelming majority define that something? Why should a minority viewpoint define a school of thought? On the other hand, if 90% of everything is crap, then everything becomes defined by its crap, and we end up with nihilism.
The problem is further complicated in that 100% of some things — e.g. religion, Scientology, Randianism, homeopathy, Nazism — are crap. H. Allen Orr criticizes The God Delusion for falling into what I call "Sturgeon's Trap": criticizing the worst of religion, not the best. Orr's criticism would be valid even if 99% of religion were crap: it's every intellectual's duty to criticize the best. Because Dawkins can refute the religious arguments he presents in The God Delusion Orr concludes on that basis that Dawkins has considered only the crap 90% of religion. But of course 100% of religion is crap; Dawkins really does criticize the best that religion has to offer. (Modern "sophisticated" apologetics are much much worse than Aquinas' classics.)
Percentages, however, are completely irrelevant to the seeker after the truth. Every good idea begins as the opinion of a minority of one. The search for truth is never a political struggle; when you let your politics take precedence over the truth, you have lost your way.
Of course, actual politics — the search for and implementation of good — is different. What a group of people actually do as a group is very dependent on the majority opinion. It's irrelevant, for example, that 1% of KKK members aren't racist; in a political sense, the KKK is definitely a racist organization, because 99% of their members are explicitly racist.
Hence my struggle with my self-identification as "communist". As far as the truth goes, I'm convinced that Marx et al. have profound insights into truths of economics, politics and psychology. On the political level, however, too many self-identified "communists" are dogmatists, Utopians, economic reductionists, opportunists, naive anarchists, or just plain ignorant fools*. (This is not a problem only among communists and socialists; the entire political left is infected with stupidity. Of course, the political right is infected with at least as much (if not more) stupidity and a lot more evil.)
*I'm pleased that although they have their own problems, the Revolutionary Communist Party exhibits none of these manifestations of egregious stupidity.
I'm beginning to feel some sympathy for the moderate, humanist Christian, surrounded by a sea of dogmatic fundamentalist assholes. Only some sympathy, though: the communist canon is a lot more sensible and humanistic than the Bible. But regardless of the quality of the canon, an argument about who is the "true" anything — communist, christian, atheist or Scotsman — is a pointless waste of time, a distraction from both the search for truth and the implementation of the good.
One of the reasons I've (mostly) closed the blog is that I'm getting more flak from fellow communists and socialists than I am from capitalists and bourgeois apologists. Not because my analyses and suggestions are wrong, but because they are not "true" socialism. It's one thing to have enemies; I've been an outspoken atheist long enough to be comfortable with the enmity of the religious. It's quite another thing — very discouraging — when your putative allies are against you.
Butterflies and Wheels mentions (presumably approvingly) Norman Geras' denunciation of postmodernism. On the one hand, having read a fair amount of postmodernist philosophy, I understand Geras' frustration: 99% of it really is complete bullshit (even granting that we should be taking epistemological advice from professors of English Literature in the first place). But Geras' denunciation of Niall Lucy & Steve Mickler's defense of postmodernism is intellectually dishonest, and I'm frankly disappointed that Ophelia Benson would even bother to mention it.
Geras' intellectual dishonesty is explicit, "This would-be defence is either postmodernism in retreat or a postmodernism that has forgotten the claims of some of its best-known protagonists." Geras is demanding that postmodernism be dogmatic. Geras could make precisely the same claim that current evolutionary biology or physics is in retreat from or has forgotten the claims of its best-known protagonists, such as Darwin or Newton. Geras simply dismisses the Lucy & Mickler's arguments because they contradict what he — as an outsider — privileges as objectionable postmodernist dogma.
Geras' problem, of course, is that there are only three choices:
- There is exactly one absolute truth (modernism)
- There is no truth at all (nihilism)
- Truth is more complicated than one or none (postmodernism)
A serious intellectual faces Sturgeons Law in evaluating any school of thought, especially one without the rigorous internal controls of modern science: 90% of everything is crap. (90% of science is crap too, but scientists have become practiced in keeping the crap out of the public eye. Well, most of it.) If 90% of something is crap, why shouldn't that overwhelming majority define that something? Why should a minority viewpoint define a school of thought? On the other hand, if 90% of everything is crap, then everything becomes defined by its crap, and we end up with nihilism.
The problem is further complicated in that 100% of some things — e.g. religion, Scientology, Randianism, homeopathy, Nazism — are crap. H. Allen Orr criticizes The God Delusion for falling into what I call "Sturgeon's Trap": criticizing the worst of religion, not the best. Orr's criticism would be valid even if 99% of religion were crap: it's every intellectual's duty to criticize the best. Because Dawkins can refute the religious arguments he presents in The God Delusion Orr concludes on that basis that Dawkins has considered only the crap 90% of religion. But of course 100% of religion is crap; Dawkins really does criticize the best that religion has to offer. (Modern "sophisticated" apologetics are much much worse than Aquinas' classics.)
Percentages, however, are completely irrelevant to the seeker after the truth. Every good idea begins as the opinion of a minority of one. The search for truth is never a political struggle; when you let your politics take precedence over the truth, you have lost your way.
Of course, actual politics — the search for and implementation of good — is different. What a group of people actually do as a group is very dependent on the majority opinion. It's irrelevant, for example, that 1% of KKK members aren't racist; in a political sense, the KKK is definitely a racist organization, because 99% of their members are explicitly racist.
Hence my struggle with my self-identification as "communist". As far as the truth goes, I'm convinced that Marx et al. have profound insights into truths of economics, politics and psychology. On the political level, however, too many self-identified "communists" are dogmatists, Utopians, economic reductionists, opportunists, naive anarchists, or just plain ignorant fools*. (This is not a problem only among communists and socialists; the entire political left is infected with stupidity. Of course, the political right is infected with at least as much (if not more) stupidity and a lot more evil.)
*I'm pleased that although they have their own problems, the Revolutionary Communist Party exhibits none of these manifestations of egregious stupidity.
I'm beginning to feel some sympathy for the moderate, humanist Christian, surrounded by a sea of dogmatic fundamentalist assholes. Only some sympathy, though: the communist canon is a lot more sensible and humanistic than the Bible. But regardless of the quality of the canon, an argument about who is the "true" anything — communist, christian, atheist or Scotsman — is a pointless waste of time, a distraction from both the search for truth and the implementation of the good.
One of the reasons I've (mostly) closed the blog is that I'm getting more flak from fellow communists and socialists than I am from capitalists and bourgeois apologists. Not because my analyses and suggestions are wrong, but because they are not "true" socialism. It's one thing to have enemies; I've been an outspoken atheist long enough to be comfortable with the enmity of the religious. It's quite another thing — very discouraging — when your putative allies are against you.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
We should not embrace moderate religion
On de-conversion writerdd exhorts us to embrace, or at least befriend moderate Christianity. I think she's incorrect.
She first asks the question, "Is fundamentalism the authentic religious voice?" Her answer is no.
The problem is that the frame of the question is wrong. There is no such thing as the authentic religious voice. All voices of people who sincerely profess a religion — left, right and moderate — are "authentic". And atheists and the non-religious — precisely because we are not religious — do not have standing to contribute to the religious voice.
(And I think the more accurate and less presumptuous word is "extremist", not "fundamentalist". Religious moderates might well object that their interpretation of religion is just as or even more compliant to the fundamental nature of their scriptures and theology as the extremists. I might disagree, but I'm an atheist; I have no standing to interpret theology.)
writerdd would like it if the moderates were the "authentic" voice of religion.
People outside of any community, physical or self-identified, do not have the standing to contribute to or restrict the voice of that community. The religious do not have standing to contribute to the atheist voice, white people to the black voice, men to the feminist voice, straight people to the LGBT voice. We might have an obligation to listen to these voices, but we cannot directly contribute. Standing is what defines the community; standing is an essential property of the entire notion of a community.
In just the same sense, the conservatives would like to see the stay-at-home moms become the authentic voice of feminism; they'd like to see the hard-working black people condemning affirmative action as the authentic voice of the black community; the self-hating celibates become the voice of the gay community. You simply don't get to do that though, and any attempt is fundamentally patronizing, condescending, and intrusive. The community defines itself.
As skeptics first and foremost, atheists do have an obligation to the truth. And the plain truth is that there are religious moderates and they are not extremists. It would be patently false to state or imply that all religious people actually are extremists. But I'm obligated to speak the truth even about enemies who were actively trying to kill me; speaking the truth does not seem to constitute embracing or befriending.
writerdd asserts that moderate believers are being "left out" of the conversation:
Reading further, though, we perhaps get a sense of where writerdd is going:
The closing parenthetical comment tells the story: the truth or falsity of Dawkins' statement is beside the point. This is an outrageous statement for any soi disant skeptic to utter. The whole point of skepticism is that the truth is paramount. If Dawkins is wrong, that he's wrong is the issue. writerdd seems to demand that we should not investigate the truth or falsity of some claims because simply raising the question "belittles those of moderate faith." This position is bullshit postmodernism at its worst.
One is a skeptic only if the truth always matters, only if the truth always comes first. Subordinate the truth to any consideration, and one is a skeptic no more.
Sam Harris may be a woo-woo loving airhead, but his fundamental point is either true or false, and deserves to be decided on the merits: Are extremists really "better" because they are truer to the literal meaning of their scripture? Are moderates really giving cover to extremists by endorsing the notion that sincere belief in an invisible sky fairy gives one a privileged position to talk about morality? These are serious questions, questions that seem to have a definite yes or no answer. If embracing or befriending the religious moderates means that the truth or falsity of these questions doesn't matter, that merely raising them is insulting or wrong, then I want no part of this "friendship".
She first asks the question, "Is fundamentalism the authentic religious voice?" Her answer is no.
The problem is that the frame of the question is wrong. There is no such thing as the authentic religious voice. All voices of people who sincerely profess a religion — left, right and moderate — are "authentic". And atheists and the non-religious — precisely because we are not religious — do not have standing to contribute to the religious voice.
(And I think the more accurate and less presumptuous word is "extremist", not "fundamentalist". Religious moderates might well object that their interpretation of religion is just as or even more compliant to the fundamental nature of their scriptures and theology as the extremists. I might disagree, but I'm an atheist; I have no standing to interpret theology.)
writerdd would like it if the moderates were the "authentic" voice of religion.
I don’t know about you, but I, for one, would rather encourage a moderate, liberal kind of faith where people are free to cherry pick what they want to believe while they conform to modern, secular values and use skepticism to make decisions in daily life.I'd like that too, but it's not up to me or any other atheist. I'd like to see that portion of any community that conforms to my personal views become the "authentic" voice of that community, but the whole point of defining a community is that they get to define their own authentic voice; outsiders are entitled only to criticize that voice, not define it.
People outside of any community, physical or self-identified, do not have the standing to contribute to or restrict the voice of that community. The religious do not have standing to contribute to the atheist voice, white people to the black voice, men to the feminist voice, straight people to the LGBT voice. We might have an obligation to listen to these voices, but we cannot directly contribute. Standing is what defines the community; standing is an essential property of the entire notion of a community.
In just the same sense, the conservatives would like to see the stay-at-home moms become the authentic voice of feminism; they'd like to see the hard-working black people condemning affirmative action as the authentic voice of the black community; the self-hating celibates become the voice of the gay community. You simply don't get to do that though, and any attempt is fundamentally patronizing, condescending, and intrusive. The community defines itself.
As skeptics first and foremost, atheists do have an obligation to the truth. And the plain truth is that there are religious moderates and they are not extremists. It would be patently false to state or imply that all religious people actually are extremists. But I'm obligated to speak the truth even about enemies who were actively trying to kill me; speaking the truth does not seem to constitute embracing or befriending.
writerdd asserts that moderate believers are being "left out" of the conversation:
The media features fundamentalists or extreme conservative believers every time a topic regarding morality comes up, as if these are the only people who can speak for believers, as if they have authority to speak for all people of faith on these issues. Not only are atheists and agnostics left out of the conversation, but moderate and liberal believers often are as well. They are not taken as seriously as those who are literalist or extremist in their views, and are often considered “soft” or “lax,” as if they were not “true” followers of the faith. When journalists act this way, they are echoing the fundamentalist point of view.This idea is just nonsense. It's very difficult to determine in the first place what constitutes being "left out of the conversation" or not taken seriously. Even if we could make that determination, what power do atheists have to change the situation? And why is the marginalization and exclusion of the religious moderates our problem as atheists? writerdd just points out a pseudo-problem that atheists couldn't change even if it were a real problem.
Reading further, though, we perhaps get a sense of where writerdd is going:
The new atheists seem to agree. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that fundamentalists, who take their scriptures literally, are in a very real sense the best practitioners of their faith because they follow their scriptures most closely. Richard Dawkins also belittles those of moderate faiths when he insists that religion never changes because it is tied to the ancient writings of scripture, an entirely fundamentalist viewpoint (and entirely wrong, but that is another issue all together).It's important to understand that Harris and Dawkins here (assuming writerdd accurately represents their views) are stating matters of truth or falsity. They are either correct or incorrect.
The closing parenthetical comment tells the story: the truth or falsity of Dawkins' statement is beside the point. This is an outrageous statement for any soi disant skeptic to utter. The whole point of skepticism is that the truth is paramount. If Dawkins is wrong, that he's wrong is the issue. writerdd seems to demand that we should not investigate the truth or falsity of some claims because simply raising the question "belittles those of moderate faith." This position is bullshit postmodernism at its worst.
One is a skeptic only if the truth always matters, only if the truth always comes first. Subordinate the truth to any consideration, and one is a skeptic no more.
Sam Harris may be a woo-woo loving airhead, but his fundamental point is either true or false, and deserves to be decided on the merits: Are extremists really "better" because they are truer to the literal meaning of their scripture? Are moderates really giving cover to extremists by endorsing the notion that sincere belief in an invisible sky fairy gives one a privileged position to talk about morality? These are serious questions, questions that seem to have a definite yes or no answer. If embracing or befriending the religious moderates means that the truth or falsity of these questions doesn't matter, that merely raising them is insulting or wrong, then I want no part of this "friendship".
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Quotation of the day
"Deconstruction thus contains within itself … an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement." Translating the esoteric mumbo jumbo: deconstruction is worthless intellectual masturbation. ...
I must agree with physicist Alan Sokal... when he says that "When one analyzes [post-modernist and deconstruction] writings, one often finds radical-sounding assertions whose meaning is ambiguous and that can be given two alternative readings: one as interesting, radical, and grossly false; the other as boring and trivially true."
-- Massimo Pigliucci
I tell you, it warms the cockles of my goddamn heart when a professional philosopher makes a simple, declarative sentence; so much the better when it's unequivocal, judgmental, and spot-on.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Postmodernism and language
Kelly Gorski is pessimistic about language. I must say, I don't share Kelly's pessimism.
She quotes Derrida approvingly. But Derrida's genius was that he raised complete and utter bullshit to a high art. One must stand in speechless admiration of his skill, but it's a mistake to take him too seriously, at least after abandoning the notion of The One Truth, which he relentlessly and justly mocks.
We can never completely rigorously formalize our notions of truth and bullshit, but that doesn't mean that truth and bullshit lose all meaning, it just means rigorous formalization itself isn't all that and a bag of chips. Language transcends formalization, and it always has; formalization, although of no small value, is a specialized and late-appearing tool.
Look at Auster, for instance. Do nouns represent functions? Often, yes. Is function The One Truth of a noun's meaning? Well, if one takes postmodernism seriously, there is no One Truth about a noun's meaning: Nouns don't capture the "essence" of things, not because they (or we) are somehow deficient, but because there is no "the essence" to be captured. There are only the myriad ways individuals relate to objects, language describes those relationships, thus all language is relative. But relativism doesn't entail total vacuity or meaninglessness.
Half the postmodernist bullshit is a demand for a new absolutism, a new One True Essence, a new "modernism"; such a demand is a betrayal of the pioneering postmodernists who showed that the idea of absolute truth (independent of the speaker's and lister's relationship to the world) is nonsense.
The other half of postmodernist bullshit (and anti-postmodern bullshit) is the idea that relativism entails nihilism, vacuity, meaninglessness. And that's bullshit. Yes, language expresses relations, but I am still me and you are still you (and that guy over there is still him), we're real people, and our relationships to reality are real.
No, I don't know what you mean... but then again, do you yourself even have exactly One True meaning? Which you? The you now or the you in the past that expressed the words? Your whole mind or some of the parts?
Words aren't dead; even if their writer is dead, the words belong in part to the reader, and the words are alive so long as the reader is alive.
She quotes Derrida approvingly. But Derrida's genius was that he raised complete and utter bullshit to a high art. One must stand in speechless admiration of his skill, but it's a mistake to take him too seriously, at least after abandoning the notion of The One Truth, which he relentlessly and justly mocks.
We can never completely rigorously formalize our notions of truth and bullshit, but that doesn't mean that truth and bullshit lose all meaning, it just means rigorous formalization itself isn't all that and a bag of chips. Language transcends formalization, and it always has; formalization, although of no small value, is a specialized and late-appearing tool.
Look at Auster, for instance. Do nouns represent functions? Often, yes. Is function The One Truth of a noun's meaning? Well, if one takes postmodernism seriously, there is no One Truth about a noun's meaning: Nouns don't capture the "essence" of things, not because they (or we) are somehow deficient, but because there is no "the essence" to be captured. There are only the myriad ways individuals relate to objects, language describes those relationships, thus all language is relative. But relativism doesn't entail total vacuity or meaninglessness.
Half the postmodernist bullshit is a demand for a new absolutism, a new One True Essence, a new "modernism"; such a demand is a betrayal of the pioneering postmodernists who showed that the idea of absolute truth (independent of the speaker's and lister's relationship to the world) is nonsense.
The other half of postmodernist bullshit (and anti-postmodern bullshit) is the idea that relativism entails nihilism, vacuity, meaninglessness. And that's bullshit. Yes, language expresses relations, but I am still me and you are still you (and that guy over there is still him), we're real people, and our relationships to reality are real.
No, I don't know what you mean... but then again, do you yourself even have exactly One True meaning? Which you? The you now or the you in the past that expressed the words? Your whole mind or some of the parts?
Words aren't dead; even if their writer is dead, the words belong in part to the reader, and the words are alive so long as the reader is alive.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Modernism, postmodernism and ethics
I'm inspired by Geoff Arnold's recent post to offer my thoughts on modernism, postmodernism and ethics.
Before the development of empirical natural sciences starting* with Galileo, we (the West) were pretty confused about truth, knowledge and ethics. After Galileo, it took us a few hundred years to figure out the scientific method** and get to the Industrial Revolution.
*More or less; the thread of every philosophy can be traced to the earliest writings; it's arguable that empiricism and naturalism start with Thales, one of the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers whose writings have survived.
**You have to look at the scientists and engineers; philosophers didn't catch on until Popper in the mid-20th century.
With the Industrial Revolution, we were confident that we had figured out truth and knowledge. We naturally figured that the truth of ourarbitrary cultural prejudices ethics would fall into place as neatly as would relatively trivial*** scientific problems such as black body radiation or the speed of light. Our ethics were true and the rock-solid proof—or at least good scientific justification—was just around the corner.
***Irony: These two apparently trivial problems demolished not only classical Newtonian physics but also the absolute truth of Euclidean geometry and the notion of synthetic a priori truths.
Human beings are naturally authoritarian-submissive (see Altemeyer, Milgram and Zimbardo). The Enlightenment rejected scriptural and personal authority, embodied in the Bible and the Church, and cast about for a new authority. The authority of science and reason seemed like a likely candidate. It's useful and no more arbitrary than any other scheme to label as "modernism" the position that Enlightenment values were the best (or nearly the best) way of living, by virtue of being objectively, scientifically true.
The first World War put paid to such naive notions; the second put the nails in the coffin. Both world wars were entirely intramural struggles: Russia and Japan got into the act by virtue of Westernizing. (Need I mention that Marx was a German?) Two generations of killing off millions of one's own people, mostly children, pretty much demolished the naive notion that "Enlightenment values" were even close to the apex of ethics.
Modernism, even the modernist notions of the One True Physics, was beset on all sides, including Quantum Mechanics and the problem of the observer, underdetermination, and severe difficulties with ontological reductionism. If we couldn't even come up with One True Physics, we were completely screwed on One True Ethics.
So postmodernism comes on the scene. I separate the school into "good" postmodernism (I consider myself a good postmodernist) and "bullshit" postmodernism. Good postmodernism just weakens our notion of truth: There is no One True Anything, but given some point of view there are truths and falsehoods. Bullshit postmodernism, on the other hand, appears to make truth a matter of pure subjective relativism: Everyone has his or her own truth, just as "valid" as anyone else's.
But we can't just dismiss truth so blithely. If you and I don't mean the same thing at least about something it's hard**** to say that we're communicating. It's arguable that much of bullshit postmodernism is not in any way communicative, but a lot of it actually seems communicative, so there must be some notion of "true for everyone" in there.
****Impossible
As authoritarian-submissive as we are, we still want the authority of some true for everyone, any truth, to underlie our ethical beliefs. It's a very scary thing—even for many atheists—to admit that we're simply on our own regarding ethics. There is no God, no Daddy, not even the Universe, that can determine our choices. We're suspended above the abyss of ethics with no net of truth.
In a sense, bullshit postmodernism is regressive: It brings truth back to the pre-modernist, pre-Enlightenment domain of subjectivity and the power to impose one's subjectivity on others. The postmodernists do a better job than the religious of hiding this personal authoritarianism, but it's still there.
Two styles of argument mark out bullshit postmodernism. The first:
The amusing thing about bullshit postmodernism is that it establishes only the personal authority of the academic humanities community. But these people are utterly inept at actually exercising this authority in any meaningful way. They can dominate and oppress a bunch of eight-year-olds, and pass the occasional stupid law, but otherwise we have little to fear from humanities academics. They might bore us to death, but they won't actually shoot anyone.
The good postmodernist simply recognizes that there are small-tee truths about how people actually are, what they actually approve of, disapprove of, admire, condemn, and desire, and that the laws and customs of a society are expressions of statistical properties of those beliefs. Some of those subjective beliefs, and their expression in law and custom will have positive (e.g. the strongest economy in the world, at least pre-Bush) or negative (a half trillion dollars not only wasted in Iraq but put in the service of appalling human suffering) effects in reality; some will have no direct effect (e.g. Christmas, Eid, Cinco de Mayo).
Before the development of empirical natural sciences starting* with Galileo, we (the West) were pretty confused about truth, knowledge and ethics. After Galileo, it took us a few hundred years to figure out the scientific method** and get to the Industrial Revolution.
*More or less; the thread of every philosophy can be traced to the earliest writings; it's arguable that empiricism and naturalism start with Thales, one of the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers whose writings have survived.
**You have to look at the scientists and engineers; philosophers didn't catch on until Popper in the mid-20th century.
With the Industrial Revolution, we were confident that we had figured out truth and knowledge. We naturally figured that the truth of our
***Irony: These two apparently trivial problems demolished not only classical Newtonian physics but also the absolute truth of Euclidean geometry and the notion of synthetic a priori truths.
Human beings are naturally authoritarian-submissive (see Altemeyer, Milgram and Zimbardo). The Enlightenment rejected scriptural and personal authority, embodied in the Bible and the Church, and cast about for a new authority. The authority of science and reason seemed like a likely candidate. It's useful and no more arbitrary than any other scheme to label as "modernism" the position that Enlightenment values were the best (or nearly the best) way of living, by virtue of being objectively, scientifically true.
The first World War put paid to such naive notions; the second put the nails in the coffin. Both world wars were entirely intramural struggles: Russia and Japan got into the act by virtue of Westernizing. (Need I mention that Marx was a German?) Two generations of killing off millions of one's own people, mostly children, pretty much demolished the naive notion that "Enlightenment values" were even close to the apex of ethics.
Modernism, even the modernist notions of the One True Physics, was beset on all sides, including Quantum Mechanics and the problem of the observer, underdetermination, and severe difficulties with ontological reductionism. If we couldn't even come up with One True Physics, we were completely screwed on One True Ethics.
So postmodernism comes on the scene. I separate the school into "good" postmodernism (I consider myself a good postmodernist) and "bullshit" postmodernism. Good postmodernism just weakens our notion of truth: There is no One True Anything, but given some point of view there are truths and falsehoods. Bullshit postmodernism, on the other hand, appears to make truth a matter of pure subjective relativism: Everyone has his or her own truth, just as "valid" as anyone else's.
But we can't just dismiss truth so blithely. If you and I don't mean the same thing at least about something it's hard**** to say that we're communicating. It's arguable that much of bullshit postmodernism is not in any way communicative, but a lot of it actually seems communicative, so there must be some notion of "true for everyone" in there.
****Impossible
As authoritarian-submissive as we are, we still want the authority of some true for everyone, any truth, to underlie our ethical beliefs. It's a very scary thing—even for many atheists—to admit that we're simply on our own regarding ethics. There is no God, no Daddy, not even the Universe, that can determine our choices. We're suspended above the abyss of ethics with no net of truth.
In a sense, bullshit postmodernism is regressive: It brings truth back to the pre-modernist, pre-Enlightenment domain of subjectivity and the power to impose one's subjectivity on others. The postmodernists do a better job than the religious of hiding this personal authoritarianism, but it's still there.
Two styles of argument mark out bullshit postmodernism. The first:
- All positions are true for the speaker
- My position is true for me
- My position is true
- Your position is different from mine
- Your position is therefore false
- All positions are true for the speaker
- Your position is true for you
- But to assert your position is true is to assert it's true for everyone
- No position is true for anyone
- Therefore your position is false and mine is true
The amusing thing about bullshit postmodernism is that it establishes only the personal authority of the academic humanities community. But these people are utterly inept at actually exercising this authority in any meaningful way. They can dominate and oppress a bunch of eight-year-olds, and pass the occasional stupid law, but otherwise we have little to fear from humanities academics. They might bore us to death, but they won't actually shoot anyone.
The good postmodernist simply recognizes that there are small-tee truths about how people actually are, what they actually approve of, disapprove of, admire, condemn, and desire, and that the laws and customs of a society are expressions of statistical properties of those beliefs. Some of those subjective beliefs, and their expression in law and custom will have positive (e.g. the strongest economy in the world, at least pre-Bush) or negative (a half trillion dollars not only wasted in Iraq but put in the service of appalling human suffering) effects in reality; some will have no direct effect (e.g. Christmas, Eid, Cinco de Mayo).
Friday, August 31, 2007
Doubt, faith, certainty and conviction
I'll mention only briefly the contradictions, logical fallacies and outrageous hypocrisy—not to mention Godwin's Law for the loss—of John Cornwell's slanderous anti-Dawkins diatribe masquerading as an "essay", which The Guardian inexplicably saw fit to publish. We've seen this sort of bullshit a thousand times before, and we know how to spot the errors. We know too that fisking every ludicrous assertion and offense against reason, logic and sensibility will not penetrate a picometer into the faith-addled goo that passes for Cornwell's brain.
I'd rather discuss what Cornwell's title promises (although the essay does not deliver): "The importance of doubt."
Like most words "doubt" has multiple meanings. An equivocation between two of these meanings—lack of conviction and lack of certainty—is the central fallacy underlying much of the judge-nothing (but judgment), criticize-nothing (but criticism), tolerate-everything (but intolerance) bullshit postmodernist anti-atheist backlash. While certainty entails conviction, conviction does not entail certainty.
Cornwell clearly ascribes certainty to Dawkins. He does not in any way rebut or even mention Dawkins' actual reasoning: That Dawkins does not "doubt" (that he's convinced) that theism, superstition and irrationality are bad is by itself not only evidence of absolutist certainty but also of Stalinism and Nazism. (One must wonder why Cornwell's vaunted tolerance and pluralism, apparently higher ethical principles than mere truth, do not extend to Stalin and Hitler.)
To the skeptic doubt is not an attitude of non-conviction. It is rather a tool: It is the process itself of subjecting our beliefs to both logical and sensible scrutiny, and the commitment to accept only those beliefs which pass that scrutiny. We are convinced because we doubt, because we ourselves have subjected the belief to the scrutiny of reason. Doubt in this sense is the expression of uncertainty: One can be certain of a belief only to the extent that evidence—or even logic—is irrelevant to that belief.
The supposed coexistence of faith and doubt—in either sense of the word—is a transparent sham. To have faith in something is, of course, to be convinced of it. But can we, even with all the charity in the world, conclude that some believers do in fact "doubt" in the sense that are not certain of their faith?
I say no.
To be uncertain about a belief entails that you're going to subject that belief to some sort of externalized scrutiny. Naturalists use logic, reason and the evidence of their senses, and all but the most die-hard solipsist accepts that the senses are externalized. But religious believers do not do so. At best, the only "scrutiny" they perform is purely internal: "Do I still believe? Yes!" Absent this externalized scrutiny, even the "uncertain" sense of doubt is not justified.
So what do these doubting theists actually mean by "doubt"? They relegate beliefs about God to the status of mere opinion. In this sense, it's very easy to see the basis of their criticism of Dawkins, et al.: It is ludicrous to assert the truth of any opinion. It's just as ridiculous to assert that it's objectively true that Brussels sprouts are disgusting as that they're tasty.
But relegation to opinion does not employ the meaning of "doubt" in either sense: I'm certain, and thereby convinced, what my opinions actually are. I'm certain that, at least right now, that Brussels sprouts disgust me. I don't doubt the proposition in any sense. (Of course my opinion might change, and I will take the odd bite now and again to find out, but I know with certainty what my opinion is right now.)
And this relegation to opinion is bullshit anyway. Beliefs about God are beliefs about objective truth, about all of reality. To label one's beliefs about God as opinions is to say the beliefs are about nothing other than one's own self. But if that were actually the case, why take umbrage at Dawkins or any other atheist? Among the thousands of atheists I've met or talked with—some of them quite stupid—not a single one has ever asserted that the word "God" has magical evil mojo. Dawkins himself goes out of his way to mention that no atheist objects to "Einstein's God" and the like. (Einstein's word choice, trivially unobjectionable on its own merits, might have increased confusion among the faith-heads. But since the faith-heads seem thoroughly confused already, it's hard to measure any sort of actual increase.)
"God" is a matter of truth, and private "opinions" about the truth never stay private. The relegation of beliefs about the truth to opinion is a dishonest, disingenuous rhetorical tactic to both shield one's own beliefs from critical scrutiny as well as to denounce others' beliefs also without critical scrutiny. It is not only the antithesis of doubt, it is an offense against reason itself.
I'd rather discuss what Cornwell's title promises (although the essay does not deliver): "The importance of doubt."
Like most words "doubt" has multiple meanings. An equivocation between two of these meanings—lack of conviction and lack of certainty—is the central fallacy underlying much of the judge-nothing (but judgment), criticize-nothing (but criticism), tolerate-everything (but intolerance) bullshit postmodernist anti-atheist backlash. While certainty entails conviction, conviction does not entail certainty.
Cornwell clearly ascribes certainty to Dawkins. He does not in any way rebut or even mention Dawkins' actual reasoning: That Dawkins does not "doubt" (that he's convinced) that theism, superstition and irrationality are bad is by itself not only evidence of absolutist certainty but also of Stalinism and Nazism. (One must wonder why Cornwell's vaunted tolerance and pluralism, apparently higher ethical principles than mere truth, do not extend to Stalin and Hitler.)
To the skeptic doubt is not an attitude of non-conviction. It is rather a tool: It is the process itself of subjecting our beliefs to both logical and sensible scrutiny, and the commitment to accept only those beliefs which pass that scrutiny. We are convinced because we doubt, because we ourselves have subjected the belief to the scrutiny of reason. Doubt in this sense is the expression of uncertainty: One can be certain of a belief only to the extent that evidence—or even logic—is irrelevant to that belief.
The supposed coexistence of faith and doubt—in either sense of the word—is a transparent sham. To have faith in something is, of course, to be convinced of it. But can we, even with all the charity in the world, conclude that some believers do in fact "doubt" in the sense that are not certain of their faith?
I say no.
To be uncertain about a belief entails that you're going to subject that belief to some sort of externalized scrutiny. Naturalists use logic, reason and the evidence of their senses, and all but the most die-hard solipsist accepts that the senses are externalized. But religious believers do not do so. At best, the only "scrutiny" they perform is purely internal: "Do I still believe? Yes!" Absent this externalized scrutiny, even the "uncertain" sense of doubt is not justified.
So what do these doubting theists actually mean by "doubt"? They relegate beliefs about God to the status of mere opinion. In this sense, it's very easy to see the basis of their criticism of Dawkins, et al.: It is ludicrous to assert the truth of any opinion. It's just as ridiculous to assert that it's objectively true that Brussels sprouts are disgusting as that they're tasty.
But relegation to opinion does not employ the meaning of "doubt" in either sense: I'm certain, and thereby convinced, what my opinions actually are. I'm certain that, at least right now, that Brussels sprouts disgust me. I don't doubt the proposition in any sense. (Of course my opinion might change, and I will take the odd bite now and again to find out, but I know with certainty what my opinion is right now.)
And this relegation to opinion is bullshit anyway. Beliefs about God are beliefs about objective truth, about all of reality. To label one's beliefs about God as opinions is to say the beliefs are about nothing other than one's own self. But if that were actually the case, why take umbrage at Dawkins or any other atheist? Among the thousands of atheists I've met or talked with—some of them quite stupid—not a single one has ever asserted that the word "God" has magical evil mojo. Dawkins himself goes out of his way to mention that no atheist objects to "Einstein's God" and the like. (Einstein's word choice, trivially unobjectionable on its own merits, might have increased confusion among the faith-heads. But since the faith-heads seem thoroughly confused already, it's hard to measure any sort of actual increase.)
"God" is a matter of truth, and private "opinions" about the truth never stay private. The relegation of beliefs about the truth to opinion is a dishonest, disingenuous rhetorical tactic to both shield one's own beliefs from critical scrutiny as well as to denounce others' beliefs also without critical scrutiny. It is not only the antithesis of doubt, it is an offense against reason itself.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Postmodernism and epistemic nihilism
Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom attribute the flaws of postmodernism to juvenile contrarianism. One of the key concepts that I read from this article is the notion of epistemology relative to ethics: If one supports an ethical principle, then an epistemology is "valid" if it supports that ethical principle.
This anti-epistemology is subtly but fundamentally different from the scientific method. Although the scientific method attempts to construct logical accounts for perceptual evidence, the task is not to justify the perceptual evidence, it is to justify the logical account. Furthermore, the foundation of the scientific method, perceptual evidence, is just that evidence which is in fact accepted by everyone. The postmodernist anti-epistemology acts in the opposite way: A post hoc pseudo-epistemology exists only to justify the ethical beliefs in question, "proving" that we "know" these beliefs are "true"—or at least "true for us".
Actually, these sorts of postmodernists don't even bother with an actual epistemic method at all; they merely denounce any method that doesn't result in justifying whatever ethical belief is at issue as "fascist": As Benson and Stangroom quote Holmes, et al.
The characterization of evidence-basis as "microfascist" seems especially telling. If it is indeed the case that the sine qua non of any epistemic system is to generate principled agreement, then any epistemic system will be "fascist": The whole point of principled agreement is that by accepting the principles, one is inexorably "forced" to agree (in the same sense that one is inexorably forced to accelerate towards the Earth at ~10 m/s²). To denounce an epistemic system because it is principled, and therefore "fascist", is to deny epistemology and endorse epistemic nihilism.
It's interesting to compare and contrast the "leftist" postmodernism that Benson and Stangroom critique with the religious approach to epistemology. From Andrew Sullivan's debate with Sam Harris: He asserts that Harris has "allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode," as if that were a good thing. Couple this with Sullivan's deprecation of religious fundamentalism as unable to "to integrate doubt into faith" and you have exactly the same sort of "leftist" postmodernism from a Christian conservative: Religious faith is a different form of "truth-seeking" which results in truths that are different for everyone.
At least people such as Kenneth are a little more politically sound: He at least tries to establish some sort of method which substantiates a universal ethical stance, instead of embracing Sullivan's ethical relativism.
The really stupid part of the "leftist" postmodernism is that it's utterly unnecessary. Evidence-based science has no primary ethical content at all. Science tells us only what is, not which is the "better" of realistic alternatives. At best, science gives us only secondary ethical content: How best (or better) achieve a preferred result. Even if one wishes, as Benson and Stangroom attribute to Marglin, to "problemati[ze] the binary opposition that Western medicine invokes—not unreasonably, one might think—between disease and health, death and life," and contrast it "unfavourably with the traditional Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox," one does not need to discuss epistemology—at least not scientific epistemology—at all. Science merely tells us that smallpox is caused by a particularbacillus virus; science does not at all tell us whether smallpox is good or bad.
Furthermore, as Benson and Stangroom point out, Marglin's goal is not to discuss the primary ethical value of smallpox itself, but rather to undermine the scientific description of smallpox as caused by abacillus virus, "to challenge science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge which renders obsolete more traditional systems of thought." It's just as "true", Marglin would seem to assert, that smallpox is some sort of divine punishment as it is that smallpox is the result of infection by a mindless bacillus virus.
I'm a postmodernist myself: I strongly disagree with the fundamental program of Modernism that primary ethics—what is "intrinsically" good and bad—is a matter of objective truth: Nothing is intrinsically good or bad; good and bad are fundamentally subjective evaluations. Infection by smallpox is bad because it causes people to suffer; infection by E-coli bacteria in our intestines is good because it causes people to feel good. Objectively, both are infestations of foreign organisms, with little to differentiate the two.
But I think a commitment to scientific truth—always descriptive, never primarily normative—is critical to the fundamental postmodernist program, because, whatever your primary ethical beliefs, science will always tell you how to achieve them.
Furthermore, to the extent that one values social cooperation, this goal is not achieved by blanket tolerance and epistemic nihilism. Blanket tolerance must tolerate ethically intolerance: If all value systems are equally true, then the ethically (and not just descriptively) totalitarian and "fascist" value systems of Islam and extremist Christianity are equally true, and their intolerance must be tolerated. To actually cooperate we must have two things: Agreement about the arena—objective reality—in which we must cooperate, and some basis for coming to ethical compromise, which entails a degree of tolerance and a degree of intolerance.
The only alternative is pure separatism: If we can't agree on how reality is, if we cannot construct ethical compromises, we have no choice but to live separately. But separatism is impossible: We cannot construct ideological or physical walls strong enough to resist human will. Even ignoring the ethical dimensions of genocide, as has been proven time and again, it is impossible in practice to physically exterminate even a tiny subset of those who disagree. We must learn to cooperate, and this is not a normative "must", but a scientific "must": If the human species survives at all, those who do learn to cooperate will eventually dominate those who do not or cannot cooperate.
Louise Lamphere, for example, a past president of the American Anthropological Association, claims that there is an “urgent need” for an “engaged anthropology,” within which moral commitment trumps impersonal scientific concern, and where the communities that anthropologists work with are treated as equal partners in the research process.I submit that this tendency should not be labeled as just "relativism", but rather as epistemological nihilism: If you're committed a priori to believing some proposition, ethical or otherwise, adding post hoc epistemic support for the proposition itself is pointless.
This anti-epistemology is subtly but fundamentally different from the scientific method. Although the scientific method attempts to construct logical accounts for perceptual evidence, the task is not to justify the perceptual evidence, it is to justify the logical account. Furthermore, the foundation of the scientific method, perceptual evidence, is just that evidence which is in fact accepted by everyone. The postmodernist anti-epistemology acts in the opposite way: A post hoc pseudo-epistemology exists only to justify the ethical beliefs in question, "proving" that we "know" these beliefs are "true"—or at least "true for us".
Actually, these sorts of postmodernists don't even bother with an actual epistemic method at all; they merely denounce any method that doesn't result in justifying whatever ethical belief is at issue as "fascist": As Benson and Stangroom quote Holmes, et al.
[T]he objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.justified by Pearson by the
notion that no one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced).Calling some mode of discourse "microfascism" seems clearly—at least in postmodern terms—a hypocritical attempt to silence that discourse.
The characterization of evidence-basis as "microfascist" seems especially telling. If it is indeed the case that the sine qua non of any epistemic system is to generate principled agreement, then any epistemic system will be "fascist": The whole point of principled agreement is that by accepting the principles, one is inexorably "forced" to agree (in the same sense that one is inexorably forced to accelerate towards the Earth at ~10 m/s²). To denounce an epistemic system because it is principled, and therefore "fascist", is to deny epistemology and endorse epistemic nihilism.
It's interesting to compare and contrast the "leftist" postmodernism that Benson and Stangroom critique with the religious approach to epistemology. From Andrew Sullivan's debate with Sam Harris: He asserts that Harris has "allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode," as if that were a good thing. Couple this with Sullivan's deprecation of religious fundamentalism as unable to "to integrate doubt into faith" and you have exactly the same sort of "leftist" postmodernism from a Christian conservative: Religious faith is a different form of "truth-seeking" which results in truths that are different for everyone.
At least people such as Kenneth are a little more politically sound: He at least tries to establish some sort of method which substantiates a universal ethical stance, instead of embracing Sullivan's ethical relativism.
The really stupid part of the "leftist" postmodernism is that it's utterly unnecessary. Evidence-based science has no primary ethical content at all. Science tells us only what is, not which is the "better" of realistic alternatives. At best, science gives us only secondary ethical content: How best (or better) achieve a preferred result. Even if one wishes, as Benson and Stangroom attribute to Marglin, to "problemati[ze] the binary opposition that Western medicine invokes—not unreasonably, one might think—between disease and health, death and life," and contrast it "unfavourably with the traditional Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox," one does not need to discuss epistemology—at least not scientific epistemology—at all. Science merely tells us that smallpox is caused by a particular
Furthermore, as Benson and Stangroom point out, Marglin's goal is not to discuss the primary ethical value of smallpox itself, but rather to undermine the scientific description of smallpox as caused by a
I'm a postmodernist myself: I strongly disagree with the fundamental program of Modernism that primary ethics—what is "intrinsically" good and bad—is a matter of objective truth: Nothing is intrinsically good or bad; good and bad are fundamentally subjective evaluations. Infection by smallpox is bad because it causes people to suffer; infection by E-coli bacteria in our intestines is good because it causes people to feel good. Objectively, both are infestations of foreign organisms, with little to differentiate the two.
But I think a commitment to scientific truth—always descriptive, never primarily normative—is critical to the fundamental postmodernist program, because, whatever your primary ethical beliefs, science will always tell you how to achieve them.
Furthermore, to the extent that one values social cooperation, this goal is not achieved by blanket tolerance and epistemic nihilism. Blanket tolerance must tolerate ethically intolerance: If all value systems are equally true, then the ethically (and not just descriptively) totalitarian and "fascist" value systems of Islam and extremist Christianity are equally true, and their intolerance must be tolerated. To actually cooperate we must have two things: Agreement about the arena—objective reality—in which we must cooperate, and some basis for coming to ethical compromise, which entails a degree of tolerance and a degree of intolerance.
The only alternative is pure separatism: If we can't agree on how reality is, if we cannot construct ethical compromises, we have no choice but to live separately. But separatism is impossible: We cannot construct ideological or physical walls strong enough to resist human will. Even ignoring the ethical dimensions of genocide, as has been proven time and again, it is impossible in practice to physically exterminate even a tiny subset of those who disagree. We must learn to cooperate, and this is not a normative "must", but a scientific "must": If the human species survives at all, those who do learn to cooperate will eventually dominate those who do not or cannot cooperate.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Multiculturalism and sociology
For your reading "pleasure", here are two entirely vapid essays on multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, citizenship and national identity and The many faces of multiculturalism. Neither says much of anything at all, much less anything interesting.
As I've noted before, "relativism" by itself is vacuous. Everything is relative, in some sense, to something else. Just saying that culture is relative to the people who comprise it is not by itself a particularly interesting observation. Which properties of the individuals are relevant to culture? To the extent that culture is anything at all, as some sort of abstraction of those properties, what sort of abstraction is it? What specifically is relative to what? What specifically is invariant with respect to what?
There are no principled, philosophical answers to the above questions. There are no objective normative truths what properties should comprise a culture, what abstraction culture should represent, what should be relative or invariant to what. We must ask, rather, scientific questions: How do people actually construct "culture"? How do people actually want to construct culture? How can an individual make rational decisions about these questions to maximize her self-interest?
We can answer the first question through the sciences of sociology and anthropology in the usual scientific manner: Construct theoretical frameworks consisting of falsifiable hypotheses, test them against reality and, accept them if they're supported by the evidence. Especially with something as complex as culture, there will be many perspectives, many theories, which can fulfill these scientific criteria and give us useful insights; until Hari Seldon appears on the scene, we won't have any sort of grand unified theory of sociology. This sort of approach is "postmodern" in the sense that it privileges a priori neither an overarching metaphysical notion of "culture" nor any particular scientific perspective. It is still scientific, though, in that only those perspectives with evidentiary meaning and support have any currency—thus excluding the trivial vacuity of the linked articles on methodological, not metaphysical, grounds.
I'll leave most of the sociology to professional sociologists, but one meta-theoretical perspective is glaringly obvious: Culture is, like personality, normatively self-descriptive. Just as "who I myself should be" is a matter of absolute personal privilege, "what culture X should be" is a matter of absolute privilege of the members of that culture.
On the other hand, actuality is a matter of real scientific truth: "Who I myself actually am" (as opposed to who I should be) is a matter of real[1] truth and can be empirically determined. It should be noted that an abstract quantity, "Who I am" has different answers (i.e. is relative to) depending on how the question is specifically constructed. One can look philosophically at this sort of scientific "relativism" either as perspective relativism or as property pluralism: One can get scientifically true views from different perspectives, or one can scientifically determine different properties. The meaning of the perspective or property relative to the way the scientific question is framed.
In precisely the same way, what a culture is is a matter of real, empirically determinable truth, and relative to the sort of scientific question asked.
Since the normative character of an individual or a culture is self-defined, one must, fundamentally, ask questions of the individual himself or the members of the culture themselves. One can collect evidence from outside the individual and culture, but the evidence must causally connect with the individual or members to be about that individual or culture. You cannot tell much of anything about me, for instance, by examining the character of my wife.
On the other hand, since all the members comprise a culture, no subset of a culture can, by itself, authoritatively define that culture. One cannot, for instance, determine what Islam is by repeating what one Imam says about Islam: You can determine only what Islam means to that particular person. Since many members comprise a culture, only statistical abstractions will have any meaning.
I'll leave the rest of the general sociology to the professionals, and repeat my two philosophical exhortations: First, don't get hung up on a priori metaphysics, just ask interesting questions about reality. Second, make sure you're asking scientifically meaningful questions, i.e. questions that are empirically falsifiable. It has been our exclusive experience that when you ask enough scientifically meaningful questions, coherent theoretical frameworks will emerge from the answers.
[1] Constructing "real" as the union of the subjective (minded) and the objective (non-minded).
As I've noted before, "relativism" by itself is vacuous. Everything is relative, in some sense, to something else. Just saying that culture is relative to the people who comprise it is not by itself a particularly interesting observation. Which properties of the individuals are relevant to culture? To the extent that culture is anything at all, as some sort of abstraction of those properties, what sort of abstraction is it? What specifically is relative to what? What specifically is invariant with respect to what?
There are no principled, philosophical answers to the above questions. There are no objective normative truths what properties should comprise a culture, what abstraction culture should represent, what should be relative or invariant to what. We must ask, rather, scientific questions: How do people actually construct "culture"? How do people actually want to construct culture? How can an individual make rational decisions about these questions to maximize her self-interest?
We can answer the first question through the sciences of sociology and anthropology in the usual scientific manner: Construct theoretical frameworks consisting of falsifiable hypotheses, test them against reality and, accept them if they're supported by the evidence. Especially with something as complex as culture, there will be many perspectives, many theories, which can fulfill these scientific criteria and give us useful insights; until Hari Seldon appears on the scene, we won't have any sort of grand unified theory of sociology. This sort of approach is "postmodern" in the sense that it privileges a priori neither an overarching metaphysical notion of "culture" nor any particular scientific perspective. It is still scientific, though, in that only those perspectives with evidentiary meaning and support have any currency—thus excluding the trivial vacuity of the linked articles on methodological, not metaphysical, grounds.
I'll leave most of the sociology to professional sociologists, but one meta-theoretical perspective is glaringly obvious: Culture is, like personality, normatively self-descriptive. Just as "who I myself should be" is a matter of absolute personal privilege, "what culture X should be" is a matter of absolute privilege of the members of that culture.
On the other hand, actuality is a matter of real scientific truth: "Who I myself actually am" (as opposed to who I should be) is a matter of real[1] truth and can be empirically determined. It should be noted that an abstract quantity, "Who I am" has different answers (i.e. is relative to) depending on how the question is specifically constructed. One can look philosophically at this sort of scientific "relativism" either as perspective relativism or as property pluralism: One can get scientifically true views from different perspectives, or one can scientifically determine different properties. The meaning of the perspective or property relative to the way the scientific question is framed.
In precisely the same way, what a culture is is a matter of real, empirically determinable truth, and relative to the sort of scientific question asked.
Since the normative character of an individual or a culture is self-defined, one must, fundamentally, ask questions of the individual himself or the members of the culture themselves. One can collect evidence from outside the individual and culture, but the evidence must causally connect with the individual or members to be about that individual or culture. You cannot tell much of anything about me, for instance, by examining the character of my wife.
On the other hand, since all the members comprise a culture, no subset of a culture can, by itself, authoritatively define that culture. One cannot, for instance, determine what Islam is by repeating what one Imam says about Islam: You can determine only what Islam means to that particular person. Since many members comprise a culture, only statistical abstractions will have any meaning.
I'll leave the rest of the general sociology to the professionals, and repeat my two philosophical exhortations: First, don't get hung up on a priori metaphysics, just ask interesting questions about reality. Second, make sure you're asking scientifically meaningful questions, i.e. questions that are empirically falsifiable. It has been our exclusive experience that when you ask enough scientifically meaningful questions, coherent theoretical frameworks will emerge from the answers.
[1] Constructing "real" as the union of the subjective (minded) and the objective (non-minded).
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Feminism and Postmodernism
Renegade Evolution offers us a righteous rant against the failings of contemporary feminism.
(This essay is turning out to be a bit rambling, more of a brain dump of some of things I'm thinking about rather than a well-structured essay making and supporting an unambiguous point, so please bear with me. Or don't. ::shrugs:: It's a blog: Deal with it.)
As I'm beginning to study Postmodernist philosophy I'm seeing the same sort of problems there that RenEv identifies with feminism, and I suspect the problems with Postmodernism might be related to (if not identical with) what Ren's talking about with Feminism.
Postmodernist philosophy (as I see it) started off as a revolt against the Modernist idea of authority: That patriarchal white European Ancient-Greek-derived capitalistic Christian Western Civilization[see update] was by definition The One Right Way To Live. That to even question the authority of PWEAGDCCWC was heresy, blasphemy, and rank stupidity (for the last gasp of this sort of Modernist authoritarianism, see the introduction to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind).
I see this sort of revolution against the arbitrary authoritarianism of PWEAGDCCWC to be a Very Good Thing. But somehow, the way was lost. In justly attacking the notion of The One Right Way To Live—i.e. The Truth-with-a-capital-Tee—postmodernist philosophers started to attack the notion of prosaic small-tee truth itself. Instead of attacking the blatant falsity and fallacy of PWEAGDCCWC, the PoMos started asserting that there was no such thing as "truth", that anything anyone said was just as "true" as anything else.
But you can't so easily dispense with the notion of "truth": Small-tee truth is extremely—even fundamentally— entrenched in our notions about what it means to speak and use language.
If the PoMos were really serious about this position, the obvious logical consequence is that it is literally the case that "goo goo ga ga" is just as "truthful" (in the sense that turtles and rocks fly equally well) as "rocks fall when you drop them." That all language reduces to nothing but the clenched fist (dominance) and the bared throat (submission). If this attitude towards truth were accurate, then everyone might as well just stop speaking completely and start shooting.
Philosophers, whose stock in trade are words and language, are of course never going to take this nihilistic metaphysic to its obvious logical conclusion. The only alternative is to bury their commitment to truth in layers of philosophical bullshit. (And I would argue that learning how to bury one's substantive position in layers of bullshit is (with, of course, a few exceptions) the primary goal of contemporary philosophical education.)
The primary technique of this sort of bullshit is to never ever actually talk about some substantive position, or directly discuss the merits or drawbacks of that position. Rather, one talks about who does and does not have the right to speak about that position. How can a man discuss women's rights? How can a white person discuss racial equality? How can a straight guy discuss gay rights? The notion seem preposterous.
Bullshit, especially the really good bullshit (and there's no doubt in my mind that Postmodernist bullshit is of premier quality), always rests on a half-truth. Of course it's true that I, a straight white Western male, can never know experientially what it is to be a woman, or black, or gay, or colonized. I have no standing to talk about what those things are, because I'm not.
While I'm always interested in learning about what it is to be something I'm not, that's not the only purpose of talking. We can talk about objective truth, and—more to the immediate point—we can talk about our shared social constructs. Our social mores, our laws, our language, these are all things we share, that we have to share, that we have to work out together. Even an authoritarian has to persuade or force me to submit; even authoritarianism cannot be established unilaterally.
Postmodernism entails a number of delicious ironies. By attacking truth itself, but still speaking, any writer must him- or herself have a hidden notion of truth—the very antithesis of deconstruction, which (when valid and interesting) aims at uncovering hidden notions of truth, and, more importantly, enthymemes (unspoken assumptions, often unjustified). Even more ironic is that, by attacking authority, writers often set themselves or their class or category as authorities. The discussion just moves from establishing truth about the subject at hand to demanding the authority to establish truth, to demanding the authority to declare who has the right to speak.
One thing I very strongly suspect is rare in any of the academic humanities is any sort of attack on the authority of academic credentials and the academic establishment. I strongly doubt that any person who has spent nearly a decade obtaining a Ph.D. is ever going to strongly argue that their doctorate is a meaningless social construct which gives them no more authority than an ordinary person.[1] Hence this blog, written by a high-school dropout with an average IQ[2], just by existing is a fiercely Postmodernist critique on academic authority.
One really delicious irony is that academia does not have the sort of raw, propagandistic power that its members think they have. By asserting their unquestionable authority, they merely marginalize themselves. Whatever persuasive power academia ever had—outside of putting a veneer of learned babble on established political authority—has been the academic commitment to truth. To the degree that any academic appears to renounce truth, they undermine the only claim to authority they ever really had.
As far as I know, no one who actually gets anything done in liberal/progressive politics really gives the smallest shit about what some Ph.D. in Women's Studies thinks about the Patriarchy. We're out there in the streets trying to elect Democratic politicians so they can appoint Supreme Court justices who will (with all good luck) stop gutting Roe v. Wade.
I have some observations that might hearten RenEv. The first is that Feminism is just as subject to Sturgeon's Law as anything else: 90% of Feminism is crap. It's still important to talk about what specifically is and is not crap, but the fact of the pervasive crappiness is not itself a cause for concern.
As to what to do, about feminism, and about anything else, I can offer only e. e. cummings' advice:
Update: The tens of millions of people murdered, and the unspeakable suffering of scores of millions more, over precisely which version of patriarchal white European Ancient-Greek-derived capitalistic Christian Western Civilization should prevail is a pretty strong argument that philosophical Modernism is about as completely full of shit as any ideology can possibly be.
[1] I don't want to criticize academic credentials in the substantive fields, especially science and engineering, as well as the humanities, such as history, which still have some degree of commitment to scientific truth. Since people in these fields actually do something, there is an enormous amount of background required to do any sort of productive work.
[2] Some people have accused me of being very smart; I believe they're incorrect. I've met people who really are very smart, and I'm not one of them. I've tested my IQ; it's a little above average, but well within the bounds of statistical normality. My theory is that I seem smart because I have a tolerably good memory, but more importantly, because I have a finely honed bullshit detector, and I'm completely uninterested in bullshitting anyone, especially myself. Once you learn to smell bullshit, when you can sense what's false before detailed analysis, it makes it so much easier to analyze, identify and criticize the source of the bullshit.
It is a sad commentary on our world when sincerity and honesty, especially self-honesty, is mistaken for raw intelligence. You don't need to be a genius to be honest.
(This essay is turning out to be a bit rambling, more of a brain dump of some of things I'm thinking about rather than a well-structured essay making and supporting an unambiguous point, so please bear with me. Or don't. ::shrugs:: It's a blog: Deal with it.)
As I'm beginning to study Postmodernist philosophy I'm seeing the same sort of problems there that RenEv identifies with feminism, and I suspect the problems with Postmodernism might be related to (if not identical with) what Ren's talking about with Feminism.
Postmodernist philosophy (as I see it) started off as a revolt against the Modernist idea of authority: That patriarchal white European Ancient-Greek-derived capitalistic Christian Western Civilization[see update] was by definition The One Right Way To Live. That to even question the authority of PWEAGDCCWC was heresy, blasphemy, and rank stupidity (for the last gasp of this sort of Modernist authoritarianism, see the introduction to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind).
I see this sort of revolution against the arbitrary authoritarianism of PWEAGDCCWC to be a Very Good Thing. But somehow, the way was lost. In justly attacking the notion of The One Right Way To Live—i.e. The Truth-with-a-capital-Tee—postmodernist philosophers started to attack the notion of prosaic small-tee truth itself. Instead of attacking the blatant falsity and fallacy of PWEAGDCCWC, the PoMos started asserting that there was no such thing as "truth", that anything anyone said was just as "true" as anything else.
But you can't so easily dispense with the notion of "truth": Small-tee truth is extremely—even fundamentally— entrenched in our notions about what it means to speak and use language.
If the PoMos were really serious about this position, the obvious logical consequence is that it is literally the case that "goo goo ga ga" is just as "truthful" (in the sense that turtles and rocks fly equally well) as "rocks fall when you drop them." That all language reduces to nothing but the clenched fist (dominance) and the bared throat (submission). If this attitude towards truth were accurate, then everyone might as well just stop speaking completely and start shooting.
Philosophers, whose stock in trade are words and language, are of course never going to take this nihilistic metaphysic to its obvious logical conclusion. The only alternative is to bury their commitment to truth in layers of philosophical bullshit. (And I would argue that learning how to bury one's substantive position in layers of bullshit is (with, of course, a few exceptions) the primary goal of contemporary philosophical education.)
The primary technique of this sort of bullshit is to never ever actually talk about some substantive position, or directly discuss the merits or drawbacks of that position. Rather, one talks about who does and does not have the right to speak about that position. How can a man discuss women's rights? How can a white person discuss racial equality? How can a straight guy discuss gay rights? The notion seem preposterous.
Bullshit, especially the really good bullshit (and there's no doubt in my mind that Postmodernist bullshit is of premier quality), always rests on a half-truth. Of course it's true that I, a straight white Western male, can never know experientially what it is to be a woman, or black, or gay, or colonized. I have no standing to talk about what those things are, because I'm not.
While I'm always interested in learning about what it is to be something I'm not, that's not the only purpose of talking. We can talk about objective truth, and—more to the immediate point—we can talk about our shared social constructs. Our social mores, our laws, our language, these are all things we share, that we have to share, that we have to work out together. Even an authoritarian has to persuade or force me to submit; even authoritarianism cannot be established unilaterally.
Postmodernism entails a number of delicious ironies. By attacking truth itself, but still speaking, any writer must him- or herself have a hidden notion of truth—the very antithesis of deconstruction, which (when valid and interesting) aims at uncovering hidden notions of truth, and, more importantly, enthymemes (unspoken assumptions, often unjustified). Even more ironic is that, by attacking authority, writers often set themselves or their class or category as authorities. The discussion just moves from establishing truth about the subject at hand to demanding the authority to establish truth, to demanding the authority to declare who has the right to speak.
One thing I very strongly suspect is rare in any of the academic humanities is any sort of attack on the authority of academic credentials and the academic establishment. I strongly doubt that any person who has spent nearly a decade obtaining a Ph.D. is ever going to strongly argue that their doctorate is a meaningless social construct which gives them no more authority than an ordinary person.[1] Hence this blog, written by a high-school dropout with an average IQ[2], just by existing is a fiercely Postmodernist critique on academic authority.
One really delicious irony is that academia does not have the sort of raw, propagandistic power that its members think they have. By asserting their unquestionable authority, they merely marginalize themselves. Whatever persuasive power academia ever had—outside of putting a veneer of learned babble on established political authority—has been the academic commitment to truth. To the degree that any academic appears to renounce truth, they undermine the only claim to authority they ever really had.
As far as I know, no one who actually gets anything done in liberal/progressive politics really gives the smallest shit about what some Ph.D. in Women's Studies thinks about the Patriarchy. We're out there in the streets trying to elect Democratic politicians so they can appoint Supreme Court justices who will (with all good luck) stop gutting Roe v. Wade.
I have some observations that might hearten RenEv. The first is that Feminism is just as subject to Sturgeon's Law as anything else: 90% of Feminism is crap. It's still important to talk about what specifically is and is not crap, but the fact of the pervasive crappiness is not itself a cause for concern.
As to what to do, about feminism, and about anything else, I can offer only e. e. cummings' advice:
to be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.Not only the hardest battle, but, at the end of the day, the only one worth fighting.
Update: The tens of millions of people murdered, and the unspeakable suffering of scores of millions more, over precisely which version of patriarchal white European Ancient-Greek-derived capitalistic Christian Western Civilization should prevail is a pretty strong argument that philosophical Modernism is about as completely full of shit as any ideology can possibly be.
[1] I don't want to criticize academic credentials in the substantive fields, especially science and engineering, as well as the humanities, such as history, which still have some degree of commitment to scientific truth. Since people in these fields actually do something, there is an enormous amount of background required to do any sort of productive work.
[2] Some people have accused me of being very smart; I believe they're incorrect. I've met people who really are very smart, and I'm not one of them. I've tested my IQ; it's a little above average, but well within the bounds of statistical normality. My theory is that I seem smart because I have a tolerably good memory, but more importantly, because I have a finely honed bullshit detector, and I'm completely uninterested in bullshitting anyone, especially myself. Once you learn to smell bullshit, when you can sense what's false before detailed analysis, it makes it so much easier to analyze, identify and criticize the source of the bullshit.
It is a sad commentary on our world when sincerity and honesty, especially self-honesty, is mistaken for raw intelligence. You don't need to be a genius to be honest.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
Quote of the Day
It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. … And it is the certitude of his infallible doctrine that renders the true believer impervious to the uncertainties, surprises and the unpleasant realities of the world around him.
Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from the self and the world as it is. …
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound or sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the one and only truth. …
It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. …
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting, and scholastic tortuousness.
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)
(h/t to The Mahablog)
Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from the self and the world as it is. …
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound or sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the one and only truth. …
It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. …
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting, and scholastic tortuousness.
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)
(h/t to The Mahablog)
Friday, March 16, 2007
Keeping Our Demons at Bay
Keeping Our Demons at Bay:
Articles like this are one reason why I think Postmodernism really matters.
I suspect too that our own soldiers are being just as "othered", just as marginalized, as the Iraqi people. They are the "troops", not individual human beings, honored not for their individuality but for the exact opposite: their willingness to abandon everything individual and human, and then tossed aside when they are no longer useful.
We should not have been in Vietnam. The Vietnamese didn’t want us there. That’s why we lost the war. We should not be in Iraq. The Iraqis don’t want us there. That’s why we lost the war.
...
That’s not to say that the Iraqis aren’t there [in David Finkel’s "hagiography" of battalion commander Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich], in every line of text, in every paragraph, in every turn of phrase. They are there ... as the backdrop on the stage, as the amorphous danger against which these young men must undergo their rite of passage into the death-cult of imperial masculinity. And because this othering of the Iraqis is so consistent, so perfectly fitted to existing cultural and entertainment conventions, there is little doubt that Finkel used the Iraqis in exactly this way —as a racialized reduction, as expendable extras on his set.
For this reason, I accuse. David Finkel, no less so than Judith Miller during her apprenticeship under Ahmad Chalabi, is not merely a journalist. He has become part of the war machine. There is blood on his hands, and just as with Judith Miller, Finkel will have to bear that Macbethian stain.
Articles like this are one reason why I think Postmodernism really matters.
I suspect too that our own soldiers are being just as "othered", just as marginalized, as the Iraqi people. They are the "troops", not individual human beings, honored not for their individuality but for the exact opposite: their willingness to abandon everything individual and human, and then tossed aside when they are no longer useful.
Phil on Radical Materialism
Phil weighs in on Radical Materialism, "a significant—perhaps neglected—aspect of postmodernism."
Thursday, March 15, 2007
What is Postmodernism?
Since Postmodernism is an emerging topic here at The Barefoot Bum, I thought I would contribute a definition of 'postmodern' from the The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995):
While there are many philosophical strands that might be considered "postmodern", we can reasonably ask what the heart of postmodernism is -- what makes a thinker a true-blue, full-blooded postmodernist? I understand postmodernism to be primarily a critical reaction to Enlightenment values, and its esteem for Reason as an impartial judge of facts. Postmodernists reject the optimistic view that the development of science and the cultivation of Reason improves human life, and rejects the notion of sustained progress towards an objective truth about the world through rational and scientific thinking.
This is a fine opportunity to begin a short series here at The Barefoot Bum on various postmodernist thinkers. I will try to give a fair and accurate overview of what I take to be their most important postmodern views -- perhaps you, dear reader, can make sense of the whirlwind of thought dubbed 'postmodernism'.
[Timmo is the proprietor of The Remarks of a Fish. This essay is original to The Barefoot Bum. --ed.]
Postmodern philosophy is therefore usefully regarded as a complex cluster concept that includes the following elements: an anti-(or post-) epistemological standpoint; anti-essentialism; antirealism; anti-foundationalism; opposition to transcendental arguments and transcendental standpoints; rejection of the picture of knowledge as accurate representation; rejection of truth as correspondence to reality; rejection of the very idea of canonical descriptions; rejection of final vocabularies, i.e., rejection of principles, distinctions, and categories that are thought to be unconditionally binding for all times, persons, and places; and a suspicion of metanarratives of the sort perhaps best illustrated by dialectical materialism... one often finds the following themes: a critique of the neutrality and sovereignty of reason -- included insistence on its pervasively gendered, historical, and ethnocentric character; a conception of the social construction of word-world mappings; a tendency to embrace historicism; a critique of any ultimate contrast between epistemology and sociology of knowledge; dissolution of an autonomous subject; insistence on the merely historical status of divisions of labor in knowledge acquisition and production; an ambivalence about the Enlightenment and its ideology.To be sure, this is a very large, technical rubric for what might be considered 'postmodern'. Many different thinkers might be thought to march under the banner of postmodernism: Dewey, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, Quine, Heidegger, Saussure, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Nussbaum. Thus, under this definition, one can be postmodern in some ways, but not in others. I, for example, am skeptical with Quine about foundationalism as an adequate account of how we can be justified in our beliefs, but I am not in the least ambivalent about Reason or the Enlightenment.
While there are many philosophical strands that might be considered "postmodern", we can reasonably ask what the heart of postmodernism is -- what makes a thinker a true-blue, full-blooded postmodernist? I understand postmodernism to be primarily a critical reaction to Enlightenment values, and its esteem for Reason as an impartial judge of facts. Postmodernists reject the optimistic view that the development of science and the cultivation of Reason improves human life, and rejects the notion of sustained progress towards an objective truth about the world through rational and scientific thinking.
This is a fine opportunity to begin a short series here at The Barefoot Bum on various postmodernist thinkers. I will try to give a fair and accurate overview of what I take to be their most important postmodern views -- perhaps you, dear reader, can make sense of the whirlwind of thought dubbed 'postmodernism'.
[Timmo is the proprietor of The Remarks of a Fish. This essay is original to The Barefoot Bum. --ed.]
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Postmodernism
In no small part due to Phil Thrift's presentation on the Postmodern philosophy of Iranian mathematician Mohammad Sal Moslehian, I'm becoming more interested in Postmodernism as a genre. I haven't yet studied the genre extensively, but I have a few thoughts going in.
First, I'm confident that 90% of Postmodernist philosophy is crap. Not because I have anything against Postmodernism (quite the contrary), or even because I've read a ton of Postmodernist philosophy (which I haven't), or even that I've done some sort of statistical sampling. I am, however, a firm believer in Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. The corollary is of course: "The existence of immense quantities of trash in [Postmodernist philosophy] is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere."
It seems fairly obvious to me that in essence, just as Modernism was an attempt to justify the authority of our cultural, social, and philosophical systems, Postmodernism represents a general revolt against every kind of authority. "What're you rebelling against, Johnny?" "Whaddya got?"
Many--perhaps even most--of these rebellions are going to miss the mark. Some due to the incompetence of the attack, a few due to the solidity of the authority itself.
Raised in liberal, individualistic politics, outside of any organized religion, and proudly nurturing a lifelong addiction to science fiction, I'm a Postmodernist in this skeptical and rebellious sense to my very genes. I see most authority simply crumble if even the possibility of skepticism is admitted. And these authorities should crumble. What authority I do acknowledge--the authority of the scientific method, for instance--is not due to any dogmatism, but rather because I can see that these few authorities are strengthened by skeptical challenge.
First, I'm confident that 90% of Postmodernist philosophy is crap. Not because I have anything against Postmodernism (quite the contrary), or even because I've read a ton of Postmodernist philosophy (which I haven't), or even that I've done some sort of statistical sampling. I am, however, a firm believer in Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. The corollary is of course: "The existence of immense quantities of trash in [Postmodernist philosophy] is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere."
It seems fairly obvious to me that in essence, just as Modernism was an attempt to justify the authority of our cultural, social, and philosophical systems, Postmodernism represents a general revolt against every kind of authority. "What're you rebelling against, Johnny?" "Whaddya got?"
Many--perhaps even most--of these rebellions are going to miss the mark. Some due to the incompetence of the attack, a few due to the solidity of the authority itself.
Raised in liberal, individualistic politics, outside of any organized religion, and proudly nurturing a lifelong addiction to science fiction, I'm a Postmodernist in this skeptical and rebellious sense to my very genes. I see most authority simply crumble if even the possibility of skepticism is admitted. And these authorities should crumble. What authority I do acknowledge--the authority of the scientific method, for instance--is not due to any dogmatism, but rather because I can see that these few authorities are strengthened by skeptical challenge.
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