Reddit reviews Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science
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We're at war with antihumanism and the postmodernist reasoning behind such ideas as New Historicism. This is something that knows no political affiliation. As documented in Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition, this sort of nihilistic anti-science full of foregone conclusions and closed circular thinking has spread to the Intelligent Design debate, business classes, the academic left, it's everywhere. It's an attack on the entire foundations of science and post-Enlightenment knowledge. I presume most of us at least appreciate the benefits of science and value their own human agency, which antihumanism says doesn't exist. We're supposedly unthinking products of our media and culture.
According to Christina Hoff Sommers herself in Who Stole Feminism?, Michel Foucault is the one of the most cited philosophers in what she describes as 'gender feminism'. Both Foucault and Jacques Derrida in particular are responsible for a good chunk of the philosophical game that allows one to find hauntings and signs of malice in any facet of life you'd care to look in.
To understand what postmodernist thought is like, try to imagine a world where all of the following is true:
These ideas come with the authoritarianism built-in, after all, it's all about consensus of narratives and supporting the group's narratives over all others.
I do want to stress that while people will argue these points, not everyone who does will actually be true believers in them. I sincerely doubt a number of people at Gawker are true believing postmodernists, they just love the perfect clickbait philosophy for their clickbait journalism. True believers do exist however and their lives must be truly frightening to them.
There's plenty of more of this fatalistic sophistry if you go digging through postmodernist thought. Foucault makes it a point to attack the history of psychology and mental health (such as this video - where in the same breath, he also decries scientific falsifiability), to define it as a system of oppression and control. While there's some unfortunate historical truth to this assertion, this is also another means of neatly avoiding the subject of reality and truth by defining the topic of 'sanity' off-limits, as well.
They use techniques influenced by Derrida's idea of 'deconstruction', a throwback to 12th century scholasticism where scholars are essentially divining the truth based upon their own personal interpretations of text, except now with postmodern interpretation, they're completely unfettered by rules or rationality. If you want to force a text to imply some sort of weird pun and then use that as part of a greater argument to call someone a shitlord, go for it. If you want to select a completely unrelated work and then contrast them to find cherry-picked meaning and treat it like a smoking gun, knock yourself out. Much like Zombo.com, the only limit here is yourself.
While not everyone in the SJW camp may apply or use all the lines of thought I mentioned above, the spirit of postmodernism is mixing and matching and you're sure to find at least a few of these assaults on logic, the most famous being: We just assume going into it that 'patriarchy' as the postmodernist defines it, is real, a systematic conspiracy into every facet of life and that's not up for debate nor can it be probed except through language itself and criticism.
Most of the other ideas are just ways of making this a closed system that cannot be contested and tools you can use to scream whatever today's variation of 'bourgeois!' is, be it 'misogynist!' or worse. Whatever that person feels is appropriate. They have 'proof', after all, and it starts with their feelings.
The Thick of It has a scene that I think perfectly captures the essence of postmodern politics:
> Hugh Abbot: So what are we gonna do now?
> Malcolm Tucker: You're gonna completely reverse your position.
> Hugh Abbot: Hang on a second... Malcolm... That's not gonna be easy. That's gonna be quite hard.
> Malcolm Tucker: Well, the announcement you didn't make today - you did.
> Hugh Abbot: No, I didn't. And there were television cameras there while I was not doing it.
> Malcolm Tucker: Fuck them.
> Hugh Abbot: I'm not sure what level of reality I'm supposed to be operating on.
> Malcolm Tucker: Look, this is what they run with. I tell them that you said it, they believe that you said it. They don't REALLY believe that you said it, they know that you never said it, but it's in their interest to say that you said it, because if they don't say that you said it, they're not gonna get what you say tomorrow or the next day, when I decide to tell them what it is you're saying.
This is what our problem is.
For extra points of view on the subject:
Edit: Had to add the Chip Morninstar doc, it's a fun one. It also mentions how Wired #1 in 1993 already had an SJW meltdown over a harmless prank. This has been a problem brewing for a while.
This might be a good place for me to review Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. It is a slam against Postmodernism of their day written by two STEMlord lefty academics. Original 1994 edition of that book inspired Sokal Hoax, and the 1998 edition I've read was revised in light of that. And I must say that the book is interesting in multiple ways.
What really stuck me is that both Paul Gross and Norman Levitt considered themselves solid leftists (Sokal still does, for that matter). And I don't think any of the book's critics have ever managed to successfully undermine their lefty credentials. Which makes it clear that the leftism shifted CONSIDERABLY in the last 25 years or so. For one, both authors thought that feminism of their time had more or less accomplished all valid goals and already overshot -- the book says academic hiring was even then biased against males.
So, 25 years ago (and probably just 5 years ago) in America it was possible to be a leftist in good standing even if you were critical of many feminist claims. It was enough to profess egalitarianism in the workplace and to be okay with abortion. Mainstream leftism was mostly about being anti-war, anti-creationism, anti-fatcat and MLK-style colorblind anti-racist. I am not sure what has happened, but downfall of evangelicals made anti-creationism superfluous which maybe then mandated strengthening of other commitments. (RaggedJackScarlet contrasts old and new leftism here)
Another interesting thing is that the authors more or less agree with Peterson and with his "Cultural Marxism" narrative even if they never use those exact words. Like him, they see the rise of postmodernism as the natural consequence of diminishing prospects of leftist activism in the eighties and nineties. Unions fell apart; there was no Vietnam war any more to motivate anti-war protests; Soviet Union fell apart and its massive crimes were finally indisputably revealed to the world. The only refuge was in academia and in abstruse theories:
> The dream of a unified, militant left with a widespread constituency belongs once more to the realm of wistful speculation. The civil rights movement that once stirred the conscience of the nation and seemed the rightful heir to everything noble in American tradition has devolved into a morass of bitter resentments, susceptible to tribalistic fantasies and demagoguery, but unable to formulate coherent goals or effective strategies. True, the women’s movement retains wide support, if one’s criterion is support for such key doctrines as reproductive rights and equal status in the workplace. But there is a sharp gradient separating mainstream feminism of this sort from the acute and apocalyptic oppositionism of “academic” feminism. [...] The Marxist tradition has deliquesced into a mere oppositional posture decorated with a traditional lexicon but severed, apparently forever, from the struggles of an organized or organizable working class. The left, in sum, is at the moment the surviving squad of theoreticians of a nonexistent mass movement.
> Nonetheless, the radical style of the sixties left traces that persist. First, there is the enduring relation between left-intellectuals and American universities. The campus constitutes the only environment in which recent radicalism became naturalized. Even as leftist rhetoric denounced higher education as the breeding ground for unquestioning servants of the bourgeoisie, leftist intellectuals, almost inadvertently, were forming a network of personal and professional ties with the institutions themselves. The scholarly community was the inevitable refuge to which activism retreated as its concrete political possibilities melted away.
> [...]
> This fact—this naturalization of the left as a well-dug-in sector of the university community—presents us with a considerable puzzle in view of the isolation and neutering of significant left-wing sentiment in the world of “real” politics. There is no strong—or even anemic—left-wing constituency out there standing godfather to the academic careers of its theorists.
They thought that even seemingly noble goals of PoMo theory were mostly result of this resentment:
> the aroma of sour grapes is in the air. The urge to redeem slides easily into an eagerness to debunk for the sake of debunking. New candidates for veneration—writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, historical figures, non-Western “ways of knowing”—are put forward not for what they are but for what they are not—white, European, male.
It seems to me that American left underwent some kind of evaporative cooling wherein in the 80's and 90's many abandoned it and only most fanatical remained who then sank deep into Theory. Now that the left has somewhat recovered due to 2008 recession and Bush incompetence, it still carries those distortions caused by lost decades.
What is also interesting is how theoreticians twenty years ago were far more willing to attack scientific method directly as hopelessly biased and tainted by colonialism, patriarchy and other sins. They really believed that it was necessary to invent "other ways of knowing" to escape shackles of western science. Various pseudisciences peddled under "Afrocentrism" banner were especially shocking to read about.
So I suppose that it is a sign of progress that modern critics no longer attack scientific method itself as evil and sexist but only scientific establishment as such. 25 years ago they said "we need to destroy science as it is" and now it is "we need more women doing science as it is." Whatever you think, the latter is much less dangerous for science itself --even if it might be at times unfair to individual scientists who might be unfairly accused of sexism now and then.
Authors can also grasp that tribalism promoted by PoMo theories is actually bad:
>As we write, we are confronted with the spectacle of a revived ethnic tribalism in Europe, where Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Moslems rape and murder one another in the charnel house of the former Yugoslavia[...] The murderous hatreds that rend Northern Ireland no longer seem anomalous. Elsewhere, the racial and religious chauvinism that pits Sikh against Hindu against Moslem, Sinhalese against Tamil, Arab Sudanese against black Sudanese goes on unabated. We might expect the humanitarian conscience to be especially aware, in such a time, of the horrors lurking in tribalism.
> Yet in the decidedly less lethal venue of academic life, we find that tribalism, in one form or another, is the most-favored project of leftist ideologues, who appear to have abandoned, for the moment, the universalism that once shone through even the dreariest left-wing cant. The “politics of identity” is now sanctified on the campus. Increasingly, many groups are held to deserve their own separate and inviolable space.
As a resident of the Balkans, I am stumped how no one else on the left sees this any more. You guys are chugging mercury thinking it'll cure you.
All in all I find it incredible how much left has shifted. Class issues were still fairly important to authors and they are obviously displeased that some abstruse theory overrode "real" concerns. And "Cultural Marxism" was at least by some seen as legitimate explanation of what went wrong. The left also once stood for universalism and could articulate why tribalism was bad. No more.
EDIT: added portion on tribalism
EDIT2: added portion on evaporative cooling
You can look at these for an examination of postmodernist authors on a case by case basis:
Higher Superstition
Fashionable Nonsense
The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy
>Basically, education and knowledge is the "liberal agenda"
http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074
The religion has nothing to do with the science so shouldn't be able to influence it. Those who try in the name of religion are morons who try to rationalize the religion and are stupid. The science is influenced by ideologies too, example:
http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074
Not to mention the science in the former Socialist countries.
The religion can influence politics just like the gut feelings, brainwashing, mass hysteria, hate, envy, prejudice, lying propaganda, moronic ideologies, crafty politicians, etc etc - nothing special with the religion here.
Are you illiterate? I answered your question:
> a process of constructing knowledge that is highly dependent on the individual's subjectivity and interpretation of their active experience and not what "actually" occurs. It is grossly unscientific garbage.
Those are not buzzwords and I sure as shit didn't make them up. You will find those terms in academia since the 90s at least.
If you are really interested, then read this book about the issues plaguing science: https://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074
Also see another one called, "The Science Wars" which is a sort of follow-up to the above.
It's not that entire universities are plagued by postmodern thinking. Postmodernism as it relates to art and subjective things has its place, and I think it's interesting, even sometimes valuable. But it is rare that postmodernism is treated as belonging only to the area of subjective topics, as it often is incorporated in other areas in which it cannot contribute something substantial.
Humanities departments in universities are the primary source of postmodern scholarship, in departments like English, Sociology, Communications, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Cultural and Social Anthropology. It is not unusual for members of these departments to extend postmodernism to areas it doesn't belong, like science. In fact, there are quite a few books written by scientists and academics addressing this very problem.
The links in my previous post also do a fine job of outlining the problem.
I find this to be an excellent paper that tries to debunk postmodern methodologies: http://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf
The philosopher Roger Scruton has written a whole book devoted to critiquing various postmodern thinkers: https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-Left/dp/1408187337/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1468857400&sr=8-1
For postmodernism's relation to the field of history, you could try this volume by Richard J. Evans: https://www.amazon.com/Defence-History-Richard-J-Evans/dp/1862073953/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
In its relation to science, you could try this book: https://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=
I think SJW's lack education because they are naturally unintelligent. They're ignorance and stupidity
A. Attracts them to easy degrees in the humanities departments of colleges, which are dominated by ex 60's radicals and where they are indoctrinated with anti white, anti male, anti capitalist, and anti science cultural marxist and post modernist BS.
B. Prevents them from acquiring jobs that are not at Mcdonalds and Starbucks and is the source of many personal failures. This makes them angry at the world, which they blame for their problems, and attracts them to the ideology of SJW tumblr bloggers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
http://www.amazon.com/dp/156663796
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_i
Good books on understanding tumblr SJWs.