Chomsky versus the Regressive Left

I tire of people trying to paint Chomsky as the father of the regressive left.

Yes, some elements of this thinking have influenced it and flowed into it (e.g., an often unbalanced and one-sided critique of US foreign policy). And, yes, you can make serious and sometimes very serious criticisms of Chomsky too.

But I also tire of regressive leftists trying to invoke Chomsky as if he is one of their own. This is blatantly untrue.

If you look seriously at Chomsky’s thought and beliefs, there is a vast amount there that is vehemently opposed to the regressive, Postmodernist left.

Let us run through a list:

(1) Chomsky is strongly in favour of free speech and he once went so far as to defend the right of a French holocaust denier to free speech.

Furthermore, Chomsky praises America’s free speech and its constitutional protection of free speech, and even goes so far as to say that America’s protection of free speech is the “best in the world” (and that is his words as quoted in Mitchell and Schoeffel 2002: 268). Do regressive leftists agree with Chomsky here and defend people’s right to free speech, even racists and holocaust deniers?

(2) Chomsky rejects French Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, and all its related ideas, and he has called leading Postmodernist thinkers “charlatans.” Chomsky has also been scathing in his assessment of Michel Foucault and cult of Foucault.

(3) Chomsky thinks that Freudianism and Marxism are irrational cults like organised religion, and has been brutal in his criticism of them (Mitchell and Schoeffel 2002: 227).

(4) Chomsky wrote a scathing attack on leftists who talk about “white male science,” saying that the concept sounds as stupid as the Nazi idea of “Jewish physics.”

(5) Chomsky is a defender of the best values of the Enlightenment from hostile anti-rationalist leftists. Chomsky is also committed to the defence of the real existence of objective truth, as part of his defence of the Enlightenment.

(6) Chomsky also rejects the extreme social constructivism and “blank slate” view of human beings that characterise some parts of the modern left, and he thinks that human beings have a real human nature caused by biology and evolution.

In particular, point (6) by implication constitutes a brutal rejection of the extreme social constructivism of Postmodernism and Third Wave Feminism: e.g., it seems likely that, if Chomsky were honest, he presumably thinks that sex differences and even some gender differences (note the word “some”) are real and rooted in biology and Darwinian evolution. This doesn’t deny important environmental influences, of course, but it requires that genes and biology are important, and entails the rejection of extreme social constructivism.

I wonder how long it will be before Chomsky is slandered as a racist, sexist, homophobic, white male oppressor and member of the patriarchy?

Time to add his name to the long list below!



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mitchell, Peter R. and John Schoeffel (eds.). 2002. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Scribe Publications, New York.

Gad Saad on Postmodernism

An amusing but serious take on Postmodernism from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioural scientist.

Chomsky defends the Enlightenment from Postmodernist Irrationalists

In 6 seconds.



Keep up the good work, Noam.

Self-Refuting Nonsense

Imagine a man with whom you were having a conversation who got up and said this:

“There is no such thing as spoken human communication or spoken human language.”

The very act of asserting that statement while others listen and understand its content utterly refutes what is being asserted: empirically, it is blatantly self-refuting.

Now consider the core belief of Postmodernism:

Proposition (1): there is no such thing as objective truth.

This is self-refuting nonsense as well.

If one believes that there are no objective truths, then it follows that nothing you can say is objectively true, not even the statement that “there are no objective truths.”

What kind of statement, then, were you making? Was your statement just gibberish like the bleating of a goat? Is it, semantically speaking, in the same category as Chomsky’s famous sentence “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”?

And, epistemologically speaking, what kind of statement was it? If it is understood as a synthetic a posteriori proposition, it is, as we have seen, manifestly self-refuting.

Now of course the sophisticated Postmodernist might defend it as a merely culturally relative truth, true only to a community of people who wish to believe it.

But that will not do. If it is not defended as a universally and objectively true statement, then the Postmodernist has not considered the possibility that objective truths do exist over and above culturally-relative beliefs.

At any rate, we have seen in the last post where it leads: to an intellectually and morally broken world-view that cannot even defend the idea that the worst beliefs in Nazism were objectively false.

I have posed this question before, and I have never seen any Postmodernist sensibly answer it: if it is not an objective historical fact that the Holocaust happened, then why is there so much evidence that it happened? Why the numerous eyewitnesses and survivors and their testimony that we can still read today? Why the huge physical evidence? (e.g., the death camps, gas chambers, etc.).

Either (1) the Holocaust happened as a real, objective event in the past or (2) it did not as an objective fact, and any left-wing person who denies objective truth has got no business opposing, criticising and condemning the disgusting, shameful and ignorant fringe of Holocaust deniers we see today.

Rather, any Postmodernists who really believe their truth relativism and Foucault’s view of truth should be saying that “all truth is made by power,” no objective truths exist, and our “truths” are invented and not determined by some objective reality – not even the Holocaust.

But then the Postmodernist would face these questions:

(1) Is the proposition that “the Holocaust happened” just a truth made by power? If “yes,” what power system “made” it and why?

(2) If you think it is not an objective truth that “the Holocaust happened,” then explain why we have overwhelming evidence that it did.

(3) if you accept the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust happened, then explain why you would persist in denying the reality of objective truth.

It does not matter what choice the Postmodernist takes, every path they could take here leads to exactly the same end as we saw in the last post: an intellectually and morally broken and bankrupt world-view.

The Consequences of Postmodernist Truth Relativism

One of the core beliefs of Postmodernism is this:

Proposition (1): there is no such thing as objective truth; all “truths” are culturally relative.

If one believes that there are no objective truths, then it follows that nothing you can say is objectively true, not even the statement that “there are no objective truths.” What sort of statement, then, is Proposition (1) if it is not objectively true? Is it rhetorical hot air? Is it akin to fictitious statements in poetry or novels? If not, what?

Moreover, why should anyone believe you? What justification do you offer to people to believe this proposition, if you do not even assert it as an objectively true statement?

Even worse, if Proposition (1) were true, then it would follow that all the propositions of Postmodernism are not objectively true, but merely “subjectively” true within the Postmodernism subculture. There is no reason why hostile people from other cultures or subcultures need believe them.

But why, then, when people criticise Postmodernist doctrines do the Postmodernists react with hysterical outrage and act like their core beliefs are objectively true and their critics are wrong?

If they took their beliefs seriously and they were consistent, they would say this in response to critics:

“Of course, it is true that all Postmodernist beliefs are not objectively true and are only relatively true within the Postmodernist subculture. Therefore within your own subculture your epistemological beliefs are true.”

The trouble with this, however, is that it cannot evade the following questions:

(1) why, then, should anyone who is not a Postmodernist believe the Postmodernist beliefs and what justifications can Postmodernists offer to their critics? What, for example, can the Postmodernists say to genuine Nazis to dissuade them from their beliefs?

(2) it cannot evade the issue that we live in a mind-independent world with a high degree of regularity and consistency, and that language can refer to and represent that reality. If language can represent reality, then it is but a short step to the correspondence theory of truth and objective empirical truths.

Let us start with (1).

If Postmodernist truth relativism and cultural relativism were taken seriously, then it follows that all the “truths” of official Nazi culture – racism, authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and German racial supremacism – were valid within Nazi culture and Nazi culture was equal to all other cultures (for that is the clear consequence of believing that all cultures are equal).

On what grounds, then, do Postmodernists object to the ideas of Nazi culture? How would they argue against it? They cannot, for example, argue that the Nazi belief that certain races are genetically inferior to other races is objectively false, for the unhinged Postmodernist core belief is that there are no objective truths (and that includes no objective empirical truths in science).

Even worse, the Postmodernist associated belief is that all cultures are equal and of equal value. So, once one beleives that, it is not possible to object to Nazi culture on moral and aesthetic grounds (especially when moral relativism is also a tenet of Postmodernism!).

Now let’s move to point (2). The analytic philosopher John Searle gives a powerful argument for this:

“The problem that all these guys [namely, postmodernists and poststructuralists] have is that once you give me that first premise—that there is a reality that exists totally independently of us—then the other steps follow naturally. Step 1, external realism: You’ve got a real world that exists independently of human beings. And step 2: Words in the language can be used to refer to objects and states of affairs in that external reality. And then step 3: If 1 and 2 are right, then some organization of those words can state objective truth about that reality. Step 4 is we can have knowledge, objective knowledge, of that truth. At some point they have to resist that derivation, because then you’ve got this objectivity of knowledge and truth on which the Enlightenment vision rests, and that’s what they want to reject.”
Postrel, Steven R. and Edward Feser. 2000. “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” Reason (February)
http://reason.com/archives/2000/02/01/reality-principles-an-intervie

As Searle points out, once we admit that there is an ordered reality independent of our thoughts about it, and that we can use language consistently to refer to objects and processes in that reality, then the other steps follow.

Many of our words, and the concepts they represent, can and do refer to objective things in reality, and clearly many concepts we have (signified by words or sounds) are constrained, limited and defined by reality. For example, the modern English word “zebra,” as understood by competent speakers of English, cannot simply refer to hedgehogs: the concept signified by the word “zebra” really is constrained by mind-independent things we see in reality.

Or, as some analytic philosophers would say, language can be isomorphic to thought (including concepts and ideas), and in turn language can indirectly correspond and refer to reality (Schwartz 2012: 182), as is also argued by modern linguists and in the discipline of evolutionary epistemology. Objective truth follows from the way language can describe or picture reality. This leads us directly to the most convincing theory of truth: the correspondence theory.

And once we recognise the reality of objective empirical truths, we have a basis by which rational human beings can resolve their differences, settle disputes, correct errors and, above all, rationally deal with political, social, cultural and economic disagreements.

By contrast, Postmodernists have no such strategy – all they have is truth relativism and cultural relativism, utterly intellectually bankrupt concepts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.

The Poststructuralists as Frustrated Marxists-Communists

What is wrong with the Left today? In my view, a big problem is the ideology called Postmodernism.

Chomsky in the video below gives us some fascinating insights into the origins of French Poststructuralism – and also into its modern offshoot Postmodernism.

Remember he is talking about the origin of French Poststructuralism in the early 1970s.



Chomsky understood the origins of Poststructuralism very well: many of the big French Poststructuralists – like Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and Michel Foucault (1920–1984) – had been Marxists, and some of them Stalinists and Maoists.

They become disillusioned with this cult-like ideology by the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had also been associated with Structuralism (the fashionable academic theory that replaced Existentialism in post-WWII France). The result? These frustrated Marxists turned to Poststructuralism, and to what they believed was a new “radical” critique of “bourgeois” society and civilisation. Unfortunately, this involved all sorts of unbelievably stupid nonsense such as truth relativism, the idea that texts don’t really have authors, and that texts can mean anything you like (no matter how insane your interpretation).

A crucial foundational text for the emerging Poststructuralist movement was Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” (Barthes 1967 = Barthes 1977). In this, Barthes essentially argued that critics should divorce their study of a text from its author, and that a text is not a product of its author with a definite and fixed meaning intended by the author (see Barthes 1977: 146).

The radical political agenda for this nonsense was expressed quite openly, explicitly and without any shame by Barthes in this article, as follows:

“Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic. …. literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” (Barthes 1977: 146).

In other words, let us ignore authors and pretend texts can mean anything. In the process, we can emancipate ourselves from “reason, science, [and] law.”

As an aside, some people seem to think that Michel Foucault was some great exception to the absurdity of the Poststructuralist movement, but this is entirely wrong and anyone who bothers to read Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” (Foucault 1984 [1969]) can see clearly he was fully on board with the stupidity.

Any person who wants to be “liberated” from reason and science is simply unhinged. The Poststructuralist ideology and its Postmodernist offspring was nothing but the most outrageous betrayal of the Left, which, if anything, ought to be strongly defending reason and modern science.

Let us just probe one point in what follows. For example, what would being “liberated” from modern science even involve? Would you be “liberated” from modern science-based medicine? Liberated from scientific principles that ensure that our engineers built buildings, houses and other structures that don’t just collapse on people’s heads and kill people?

Liberated from vaccination programs or scientific principles of public health and sanitation that protect first-world countries from diseases that still plague the developing world? Liberated from the germ theory of disease? Liberated from the principles of internal combustion and science that make motor vehicles work?

The few people in our world today who seriously want to be “liberated” from modern science are mostly religious fundamentalists of the most extreme kind – people who don’t accept Darwinian evolution or even modern medicine. Is that who the progressive left wants to stand with these days?

It is not surprising that the Postmodernist left took up this bizarre hostility to science to the point where it had become an embarrassment to anyone who cares to look at the issue seriously.

If the left wants to reform and strengthen itself, a good place to start is simply for left-wing people to subject Postmodernism to the withering criticism and contempt it deserves, without any concern for offending fellow leftists. Postmodernism does very little except rot your brain – it is the enemy of reason, science, logic, progressive economics and rational discourse.

Further Reading
“Postmodernism: Its Family Tree and Origins,” February 8, 2015.

“Quantum Weirdness and Nonsense,” October 4, 2015.

“Foucault’s “What is an Author?”: A Critique ,” March 7, 2015.

“Lectures on Russian Formalism and Semiotics and Structuralism,” February 19, 2015.

“Postmodernism and Third World Progressive Movements,” February 9, 2015.

“Yanis Varoufakis on Postmodernism and Economic Methodology,” February 16, 2015.

“The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism,” February 5, 2015.

“Chomsky on Žižek and Lacan,” February 6, 2015.

“Nonsense and Postmodernist Writing,” February 7, 2015.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland. 1967. “Death of the Author,” Aspen 5/6.

Barthes, Roland. 1977. “Death of the Author,” Image Music Text (trans. Stephen Heath). Fontana, London. 142–148.

Foucault, Michel. 1984 [1969]. “What is an Author?,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Pantheon, New York. 101–120.

Quantum Weirdness and Nonsense

The strange world of quantum mechanics seems to have a natural appeal to irrational and foolish people like Postmodernists and others who deny objective empirical truth or the laws of thought.

In arguments with such people when you defend the reality of real objective empirical truths, you will frequently find such people immediately appealing to various weird phenomena in quantum mechanics to defend themselves. “Doesn’t quantum mechanics prove that there is no objective truth?,” they might say.

The use (or, rather, abuse) of quantum theory in this manner is deeply mistaken and fallacious, however, for the simple reason that what is true for, and actually does happen in, the infinitesimally small world of quantum mechanics need not be true at all for large objects in the macroscopic world in which human beings live. Let us take one example: abuse of quantum mechanics in attempts to dismiss the laws of logic.

For example, in the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, a cat is imagined as being both alive and dead simultaneously, because it is imagined as being in a state of quantum superposition.

Now, if it were true that a cat could naturally be in such a state, wouldn’t this disprove the Law of Noncontradiction, the law of logic that one cannot assert as true at the same time (1) a proposition p and (2) its negation (¬p) (or, that is to say, one cannot assert p ∧ ¬p without fatal self-contradiction)?

The answer to this lies in asking: how realistic is the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment? Actually, there is no rational reason to think large macroscopic objects like cats could ever naturally be in a state of quantum superposition at all: the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is abstract, unrealistic and not possible in nature (Newton 2000: 166).

To cite some recent research here, some physicists have found evidence that time dilation effects caused by gravity cause the natural collapse of quantum superpositions in objects the size of molecules and larger objects, and that on a system like the Earth (with a given gravity), even with current technology, the size limit for an object in a state of quantum superposition is about a millimetre (which actually seems to be surprisingly large!). Of course, scientists might use better technology to overcome this natural limit in experiments and so create larger objects in a state of quantum superposition, but this is obviously a highly artificial activity that does not – as far as we know – happen in nature.

So the point is: whatever weirdness that happens at quantum scales in nature stays there and does not naturally intrude into our macroscopic world, so that it does not invalidate or refute the laws of logic as applied to the natural macroscopic world. Nor does it refute the arguments for real objective truth or the laws of logic when the latter are carefully restricted to the correct domain in which they operate: the natural macroscopic world of human life and large objects in it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gerry, Christopher C. and Kimberley M. Bruno. 2013. The Quantum Divide: Why Schrödinger’s Cat is either Dead or Alive. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Newton, Roger G. 2000. Thinking about Physics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Pikovski, Igor, Zych, Magdalena, Costa, Fabio and Časlav Brukner . 2015. “Universal Decoherence due to Gravitational Time Dilation,” Nature Physics
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3366.html

Foucault’s Obscurantism: He Admitted it Himself

I am currently having a read through some of Michel Foucault’s major works, and criticisms of his theories, but before I get to detailed criticism, I will just open my critique with my first charge against Foucault: obscurantist writing. How do we know this?

He admitted it himself to the analytic philosopher John Searle, as anyone can hear in the video below!



According to Foucault, you needed to have 10% incomprehensible gibberish in your writing to be taken seriously in French Poststructuralist philosophical pretension! (Even worse, Bourdieu put it at 20%.) Clear writing was not a virtue. Frankly, this already raises alarm bells. If you cannot write clearly and 10% of what you write is gibberish, then questions must be asked about the intellectual merit of your work. Maybe the remaining 90% has some merit, but our suspicions are already raised.

And gibberish was not only a fault of Foucault’s work, but also of French Poststructuralist and general Postmodernist writing.

Yanis Varoufakis on Postmodernism and Economic Methodology

Yanis Varoufakis, now Finance Minister of Greece, some years ago wrote a fascinating book review (see Varoufakis 2002a) of Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge (2001), an edited collection of essays many of which defend Postmodernist epistemology as applied to economic theory.

In his review of the book, Varoufakis launches into a devastating attack on Postmodernism as any sort of viable epistemology or method for economic science.

His critique is taken from an earlier article (Varoufakis 2002c), and an online version of this with its comments on Postmodernism can be read here. I quote below from the online article, as well as referring to the full review.

Now admittedly I do not know whether Mr Varoufakis continues to hold the views he expressed in his 2002 paper, but they are still excellent criticisms, and I have not seen anything that would lead me to think he has repudiated them.

First, Varoufakis notes how Postmodernism shuns any group of people who believe that they have found objective truths, since such experts are deemed to be “privileging” their own “metanarrative” at the expense of other people’s narratives (Varoufakis 2002a: 389).

Although Varoufakis sees some merit in many of the papers in Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge (2001), including what looks like a very interesting one by Philip Mirowski (2002), nevertheless his verdict on Postmodernism is damning.

Varoufakis notes that strong and effective advocates of neoclassical economics have existed for years and long before Postmodernism (Varoufakis 2002: 392). The Postmodern method demands an utter rejection of the view that modern capitalist economies can be regarded as coherent systems, since this would be a “metanarrative” (Varoufakis 2002a: 392). The question arises (though Varoufakis himself does not pose it): how is that compatible with Post Keynesian economics?

Worse, according to Varoufakis, the Postmodernist method has “no future” (Varoufakis 2002a: 393).

Why? Varoufakis argues as follows:

“… despite its considerable oeuvre, postmodern criticisms of economics are doomed to shrivel and be absorbed by mainstream economics; the predator turning into unsuspecting prey. I risk this prediction for two reasons.

First, postmodernists allow economics to parade as equally scientific as the natural sciences (albeit on the grounds that no discipline is truly scientific). They are right of course to think that all theory resembles religion, since it also seeks to give meaning to the practices and expectations of whole communities. However some theories are capable of transcending religion and approaching objectivity better than others. Nature’s habit of working independently of our beliefs about it means that the natural scientist can devise experiments which have the power disinterestedly to discard falsity and thus forge knowledge and progress. Society, on the other hand, is corrupted to the very marrow of its bones by our collective beliefs about it, and can therefore provide no objective test of social theory (the latter being part of the very web of beliefs that society is made of). Thus social theory, unlike thermodynamics, is condemned to remain untestable, and stuck in the realm of opinion. Economics valiantly attempts to extricate itself from this fate with a touching commitment to mathematics but, sadly, it only ends up as a religion with equations.

Postmodernity errs in thinking of this as the inevitable failure of all Modernist enterprises. It lambastes economists’ churlish reliance on an Outer Wall of Algebra and an Inner Wall of Statistics but overlooks their success at never even coming close to the nature and the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, thus shielding the latter from rational criticism. But such is the fate of all idealisms which give language an existence independent of the material conditions of social life and reproduction. If only postmodernist critics understood theology and mathematics a little better! Perhaps they would have recognised in economics the greatest proof that Modernity is saturated with its negation.

Which brings me to the second part of the argument: Postmodernity not only lets neoclassical economics off the hook but, more worryingly, reinforces it copiously before dissolving into it. Consider what the postmodern rejection of metanarratives means at the individual level: It means the loss of any capacity to scrutinise one's private urges rationally on the basis of some collectively constructed notion (or metanarrative) of the Good. Stripped of those capacities, the individual fragments into a community of selves, a bundle of ordinal preferences, and ends up with no one self whose preferences those are. In this Empire of Ordinal Preference the only possible data that social theory can go to work with are the differences in individual whims and freely chosen identities. These data are then, courtesy of their ordinal properties, impossible to compare across persons (for this would require a metanarrative) or procure a view of capitalism as a system. Thus in a fully-fledged postmodern schema, social relations are confined to interplay, voluntarism, tolerance and exchange; society is the playground where the latter unfold; and discussions of the General Will, exploitation and developmental freedom make no sense. Does this all sound familiar?

If it does the reason is that neoclassical economics went down that alley decades ago. ….

For Oscar Wilde the supreme vice was shallowness. For Postmodernity this is the New Jerusalem. Its playfulness allowed it to thrive in the friendlier waters of literary and cultural studies at a time when ‘margins’ were becoming central and classical stuffiness was going out of fashion. But now postmodernists have entered shark-infested territory. Neoclassical economics, another purveyor of shallowness, threatens to bend them to its will, gain strength from them and subsequently reinforce hierarchies more oppressive and totalising than those the postmodernists set out initially to dismantle.”
Varoufakis, Yanis. 2002. “Postmodernism: Conspiring with the Orthodoxy,” 10 June
http://evatt.org.au/news/postmodernism-conspiring-orthodoxy.html

Ouch! Varoufakis is saying that Postmodernist criticisms of neoclassical theory, by the intellectual vacuity of Postmodernism, will subtly blend into neoclassical economics.

Varoufakis also commits himself to a reality that has objectivity, and presumably objective truths, to which science can approach in its testable and falsifiable hypotheses and theories.

And, says Varoufakis, current popular and academic movements to reform economics should reject Postmodernism:

“In recent years many dissident voices had to adapt themselves to postmodern-speak in an attempt to be 'included' on the postmodern bandwagon. The PAE [Post-Autistic Economics] movement must release such voices from this obligation. Social criticism of economics must reclaim an awareness that to reject the scientific status of economics is not to reject science in general or to espouse postmodernism.

Indeed irony and ambiguity were utilised, long before Postmodernity, by thinkers eager to come to what a more confident past once knew as the truth. To re-establish irony, ambiguity and indeterminateness in the discourse of economists would be a triumph of the spirit. But it would not be a postmodern turn. For the latter has no monopoly on an appreciation of the radical indeterminacy of social processes (as Hegel would be all too eager to remind us) or the importance of not taking our selves, and our theories, too seriously. On the contrary, Postmodernity undermines itself by offering Modernity’s most awful purveyor another means of extending its dominance. ….

The postmodern turn will be chosen by pseudo-dissidents whose prime interests lie in acquiring a chic image; one that the self-effacing postmodern criticism is good at imparting. The less fashionable option of working towards historically grounded knowledge will appeal to the truly ‘unreasonable’ dissidents; those driven by an unbending commitment to a rational transformation of society.”
Varoufakis, Yanis. 2002. “Postmodernism: Conspiring with the Orthodoxy,” 10 June
http://evatt.org.au/news/postmodernism-conspiring-orthodoxy.html

Bravo! We can add to this John King’s (2002: 195–196) observations that Postmodernist epistemology is incompatible with core Post Keynesian principles, such as objective reality and objective truth, and even something as basic as Nicholas Kaldor’s “stylised facts” about modern capitalist economies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cullenberg, Stephen, Amariglio, Jack and David Ruccio (eds.). 2001. Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge. Routledge, London and New York.

King, J. E. 2002. A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA.

Mirowski, Philip. 2001. “Refusing the Gift,” in Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio, and David Ruccio (eds.). Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge. Routledge, London and New York. 431–458.

Varoufakis, Yanis. 2002a. “Deconstructing Homo Economicus? Reflections on Postmodernity’s Encounter with Neoclassical Economics” (review of Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge), Journal of Economic Methodology 9.3: 389–396.

Varoufakis, Yanis. 2002b. “Postmodernism: Conspiring with the Orthodoxy,” 10 June
http://evatt.org.au/news/postmodernism-conspiring-orthodoxy.html

Varoufakis, Yanis. 2002c. “Why Critics of Economics can Ill-afford the ‘Postmodern Turn,’” Post-Autistic Economics Review 13 (May 2): article 1.

Postmodernism and Third World Progressive Movements

Aren’t you exaggerating the problems caused by Postmodernism? Isn’t it really kind of harmless? Defenders of Postmodernism might argue this.

Actually, no, I do not think so. The evidence strongly suggests it has had very bad effects on Third World progressive movements and social activism.

First, let us consider what (a younger!) Chomsky says in the video below about Postmodernism and the Third World.



So is there other evidence to back this up? Yes, we need only look at Nanda (1998).

Meera Nanda is an Indian historian and philosopher of science.

She points out that the postmodernist idea of “ethnoscience” – that the science that emerged from the West is only one “discourse” amongst many “discourses” and that are all are equally valid – makes for some extraordinarily anti-progressive and reactionary movements in the developing world, which do much to retard social progress and even harm people.

This, Nanda points out, can be seen in India. In fact, the ethnoscientific and cultural relativist ideas of postmodernism actually empower local traditional conservatives and religious fanatics and allow them to complain that criticisms of their attitudes to women or society as “ethnocentric” and “imperialistic” (Nanda 1998: 287).

Nanda points to utterly horrifying examples. A well-known Postmodernist has declared that mass vaccination in India against smallpox is an “affront to the local custom of variolation, which included inoculation with human smallpox matter accompanied by prayers to the goddess of smallpox” (Nanda 1998: 291). But all the evidence shows that this traditional method is “10 times more likely to actually cause the disease as compared to the modern vaccine” (Nanda 1998: 291). Effective vaccination based on Western medicine, so the Postmodernists claim, is just a “Western logocentric mode of thought” (Nanda 1998: 291).

Nanda relates how native Hindu nationalist and religious fundamentalist movements use the ideas of Postmodernism to defend village sorcerers against modern scientific medicine (Nanda 1998: 292).

One Indian political psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy has drawn on postmodernism and postcolonialism to defend some – shall we say? – eyebrow-raising ideas:

“True ‘patriots’ like Nandy have not even spared those who protested a recent incidence of widow immolation (sati), branding them as modernized Westernized elites who denigrate authentic folk practices (Nandy 1988). Not surprisingly, such nativist, antimodernist ideas have found a sympathetic audience among right‐wing Hindu fundamentalist parties (Nanda 1997b).”

This should send chills down your spine. It is the logical culmination – whether Postmodernists believe in logic or not – of saying there is no truth, no objective morality, and that all cultural “discourses” are equally valid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nanda, M. 1998. “The Epistemic Charity of the Social Constructivist Critics of Science and why the Third World should refuse the Offer,” in N. Koertge (ed.), A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science. Oxford University Press, New York. 286–311.

The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.

Some of the pernicious ideas that Postmodernism has given rise to are the following:

(1) the view that there is no such thing as objective truth;

(2) cultural relativism;

(3) following from (2) the view that there is no such thing as objective morality;

(4) the view that modern science is not true or just one “narrative” that is just as “valid” as any other, and

(5) the view that no text can have a fixed meaning intended by its author.

These ideas have led to intellectual catastrophe on the Left. They would be just as devastating to Post Keynesian economics, if seriously pursued as epistemological ideas. John King (2002: 195–196), for example, is absolutely right to point out that Postmodernist ideas are incompatible with core Post Keynesian principles, such as objective reality and objective truth, and even something as basic as Nicholas Kaldor’s “stylised facts” about modern capitalist economies.

But here I just want to take a quick look over the intellectual origins of modern Postmodernism.

The origins of Postmodernism are complicated. In the mid-20th century, structuralism was the fashionable theory which had replaced existentialism and which had spread from linguistics to anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.

But by the 1970s many French intellectuals, many of whom were former Marxists and communists, reacted against structuralism and Marxism and invented a new poststructuralist philosophy.

It is true that some of the big name philosophers who were associated with poststructuralism did not explicitly identify themselves as “postmodernists,” but we should not be fooled by this: the French Poststructuralist movement is a major source of modern Postmodernism.

Within French poststructuralism, there were at least two important strands, as follows:

(1) the strand derived from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and

(2) the one associated with the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

But numerous other influences flowed into the Postmodernism cacophony that you find in modern cultural studies, literature and philosophy departments in modern universities.

One stream that has entered into modern postmodernism is semiotics, which was in origin a discipline within structuralism but came to influence certain Poststructuralists like Lacan and Foucault.

A third, but underrated, influence on modern Postmodernism was Anglo-American New Criticism, which had been the dominant form of literary criticism in the English-speaking world until the late 1950s and early 1960s, but which, even though it has collapsed, also influenced the theory of textual “deconstruction” that has become an almost cult-like staple of modern postmodernism and cultural studies departments.

A fourth source of modern Postmodernist pretension is the pseudo-science of Freudian psychology and its bastard offspring Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lacanianism.

A fifth influence, though perhaps weaker than the ones above, was Theodor Adorno and the German Frankfurt School, whose social and cultural Marxism was a harbinger of many themes in modern Postmodernism.

Many people on the Left who think of themselves as intellectuals or who are (bizarrely) regarded widely as Leftist intellectuals have been brought up on a steady diet of Postmodernism nonsense: you can always spot them by their arcane and verbose jargon, and their frequent inability to explain what they mean in ordinary, straightforward language. The appalling cult of Postmodernist jargon was famously pilloried by the Postmodernism Generator, a computer program that can write a grammatically correct essay in the Postmodernist style, but is literally nonsense.

Postmodernism as a general philosophy, as the famous linguist Noam Chomsky has said, should go to the flames. It is as simple as that.

Maybe some few ideas can be salvaged from it, but I would be very surprised indeed if these were anything but trivial truths or things that other philosophers have already known for a long time.

Finally, here are some videos below on postmodernism. The first two are excellent videos in which Chomsky explains the history and absurdities of Postmodernism, and its terrible effects on attitudes to modern science and even intellectual life in the developing world.





The final one is from John Searle, from his own conversations with Foucault and Bourdieu, explaining why French poststructuralism is filled with such incomprehensible rubbish.



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aylesworth, Gary. 2005 (rev. 2015). “Postmodernism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

King, J. E. 2002. A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA.

Chomsky on Postmodernism and Poststructuralism

The left – particularly the academic left – really went down a wrong path when Postmodernism and Poststructuralism started poisoning its intellectual life.

If you have worked and studied in English speaking universities over the past 30 years in the humanities, I suspect you will have encountered the mind-numbing drivel that characterizes much of Postmodernist writing. One of its worst excesses was an attack on the natural sciences, exposed in all its ignorance by Alan Sokal and the now famous Sokal affair, and in more detail by Sokal and Bricmont in Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London, 1998).

I will never forget the time I once wasted trying to understand Derrida, and my conclusion that Derrida’s writings are some of the worst rubbish I have ever read.

Frankly, I don’t think it is difficult to find support for this view. Noam Chomsky, probably the most well known libertarian socialist today, gives his view of Postmodernism:

“Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible—he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven’t met, because I am very remote from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones—the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish”
Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism.

As on so many other things, Chomsky is dead right on this subject (and his description of Lacan as “an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan” is priceless!). Nor is he alone, as there is an equally stinging attack on Postmodernism from the philosopher John Searle, which is worth reading.

The major historical issue for the left was, and still should be, economics. I certainly don’t deny the importance of social, cultural and other moral issues, but economics is the burning issue of our time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dawkins, R. “Postmodernism Disrobed,” RichardDawkins.net, 1 April 2007
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed

Gross, P. R. and N. Levitt, 1994. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Postrel, S. R. and E. Feser, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” Reason.com (9 February 2000)
http://www.reason.com/news/show/27599.html

Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont. 1998. Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, Profile, London.