Category Archives: Philosophy

Partisan Identity and the Death of Representative Governance

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There is a danger in thinking of ourselves as political and—more precisely—partisan animals. A big chunk of our modern political derangement flows directly from incorporating ideas like “liberal” and “conservative” into our individual identities. As I write in an essay at MerionWest, this is dry kindling for the spread of partisan discord.

On either side of the political spectrum, discourse is dominated by unhinged ideologues whose voices are amplified by their reactionary opposites and an attention-hungry media that feasts on controversy. The most salient opinions are often those most thoroughly divorced from discernible reality. From pole to pole, nuance and clarity are actively derided. On the political right, a pandemic has become a hub for belligerence and conspiracy theories. On the political left, race, gender, and power have suddenly transformed into religious fetishes, and dissent has become an act of intolerable violence. The political arena is no longer a contest of ideas, but of identities.

None of this reflects a political reality anyone would esteem. And most of us—regardless of how we voted in the last election—recognize this. But because the idea of left and right, of liberal and conservative, has seeped so deeply into our brains and characterizes so much of our political discourse, many of us are left fumbling for fresh traction. There is something kooky—even dangerous—going on in the shrill fringes. It is true wherever you look. Unfortunately, our way of understanding ourselves as political animals does not leave us with a lot of options. Open dissent from political orthodoxy risks excommunication—from friends, from family, from professional affiliations.

Read more at MerionWest.

Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

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I wrote a new thing for Areo Magazine. Here are some excerpts:

Science is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Individual scientists are riddled with biases and blind spots. Their views are subtly influenced by their sociopolitical contexts. The scope of their thought and investigation is substantially curtailed by the limits of extant knowledge and technology, some of which might well be faulty. But science is also a structured in a way that imbues it with peculiar properties. It can produce mistakes, but, to a degree unmatched by any other discipline, it is uniquely designed to identify those mistakes. Though imperfect, science is—by a considerable margin—the most powerful knowledge-gaining mechanism humans have ever devised.

 

But, even with a theory like general relativity, whose predictions have been tested and confirmed countless times, scientists still don’t claim to have discovered the final, unimpeachable description of space and time. In fact, most physicists will probably tell you that, at very vast or very tiny scales, the physics of general relativity is useless, if not entirely wrong. General relativity is one of the most successful theoretical frameworks ever devised, but it is not true beyond all doubt. There’s more reason to be confident in general relativity than there is to be confident about any of the comforting assumptions we use to get through the day—my spouse loves me, my job is secure, I’ll see my family again in the evening—but, in the strictest sense, it is not true beyond doubt.

 

Because postmodernists reject the idea of a final arbiter, such as a universally accessible and ultimately knowable reality against which claims can be evaluated, when postmodernists ask themselves are you sure? they can never really know the answer. Postmodernism lacks an anchor point for error correction. As a result, it is fundamentally illegitimate—and ultimately pointless—as an intellectual enterprise. It is, at best, a self-perpetuating indulgence, ostensibly doing the work scientific disciplines naturally do on their own.

 

In repudiating the notion that truths are fixed for eternity, postmodernism denies itself the capacity to course correct. Its students may pay lip service to the crude notion that some truths are better than others. But, without recourse to something universal and knowable outside their individual and social contexts, they’ll never be able to tell which truths those are.

As always, I encourage you to read the full piece here. And take some time to explore Areo, because they publish a lot of other interesting and insightful stuff.

Stop Stigmatizing Cultural Appropriation

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This one is hosted over at Areo Magazine. Here’s a taste:

Cultural appropriation. The term alone leaves many people primed for offense. Unfortunately, as a tool for policing behavior, the concept makes little sense. It implies that extant cultural differences are precious and worth preserving at great cost; that cultural artifacts can be owned; that the bounds of ownership break cleanly along racial lines; and that the value of minority cultures is somehow contingent upon how members of dominant cultures treat them. The first claim is clumsy and misguided—an understanding of culture reveals the latter two to be both false and pernicious. After a quick appraisal of the current sociopolitical landscape, I will explain how a scientific understanding of culture and basic human biology drains cultural appropriation of its coherence, while a sufficiently broad survey of human history renders it petty and parochial.

For more, check out Stop Stigmatizing Cultural Appropriations. And poke around a bit while you’re over there. Lots of interesting stuff at Areo.

Speedy

Does this weird, anthropomorphized rodent diminish an entire culture? Would a mouse so fond of cheese rapidly develop cardiovascular problems? What would his (hers? its?) dopamine reaction curve look like anticipating cheese versus consuming it? Are misused sombreros an act of violence? So many questions. So few answers.

 

What Critics Get Wrong (and Right) About ‘Sokal 2.0’

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Much has been written about the recent hoax perpetrated against segments of postmodern academia, most of it fairly binary. People are either enthusiastic fans or strident critics. For my part, I’m in the former camp. The fields targeted by the hoax are, at best, silly and indulgent. Less generously, a case can be made that these fields are actively harmful. They not only spread, but actively reinforce, bias, confusion, and extremism.

Still, the hoax was flawed. For one, it wasn’t scientific. Though, in this regard, it’s worth remembering that the authors never claimed otherwise—in fact, they state explicitly that their project was not scientific. And, while it proves that journals within those fields will publish garbage, it doesn’t prove that garbage is all they produce.

Below, I’ll explore some of these criticisms. I’ll do so largely with an eye on the philosophical roots of the disciplines in question as compared to the sciences. Points of merit will be noted, but the primary thrust here is to illustrate how a lot of the criticism of the hoax stems from a failure to understand the fields it hit.

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An Expansive Sokal-Style Hoax Exposes Academic Tomfoolery

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An impressive Sokal-style hoax came to light this week and, frankly, I could not be more pleased. The same should be true of anyone who values evidenced-based reasoning and thoughtful, honest scholarship. It took aim at the ideological fanaticism, rampant bias, and pseudo-intellectualism poisoning large swaths of the humanities. There’s an excellent and extensive write-up on this in Areo Magazine, so I won’t spend much time on an exhaustive summary. Make no mistake–it’s worth looking into, but I won’t pretend I can provide a better summary than the one provided by the original authors. Suffice it to say that several leading journals in the humanities (ones focused on culture/gender/identity studies) accepted and/or published papers with absurd or evenly deeply unethical conclusions. One even published sections of Hitler’s Mein Kampf reworked with modern feminist jargon.

Here, I’d like to explain why the hoax is a good thing. Surely people immersed in the fields exposed by the hoax as cauldrons of blind and indulgent hucksterism will cook up all manner of wild apologetics to minimize the harm done to their disciplines. Rationalizing faults and failings is a very human thing to do. Some of their criticisms will probably even have merit.

Thing is, the hoax–perpetrated by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsey, and Peter Boghossian–wasn’t about harming a grossly misguided set of intellectual traditions. It was about exposing the harm those fields are doing to academia in general and society at large. These are the vacuous progeny of schools of thought based primarily in tortured sophistry and intellectual masturbation. They are, by their very nature, incapable of contributing to human knowledge or advancing human progress. Curing diseases, expanding the scope of human rights, improving the prospects of vulnerable or marginalized groups, or even the humbdrum business of finding things out is not what these fields are about.

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Atheism and the Public Sphere

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Religious liberals and conservative moderates often recoil in the face of hard atheism. To them, atheism represents a sort callous disdain for an inoffensive source of succor and support. Why, they wonder, are people subjected to such rancorous ridicule for believing in something that brings them comfort?

Doubtless this reaction springs from a place of authenticity. There are plenty of atheists who scorn religion wholesale and excoriate its practitioners as frail imbeciles. And there are plenty of others who take no real offense at private religiosity but opportunistically assail believers with similar barbs. Why not? It’s good fun at the expense of an easy target. A bit of lazy recreation can go a long way. It’s shooting tin cans in the desert.

Because of this confusion, it’s worth making efforts to advance a more nuanced position. Naturally, I can’t speak for the entire population of atheists. The atheist community is diverse. Some, like me, disavow religious belief because it is contrary to a worldview built around reason and evidence. Faith is a childish epistemology. It can’t be reconciled with science and careful reasoning. Others disdain religion for emotional reasons.

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