For Molly and Caroline

For a while now, I've been playing guitar and singing silly songs to Caroline and Joey while they jump on the bed. Recently I've started singing them "That's how I escaped my certain fate." Caroline in particular loves it. While Joey and I were surfing youtube, we found this video of the reformed Mission of Burma playing one of their best tunes. We decided to post it so that when Molly and Caroline woke up, they would be sure to watch it.

Philosophy and popular culture: what's been done, what can be done

Below I have lists titles from the Popular Culture and Philosophy series published by Open Court and Blackwell. The series began at Open Court under Bill Irwin. Irwin moved to Blackwell in 2006 and started a series there, while George Reisch continued the original series at Open Court.

Studying the lists brings up some observations

• No one has tried Britney Spears and Philosophy yet although its bound to be a seller. Molly tells me that "Britney Spears" has been the most popular search on Yahoo for something like seven years running.
• The biggest forces in popular culture are actually too sensitive and complex for this sort of work. No one has yet tried Pornography and Philosophy, Evangelical Christianity and Philosophy, or Capitalism and Philosophy, although Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy comes close. Notice also that it is the only one to mention controversy in the title.
• Open Court started really cranking these out under Reisch.
  
• Most titles are still about movies and TV shows, with some about bands. Other parts of culture are underrepresented. We have two games (baseball and poker) a diet (Atkins) a brand name (Harley Davidson) and an attempt to cash in on the success of Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit.
  

The Open Court Series Under Bill Irwin

• Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (2000)
• The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer (2001)
• The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (2003)
• The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All (2003)
• Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter's Box (2004)
• The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am (2004)
• Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong? (2004)
• Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004)
• Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy: The Cross, the Questions, the Controversy (2004)
• More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (2005)
• Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine (2005)
• Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way (2005)
• The Atkins Diet and Philosophy: Chewing the Fat with Kant and Nietzsche (2005)
• The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy: The Lion, the Witch, and the Worldview (2005)
• Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (2005)

The Open Court Series Under George Reisch

• Bob Dylan and Philosophy: It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Thinking) (2006)
• Harley-Davidson and Philosophy: Full-Throttle Aristotle (2006)
• Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (2006)
• Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings (2006)
• U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band (2006)
• The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless (2006)
• James Bond and Philosophy: Questions Are Forever (2006)
• Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Get Perfect Results Every Time (2006)
• The Beatles and Philosophy: Nothing You Can Think That Can't Be Thunk (2006)
• South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating (2007)
• Hitchcock and Philosophy: Dial M for Metaphysics (2007)
• The Grateful Dead and Philosophy: Getting High Minded about Love and Haight (2007)
• Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy: How to Philosophize with a Pair of Pliers and a Blowtorch (2007)
• Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with that Axiom, Eugene! (2007)
• Johnny Cash and Philosophy (forthcoming 2008)
• Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy (forthcoming 2008)
• Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy (forthcoming 2008)

The Blackwell Series under Bill Irwin

• The Office and Philosophy (2008)
  
• Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy (feat. me!) (2008)
  
• Lost and Philosophy (2007)
  
• 24 and Philosophy (2007)
  
• The Daily Show and Philosophy(2007)
• Family Guy and Philosophy (2007)
• Metallica and Philosophy (2007)
  
• South Park and Philosophy(2006)

Dr. Seuss and Philosophy: Notes toward a book proposal

Possible topics include:

• On Beyond Zebra and the Nature of Linguistic Convention
• Oh Thinks You Can Think and the Nature of Representation
• The Lorax and the Interests of Nature
• Horton Hears a Who and Moral Personhood.
• Can a Children's Book do Philosophy? Can a Child do Philosophy?
• The Sneeches vs. the Chieftain in McGrew's Zoo: Race in Dr. Seuess.
• Adaptations of Suess: Cartoons, Live Action Movies, Video Games and the Nature of Fidelity
  
• Yertle the Turtle and the Buddha on the Ethics of Ambition
• The Grinch and Moral Conversion
• Green Eggs and Ham and the Universality of Aesthetic Judgments.

Those are the good ones I came up with in the shower just now. (If only I had the chance to shower more often, I would be more creative). Any other ideas? The publishers of these sorts of books are looking mostly for suggestions like On Beyond Zebra and the Nature of Linguistic Convention than Horton Hears a Who and Moral Personhood. They want topics in metaphysics, epistemology, language and mind, rather than ethics, and they especially don't want people simply to repeat the surface content of the book. Bill Irwin at Blackwell has no problem with just using popular culture as a source of examples, rather than extolling the philosophical virtues of a particular work. Publishers of these volumes also seem to go out of their way to avoid touchy issues like the use of racial stereotypes in a bit of pop culture. John Shelton Lawrence in Philosophy Now points out that Star Wars and Philosophy assiduously avoids the obvious racial and gender problems the movies raise. Lets face it: this is a flaw that should be redressed.

Republican Communism: Cover, TOC, and Notes

I did a cover and table of contents for the new masterpiece, Republican Communism. click through for larger version.





Here are the collected notes on the thread, organized based on the proposed TOC.

Contributors: BitchPhD, Cala, Rob Helpy-Chalk, Jackmormon, Jesus McQueen, mcmc, md 20/400, Michael, potchkeh, Knecht Ruprecht

For Chapter 3. Barry Goldwater and the Birth of Republican Communism

I think I remember that the neighborhood associations *were* started by republican political operatives. There was a bit about this in Rick Perlstein's Goldwater book, if I remember properly.

From the index...

John Birch Society, origins of, 79; attacks on communist Republicans, 83; fundamental truth of criticism of Eisenhower, 93;

For Chapter 4: Ronald Regan’s Communist Morning in America

Communists believed they were locked in a mortal struggle with dark forces would stop at nothing to destroy them, and that the only answer was to spread liberation to every corner of the globe, by force if necessary, and irrespective of the wishes of the inhabitants.

For Chapter 6: Conservative Communism and the Cult of State's Rights

Republicans support states' rights, which aligns them with the defederalising tendencies among the European Socialist/Green administrations (obviously communism's heirs), therefore Republicans are Communists. QED.

For Chapter 7: Conservative Racism

Marxism has strong anti-Semitic tendencies, yet as been attractive to a lot of Jews. The Republican party has strong anti-semitic tendencies, and yet is attractive to a lot of Jews. So Republicans are communists. QED.

Communism was ostensibly "beyond race," while Republicans claim "not to see race"---both movements declare post-racism by fiat, ignoring the hatreds swirling beneath their ideology. Uh, Republicans=Communists. QED.

For Chapter 8: Conservative Communist Voodoo Economics

Marx favored government control of the economy, and in the USSR this sort of government control was used to benefit the narrow elite. Republicans have always used big government to benefit their cronies. (Deficits have gone up under every republican since Regan, etc). Therefore Republicans are communists. QED

Communists oppose independent trade unions. Republicans oppose independent trade unions.

Communists oppose ameliorist social democratic welfare policies. Republicans oppose ameliorist social democratic welfare policies.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Republicans are Communists, and have always been so, QED.

For whatever chapter deal with the environment

Marx was relentelessly pro-industrialism and anti environmental. Republicans are relentlessly pro-industrialism and anti-environmental. So Republicans are communists. QED.

For whatever chapter deals with food & cultural issues.

Red is the color of the Communist party. Red is the color of the Republican party. (This is only marginally stupider than Goldberg's comments about the significance of red in the Nazi flag.)

Republicans laugh at liberals for liking pretentious high quality chocolate. Orwell talked about chocolate in 1984. Therefore Republicans are socialists. QED.

Communists prefer bland, tasteless, nationalistically domestic foods and so do Republicans.

Republicans wave the Confederate flag and claim that it has no broader historical significance. Your average communist would not recognize the significance of the Confederate flag. QED.

Ooh, we need a counter to the fascist organic food thing. Hmm. Under communism, the state was in charge of what people should eat, how much, and where they got it. Under the Republicans, we're all supposed to eat corporate food, believe what corporations tell us about its healthiness, and buy it from nation-wide chains.

Communists at the highest level of power feign solidarity with the peasant/working class through cultural signifiers like uncosmopolitan tastes in food and clothing, just like Republicans. QED.

I have heard that despite having proclaimed the equality of the sexes, Soviet Russia remained quite prudish. Also, it is my impression that Communism frowned on abortion. And if I've heard it, surely that's enough evidence to print it!

Communists have ghastly taste in (fill in the blank), Republicans have ghastly taste in (likewise).

Other

Communists took power without an electoral majority, then proceded to use their control over the apparatus of the state to make their party invulnerable to challenge.

Communists granted the people extensive rights on paper, but used their control over the judiciary (and, where necessary, extrajudicial imprisonment) to ensure that those rights were emptied of substance.

Republicans believe---ostensibly!---in the efficacy of boot-camps for juvenile offenders. Communists believe---ostensibly!---in the efficacy of labor camps for dissidants. In both cases, the shared presumption is that forced labor will either rehabilitate or punish. QED.

Communists believe that religion is the opiate of the masses and scorn its tendency to blind the poor to their true class interests. Republicans believe that religion is the opiate of the masses and profit from its tendency to blind the poor to their true class interests.

Communists believed that the only way they could preserve their revolution was by exporting it, by force if necessary. Republicans supported George W. Bush and his goal of "making the world safe for democracy"... QE M-F D.

Communists ascribed dissident sentiments to mental illness. Republicans ascribed dissident sentiments to Bush derangement syndrome.

Communists complained about being blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s. Republicans complain about being blacklisted in Hollywood.

Communists made sure that every town and village had a public landmark named after their deceased leader. Republicans want to make sure that every county in America has a public landmark named after their deceased leader.

Unused Chapter titles

I. Republican Communism: Why that's not a contradiction.

III. Sibling Rivalry: The Cold War and the McCarthey Era

VII. Why Nixon Could Go To China.

IX. Why Reagan and Gorbachev Hit it Off So Well

X. George H.W. Bush: Communism's Undertaker, or Successor?

"Republican Communists: The Mysterious Past of the Right from Marx to Ann Althouse"

Michael at Unfogged has come up with the perfect response book to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism "Republican Communists: The Mysterious Past of the Right from Marx to Ann Althouse". This book needs to be written, so I am starting to collect good arguments for it. Here is what I have so far:

Marx favored government control of the economy, and in the USSR this sort of government control was used to benefit the narrow elite. Republicans have always used big government to benefit their cronies. (Deficits have gone up under every republican since Regan, etc). Therefore Republicans are communists. QED

Marx was relentelessly pro-industrialism and anti environmental. Republicans are relentlessly pro-industrialism and anti-environmental. So Republicans are communists. QED.

Marxism has strong anti-semitic tendencies, yet as been attractive to a lot of Jews. The Republican party has strong anti-semitic tendencies, and yet is attractive to a lot of Jews. So Republicans are communists. QED.

Further submissions welcome.

Added: Some from Knecht

TSA detains five year olds because their names were on the no fly list

This has happened twice now (first story from KING5 TV, second story from boing boing,). Representative quote from the first child's mother: "I picked up my child to give him a hug and say 'its ok, we're doing fine' and they reported to me that I was not allowed to touch him, he was a security risk and they had to re-search me to be sure I had not obtained any materials from him."

Clearly, though the budding Jack Bauers at the TSA were right to suspect something was a foot. The kids had really unusual names, so it how likely could a mix up be? The first child was "Matthew Gardner" and the second, "Sam Adams."

Between the environmental damage of the plane's emissions, and the social damage caused by fear mongering security officials, I see a strong case to never fly on an airplane again.

Countrywide forged documents to forclose on borrower.

Via Majikthise, this NYT report that Troubled Mortgage Broker Countrywide forged three letters relating to the bankruptcy case of a homeowner who was seeking to avoid foreclosure. The homeowner had met the bankruptcy conditions and her case was closed on March 9 2007. One month later, she suddenly received a letter saying she owed an additional $4,166. To justify this claim, Countrywide sent the homeowner's lawyers copies of three letters on company letterhead , dated September 2003, October 2004 and March 2007. These letters purported to be warnings to the homeowner, her lawyers and the bankruptcy court that the homeowners escrow payments had been adjusted an she owed more money.

The problem is that those letters were not sent in September 2003, October 2004 and March 2007. By Countrywide's own admission, they were "recreated" and placed in the homeowners file in April. The first letter actually had the wrong address for the lawyer, who had not yet moved into the office listed. Here's how the times presents Countrywide's explanation of the "recreated" letters

Under questioning by the judge, Ms. Puida [a lawyer for countrywide] said that “a processor” at Countrywide had generated the letters to show how the escrow discrepancies arose. “They were not offered to prove that they had been sent,” Ms. Puida said. But she also said, under questioning from the court, that the letters did not carry a disclaimer indicating that they were not actual correspondence or that they had never been sent.

Countrywide's lawyer could not explain why the faked letters were sent to the homeowners lawyer, if it wasn't as evidence that real letters has been sent earlier.

More information and background is available at Majikthise and the cites she links to.

University of St. Thomas Locks Out Faculty Union

The University of St. Thomas, a liberal arts university in New Brunswick, has locked out 160 unionized full and part time teachers, before their union had the opportunity to vote on a strike. The University's goal was to force a vote on what it called its "final contract proposal." Many issues vital to adjunct faculty are on the negotiating table here, including health benefits, salary, job security and union representation. The union is also fighting for greater control by full time faculty over hiring and promotion, and autonomy over teaching practices. Underlying this is a dispute over the character of the university, which was founded as a Catholic institution, but is now publicly funded and tightly integrated with the University of New Brunswick, with which it shares libraries, athletic programs, even the heating plant.

Here is website for the locked out union.

Coverage by the press in New Brunswick, where every paper is owned by a single family, has not been favorable. A friend of mine on the faculty recommended this article from a socialist newspaper for more information.

Here is the press release from the university, where they explain that they locked out the faculty for the sake of the students.

The full talk for tomorrow

Below is the full talk. I've marked the part where the new material picks up. I put in a sports analogy (from Stanley Fish) to make it more accessible.

____________________________

"Realism and the Reality Based Community: A Retrospective Look at Postmodernism"

The ideas behind postmodernism have been lurking in western philosophy since the beginning, and were advocated in the last couple centuries by big name philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. But I am more interested in the history of the idea as a buzzword and battleground in the US culture wars. So my focus is going to be on the growth and reception of these ideas in starting in the post WWII era, a time when American universities grew rapidly in size and prestige because of the GI bill and the reaction to Sputnik.

The ideas I am introducing here were a part of a skeptical reaction to the European Enlightenment and the revolution in modern science. The Enlightenment (for simplicity's sake, lets take it as running from 1600 to 1800) was generally perceived as a time of great advance in human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. Not coincidentally, it also saw the rise of capitalism and the political en economic domination of Europe over the rest of the world. Enlightenment philosophers were concerned with systematizing and legitimizing the advances in science and technology that they saw, but many were also concerned with explaining and justifying the social order that was emerging including the power of European governments and the mechanisms of capital. All these efforts involved making assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of meaning, which later thinkers would come to reject.

Since the beginning, the Enlightenment had skeptics, but prior to the postmodern era I am concerned with, such skepticism had always been associated with conservative and right wing politics. Skeptics of the Enlightenment were openly fascist, like Heidegger, quasi fascists like Nietzsche, or at least reactionary defenders of monarchy like Edmund Burke. The association between skepticism and conservatism is natural. If you doubt the human ability to know reality, than simply sticking with tried and true institutions like the church or the kingdom is the safest bet. Champions of the Enlightenment were people like John Stuart Mill, working to promote democracy, freedom of speech, and the rights of women.

Somehow, in the second half of the 20th century in America, these images became reversed. As the United States came to dominate the world politically, and American universities came to be the centers of production for knowledge worldwide, it became fashionable for defenders of oppressed people to be skeptical of the knowledge claims of the enlightenment and to challenge the assumptions about knowledge and meaning that underpinned those claims. I’ve been charged to talk about “postmodernism”, but really the movement went under a large number of names, including “relativism,” “constructivism,” “social constructivism,” “post-structuralism” and “post colonial thought.”

All these isms shared certain skeptical claims about meaning and knowledge. Knowledge was always in some way relativized to culture, so that it was possible to talk about many “equally valid ways of knowing” of which enlightenment science was only one. For some parts of science, this can be straightforward enough. For instance, contemporary biologists say that the cassowary (an ostrich-like creature) is a bird, albeit one that cannot fly. The Karam people of New Guinea, who live alongside the cassowary, say that the cassowary does not belong in the same category as the birds (which they call yakt) but bats do belong to that category. So who’s to say that the biologists are right and the Karam are wrong? Well it is easy enough to say that this is true for things like naming systems, but harder to generalize to things like thermodynamics. Nevertheless that is just what relativists about scientific knowledge tried to do.

Claims to knowledge were also always in some way “constructed” or “socially constructed” in the postmodernist movements. This meant that they had less to do with grasping the way the world actually works and more to do with creating social structures that advanced the interests of the people who claimed to have knowledge. The science of thermodynamics was not really a description of the properties of heat. It was about convincing people to buy steam engines and arranging society so that they would be happy when they bought one. The idea of the social construction of knowledge caught on, in part because it gave scholars an easy way to quickly generate work that would be published. You simply pick an idea that everyone takes for granted, say, gravity, discuss the history of the idea in a way that emphasizes political interests, and title your book The Social Construction of Gravity.

_______________________________

New Material Begins Here

If the idea that gravity is a social construct seems wildly implausible, consider an analogy to baseball, proposed by Stanley Fish in a New York Times article from May 21st 1996. Balls and strikes are real features of the world. Nevertheless, they only exist because they are instituted by human beings, who decide what counts as a ball and a strike. Importantly for Fish, “established facts” play a role in the creation of the rules of baseball. The laws of gravity make it impossible to put the pitcher’s mound five miles from home plate. Nevertheless, we say that things in a baseball game like balls and strikes are human products. Fish believes that science works the same way, while already established facts may constrain our theorizing, we ultimately decide what goes into our theories based on what suites our practical needs.

All this leads to another famous baseball analogy, the analogy of the three umpires, also attributed to Fish. The pre modern umpire says “I call them as they are.” This umpire is the medieval theologian speaking with the authority of the church. The modern umpire, the umpire of the scientific revolution, is an empiricist, he says “I call them as I see them.” The postmodern umpire, he claims more authority than either of the earlier two. He says “They ain’t nothin’ until I call them.”

Skeptical claims about meaning were just as important to the postmodernist movement as skeptical claims about knowledge, but I don’t have time to explicate them here. Basically what happened though is that postmodern thinkers exploited the slippery and ambiguous nature of human language to make it seem as though words could mean anything the interpreter wanted them to mean. Thus the art of “deconstruction” caught on at American universities. Someone skilled in the lingo could make any text say the opposite of what you thought it said, and doing that to a work was an easy way to get something published. Books called Deconstructing X become as popular as books called The Social Construction of Y. Tied to this movement was a kind of creeping textism. In the preferred language of the postmodernist, books, poems newspapers, etc., were all “texts” to be interpreted. Soon, though, lots of other things came to be texts, like pictures, TV shows, human beings. The net result was that everything seemed to be a text, and texts themselves didn’t seem to mean anything.

I am really describing the most extreme views here, and I am simplifying the ideas of individual thinkers quite a bit, but when you look the overall effect of the movement on academic thinking, this is basically what you saw: a proliferation of books that were skeptical of established thinking on grounds that were designed to make one skeptical of all thinking in general. And this caught on throughout the all humanities and social sciences, except interestingly philosophy itself. As the philosopher Ian Hacking points out, relativist and social constructivist ideas caught on because they were liberating. The existing social order is often presented as a god-given, unalterable fact. “Men work and women raise babies” has been presented as both a social norm and a biological fact. If motherhood is a social construct, it is at least thinkable that we can change things.

There is serious danger in postmodern thinking, though. Postmodernism can devolve into genuine voluntarism about reality, and you can see this in the careers of the two most postmodern leaders in the last hundred years, Mao Zedong and George W. Bush. I first saw the word “volunturism” used in this sense reading histories of the Mao era in China. Mao basically believed that if he could mobilize enough of the peasants’ political power, he could transcend the laws of biology and physics. This came out in his crazy mega engineering projects, like his dam building efforts. Engineers and hydrologists told Mao that he couldn’t effectively damn the Yellow River. The same crud that makes the river yellow will quickly silt up any dam and make it useless for power generation and flood control. Mao’s response to this was to send the engineers and hydrologists to reeducation camps, most notably Huang Wanli, and build the dam anyway. It was the first of hundred of dams to go up across China with no scientific planning. Mao simply commanded the peasants to fill rivers with rocks, and believed that their revolutionary fervor would make the project work. Needless to say, these dams never did work.
There was a famous incident written described by Ron Suskind in the New York Times in which a staffer for our current president exhibited a similar voluntarism about reality.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
I think history has now shown that Bush’s attempt to control reality was as successful as Mao’s
“Voluntarism about reality” seems like a great term to describe this megalomaniacal worldview. To my knowledge, no one in philosophy uses the word “voluntarism” in this sense. Ian Hacking once labeled as similar view “linguistic idealism” and said the only person who actually believed it was Richard Nixon, but “linguistic idealism” doesn’t actually capture the disdain for real language embodied by irrationalists like Mao. For the most part, no one in philosophy or the postmodern movement has thought about voluntarism about reality because no one can imagine having the kind of power that makes the idea seem plausible. College professors can be full of themselves, but we also all see the limits of our power whenever we leave the classroom.
I see the extreme versions of postmodernism on the decline, in part because of the political implications of the view and in part because the extreme versions of the view are just untenable. Postmodern philosophies are being replaced by pragmatic philosophies, which resemble the postmodern views, but make enough allowances for reality that we can go back to the business of getting things done. In this sense, you see progressive thinking returning, actually to its Enlightenment roots. The Enlightenment began, after all, with skepticism about the received religious ideas of the medieval era, but it added to that skepticism and attempt to rebuild our belief systems in a way that would actually be more liberating and useful for people.
There are a lot of examples of this retreat from postmodernism, but in the minutes remaining I can only focus on one, and that is the retreat from the “science wars” of the 1990s. The social construction of science was an important part of the postmodern movement. Although the bulk of the movement was absorbed with deconstruction of literary texts and ideas of meaning skepticism, it was the skepticism about science that really stuck in the craw of philosophers. Thus began the Science Wars of the 90s. A group of sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, David Bloor, Bruno Latour, and Steve Fuller. Although there were differences amongst their approaches, they all basically sought to explain the acceptance of scientific theories using only facts about sociology, and not the physical world the scientists were studying. To make the story short, they failed. Pickering was the first and most prominent defection. He was trained as a physicist, and ultimately he realized that he couldn’t prove what he set out to prove. Bloor and Latour have not done such a public turn around, but they have managed to back away from the extreme claims. Bloor basically got out of the science studies business to work on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, thus avoiding the issues that caused trouble. Latour is an odd case, because although his rhetoric was often the most bombastic, when you pay attention to what he is saying, you see that he was a moderate who acknowledged that the physical world plays a role in the development of scientific theories all along. (A lot of the misunderstanding of his views comes I think from the different role intellectuals play in France, where Latour has spent most of his career.) I any case, Latour has expressed regret that his ideas about science have been used to promote skepticism about global warming , thus illustrating the political dimension of the retreat from postmodernism. Steve Fuller also illustrates the political dimension of the issue, but in a different fashion. Rather than retreat from his skepticism about knowledge, he has gone to work for people who profit from skepticism about science. He has written articles and testified in court on behalf of the Discovery Institute, a political group which promotes creationism and intelligent design and in general attempts to insert dogmatic Christianity into science. Fuller’s work with the Discovery Institute has been condemned by many sociologists working in science studies.
So what next after postmodernism? No one wants to be a post-postmodernist. Typically constructivist views of knowledge get contrasted with “realist” views of knowledge, but I think that too many legitimate concerns have been raised about realist views of knowledge to return to that old viewpoint. A common move by postmodernists wanting to moderate their excess has been to embrace pragmatism, a philosophy that flourished in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that shares many ideas with postmodernism, but has always been perceived as pro science. The late philosopher Richard Rorty started calling himself a pragmatist in the later half of his career. But Rorty never abandoned his fundamental skepticism about reality, including his belief that the English language would be better off without the word “real.” This lead Simon Blackburn to note in Slate Magazine that Rorty never learned the fundamental lessons of American pragmatists, that reality has its uses. If you want to have a practical working philosophy, you have to have the concept “real” in your vocabulary.
I suggest that in the aftermath of postmodernism we embrace the name used by the Bush staffer to describe writers like Ron Suskind, “reality based community,” There are three things I like about the name “reality based community”: the word “reality”, the word “community”, and the word “based”. I think it manages to capture much of what was true about social constructivism, while still allowing us to make the sort of scientific truth claims that we need to actually go about improving people’s lives. The word “reality” lets us admit that there is more to the world than our representations of it. In fact, the world will always outstrip and outwit our representations of it, foiling our plans to build dams and invade oil rich nations. I’d say something about the part of reality that runs past our representations, but reality would just slip beyond that, too. The word “community” allows us to acknowledge some of the facts that the social constructivists reminded us of. We don’t just meet up with reality as a prepackaged comprehensible unit. We encounter it as a group and carry with us all the baggage of that group. The word “based” is also important--it is not just an empty connective. When we attempt to develop knowledge as a community, we can’t dwell in our own baggage. We must be open to the ways reality can surprise us. We have to base what we are doing on the signals from outside. We have to call them as we see them.

On Kids' Questions

Caroline asked me in the car just now, "Daddy, how does the brain hold all the words you want to say?" (I told her it was a great question, but that no one knew the answer.)

Joey asks "What kind?" where other children ask "why?" When Caroline was Joey's age and a little younger, she would point to everything she saw and asked "why?" "Why leaf?" There were also standard kid why questions, like "why do trees have leaves?" Children say why just to get information from adults, any information, and they don't really care whether you are giving a proper "why" explanation. They just want you to keep the conversation going. "Why" is good for this because it iterates indefinitely, as any parent will recognize.

For Joey, the way to keep information coming is to ask "what kind."

"That's a leaf"
"What kind leaf"
"A maple leaf"
"What kind maple leaf?"
"A red one"

etc.

I'm amused that "what kind?" iterates as well as "why?" I also imagine I am raising the next Linnaeus.

Notes toward wednesday's talk

So I was originally asked to do an introductory talk on "postmodernism" for the community college faculty. I agreed, and have decided to make it a retrospective look on what I think is a dying fad. The talk isn't especially formal, and the audience will have little or no specialized knowledge in philosophy. I started writing it today, and here is the first draft of the first part. Looking at it now, I see I'm coming off as too hostile to various postmodernisms. This will soften as things develop.

----------

"Realism and the Reality Based Community: A Retrospective Look at Postmodernism"

The ideas behind postmodernism have been lurking in western philosophy since the beginning, and were advocated in the last couple centuries by big name philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. But I am more interested in the history of the idea as a buzzword and battleground in the US culture wars. So my focus is going to be on the growth and reception of these ideas in starting in the post WWII era, a time when American universities grew rapidly in size and prestige because of the GI bill and the reaction to Sputnik.

The ideas I am introducing here were a part of a skeptical reaction to the European Enlightenment and the revolution in modern science. The Enlightenment (for simplicity's sake, lets take it as running from 1600 to 1800) was generally perceived as a time of great advance in human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. Not coincidentally, it also saw the rise of capitalism and the political en economic domination of Europe over the rest of the world. Enlightenment philosophers were concerned with systematizing and legitimizing the advances in science and technology that they saw, but many were also concerned with explaining and justifying the social order that was emerging including the power of European governments and the mechanisms of capital. All these efforts involved making assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of meaning, which later thinkers would come to reject.

Since the beginning, the Enlightenment had skeptics, but prior to the postmodern era I am concerned with, such skepticism had always been associated with conservative and right wing politics. Skeptics of the Enlightenment were openly fascist, like Heidegger, quasi fascists like Nietzsche, or at least reactionary defenders of monarchy like Edmund Burke. The association between skepticism and conservatism is natural. If you doubt the human ability to know reality, than simply sticking with tried and true institutions like the church or the kingdom is the safest bet. Champions of the Enlightenment were people like John Stuart Mill, working to promote democracy, freedom of speech, and the rights of women.

Somehow, in the second half of the 20th century in America, these images became reversed. As the United States came to dominate the world politically, and American universities came to be the centers of production for knowledge worldwide, it became fashionable for defenders of oppressed people to be skeptical of the knowledge claims of the enlightenment and to challenge the assumptions about knowledge and meaning that underpinned those claims. I’ve been charged to talk about “postmodernism”, but really the movement went under a large number of names, including “relativism,” “constructivism,” “social constructivism,” “post-structuralism” and “post colonial thought.”


All these isms shared certain skeptical claims about meaning and knowledge. Knowledge was always in some way relativized to culture, so that it was possible to talk about many “equally valid ways of knowing” of which enlightenment science was only one. For instance, contemporary biologists say that the cassowary (an ostrich-like creature) is a bird, albeit one that cannot fly. The Karam people of New Guinea, who live alongside the cassowary, say that the cassowary does not belong in the same category as the birds (which they call yakt) but bats do belong to that category. So who’s to say that the biologists are right and the Karam are wrong? Knowledge is all relative.

Claims to knowledge were also always in some way “constructed” or “socially constructed” in the postmodernist movements. This meant that they had less to do with grasping the way the world actually works and more to do with creating social structures that advanced the interests of the people who claimed to have knowledge. The science of thermodynamics was not really a description of the properties of heat. It was about convincing people to buy steam engines and arranging society so that they would be happy when they bought one. The idea of the social construction of knowledge caught on, in part because it gave scholars an easy way to quickly generate work that would be published. You simply pick an idea that everyone takes for granted, say, gravity, discuss the history of the idea in a way that emphasizes political interests, and title your book The Social Construction of Gravity

Skeptical claims about meaning are harder to explicate, but for many, especially in English and literature, were more central to the postmodern movement. Thinkers in the Enlightenment often took a very atomistic view of language. Locke’s view of language is a good example here. For Locke, the mind gets ideas through the senses. We see a dog in front of us and we get an idea of that dog in our minds. The mind can then universalize that idea to the general concept dog. Words are simply labels the mind puts on these ideas, like sticking post-it notes to the objects on your desk. (Write “Phone” on a yellow sticky and slap it on the phone.) Once the mind individually constructs its language, it can meet up with other minds to coordinate their labels.

There is a lot wrong with this view of language. There is a lot more to language than labels: this is at best an account of nouns. Language is not made up by the mind and then shared with others; it is learned as one is assimilated into a group. The parts of language are not easily isolated. It is hard even to come up with a coherent distinction between nouns and verbs that makes sense across languages. In the resulting picture of meaning, you have to understand entire languages and societies in order to see how an individual word comes to have a meaning. Words simply do not stick to objects like post it notes.

The social and holistic nature of language makes meaning very slippery, and this slipperiness is exploited by a lot of postmodern philosophies of language. In the hands of some philosophers, it started to seem like words didn’t mean anything, or could mean anything we wanted them to, and that written works could be interpreted as saying the exact opposite of what they claimed to say. Thus the art of “deconstruction” caught on at American universities. Someone skilled in the lingo could make any text say the opposite of what you thought it said, and doing that to a work was an easy way to get something published. Books called Deconstructing X become as popular as books called The Social Construction of Y.

Ok, that's what I have so far. Coming up next

I. The spread of skeptical philosophies throughout all the humanities and social sciences, except philosophy itself, in American universities in the post war period.

A. Notable dates
B. Roots of this trend
C. The odd fact that many of these ideas have their roots in philosophers that we think of as paragons of rationality, like Carnap.
D. Reasons for the trend.

II. The retreat of skeptical philosophies.
A. Basic critiques
B. Science studies people who either recant (Pickering) or become ostrocized (the guy who is now testifying for creationists)
C. Softer philosophies, like pragmatism and contextualism, and the fact that they are way cool. (The talk title will come in here.)
D. Political reasons for progressives to embrace the possibility of knowledge.

Loompanics and free speech

This post is mostly a note to myself, although it may interest others. I routinely use the publications from the late great Loompanics Press as examples in classes on free speech, and I've been meaning to collect more internet resources for the class for some time now. Right now on the Angel page for my ethics course, I only have some badly formatted and probably now dead links to old Loompanics books. I want to get a fixed batch of links in this post.

Loompanics was an independent publisher that specialized in how to books for various criminal acts, from lock picking and counterfeiting to assassination. Their staple, though was books on drug manufacturing. Sifu Tweety, at Unfogged just informed me that one Loompanics author, Steve Preisler ("Uncle Fester"), became a widely used resource in the crystal meth boom, and was subject to some media attention. (It was Tweety's comment that inspired me to try to fix some of this old info.)

The company went out of business in 2006, but its website continues to exist in a semi functional ghost form, no doubt generating ad revenue. My original discussion forum had links to the pages for their books on lock picking, counterfitting, assassination, faking your own death, and gaslighting. It looks like I can recreate all those links, except faking your own death, which was a fun one. I also had lots and lots of drug links, but I can substitute the category link and a link to Uncle Fester's more influential work. These new links will probably die soon also, so I should find a more stable way to refer to these books, but I'm not going to now.

Wow, browsing the Loompanics site, I see they once carried How to Lie with Statistics, which is a book used in real stats classes sometimes, and I've considered using in critical thinking courses.

The other reference I want to find is to a review (I swear it was by Frank Rich, but nytimes.com disagrees with me) which described the incredible voyeuristic appeal of these books, and hypothesized that most of this advice is never acted on, but read for entertainment purposes.

Ok, enough for now. I'll revisit this before I teach free speech issues again.

Brad DeLong on Huckabee's Crazy Tax Plan

I am grateful for the existence of Brad DeLong and his ability to write things like this Salon piece.

When I first heard about the Huckabee ("Huckabee, fuck me!") plan, I couldn't believe such a batshit idea was being proposed by a mainstream political figure. In addition to giving a precise explanation of why the Huckabee plan makes no sense, DeLong has a concise explanation of why it is still getting a hearing

[huckabee] is counting on people not knowing what he is really promising. I believe he is counting on the nigh total fecklessness of America's press corps -- a fecklessness that I at least now see as deployed with a sharp partisan edge. As economist John Irons laments on his blog, ArgMax.com: "I'm not sure how he is getting away with adopting the FairTax as part of his platform. Wouldn't Democrats be skewered in the media if they proposed a tax increase on people making between $30,000 and $200,000?" Yes.

But Huckabee is a Republican. And it is different if you are a Republican.

"He cannot tolerate the shame of defeat"

The original Japanese credits to speed racer, with English translation.

"Focus your eyes, and behold his stamina and depth of endurance
Make it race your car around the track
Race your car toward righteousness"

My talk next week

I have agreed to give a talk matching this description next week:

Rob Loftis "Realism and the Reality Based Community: A Retrospective Look at Postmodernism"

A variety of skeptical philosophies with names like "postmodernism" "constructivism" and "relativism" were popular in large swaths of American universities in the late twentieth century. This talk will examine what these movements were and argue that their influence is fading.

Any advice on what do to from here is appreciated. (I agreed to do the talk mostly for an excuse to read Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge, which I haven't done.)