Posted on 04/04/2002 9:17:09 AM PST by denydenydeny
When Michael Frayn's award-winning play, Copenhagen, came out, it seemed too good to be true. Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who identified the "Uncertainty Principle" in quantum physics (in which full knowledge is under some circumstances impossible to attain) might or might not have tried to subvert Nazi Germany's nuclear-weapons program. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the most famous idea of modern physics, had become a cornerstone of postmodern thinking, in which the possibility of objective truth is denied; so it was very fitting to see a postmodern play in which even the moral principles of the Uncertainty Principle's creator are themselves uncertain.
Truth, however, turns out to be more stubborn than the postmodernists wish. New evidence has emerged that Heisenberg was not opposed to the Nazis. Moreover, new research suggests that much of what Heisenberg taught about physics may be wrong, and that reality is not so indefinite as the postmodernists want to believe.
Along with Heisenberg, the great founder of quantum mechanics was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, was also a leading character in the play Copenhagen; Bohr died in 1962, Heisenberg in 1976. Recently revealed letters from Bohr's archive show that Heisenberg didn't sabotage the German nuclear effort at all, despite his post-war claims to have done so. According to one letter, which Bohr wrote after the war, but never sent to Heisenberg: "you…expressed your definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of cooperation…you spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons…." According to Bohr, Heisenberg had a "certain conviction of a German victory and confidence in what it would bring."
Heisenberg's accommodating relationship with Nazism is hardly unique among the great thinkers of postmodernism. Martin Heidegger, the most influential philosopher of the 20th century and the founder of postmodernism, adored Nazism. 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. National Socialism, Heidegger explained, was true Being.
Likewise reinforcing Nazism was Heidegger's insistence that authentic living was impossible unless one had rejected the hope of an immortal soul (and thus rejected the possibility of facing a Final Judgment), and instead grappled with inevitability of "Being-toward-Death."
Among Heidegger's admirers was literary critic Paul de Man, who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium, penning literary essays for a pro-Nazi newspaper in which he condemned Jews for their supposed vulgarity, and proposed deportation as a solution to the "Jewish problem." After the war, de Man moved to Yale, where he founded the "Yale School" of deconstructionist literary criticism; beginning at Yale, de Man's theories spread throughout American universities, thereby politicizing humanities and literature departments with radical anti-Westernism and anti-rationalism.
A litany of the stars of post-modernism is mostly a litany for admirers of some form of totalitarianism. Although the Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre participated in the French Underground during World War II, he defended Stalinism and Maoism, even the Cultural Revolution. Sartre wrote the introduction to Marxist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth (published in 1961, but still enormously influential on campuses today). The book describes the Algerian anti-colonial war against France, and extols the purifying force of violence, especially racial terrorism of natives against the distinct "species" of whites and their native allies. Fanon inspired murderous racists and hatemongers around the world, including the Black Panthers.
The intellectual founder of the 1979 Iranian revolution was Ali Shariat, who studied at the Sorbonne, and liked Fanon and Sartre so much that he translated them into Farsi. Another deconstructionist disciple of Heidegger's, Michel Foucault, swooned that Ayotollah Khomeini was "a kind of mystic saint." Foucault welcomed the Ayatollah's "political spirituality" which would take Iran back to its natural roots, overthrowing the modernizing forces of global capitalism. In this regard, the Ayatollah's program for Iran was quite similar to Hitler's program for Germany.
Indeed, postmodernism has been the intellectual Axis of Evil of many mass killers. As Walter Newell writes in The Weekly Standard:
Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a foggy, medieval, blood and soil collectivism purged of the corruptions of modernity, and just as Pol Pot [who, like Shariat, studied at the Sorbonne] wanted Cambodia to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream of returning his world to the imagined purity of seventh century Islam. And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish its goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does Osama regard terror as good in itself, a therapeutic act, quite apart from any concrete aim. The willingness to kill is proof of one's purity.
If you don't believe The Weekly Standard, try The Hindustan Times, which explains that "Osama bin Laden is not a medieval but a post-modern phenomenon."
The enmity between postmodernism and capitalism is not accidental. Capitalism believes that individuals are unique, and should be able to act in a free market to fulfill their unique desires. Rather than being prisoners of their culture, individuals are free to pursue their own dreams. Rather than seeking a reversion to the primitive, supposedly authentic past, capitalism looks forward to a dynamic, ever-changing future, in which authenticity is created by the individual, rather than imposed by an omnipotent Hitler or Khomeini.
What does all this have to do with Werner Heisenberg? The answer is that Heisenberg provided what was seen as the scientific foundation for postmodernism.
Architect Philip Johnson notes that a core value of postmodernism is "a loathing for 'bourgeois values' (a.k.a. truth, beauty, and goodness)." Yet, preferring Rigoberta Menchu (communist author of a fraudulent autobiography about her nonexistent "peasant" childhood in Guatemala) to Jane Austen (an advocate of truth, beauty, and goodness) is itself nothing more than a literary taste. Why should students be taught that a taste for totalitarian untruths is superior to a taste for literature founded on eternal values?
The dominant approach has been to attack language itself. Great emphasis is placed on the contingency of language, the difficulties of being sure what another person really means, the inseparability of any text from its cultural context, barriers to genuine communication, and so on. This is been the project of, most famously, Heidegger's disciple Jacques Derrida and, in a very different way, another disciple, German Marxist Jürgen Habermas.
For some people, though, undermining language is insufficient. A person can understand the contingency of knowledge and communication, and still come away believing in Western democracy, in rational science, and in eternal values. This is precisely what the great Protestant philosopher Reinhold Neibuhr did at the middle of the 20th century. Political thinkers who were influenced by Neibuhr, such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., confidently proclaimed that American democracy was morally superior to Stalinism. Similarly, James Madison's Federalist 37 explained how the limitations of human language created "unavoidable inaccuracy" in the communication of ideas. Yet Madison did not view this problem as proving that truth did not exist, or that preferring freedom to tyranny was merely an arbitrary taste.
Heisenberg's great contribution was to provide a scientific foundation for the attack on the very existence of truth, and hence on the existence of moral values. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle began with Heisenberg's experiments in subatomic physics. He found that you could know an electron's position, or you could know an electron's momentum, but you couldn't know both at the same time; by measuring one, you would change the other. Taken to a much broader level, because one is always part of the system that one is observing, it is impossible to know anything about the system with certainty.
Some extensions of the Uncertainty Principle can be thought provoking and benign. For example, in 1979, Gary Zukav and David Finkelstein authored The Dancing Wu Li Masters : An Overview of the New Physics, which used the Uncertainty Principle, as well as many other elements of quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and other (then) cutting-edge physics to introduce the reader to Eastern mysticism.
But as Marxist sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz (City University of New York) has argued in his book Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Heisenberg's work also seems to legitimize the whole postmodern project. Because of physics' reputation as the most rigorous and neutral of all the sciences, the work of Heisenberg and his colleague Niels Bohr seem to supply the definitive proof for postmodernism's skepticism about truth and universal values. If, as Aronowitz and other postmodernists argue, Heisenberg showed that even science didn't have objective truth, then literature and the humanities certainly could not.
The modern academy's use of physics in the service of postmodernism was criticized in several of books: The Flight from Science and Reason; A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science; and Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. This latter book so enraged the postmodern academy that an entire 1996 issue of the journal Social Text was devoted to attacking it. That special issue of Social Text, long a cutting-edge pomo journal, included a counter-essays by the journal's cofounder Stanley Aronowitz and other postmodernists. The concluding article was "Transgressing Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by New York University physicist Alan D. Sokal.
Sokal began by affirming postmodern principles: "it has become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Thus, "scientific 'knowledge,' far form being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it." Sokal went on to link various scientific or mathematical subjects (such as Paul Joseph Cohen's work on the mathematical Axiom of Choice) with social concepts with which they had no relation (such as radical feminism).
In most cases, Sokal simply asserted that the scientific theory supported the (always-leftist) social result for which was arguing. The meat of the article was an argument that quantum gravity (a genuine field of study, involving attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity) proved the case for "progressive" politics. Sokal concluded by urging that science, especially mathematics and physics, be conducted with the intent of supporting radical feminist and other "progressive" causes. He even argued that the value of pi was socially constructed.
A short while later, Sokal announced in the magazine Lingua Franca that the whole thing was a hoax. Although Sokal is Marxist who had worked with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, he objected to postmodernism's misuse of hard science. He wrote of his essay as a parody of how postmodernism had combined 1930s physics, linguistics theory, and political correctness to produce an academic literature that meant absolutely nothing. The Bohr/Heisenberg denial of reality had reached its culmination; one could write articles using Bohr and Heisenberg to describe things having nothing to do with physics. And, like the subatomic world described by Bohr and Heisenberg, the article could be incomprehensible, lacking any fixed reality. Later, Sokal coedited a follow-up book, Fashionable Nonsense : Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.
Aronowitz and the rest of the postmodernists were not acting contrary to the intentions of Heisenberg, who hoped that his theories of physics "will exert their influence upon the wider fields of the world of ideas [just as] the changes at the end of the Renaissance transformed the cultural life of the succeeding epochs."
Max Born, another founder of quantum physics, wrote that "epistemological lessons" from physics could answer questions such as the relationship between capitalism and socialism. Niels Bohr was even more aggressive in promoting the Uncertainty Principle into a general statement of the nature of reality, and insisting that principles from quantum mechanics were not just interesting metaphors with which to discuss society, but scientific facts about human culture.
Yet it turns out that much of Heisenberg wrote (and hence, the scientific basis of postmodernism) may be losing its "privileged position" of indisputable scientific truth.
The physicist Carver Mead, of the California Institute of Technology, is the author of Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism (MIT Press, 2000) which suggests that much of what Bohr and Heisenberg claimed was wrong. (Bohr, by the way, was always anti-Nazi, was spirited out of Denmark in 1943 by the Danish resistance, and went on to collaborate with Einstein in the Manhattan Project.)
At a famous debate in Copenhagen, Albert Einstein uttered his famous line "God doesn't play dice with the universe" — as Einstein objected to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and to Bohr's vision of the randomness and incomprehensibility of reality.
Carver is attempting to topple Bohr/Heisenberg from their current roles as the ultimate geniuses of physics, just as previous intellectuals shattered the auras of authority and infallibility which once, wrongly, surrounded Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
According to Carver, Bohr beat Einstein in the Copenhagen debates, held in 1927 and 1930, simply through the force of Bohr's intimidating, dictatorial personality. What Bohr and Heisenberg pronounced as true for all time turns out simply to be the product of their limited understanding, Carver argues.
The conflicts that Bohr/Heisenberg claimed between their own quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories of relativity turn out to be resolvable into a single unified theory, says Carver. Carver argues that Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong in claiming that the laws of logic do not apply at the subatomic level, and also wrong in claiming that the subatomic world is fundamentally random.
Only time will tell if Mead's theories to reconceptualize quantum physics will gain wide acceptance. But the very existence of Mead's book suggests that Heisenberg and Bohr are just as subject to "contestation" as any other idea; the Bohr/Heisenberg view is not an unarguable scientific fact upon which to found a philosophy of human existence.
If Heisenberg and Bohr were wrong that quantum events (e.g., where an electron is) are fundamentally random, then the use of their theory to label traditional literature as politically incorrect may also be wrong:
The other postmodern defining notion: the end of narrative or overarching themes or missions or purposes. Nothing was as it seemed. We were all atoms that occasionally bumped randomly against each other.
Postmoderism's hostility to big narratives isn't just a function of particle physics, however. The underlying rationale is ideological, as explained by the newsletter of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists:
It is difficult, however, to imagine how one could be suspicious of meta-narratives without a de-centring of the West, since the most powerful narrative of the last 200 years has been the one that told the tale of the West's destiny. With this in mind then, I would suggest that it is more useful for Muslims to understand post-modernism as the de-centring of the West. . ..
The author goes on to describe the demonization of "Bin Laden's 'terrrorism'" and the rejection of postmodernism as two forms of false consciousness which impede Muslim political action.
Yet the political consequence of the September 11 attacks is the recentering of the West (more precisely, the United States) more powerfully than ever before. The United States is indeed the world's hegemon, capable of toppling a regime on the other side of the world in a few weeks, while suffering very low casualties itself. Notwithstanding the objections of Syrian diplomats or Belgian Eurocrats, the United States and its simplisme can conquer at will, with little need for multilateral approval.
And literature? Well, destroy-American-society-first is still doing pretty well in university bookstores. Duke literature professor Michael Hardt and has teamed up with Antonio Negri, an Italian terrorist and poet currently in prison for his role as a leader of the murderous Red Brigades. Negri later became good friends with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Hardt and Negri have produced Empire, a 500-page combination of postmodernism, Marxism, and antiglobalism. It is one of the hottest university bestsellers in many a year.
But far more Americans have been reading Lord of the Rings, which retells "the tale of the West's destiny" to vindicate freedom and destroy evil.
The meta-narrative of the last several years — astride the best-seller list like a colossus — has been the Harry Potter series. Neither LOTR nor Potter is a direct Christian allegory, but both narratives are infused with The Greatest Story Ever Told. They promote the brotherhood of man, the capacity of an individual to change the world, the possibilities of hope rather than the limits of our current condition — and they pronounce that our actions are to be judged according to eternal moral standards. The heroes in LOTR and in Harry Potter are offered ultimate power, and they refuse it, because the power would be in the service of evil.
At the end of Harry Potter's book one, Harry confronts the Hitlerian Lord Voldemort and the Quislingish Professor Quirrel. Voldemort orders Harry to cooperate with him, and Quirrel claims: "There is no good and evil, only power." Harry refuses, risking his life.
Heisenberg was offered the same choice by Hitler. The newly revealed Bohr letters explain that Heisenberg's justification for building the A-bomb for the Nazis was that Heisenberg was certain they would win. Heisenberg obviously did not believe that it would be morally better to be killed by the SS than to help the Nazis build a weapon of mass destruction with which be used to murder millions of innocents. Heisenberg's collaborationist rationale fit precisely with the Hitler/Voldemort philosophy that power is the only reality. Indeed, "there is no truth, only power," summarizes Heisenberg's theory of physics and its application to moral philosophy.
We didn't really need J. K. Rowling or new discoveries in subatomic physics to remember that freedom is good and tyranny is evil. But we did need to recover our nation's moral compass.
A few years ago Americans were willing to listen to a president discuss the meaning of "is" as he were at a Modern Language Association meeting. September 11 showed us the face of pure evil. Our nation has seen the enemy plainly, and that vision may be the beginning of the end of postmodernism in America. It is no coincidence that the places in America which have been the most reluctant to call al Qaeda evil have been the places where postmodernism is strongest.
The rest of America has, happily, finally mustered the self-confidence to stand up to this form of radical nihilism.
We will continue to debate the nature of language and of the subatomic, and we will continue to tolerate and celebrate diverse cultures. We can do all of these things without teaching college students (including foreign students who may one day rule their homeland) that living as a serf under the tyranny of Wahhabis, Nazis, or Stalinists is more authentically human than living as a free American.
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.
Mr. Kopel's argument runs into very serious problems here. "Capitalism" does not believe anything. It merely embodies the economic consequences of the moral principle that individuals are unique, and that they have certain fundamental rights. Contrary to Kopel's apparent claim, capitalism is a result, not a source of authenticity.
As described here, Capitalism reduces to anarchy: According to Kopel, the only "authentic" things are created by individual. Anything that constrains individual desires "imprisons" us.
Kopel's own argument would seem to go against capitalism itself: the very pricing structure of capitalism contradicts him. We can pursue our dreams and desires only so long as we can afford to do so. Prices constrain "authenticity." And because prices reflect the wants, needs, and direction of society at large, those constraints are imposed not just by "somebody," but by everybody. In other words, capitalism represents the very "Culture" that Kopel claims denies our authenticity!
If capitalism represents the "good" in this argument, it cannot be defended on the grounds Kopel provides. We must instead rely on something else.
As it happens, which capitalism is built upon moral priciples. Moreover, those principles are assumed to be universal, and individuals are constrained to abide by them. By Kopel's lights, unfortunately, those principles are apparently not authentic, because they're not created by individuals. Indeed, they are in some sense imposed upon us.
At this point Kopel's simple "freedom vs. culture" model completely falls apart. To deny universal principles is to concede the debate to postmodernist thought. Yet admitting to universal moral principles is to admit that they are by their very nature "imposed" in some omnipotent way. The fact of "imposition" is therefore not determinative of authenticity, or the lack thereof.
Thus, Hitler or Khomeni can no longer be condemned merely because they "imposed authenticity." Their actions must instead be condemned -- if they can be condemned at all -- by comparing their actual actions to what they "should" have done.
This ultimately takes us to something he's missed, either accidentally deliberately. The battle is not just "between postmodernism and capitalism," it is between postmodernism and traditional Western morality -- which is to say, it is between postmodernism and Judeo-Christian morality.
This takes Kopel to a place he evidently does not want to go -- one may guess it's because he thinks it will lead him into a science-vs.-religion argument.
By avoiding the subject, however, he's simply given away the store.
Betty, your comments are welcome here on the history of philosophy, for I know you are well-versed. For that matter, your comments are welcome, period.
And I thought beckett's excellent mind might like some "grist for the mill" . . . ;-}
There is not much evidence to the contrary.
It is the out workings of philosophers/thinkers/dreamers that have given you this culture, this land. It is the fruit of others that may jeopardize those some privileges. It is a romantic idea you exist in this moment in time by your own force of will, but in truth, you neither define the parameters of your life, nor are you cable of anything but the most minor alterations of the set.
Now there's an "unfashionable idea," reflecting. Reminds me of a line from Voegelin: "In empirical action man is always necessitated physically and psychologically; there is no empirical freedom."
Still, man speaks of freedom as if it were something real. But if that were so, if Voegelin's insight is to be trusted, then freedom -- and necessity -- must have a source beyond "mere" empirical existence.
"To man," writes Voegelin, citing Schelling, "there must be conceded a principle outside and above the world; for how could he alone of all creatures trace the long way of evolution from the present back to the deepest night of the past, how could he alone ascend to the beginning of the ages.... The soul does not know, 'it rather is itself knowledge.'"
Somehow, man -- though bound up inextricably in and by the world, and therefore never able to find an empirical position outside the world from which to view it in its totality and (probable) infinity -- "knows" some things that are not empirically based or derived.
Post-modernism posits empirical existence as the "all there is, there is nothing else beside." There is no realm of the spirit; there is no right nor wrong, good nor evil; power is everything.
Practically speaking, I think it helps to understand power in its essentials as power over men. I think this is how the post-modernists understand it; which is why it is so appealing to them. I mean, we're not talking about the power of a great artist or such like here.
Kopel points out that the overwhelming majority of "leading lights" of post-modernism have been and are proponents of some sort of totalitarian persuasion or other. Once a man has been "sold" on the idea that he has no soul, is not a spiritually centered being, then he can be led to the habits of a slave -- for you have convinced him that the principle on which his genuine freedom rests does not "exist." Thus the mania for the destruction of the spiritual realm as the prime directive of the entire post-modernist movement.
The line of transmission from "God is dead" runs through "man has no soul," on to moral relativism, to the dehumanization of the person that occurs when man is regarded as physical body only; ultimately to the destruction of freedom -- and not just of the spiritually-based type, but of whatever empirical freedom remains open to human action.
Personally I'm glad George Bush is our "first post-post-modernist president." (I agree with Kopel on this.) They were a "bad lot." Time to bid them a fond adieu. best, bb.
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?
Your rejoinder:
Really? You live in a cabin, isolated from all events and society. You don't read the news, vote, buy new refrigerators, educate your children? (more)
There is a complete disconnect between "philosophical constructs" and an isolated cabin in the woods. I am indebted to my forbears for thier gifts of industry, intelligence, intuition and inventiveness but they in no way rule my desiny. I do.
thank you for your thoughtful reply, how true
while here we are a bit like third graders being taken on a field trip, we are feeling rather smart and grown-up because mom let us choose our outfit today, oh the independence, the self confidence! And the mother smiles.
Yet the awareness that such a thing as independence could exist, or the longing for fair-play, or justice as grown-ups would call it, is one of the small proofs of the reality of more than what can "be sensed."
that is why I qualified destiny with earthly
All about us is a world fully functioning, the rules, while not stagnant, are fixed at any point in time. You are powerless to negate even the tiniest appointment. For a poor example take buying the new frig...you can buy it, you can not .....but what you can not do is live in a world where new refrigerators are not, where the convergence of economic theorist, and government have produced a moment in history when even the poorest fellow in town has refrigeration for his food. You are limited to a world where refrigerates abound and you powerless to change that.
That you say you rule your own destiny seems odd to me, maybe you mean that you are an adult, thinking for himself and choosing this or that, that you are not a slave - not a victim. Fair enough. And honorable. But the choices you can make are only the choices of this moment in time/space. You can not choose to be a knight in Arthur's court. You can not choose your parents. You can not choose to watch Gumby on Saturday mornings.
History is like a fast flowing river and you are a crimson leaf that fell from a sugar maple along the bank in Autumn.
That there maybe something inside you that knows of a place where river is not - that is what the posts above are about.
Nice post, bb. You know that I'm a fan of your insightful prose.
Perhaps belaboring the obvious, insofar as we are physical creatures, the demands of physicality (eating, sleeping etc.) constrain our freedom but we have, in this age, far greater freedom from these demands than at any former time in the history of humankind. How many U.S. parents have been driven to the edge of exasperation by their kids' "I'm bored", to make the homely point. We, humanity, have earned this freedom and we have found it best expressed in a political system that is least intrusive upon the individual. I am grateful but not complacent.
9/11 gave us the gift of contrast. It is abundantly clear that, whatever the rhetoric, the postmodernists in their enclave universities hate America and all it stands for. Their soul, in my view, has been twisted by their massive insecurities as they have "hidden" in their ivy-enclosed halls. We have mistakenly allowed them to avoid adulthood by our belief in specialization (and as we have the denizens of Hollywood) and for this gift of freedom from responsibility, they (plural) are perverting the minds of the young because, simply, misery does love company. A gift of freedom from responsibility is no gift and the cure is accountability.
Well, I do ramble, but "things" are not nearly so complicated as we humans are wont to make them. Nice to see you here, bb.
Well I obviously would not agree with this, and especially that government has produced anything. Government is, by and large, a parasite upon the producers and our government's contribution, until the 20th Century, has been to remain in the background enforcing the rights of individuals, thus allowing individuals and their creativity to build a great nation.
You seem much the pessimist. I am not. See my post to bb.
Your reply
Well I obviously would not agree with this, and especially that government has produced anything.
Maybe you misunderstood what I meant by produce, there must be more apt word, I was trying to make the small point that at any point in the time line of history the events of the preceding time structure the environment of that said point. When we arrive in our moment of history, the stage is set.
Your choices are limited by the broader environment created by those gone before and by your personal environment - your past, your age, your sex, your abilities, etc.
.But it does seem our opinions about the proper role of government might be very similar.
You seem much the pessimist. I am not. See my post to bb.
I don't know if pessimism is correct, (although I will admit to times of despair about the direction of our nation) yet there may be great joy in knowing that while we we have no control on where we are placed, the few choices that we do have really matter- both personally and in the broader culture, for your choices become, going back to my earlier analogy, part of the river that others will fall into little further down.
That Mr. Kopel has the gall to say this after disowning Sartre, Heiddeger, and Marx reveals his own superficial reading of these thinkers--a superficiality exceeded only in his idea of capitalism.
Hey P! You and I both know that the transmission of culture -- from father to son as it were (I'm going generic here) -- has been the primary directive of the educational process throughout history until quite recent times. When most Western countries decided to adopt the Prussian model of public education, forsaking the Classical model in the process, the unity of human knowledge went down the chute.
In the lower grades, the emphasis was then placed on "civic education" -- how to fit a person into the framework of the given society and its (putative) requirements, which at the time meant the requirements of industrial society.
At the collegiate level, the emphasis shifted to qualifying persons to practice as specialists of human knowledge -- in, say, law, economics, mathematics, medicine, history, physics, biology, the arts, etc., etc. The purpose at this level, and the post-graduate level, was to form expert "administrators" whose professional purpose it would be to direct the "quality" of human life.
What none of these people ever get these days, even at the highest pinnacles of Academe, is any notion that human knowledge encompasses more than just one's own speciality. And that, if you want to practice your specialty with excellence and distinction, you need to know how the discoveries of other human knowledge bases accumulated over history might shed some needful (helpful) light on your own problems.
But these days, the past is disdained -- yet some people claim to know what the future is. And isn't that an interesting problem, P?
I'd love to delve into the issue further here; but I've got to work tomorrow, so have to go to bed. Hope to catch up with you later. Peace and love, P -- bb.
The humanities academic left will never live down Sokal's ruse. It was a masterstroke.
On LOTR, I remember CBS film critic John Leonard's review of the movie. He never even mentioned the qualities or lack thereof of the movie itself. All the old lion Liberal (and former young conservative) could bring himself to say was that Tolkien was a "monarchist and a luddite who feared the advance of the mongrel hordes." Tolkien would probably plead guilty to the first two (he loved the King and hated technology), but Leonard is making mischief by accusing Tolkien of fearing the "mongrel hordes." On the contrary, he loathed the racialist policies then rising on the European continent and said so at every opportunity. But you see, postmodernist Leonard has to make the charge. He knows that only through the mechanism of identity politics can a historical figure be effectively discredited in the present muddle-headed culture. And Leonard wants to discredit Tolkien because his powerful morality play draws upon a construct that Leonard wants to deny, a construct in desperate need of deconstruction, one that he no doubt considers a simplistic, unforgiving, paternalistic and zero-sum myth --- the battle between good and evil that rages in every human breast.
I harbor these beliefs while earning my living in a very hands-on and competitive environment.
LOL, wouldn't blame you! Perhaps it would have been more helpful to have drawn the point. Which would be this: Our kids are indifferent -- and thus the American future is in jeopardy -- because the schools no longer transmit American culture and history, and Western historical culture more generally, as their prime directive. Ever since John Dewey, the great educationist innovator of the early 20th century, the American public schools have been put on the Prussian model. That means schools are no longer institutions of learning and thinking, they are institutions for the provision of "social adjustment." The Constitution that I know and love is simply no longer taught.
A high-school sophomore- or junior-level American government textbook that I had a chance to review a few months back is an example of what I mean. (Publisher: Prentice-Hall, as I recall.) It actually devotes a chapter to the "informal amendment process" -- e.g., executive orders, administrative rule-making, etc. -- and praised it as a natural constitutional evolution in response to the complexities of contemporary American life. It also beats the tom-tom for an imperial executive -- because Congress is just an untrustworthy pack of scurrilous politicoes, and you can never depend on them to "do the right thing." No wonder our kids are slack-jawed and glassy-eyed -- and totally cynical by age 12. Why should they care to get involved with issues like that?
They are never told the real American story (based on actual history -- i.e., not redacted to conform to passing, fickle, ideological fashions). They hear little about the Framers, if anything at all, or about the Constitution, that great culmination of American historical experience and Western political thought. The word "Liberty!" has not tickled their eardrums in all of what little high school history they are led kicking and screaming to take.
But they're being well fitted to be somebody's good, "reliable" employee some day; and "politically-correct" and tractible "citizen" to boot.
No wonder we've got problems: The public schools have become bastions of irrationality. They beget irrational graduates, some of whom (most these days, it seems) get to go on to college, to perfect their skills as soon-to-be members of the Managerial Class. Ignorant as sin, they are yet well-stocked in the ideals of human self-perfection, and in the tools for advancing and securing same. Peace and love, bb.
p.s.: Please forgive me if philosophy has slid over into polemics here. I simply find this situation deplorable.
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