Ali Eteraz, a Muslim commentator who is close to the epicenter of where Islamic thought in the West ought to be, and who is consistently interesting, is interesting again today.
I always considered myself a humanist and do still. It just cannot be the case that only one ‘side’ of a political divide have a monopoly on humanism. I know for a fact that Isaiah Berlin would not exactly be welcome in some parts of the left; nor Solzhenitsyn. [I also know that Burke would be ridiculed in some parts of the right]. I cannot in clean conscience engage against religious supremacism and exclusion if I engage in ideological supremacism and exclusion.
I believe in human solidarity. In the elimination of cruelty and humiliation. I believe in living beyond labels and identity markers.
Welcome to the muddle in the middle, Ali. Come pull up a comfortable chair and I’ll pour the drinks.
A.L., All I can say to A.L. & ALi is good luck, a wish half-genuine and half in jest. I agree that the sentiment is a good one, and one I support, however, I don’t believe that by espousing it, it will spread. Look how absent it is on this particular site which is supposedly dedicated to such a stance.
Now, I am the first to admit that this is pure opinion and without any hard supporting evidence, but I do feel that the trend is AWAY from what Ali is representing. Not just at this site, but in the country and around the world. After some 4 or 5 centuries there is significant movement away from humanism and toward a hardening of irrational ideologies.
The problem I have with Ali here is that it does not come to grips with the fact (if I may dress my opinion as fact for a moment) that his very position, mine, and to a large extent A.L.’s, IS a partisan stance. All too sadly, in this day and age, a plea for humanism is to take a politically partisan position–even in this country…or should I say that among Western nation’s ESPECIALLY in this country. Much of the support for the political right, i.e., the Republican party, is derived from an attack against humanism. And while there is also an attack from segments of the left, those segments have no authentic power and pose much less of a danger.
mark: If by humanism you mean that philosophy which affirms the worth and value of people and which espouses thew universality of morality, then by all means I’m a humanist. The problem I have is that so many who call themselves humanists espouse philosophies which I believe degrade and devalue people (under guises of things like ‘socialism’) and espouse philosophies which refuse to recognize the universality of morality except in the most trivial and self-serving ways. In any event, it is not at all clear to me that the real enemies of humanism are on the Right, any more than it is clear to me that the real enemy of Liberalism is on the right. I for one am not likely to critique humanism as being overly species-centric, and it is certainly not at all clear to me that Christianity is a faster growing and more influential religion at this juncture than Environmentalism.
No, I would not say that the Right or religion is the enemy of humanism, despite Secular Humanisms deliberate setting itself against religion. I would say that the Right is the enemy of post-modernism, Marxism, and the rest of the slouching toward barbarism espoused as ‘humanism’ by so many.
But, of all of that, that is not at all what struck me about A.L’s little attempt at brotherhood.
What struck me is the cultural reference, “I’ll pour the drinks.” The natural interpretation of this reference just highlights the cultural gap we are speaking of, even if we are speaking to a humanist Moslem. Nice intentions though.
I wonder at your characterization of the opposing ideologies as irrational. I might oppose these ideologies, but I would not claim that they are irrational. By what standard are you judging them irrational? The future will belong to those that show up for it, and its is manifestly evident that what you deem a ‘rational’ culture has no interest in being part of the future. So just who is being irrational here? Likewise, you bemoan the falling away from the ideologies you espouse after 3-4 centuries of thier sway, but I would say that the very philosophies that you espouse are not the ones which held sway for 3-4 centuries, but rather are ones which have held sway for just a few decades, and the falling away is not irrational but because they manifestly don’t work. So who is being irrational here?
I’m guilty of being overly verbose at times, so let me sum up my problem.
Is the philosophy now called ‘liberal humanism’ either Liberal or Humanism?
celebrim, I greatly enjoyed and appreciated your response to my post. I will respond tomorrw when I have a little more (any at all) time.
The Right the enemy of post-modernism?
Quite the brave stance. And what is post-modernism in America, exactly? Relativism? Multiculturalism? Certainly it isn’t progressivism, because little is underminded more than the progressive agenda by postmodern, amoral thinking (see Sokal, here). Personally, I’ve found some Bush admin actions and statements to be quite postmodern in their commitment to the truth and elevation of language.
No, at the risk of sounding postmodern myself, I don’t thnk we can attribute any sort of dedicated ideological lines to our politics at this moment. What with Republicans feverishly nation-building and Democrats espousing cold, hard realism (to name a few examples)– the substance took a back seat to power awhile back.
Most of what we experience today when we bump into entrenched (modern) liberalism is an incoherent reaction to all the mistakes the West has made over the years. And there certainly are many. Relativists like Said will say that the West created a discourse about the Orient that had little to do with reality (and that I’ll agree with) and therefore that invalidates a lot of our views of the East (ditto), but then goes on further to say that this then invalidates all of our own discourse about ourselves. That is where I get off the train. Perhaps Mark, too.
Anyways, don’t blame Mark too much. As was long-ago stated by a magical negro who for one perfect moment managed to link post-modernism, marxism, and Islamic terrorism, “for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.” He knew us well.
Sometimes I wonder whether the goal of the rightwing attacks on the MSM is to create a mirror image of Islamic media; a steady stream of bad news, barbaric acts, and cruelty– all drenched in victimhood and pseudo-powerlessness. Our wingnuts certainly got that last part down cold, but I think they’ll probably just settle for good old American yellow journalism (remember the Maine!), it’s more civilized.
Let’s just remember what we’re defending while we’re defending it. I was listening to Michael Savage give a rant the other day on crappy beer that somehow ended up as a tirade against the production of Shakespeare in high schools. Borders, language… culture?
I do think the elimination (or at least the reduction) of cruelty is possible.
The elimination of humiliation is beyond possibility for civilized people. Humiliation is one of the discontents of civilization.
I suppose we could re-instate dueling to make Ali happy. However, dueling is SOOOOOOO uncivilized.
SAO,
Edward Said was a poseur and liar.
Let me quote the great Orientalist Patton who gets to the heart of the matter:
“To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing”
— General George S. Patton: The War as I Knew it
The problem Said had with the Orientalists is that the Orientalists were telling a humiliating truth.
So what was Said’s response? Did he try to reform Arab culture?
Nope.
His response was: don’t look, and if you look don’t judge. Real scholarly approach there. Don’t compare X with Y. Y might not look so good for Y and that would be a humiliation. Said spent his whole life telling the West: “Don’t look at my humiliation.” He took the safe way out. In fact he was lionized in his own decayed culture. He was no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
SAO, I might note that there is a “a steady stream of bad news, barbaric acts, and cruelty” coming out of the Islamic world. Not to mention homophobia and misogyny.
Cover it up, or clean it up? Well we have tried plan A. Time for plan B.
I Support Democracy In Iraq. The whole ME for that matter. Iraq to start.
Ali says:
I cannot in clean conscience engage against religious supremacism and exclusion if I engage in ideological supremacism and exclusion.
Sure you can.
For the most part it is impossible to tell whether belief in God A or God B or God Ba has more merit.
However, one can measure the results of one ideology over another. Capitalism vs. Communism for instance.
Modern man has advanced through differentiation. You know reason. Occam’s Razor and all that. We have rules for judging differences. In size. In weight. Even in opinion.
I’d hate to give all that up just so you can feel goood about giving up religious supremacism.
SAO,
I don’t think Said would have said that a created discourse “invalidates” what we say about ourselves (or that it “invalidates” what we say about others), but rather simply points out the subjective base on which it stands. I’m reducing some of his thought to a crude statement here, but what Said basicly did in Orientalism is point out that what was taken as “fact” by many was merely “opinion.” I don’t think he meant to invalidate the opinion so much as show it for what it was by revealing its inner workings. After all, a good relativist wouldn’t argue that a particular way of looking at things was “invalid,” just subjective.
Thanks for the Epstien link. for the most part, my beliefs echo hers and any exceptions are pretty minor. There’s no question that some theorists, especially in academia, take things way too far and that opponent’s then take these extreme’s and substitute them for the more reasoned and interesting forms of post-modernism. Their attacks are misplaced. You see it here all the time.
I do see postmodernism as one thread among many continuing the long, distiguinshed western tradition of humanism and enlightenment thought, the essence of which, to my mind, is a challenge to whatever authority is being used to back up opinions as truth or fact.
The chief rule of POMO is “You can’t decide”.
Some of us believe you can decide.
POMO is not an advance any more than communism was an advance.
POMO is just muddying the waters. It is defensive in nature. First it says “don’t look”, but if you do look “don’t judge”.
So far all the advancements of Western Civilization have come from making judgements. The POMO crowd wants to give that up. OK. What is the gain? So we can look the other way when some cultures and nations hang homosexuals in the public square with a clear concience – “who are we to judge?”
Camille Paglia says that POMO is errant non-sense. I’m with her.
M. Simon,
As a PoMo-ist, I have decided that you are wrong about my beliefs. I believe people CAN decide and in fact decide everyday. Where you and I may differ is in one’s ability to claim one decision is better than another based on anything beyond your belief that it is so.
M. Simon, a brief addendum: I’ve decided that you don’t understand post-modern theories sufficiently to critique them in a useful or persuasive manner. It’s just a judgement of mine.
Uh, Mark,
Postmodernism is emphatically NOT in any sense a continuation of the Enlightenment. It is a reaction against the Enlightenment that has roots, ironically enough, in reactionary anti-Enlightenment thought developed by such thinkers as Joseph De Maistre and Arthur de Gobineau after the French revolution (See Richard Wolin’s _The Seduction of Unreason_). It has further roots in far-right, sometimes Nazi collaborating, philosophers like Nietzche, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmidt, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and Georges Bataille.
It’s actually funny that you say it represents progress when the whole thrust of postmodernism is that “progress” (postmodernists never use the word without scare quotes) is just one more discredited “metanarrative” (See Jean-Francois Lyotard’s _The Postmodern Condition_) or part of the “episteme” or “dominant discourse” of a particular era (See just about anything by Foucault, who maintained that there is an absolute incomensurability of historic “epistemes” that makes progress impossible, a mere illusion internal to an episteme).
Before you consider yourself one of the postmodernists, you might want to read some.
Thanks for the tip, Fred, but I have read a great deal and have reached different conclusions about the nature, origins and meanings of post-modernism than you have. I think I use the term in a broader sense than you do as your description seems to represent only a single current of post-modern thought.
Briefly, to understand that an idea, such a progress, is a cultural construct, an illusion, or part of an episteme, is not to “discredit” it as an idea, but to discredit is an independent authority. But having said that, I have to also say that I never said that “it [post-modernism, presumably] represents progress,” a belief you find so funny. I’m also at a loss to understand where you would get the idea that “the whole thrust of postmodernism is that “progress” (your quotes)…is just one more discreditated “metanarrative”…”; I think postmodernism has a number of thrusts, very few of which, if any, deal with the notion of progress. Like it or not, so many aspects of post-modern thought have seeped into our collective belief system, that I think it’s fairly safe to say that we are all post-modernists. However, we’re all free to differ about that.
mark: The philosophies you are trying to join are fundamentally at odds with each other.
For example, the statement, “…one’s ability to claim one decision is better than another based on anything beyond your belief that it is so.”, is fundamentally at odds with both Humanism and Liberalism (as well as Christianity).
All three of those philosophies claim not only authority but universal authority, and that they therefore do claim that one decision or one belief is better than another. They have different basis on which they rest those claims of authority, and they have different areas in which they make that claim, but they all make that same claim.
“Briefly, to understand that an idea, such a progress, is a cultural construct, an illusion, or part of an episteme, is not to “discredit” it as an idea, but to discredit is an independent authority.”
If you discredit its independent authority, you discredit it entirely except as a personal sop. More importantly, as a practical matter you discredit the transmission of the idea, much less the imposition of it and if only because of human pyschology you will lose in a memetic struggle with ideas that do claim to rest on independent authority. In other words, it should hardly surprise you that ideas like that are dying. Whether or not they are wrong, and I think that they are, they lack memetic fitness. They can’t compete. So once again, we return to the question of just who is being rational?
Mark, I have decided that your statements constitute proof of my claim that in many cases, that which is called ‘Liberal Humanism’ is neither Liberal nor Humanism. Just a judgement.
“Like it or not, so many aspects of post-modern thought have seeped into our collective belief system, that I think it’s fairly safe to say that we are all post-modernists.”
Today is a day of not some small rejoicing in my heart. Today, I read a speach by the new President elect of France, and it was not at all ‘post-modern’ in character. It was the French equivalent of something Reagan might have said. It called black black and white white, and it said that these aren’t constructs but things of real value. It was a clean break with anything Chirac would have said, and it reminded me just how beautiful the French language can be when its speaker isn’t saying something insipid, weak, and vacillating. If even the French are turning away from post-modernism, I think it is safe to say that we are not all post-modernists, thanks be to God.
You are right Mark about in drawing the distinction between subjectiity and invalidation. I don’t believe Said ever stated (to my knowledge) that Orientalism invalidates our view of ourselves. I would say though, that many others after him have drawn that conclusion– to great effect.
I don’t believe in bad philosophy in the same way A.L. does. Postmodernism is a lot less original and ground-breaking than people make it out to be. In reality, I think it’s part of an ongoing stuggle in the West than is nowhere near finished (that’s why reading “The End of ___” titled books bother me). Sometimes we slouch towards barbarism, sometimes we pull ourselves back.
In the end, I am much more afraid of people who think they know what is only God’s truth (gnosis) than people who don’t believe in truth at all.
celebrim, i am still hoping to find time to compose an response (as promised yesterday) to your earlier post. I agree with much of what you say here in #15 though i would take a decidely less absolutist approach about what such bulky packages as humanism, liberlism, etc. contain. many such large concepts often contain their own contradictions, much as you and I do.
i’m not concerned with the triumph of an idea as a judgment of its veracity or appropriateness. i do think there is much to be gained by understanding how we tend to invent authority to clear our paths and eliminate difficult decisions.
I do believe, too, that within the western tradition, humanism and liberalism and post-modernism are fundamentally at odds with christianity…just as i believe science is fundamentally at odds with religion, yet all our contained within western culture….so I am not trying to join these things in the manner you seem to think i am, that is to say I am not trying to resolve them.
i wouldn’t put too much weight on the shoulders of single french election, which, from this distance anyway, seems to be more about the problems of immigration in france than it does about post-modern theory.
humanism as i understand it challenged theology as an authoritaive source of knowledge & power. post-modernism continues that challenge by showing how many of the assumption of humanism and liberalism are also subject to examination and can shown to be social constructs and not the universal truths once thought to be. to me this is a healthy venture and deepens our understanding of how we think and interact. it is simultaneously a challenge to and a continuation or extension of humanism and liberalism…its a slow destrution of dogma.
since i am in such a rush now and unable to put anything better together than this, i am left with the hope that i can find the time to put more thought into a post for you than this in the not too distant future, but right now i am swamped with work and shouldn’t even be sneaking these blurry responses out.
SAO,
“Postmodernism is a lot less original and ground-breaking than people make it out to be. In reality, I think it’s part of an ongoing stuggle in the West than is nowhere near finished….”
I couldn’t agree more and have rarely heard it put any better.
“In the end, I am much more afraid of people who think they know what is only God’s truth (gnosis) than people who don’t believe in truth at all.”
Amen to that.
Mark,
OK, “whole thrust” may be an overstatement, although it is certainly a major thrust of Lyotard’s version of postmodernism. I have to agree with Celebrim, how is calling progress an “illusion” not discrediting the idea? There is no progress, only change that some power structure (pomoists love their abstractions) finds it convenient to call progress in order to maintain its power.
It’s all academic anyway. From what I’ve read (Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, Lacan, Althusser, Irigaray, Cixous, Jameson, and a host of epigones, as well as a host of critiques of pomo from left–Wolin, Eagleton, Habermas–right–Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball, Aasdair MacIntyre–and center–John Searle, Frederick Crews) this whole debate we’re having is itself meaningless by pomo tenets. After all, “facts” are nothing but constructs of power structures. There is “nothing outside the text” by which to adjudicate what is fact and what is opinion or what is a valid or invalid interpretation of “facts.” And reason, logic, and argument are only other forms of ideology, a strictly Western, white, male mindset reified as “universal” so it can be imposed on the racial, sexual, or class “other” in order to maintain Western, white, male power.
What “other currents” of pomo would contradict that picture?
I have to agree with Roger Scruton, the jargon, tortured syntax, and meaningless abstractions of pomo are not meant to be arguments. They are shibboleths designed to cut off argument. As Scruton puts it “I would suggest that gobbledygook is far more effective in propagating left-wing and progressive opinions than reasoned argument, for the simple reason that progressive opinions, once explicitly stated, expose themselves to the threat of refutation, something they do not always survive.”
Oh and by the way, “In the end, I am much more afraid of people who think they know what is only God’s truth (gnosis) than people who don’t believe in truth at all” is a classic example of a formal logical fallacy, the false dichotomy. There are all manner of positions between those two extremes. You don’t have to choose between direct knowledge of absolute truth and not believing in truth at all. And frankly, I’m just as scared of people who maintain that there is no truth (usually followed by “only what the party says”) as I am of people who believe they have the absolute truth.
Fred, I think you are exagerating some claims, conflating others and generally misrepresenting pomo theories in order to more easily denounce it. there’s a lot of fluff, no doubt, surrounding the heart. but, to me, the heart is sound. we are too quick to regard our values, opinions, etc. as universal and too often blind to their human origins. the need for an authority “oustide the text” is a strong one but the belief that there is something outside the text is illusory and it keeps getting us into trouble. to me that’s the basic heart of the theory and there’s a great deal that’s interesting and useful in that heart. i’d liken it to psychoanalytic theory in that the basic premise represented an important shift in our thinking even though there was an awful lot of garbage written in its name. I think, in the end, I am a little more comfortable without absolutes than you are. To each his own.
my own interest in pomo theory is primarily linguistic, partcularly its exploration of where and how meaning arises. i have found it fascinating and useful, but would never claim it to be a complete or all-embracing code or explanation.
#11 mark,
As a POMOist you are falling down on the job.
I can’t be wrong. I just have a different point of view which is totally valid given my life experiences.
I suspect you of impersonating a POMOist.
Wait. I forgot the escape clause.
It could be false conciousness implanted by the evil power structure.
I’ve got the dreaded bourgeoisie disease. I’m just a brainwashed automaton designed to impose evil on the world. Man those commies, I mean socialists, no wait progressives, uh, I meant to say post modernists, were right.
Don’t tell my mother.
Mark,
Specifically which claims am I exaggerating and how? Which ones am I conflating? And which ones am I misrepresenting? As befits a post modernist you are long on abstraction but short on detail here.
I had pomo shoved down my throat for nine years in graduate school, I can find you a quote from a postmodern theorist to back up every claim I made.
As for being comfortable without absolutes, again, absolutism and relativism are not the only options. There is a humility before the complexity and unpredictability of much of existence while at the same time a wonder at the human ability to know about the world. There is belief that while there may be an absolute truth, a finite being such as a human must be satisfied with what glimpses of it our finite condition affords us.
Finally, when there is no truth, there are no lies. What makes your postmodernist fiction any better than my conservative fiction? Or Hitler’s Nazi fiction? Or Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot’s Communist fiction? Or any other fiction. If there’s “nothing outside the text” by which to adjudicate between those fictions only more fictions, then there’s nothing left but power. Postmodernists claim to value tolerance, but the tenets of their philosophy offer no reason other than personal preference why tolerance is better than intolerance or, for that matter, why peace is better than war (Nietzche believed it wasn’t), why freedom is better than oppression or any other value judgement. Complete suspension of belief isn’t open mindedness or tolerance, it’s paralysis.
M. Simon, I guess that all depends on how accurate your understanding of post-modern theories is. I’m sure you can find one or two theorists who will agree with you. I suspect most won’t. My understanding is that most pomo theorists, critics, writers, etc., do, in fact, make judgements all the time and most would probably find your views of their work to be inaccurate and would conclude that you are wrong.
Fred, I am sure you can find a quote from different authors for each of your claims, which was kind of my point. You are stringing together a series of thoughts from several sources and coming to a set of conclusions that none of them came to and then ascribing this set of conclusions to all of them. I have read a great deal of theory by a wide variey of theorists and never once have I felt that any one of them was intentionally or inadvertantly making the claims you say they are.
On two points, I do agree with you. 1) Whether there is an absolute truth or not, we are probably not equipped with the means to perceive it. (though I tend to believe that the absolute truth, like God, is an invention of ours); 2. post-modern theory will lead to the conclusion that while tolerance is better than intolerance there is no court before which to plea the case and that, in the end, we are left with our personal preference as our guide. that doesn’t make me uncomfortable. but it does seem to bother you a great deal. it would be nice, i admit, if there were an authority to back up my belief that tolerance is better than in tolerance. it would make life a lot easier, that’s for sure. but our wishing for it isn’t going to make it magically appear.
I agree that this is at the core of pomo thinking. i disagree that it leads into some sort of despair or paralysis or inability on my part to make judgements, moral, political, scientific or about which wine to drink tonight.
i believe human beings are the accidental result of natural selection and we are pretty much left up to our own devices on how to navigate our situation as best we can. i think that reason is good tool to decide between nazism and other types of government. i really don’t need an outside authority to validate my belief that nazism is a very bad choice and that its something worth fighting against.
Finally, if there is nothing outside the text, then search within the text and see what you can come up with.
In the real world ideologies compete with one another. How many are willing to be inconvenienced, let alone die, while defending an ideology of nothingness. PoMo amounts to unilateral disarmament in any war of ideologies.
There’ll be no fuss from me when PoMo joins other failed ideologies in the dust bin of history, but only to the extent that it doesn’t take my civilization with it.
luker, for goodness sakes, pomo is not an ideology; it doesn’t advocate any particular form of government or economics nor is it much concerned with how you conduct your life. It is simply a way of looking at and understanding how language and other social structures function; it’s a study of how we come to think as we do. it is a mixture of literary criticism, philosoply, linguistics and pyschology. it holds that we invent gods in order to tell us that what we have chosen to believe about ourselves is correct; and sometimes we convince ourselves that these gods are not really gods but something equally magical and independently existing like “morality.”
Mark, I don’t believe for a second that you’re serious about being comfortable with personal preference as a guide to morality. That is what Steve Allen would call “Dumbth.” I hope for your sake you don’t live around many people who feel the same way. Just watch the evening news to see what some people’s preferences are.
Your appeal to reason is as funny from a pomo perspective as your appeal to progress. Postmodernism is unabashedly irrationalist. “Reason” is just another patriarchal, capitalist, heterosexist ideology, another example of the Western white male mindset attempting to colonize others by pretending to universality.
And choosing a wine to drink tonight has a helluva lot less impact on other people than choosing between tolerance and intolerance, freedom and oppression, or war and peace. If you really believe those two kinds of choices are the same then you suffer from a profound moral idiocy.
Fred, brushing aside your personal insults for a moment, I’d like to remind you again that I never appealed to nor mentioned progress other than in reference to your use of it. I’m not sure why you continue to harp on it.
I believe postmodernism uses reason to show how many codes, reason among them, do pretend to universality when, in fact, they are not universal.
I am comfortable with the idea that morality is result of (often collective) personal preferences because I think this is true. I think moral codes are an invention of the human mind and are based upon a host of factors, but ultimately are not much more than a collection of preferences, a means of achieving desired results. I don’t believe that makes me any less disposed to be a moral person, so I’m not quite sure what you are driving at. I watch the evening news and every night there are a number of acts that I condemn. I don’t think that any postmodernist thinks there should be no laws and that there should be a free for all of criminal activity. I just think that a post modernist recognizes that the basis for those laws is human and not divine, that is to say, that ultimately humans make up laws because they decide its better that way. I think they are right. I think it is better with laws. Then you start to get into arguments over which laws are better than others. But there’s really no authority to appeal to in those arguments. It will always comes out to whatever you think is most likely to ahcieve the desired results, a concept that will change from person to person.
I happen to like the way we’ve worked out things in the US. I think democracy works well. But that’s really just my preference. There’s no rule book in the sky that I can point to and say, see, my preference for democracy is recommended by 4 out of 5 gods and therefore must be the correct answer. in the end, we rely on what we think works best to produce a way of life that appeals to us, in other words, our personal preferences. I can live with that.
Well, ascribing morality to a collective preference is certainly a step up from condidering it an individual preference, but there are problems with that too. It means that no collectivity can commit an immoral act. That’s an arguable position, but it forces you to countenance some pretty horrible things, the Holocaust being the most extreme example, female circumcision, torture and execution of homosexuals, and _Suttee_ being other egregious examples. It also means that if a particular collective practices, say, genocide as its collective preference, then any member of the collective that opposes the genocide is acting immorally. Again, an arguable position but one that demeans and ignores the courage and humanity of dissidents who, often at the risk or even loss of their lives, oppose collective decisions they believe to be immoral. Have you really thought through the consequences of your relativism?
Finally, let me ask you a question. I assume (correct me if I’m wrong) that you oppose the Christian right. I also assume it’s because you believe they are attempting to impose “their” morality on others. My question is why shouldn’t they if they have or attain the power to do so?
I notice that the POMO stuff can be rather easily sold to theoretical physicists, but that it has almost no hold in the engineering fields.
Seeing as how I’m an engineer it may be that my life experiences have prejudiced me.
Or POMO could be stupid.
Mark, I’d love a clarification before I comment further on your POMO position, when you have time: are you arguing that no ultimately consistent reality exists, or are you arguing that it does, but no human belief system yet exists which describes it accurately? It seems to me that this would have bearing on the merits of using reason in any form.
Mark,
I saw this thread last night and didn’t get a chance to comment. Your the first person I’ve come across that claims to be an actual believer in postmodernism. I’d like to discuss this with you. I’ve always been interested in why people believe what they believe.
I find it strange that you have stated the following:
I believe postmodernism uses reason to show how many codes, reason among them, do pretend to universality when, in fact, they are not universal.
Reason is a code? What do you mean by that? What do you mean by saying that reason pretends to universality? Why would you use reason if you think it has no “authority”.
Based on this and the other statements you’ve made it seems to me that you don’t have a proper understanding of reason and science. Properly understood they are not based on “authority”. Neither are they foundationalist.
You said this:
“pomo is not an ideology; it doesn’t advocate any particular form of government or economics nor is it much concerned with how you conduct your life. It is simply a way of looking at and understanding how language and other social structures function;”
Would you say it’s an epistomological philosophy, a theory of knowledge?
BM,
First let me explain that there are days when I can engage in these exchanges for hours at a time and then there are days when I am nowhere near a computer, so don’t take sudden silences for anything other than an odd–and sometimes overwhelming-work schedule.
to take your last question first, it is my decidely inexpert opinion, that postmodernism is fundamentally a belief about linguistics, but that because of its particular beliefs, it is, as you say, a theory about knowledge and thus an epistimological philosophy.
When I say reason is a code, I mean that it has a set of rules which it obeys and it is a means of understanding the world and communicating that understanding. There are, of course, other ways of understanding the world. Personally, I find reason to be the best and most successful of these.
However, there are those who throughout the past, have made claims that reason has a self-sustaining, independent existence and that this forms the base of its authority and that appeals to it are final and the question at hand is resloved. I think a lot of pomo work has cast some doubt on this position and we might have to defend reason, or its use, on the grounds that we prefer it because it seems to work so well, not because it has some independent universal existence.
As for science, I don’t think pomo has much that is usefull to say about science beyond the –by now–trite account of how individual scientists and the framework within which they think are often more of product of culture than we’d like to admit. Personally, I have nothing but the profoundest respect for western science of the last 3 centuries and consider its achievements to be among the greatest of all civilization.
To circle back to the begining, the parts of pomo I find attractive are mostly linguistic and I think the essential idea there is that meaning is a construct of language itself and that language does not, as it seems, correspond to an outside reality. And since knowldge cannot be expressed without language there is always some gap between the outside world and our knowledge that is mediated by language. Attempts to find a stable center, some authority that confirms our beliefs, are always doomed to failure because there is no stable center. We’re pretty much on our own.
That’s my convuluted understanding.
Piercello,
Not to try to slip out of catch or anything, I’m arguing that the following is a reasonable proposition, one which I find attractive and one which I cannot rule out as worthy of consideration:
We simply cannot know whether or not there is an independent reality but that we do know that IF there were one it is very unlikely that any belief system of ours would describe it accurately.
What I think Pomo has done pretty well during its brief spell on earth is demonstrate that most systems of thought that were believed to be built on a stable bedrock of truth are actually, upon investigation, no more secure than other “faith”-type systems. That doesn’t mean that you don’t still have to pick one, only that you can’t successfully claim it is more based on truth than others.
As the pomos like to say: there may be a great hunger for a transcendental signifier but there isn’t one….so far. There’s always a social construct at the bottom, never a truth.
M. Simon,
You left out another possibility. Theorticial physicists might be stupid.
Fred,
In answer to #31’s
“It means that no collectivity can commit an immoral act.” I’d argue…AGAIN..that it means no such thing. I still regard the various acts you list as immoral..however collective endorsed. I, for one, am capable of making a distinction between knowing what the source of morality is, i.e. collective preference, and being able to chose among various moralities WITHOUT having to appeal to God or a substitute to back up my claim.
I do oppose the Christian right. I oppose all religions as being silly, in particular the belief that Jesus died for my sins and then rose from the dead and went back to heaven where He came from.
I also oppose the Christian right and any other group on a political level that tries to put their wacky views into our laws. I don’t see anything in my beleifs that would prevent me from such opposition. I have a belief system that says there are better ways to organize our collective lives than the use of fairytales as a basis for law. However, and again, I make no claim that my belief system is based upon anything other than my belief it is a better way. I think most people feel the same way though would explain it differently. It’s only because most people agree with a certain set of rules and thus have the power to force others to obey those rules that religious right is not able to have its way.
Ok, I’ve read your response. I’m not sure I understand you yet so it doesn’t seem fair to criticize at this point. Now I’m interested in knowing what is new and non-trite in PoMo according to you. So far it seems that when PoMo is making valid claims they are already subsumed by science or rationalism. It doesn’t make sense to credit PoMo on this account if the ideas are not original. Especially since PoMo is suppose to be a criticism of these other disciplines even if done linguistically.
For example, science already has built into it the idea that people are biased and it has methodologies for exposing and eliminating the error inherent in that bias. It also is careful about reducing error due to language. So why do I need PoMo to tell me the trite notion that scientist are the product of their culture? Seems like it was obvious from the start. I used this example because I thought you would agree with it as an objection to PoMo.
Some of what you had to say seemed to be old fashioned classical skepticism. So that doesn’t seem new and it also seems that PoMo would be vulnerable to the same arguments that foil classical skepticism.
So can you give a specific example where PoMo makes a claim that isn’t obvious. We all know that science doesn’t apply to dance as an art form, though it does apply to dance in other ways. For instance, science would have something to say about say opening a dance studio on Jupiter or the Moon.
Mark,
According to you is Pomo or those parts you value falsifiable? If so explain how.
Mark, are you still monitoring this? If not I’ll not bother to look again.
Stale thread, so I’ll probably not get a response BUT
_I, for one, am capable of making a distinction between knowing what the source of morality is, i.e. collective preference, and being able to chose among various moralities WITHOUT having to appeal to God or a substitute to back up my claim._
And I’ll ask–AGAIN–if you decide that a collective is acting immorally, on what grounds do you make that decision? If you’re choosing between various collective moralities, why would the collective morality that demands equality for women be any better than the one that demands subjection of women? AGAIN you’re left only with power as a distinguisher. Which collectivity has the power to impose its preferences. And you have absolutely no basis for resisting that power. In fact, you have every incentive for going along with it. If there is no right or wrong only power, is it not rational to align yourself with the most powerful, at least unless you see a real possibility of power shifting to a presently powerless group?
BM, (& Fred)
Sorry, as I said, I am away from computers for days at a time. Also, as I said, I don’t think pomo has anything interesting to say or is much concerned about science. Further, as I said, I agree with an earlier post that pomo’s not all that new or different or original. I think there is one profound idea at its base and it is philosophical in nature; it is an epistimological statement. all belief systems are built on social constructs. there are no axiomatic foundations. meaning is derived from the activity of language itself and doesn’t exist OUT THERE, outside of language. I think that, using the tools of th enlightenment, pomo has persuasively shown that the enlightement itself, contrary to previous belief, is on no more solid ground than, say, Christianity, as a means of comprehending the world. This resulting relativism, however, does not mean than a stand cannot be taken, only that the choice of stands cannot be made based on an appeal to some outside authority. My preference for capatilsim, democracy, rationality, freedom, etc. are, in the end, largely culturally determined choices. Make no mistake, I still prefer them, still argue for them, still fully participate in them, but cannot point to an unimpeachable source for my beliefs.
Fred, I think the above answers your question. I believe there are no grounds for my decisions about morality. What are the grounds for your beliefs? What is the source of morality in your opinion? In particulary, what is the source of your specific moral code?