Postmodernism Disrobed

Nature Magazine ^ | 9 July 1998 | Richard Dawkins

[Tomalak]

Amen. In many ways, the Left is more anti-science than the Right.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

We are experiencing a great rebirth of...irony. Comedically speaking, "it's a good thing."

[Hans]

Wonderful post.
Thanks

[parsifal]

I am not sure. Relevance is relative to the position of the viewer/user in all sociological scenarios. The gap between I/me and you/them distorts all cross-medium communication transmitational attempts. Only at a micro level of non-objective expression, is real communication possible. This has been verified by reference to string theory in cosmological studies. Reality comes in little pieces and blinks in and out of existence. So too, non-objective characterizations of semi-objective linguistic temporalities. parsy.

[tallhappy]

What are you talking about?

Who ever said or thought the right was anti-Sceince.

Who ever thought Dawkins isn't a hardcore leftist.

[Tomalak]

Creationists are invariably on the right.

[Nick Danger]

What you said, whatever that is.

[tallhappy]

I'm sorry. I am fighting the natual urge to point out serious deficiencies in your worldview.

You'd do better than reading Dawkins and worrying about creationism vs evolutionism flapdoodle.

It's like you want to waste your time and what little intellectual capacity you have in inanities.

[parsifal]

"What you said, whatever that is."

Absolutely brilliant reposte! Because whatever any of us say is whatever we said. Interpersonal communication is like a fiber optic cable that carries many signals. We concentrate on the vibratory sonic pressure wave portion of the signal and eschew all other non-vibratory meaning signals. The bytes of communication have to be reprocessed and reassembled in a mutually acceptable matrix of meaning paradigms. So let me respond to you by saying YES--What you said, whatever it is--in the here and now. parsy the sympatico.

[Amelia]

This seems to explain why postmodernism, which was a Big Thing in some of the graduate-level education courses I took, never made any sense to me.

[IronJack]

The best description I've heard of "po-mo" is from The Simpsons: weird for weird's sake.

[Ahban]

Creationists are ultimately pro-science because we believe in absolute and unchanging truth. Leftists to not believe in such a thing as absolute truth, and so will ultimately reject science.

On one side are those who think we should seek the truth and conform our desires to it, on the other is the side that believes the "truth" is an illusion that should be conformed to our desires.

These are the ones that promote flawed "studies" designed to support whatever cause they were advocating to begin with. THAT is what will undermine public confidence in science. Not creationists questions, but leftists perversion - perversion of the scientific method into a mere propaganda tool.

Regardless of how frustrated you get with us on the marcroevolution issue, Creationists will ultitmately prove to be the greatist supporters of science, even as most of the great scientitsts of history were in fact creationists.

[Nick Danger]

Spoken in true sequipedalian tergiversation! The Hegelian dynamic of your multi-dimensional response, while pregnant with nascent undertones of swirling higher meaning, leaves me gasping for what to say next, save this monosyllabic prolation: ouch.

[Reactionary]

The left has "appropriated" the extreme right's literary tradition, I'm afraid.

Who are the literary heroes of the postmodernists? Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Paul de Man. None of those men was a friend to liberal democracy. All of them were anti-Enlightenment, anti-rationality, anti-science.

Heidegger, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was a member of the Nazi Party. De Man wrote pro-Nazi articles in his native Belgium. Nietzsche made war upon Christianity and proclaimed the death of God.

At least those men could write. The tenured radicals who inhabit our universities not only lack that ability, they lack the ability to make sense of what they've read. They give mediocrity a bad name.

[general_re]

If I may, can I suggest we not look at this through the "creation versus evolution" lens for a moment? Yes, it's true that Dawkins is a leftist, but it's also, but it's important that cogent criticisms of pomo nonsense come from leftists like Dawkins and Sokal (who is a wholly unreconstructed socialist himself). While much good and valuable criticism of postmodernism hascome from writers like Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, it's all too easy for the leftist practitioners of such quackery to dismiss conservative criticism as being biased and flawed.

Ultimately, the goal of postmodernism in general is to deny the reality of objective truth, and objective fact, and to render everything in terms of opinion and feelings and so forth. One may disagree with Dawkins et al about what exactly the truth is, but let us at least give him credit for standing up for the notion of truth in general. Let's not disagree with him strictly for the sake of disagreeing with him ;)

[Erasmus]

When he submitted his intentionally meaningless article to a post-intellectual modernist journal, Alan Sokal was engaging in the first known instance of what I will call the Inverse Turing Test.

In the ordinary Turing test, of course, the idea is for computer designers to come up with a computer with which you have a conversation, and you can't tell it apart from a flesh-and-blood person.

In the Inverse Turing test, you (a human being) try to imitate an automaton. If observers can't tell the difference between you and a real automaton, you've passed the test.

Such is the case in the articles published by the postintellectual modernist journals like the one that Sokal successfully hacked.

[sauropod]

Ping for study

[Kevin Curry]

Atheists (libertarian or otherwise), feminists, omnigendered freaks, animal rights fruitcakes, and Darwinists are all fellow citizens of the realm of the far left. The atheist libertarians just gripe about the taxes they have to pay to live there.

[Kevin Curry]

One may disagree with Dawkins et al about what exactly the truth is, but let us at least give him credit

Dawkins deserves nothing but contempt. He is an utter fool, and astoundingly smug about it. Dawkins is a gold-plated materialist hyperzealot who is far more fierce in defending his peculiar dogma than the most strident religious fundamentalist is in defending religious faith.

Dawkins wouldn't know the truth if it jumped up and bit him on his smug, materialist hyperzealot nether cheeks.

[Jonathon Spectre]

>applause<

Man, it's not often something I read can get me to laugh, but this had me howling the whole way through. Thanks for a great read.