Uncertain Uncertainty ("Postmodernism on its way tothe ashheap of history")

National Review Online ^ | 4/4/02 | Dave Kopel

[denydenydeny]

Indexing.

[Grampa Dave]

The best part of this oped is his conclusion!

Too much verbiage and history for most people.

Here is the meat of this long tome:

George Bush is our first post-postmodern president. He can't tell Heisenberg from Heidegger but, unlike them, he can tell right from wrong:

It is always and everywhere wrong to target and kill the innocent. It is always and everywhere wrong to be cruel and hateful, to enslave and oppress. It is always and everywhere right to be kind and just, to protect the lives of others, and to lay down your life for a friend.

Postmodernism is on its way to the ash heap of history.

[alcuin]

Good post.

[KantianBurke]

good piece but I got a heachache from reading all of it

[Exnihilo]

Indeed, "there is no truth, only power," summarizes Heisenberg's theory of physics and its application to moral philosophy.

I can't believe these people who we call "intellectuals" are so effing stupid! This statement falls apart upon inspection.

If "there is no truth, only power", then the statement "there is no truth, only power" is not, and cannot be true. It's self-refuting.

The author of this article could have saved himself and us a lot of time by pointing out this obvious fact of post-modernist "rationality".

[Doctor Stochastic]

Einsten never worked on the Manhattan Project. The author is a bit loose with his history.

Sokal's website has his Social Text article. It's worth reading. Anyone with any scientifice knowledge can see it's a joke from the beginning. (The editors of Social Text didn't even send the article to a scientist for peer-review.)

[Restorer]

I have always wondered at the ability of the deconstructionists to except their own works from their criticism of the validity of knowledge.

[CatoRenasci]

The author is also a little fast and loose on the Heisenberg/Bohr dispute. There was a rather nuanced article about it in the left-wing New York Review of Books a couple of issues ago that was fascinating.

[cornelis]

When fast and loose Kopel gets paid. Dr. Johnson advised that whenever you write a passage with admirable and intoxicating flair, strike it.

[cornelis]

Architect Philip Johnson notes that a core value of postmodernism is "a loathing for 'bourgeois values' (a.k.a. truth, beauty, and goodness)."

LOL. I'll be post-modern: "Americans who care for truth, beauty and goodness have no idea what they are."

[ffusco]

johnson was a pretty mediocre architect BTW He ripped off, copied and dumbed down whatever was fashionable throughout his career. Anyone see the ATT building in NY( the one w/ the Chippendale top) It is awful, sentimental garbage.

[reflecting]

Thanks, a good read.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks, I just posted the Readers Digest Condensed Version of an over long oped.

[Pietro]

"johnson was a pretty mediocre architect"

I agree w/ that assesment, in fact Johnson called himself a whore. OTOH, the AT&T bldg. did break the tyrany of the box, even if it is a cliche, and his PPG Place in Pittsburgh is a beautiful bldg. Bear in mind that's a "homer" opinion from someone that has worked in the PPG bldg.

[untenured]

He lavished praise on Hitler in Heidegger's inaugural speech as Rektorat at the University of Frieburg, explaining that the Fuhrer offered Germany the opportunity to reject modern industrial capitalism, and to recover its true, authentic culture.

... Heidegger called human existence Dasein ("being-there"), meaning that existence was controlled by one's culture. Since an individual had no control over "thrown-ness" (geworfen — what culture he was born into), there is nothing fundamentally unique about an individual, nor is there anything which all humans have in common. This turned out to be a powerful philosophical foundation for Nazism: Individual Germans had no existence outside their German culture and, having no common traits with humanity, Germans should have no qualms about subjugating other people.

Interesting. I teach a class on globalization. For about a year I have been making the argument that cultural/tribal determinism is, in the words of Mario Vargas Llosa, a "reductionist" and "dehumanizing" way of garroting human dignity. That philosophy undergirds the cultural sovereignty wing of the anti-globalization movement which, at its core, claims that some mullah, caudillo, highbrow intellectual or Minister of State Security knows far better than you how you should live your life.

[the Wayne]

I'm not an expert on postmodernism, but I think the author is making some mistaken assumptions about it. He seems to think that it's equivalent to anti-Americanism and that it was created by yanking a scientific theory and building a philosophy on it.

Maybe. But modernism is itself a philosophy built on a pseudo-scientific foundation. One of the reasons that modernism is collapsing is that it is unable to question itself because it's "scientific" and therefore cannot be falsified. And it has become the religion of the anti-religious.

Who knows, postmodernism may be destined for the ash heap, but modernism is itself a hubris-filled blip in history.

[reflecting]

Do you remember the moment when you understood that the philosophical constructs of men, whose names you did not know, ruled the minds that determined your earthly destiny?

[Grampa Dave]

My wakeup call re your question happened during the Cuban Crisis in October 1962.

However, I knew who most of the players were then.

Now that I'm older and more cynical, I just follow the wisdom of a very wise black conservative friend. His words of advice when you see something that strike you as funny or different in the world, just follow the money if you can find the trail. He says to forget the fancy words and so called doctrine, just find the money trail, and you will have the reality of the verbage.

So I'm like President Bush, I can't tell Heisenberg from Heidegger but, unlike them, I can tell right from wrong!

Then I want to know who has been financing the evil wrong doers to follow the money trail for reality not theory.

[dheretic]

George Bush is our first post-postmodern president. He can't tell Heisenberg from Heidegger but, unlike them, he can tell right from wrong: It is always and everywhere wrong to target and kill the innocent. It is always and everywhere wrong to be cruel and hateful, to enslave and oppress. It is always and everywhere right to be kind and just, to protect the lives of others, and to lay down your life for a friend.

Unless you happen to be a jewish majority in a strip of land that accounts for 1% of a region controlled by genocidal despots and thugs with a superpower breething down your neck telling you that you shouldn't defend yourself by proactively taking out centers of terrorism while it does the exact same thing in another part of the world.