More Post-Modern and Liberal Arts stuff
Jan. 17th, 2006 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynAm doing Tang Soo Do again. It's putting a crimp in my budget, and my schedule, but I'll live. They do some Hapkido here as well, so I'm spending a lot more time being thrown to the ground. It's interesting, and I'll have to see if I can continue it.
Was sort of a slow day at work, so I thought about something that's been bugging me since epiphaniebloom poked her head up. Now that I think about it, I think that considering Post-Modernism will tell you a lot about what's been going wrong with Academia recently. Since I only have one horse to ride in my stable (or at least that I'm bringing out) I think I'll ramble aimlessly about Post-Modernism in the context of the unstable relationship between the sciences and the humanities.
So I was thinking (something that does happen, albiet rarely), that a great deal of the antagonism between the Sciences and Humanities can probably be laid at the feet of that bastard (in both senses of the world) child of Literary Criticism, Post-Modern theory. Post-Modernists, whose fanatic members are henceforth referred to as PoMos, would probably be delighted to know that they have stirred up controversy between the “establishment” in both directions, but it’s really going to be to their detriment in the long run. Unless they die first, of course, which seems to be more likely these days.
I should not badmouth Post-Modernism universally; it has given us some valuable insights into the sociology of science. Science is not so much the single path, as hypothesized by earlier philosophers, where each advance is a logical progression on the next. Instead there are several places where science turns into a branching tree, and choices are made based on social and economic considerations about which branch to go down. After World War II for instance there was a great deal of interest in nuclear physics, not so much because it was the most logical field, or the one that presented the most potential, but rather because it was the one that was the most necessary due to social constraints. Scientists, in the end, are responsible to those who pay us, and even though there is a lot of activity on the boundaries where no sane funding agency would go, most of the research activity, and most of the everyday triumphs, are in areas that are seen as profitable, useful, or essential.
In fact, most of the disciplines I know are mostly ambivalent to the existence of Post-Modernism. What’s there to get worked up about? They provide a unique view of the world, they try different interpretations of the way things work, and, as far as scientists are concerned, they don’t get in the way very much. Like most of the fads that have swept through the Humanities since 1900, Post-Moderism is mostly ignored: we have enough problems dealing with our own fads (pentaquarks for instance).
But every theory breeds its fanatics, and the PoMos have been especially bad at this. At some point, the young, eager PoMo fundamentalists began pouring out of the woodwork (the concept of a fundamentalist, dogmatic, Post-Modernist is so rife with contradictions in and of itself that it’s a wonder their brains don’t explode). From whatever dark pits these ones sprung out of, they continue to rise from the depths and leap furiously at every piece of hierarchical knowledge they can get their hands on, knowing that they are sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity.
To the PoMo fanatic, every assumption is to be questioned, unless it’s their own. Every source of authority is to be questioned, unless it happens to belong to a Post-Modernist. A few years ago they, having filled the reservoir of toleration within the Humanities departments, began swirling over the top and pouring down on the heads of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the same constellation. This lead to some unfortunate confrontations.
Fanatic Post-Modernism, with its refusal to accept objective reality, is one of the few forces that actually challenges the scientific method itself as fatally flawed. Although most of the PoMos don’t follow this path, there are some who do insist that the entire nature of science is based on subjective social constructs and is fatally flawed. In their minds, it seems, the very nature of scientific culture means that scientific knowledge is a construct that is, far from being objective, patriarchial, Christian, and white. From there they launch a series of attacks on the validity of future scientific experimentation without the benefit of Post-Modern guidance.
From the Science side of things, this is a bit like an elephant getting attacked by a mosquito. Even if the mosquito drinks until it explodes, the elephant isn’t even going to notice. We win in the court of public opinion, partially because Fanatic PoMos have a tendency of trying to make themselves sound really smart which ends up with them sounding really pretentious, and partially because we can tromp the entire Humanities department in public performances. They may have a breathtaking analysis of how Shakespeare encompassed and then transcended the mores of his time, but we have something that lights up when you push it, and we brought enough for everyone. This is just another example that, in the court of public opinion, the guy with the most shinies wins every time. Seriously though, even if the entire Humanities division gets up on a podium and tell the rest of the world how wrong the scientific worldview is, how flawed it is, and how it is unrelated to the reality of others, as long as we keep producing faster computers, cooler cars, and things that explode when you push the right button, we’re not worried overly about the future of our field.
But it does engender a bit of a reaction. After all, someone is not only attacking our field of research as useless (which is personal), but is attacking our entire field (which is professional), and doing so in such a ridiculous way that we feel almost personally offended that anyone manages to take them seriously.
Consider what it looks like from our end. The claim that Einstein’s E=mc2 is a “sexed equation” because it gives prominence to a single speed, in this case, the speed of light. Lacan’s claim that the square root of negative one is equivalent to an erectile organ. The embracing of wholesale quantum mechanics and vacuum energy flux without the faintest idea what such statements entail. And, last but not least, the wholesale mauling of the Axiom of Choice. Of course, I could go on for a bit, but none of the claims makes any more sense to us.
Here, of course, comes the conflict. PoMos expect the world to either be astonished by their brilliance (if people are honest) or to rise against them (if they are members of the establishment). They seem to do this to draw attention to themselves. In Science, however, the response has been to treat the PoMos the same way we treat people who post on internet forums seventy-three times in one night claiming to have found a full theory of Quantum Gravity. That is, for the most part, people ignore them. After all, if we spent all our time talking to every yahoo who could dial into a physics department, we would hardly have any time to ourselves at all. But sometimes we respond with derision. Even worse, we tend to ignore their ideas totally, and snicker at them behind their backs. This, of course, means war.
These two sides, I fear, are doomed never to meet in the middle. Even among the academically sincere and intellectually talented side of Post-Modernism, the gap in basic assumptions, in worldview, and in approach is so different between them and science that there is very little that can be done to bridge it. Since Science can’t say anything about the Humanities (after all, it’s definitely out of our purview), we might as well avoid each other and stay the hell away. It keeps the peace. But, there is a tendency among some members of the Humanities to claim jurisdiction over all areas of knowledge, and who publish a great many critiques of science.
This gets the hackles up from time to time. My first exposure to this was in a book I picked up in the local co-op bookstore to read about critiques of science, written from a feminist perspective. One of the first things I had to object to was, in the case of the physical sciences and mathematics, that the validity of those fields was undermined by their gender ratio. Now, I have no problem with increasing programs and motivation so that more women enter those fields, but to claim that the results produced up until now are less valid because of the gender imbalance seemed too peculiar to be true. Does that mean that Gauss’s Law is more logically correct if it is named after a woman? How is atomic theory (part of the current set a result of a brilliant woman after whom the physics building is named at UCSD) any more exact or descriptive should it have been developed by a more gender-mixed staff? For a long time I remained convinced that what we had here was a failure of communication, an incorrect impression of what had happened, that I had implied a spin and intent that had never existed in the first place. It took a long time for me to realize that this author meant precisely that.
There is something in being told how to do your job, your specialty, and what you love, by someone who not only knows nothing about the subject, but disagrees with it because it interferes with a peculiar belief of theirs that they hold to be inviolate, that sets people’s teeth on edge. It’s why being proselytized about evolution by the bible beaters gets the biologists and paleontologists on edge, because now they’re being told what they see and how to do their job by people who hold their own belief strongly, and refuse to even learn the basics. It’s probably the basis behind an increasing amount of sharp rejoinders from the Sciences to the Humanities, ones that are sometimes returned in kind.
For American universities, this can only end badly for the Humanities, since the Sciences pay a lot of their way at large universities (and even at some small ones). With the financial controls increasingly in the hands of science faculty, they can make ever more demands. To attack them head on, and without a valid argument, simply because you want to challenge the establishment, is probably one of the stupider things you can do, and invites retaliation. Of course, they won’t do anything rash; most of them understand the value of a Humanities education, but the next time the Engineering department manages to get funding cut to a new Humanities building in exchange for revamping some laboratories you may want to thank your local Post-Modernist Fanatic. With a knife.
Was sort of a slow day at work, so I thought about something that's been bugging me since epiphaniebloom poked her head up. Now that I think about it, I think that considering Post-Modernism will tell you a lot about what's been going wrong with Academia recently. Since I only have one horse to ride in my stable (or at least that I'm bringing out) I think I'll ramble aimlessly about Post-Modernism in the context of the unstable relationship between the sciences and the humanities.
So I was thinking (something that does happen, albiet rarely), that a great deal of the antagonism between the Sciences and Humanities can probably be laid at the feet of that bastard (in both senses of the world) child of Literary Criticism, Post-Modern theory. Post-Modernists, whose fanatic members are henceforth referred to as PoMos, would probably be delighted to know that they have stirred up controversy between the “establishment” in both directions, but it’s really going to be to their detriment in the long run. Unless they die first, of course, which seems to be more likely these days.
I should not badmouth Post-Modernism universally; it has given us some valuable insights into the sociology of science. Science is not so much the single path, as hypothesized by earlier philosophers, where each advance is a logical progression on the next. Instead there are several places where science turns into a branching tree, and choices are made based on social and economic considerations about which branch to go down. After World War II for instance there was a great deal of interest in nuclear physics, not so much because it was the most logical field, or the one that presented the most potential, but rather because it was the one that was the most necessary due to social constraints. Scientists, in the end, are responsible to those who pay us, and even though there is a lot of activity on the boundaries where no sane funding agency would go, most of the research activity, and most of the everyday triumphs, are in areas that are seen as profitable, useful, or essential.
In fact, most of the disciplines I know are mostly ambivalent to the existence of Post-Modernism. What’s there to get worked up about? They provide a unique view of the world, they try different interpretations of the way things work, and, as far as scientists are concerned, they don’t get in the way very much. Like most of the fads that have swept through the Humanities since 1900, Post-Moderism is mostly ignored: we have enough problems dealing with our own fads (pentaquarks for instance).
But every theory breeds its fanatics, and the PoMos have been especially bad at this. At some point, the young, eager PoMo fundamentalists began pouring out of the woodwork (the concept of a fundamentalist, dogmatic, Post-Modernist is so rife with contradictions in and of itself that it’s a wonder their brains don’t explode). From whatever dark pits these ones sprung out of, they continue to rise from the depths and leap furiously at every piece of hierarchical knowledge they can get their hands on, knowing that they are sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity.
To the PoMo fanatic, every assumption is to be questioned, unless it’s their own. Every source of authority is to be questioned, unless it happens to belong to a Post-Modernist. A few years ago they, having filled the reservoir of toleration within the Humanities departments, began swirling over the top and pouring down on the heads of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the same constellation. This lead to some unfortunate confrontations.
Fanatic Post-Modernism, with its refusal to accept objective reality, is one of the few forces that actually challenges the scientific method itself as fatally flawed. Although most of the PoMos don’t follow this path, there are some who do insist that the entire nature of science is based on subjective social constructs and is fatally flawed. In their minds, it seems, the very nature of scientific culture means that scientific knowledge is a construct that is, far from being objective, patriarchial, Christian, and white. From there they launch a series of attacks on the validity of future scientific experimentation without the benefit of Post-Modern guidance.
From the Science side of things, this is a bit like an elephant getting attacked by a mosquito. Even if the mosquito drinks until it explodes, the elephant isn’t even going to notice. We win in the court of public opinion, partially because Fanatic PoMos have a tendency of trying to make themselves sound really smart which ends up with them sounding really pretentious, and partially because we can tromp the entire Humanities department in public performances. They may have a breathtaking analysis of how Shakespeare encompassed and then transcended the mores of his time, but we have something that lights up when you push it, and we brought enough for everyone. This is just another example that, in the court of public opinion, the guy with the most shinies wins every time. Seriously though, even if the entire Humanities division gets up on a podium and tell the rest of the world how wrong the scientific worldview is, how flawed it is, and how it is unrelated to the reality of others, as long as we keep producing faster computers, cooler cars, and things that explode when you push the right button, we’re not worried overly about the future of our field.
But it does engender a bit of a reaction. After all, someone is not only attacking our field of research as useless (which is personal), but is attacking our entire field (which is professional), and doing so in such a ridiculous way that we feel almost personally offended that anyone manages to take them seriously.
Consider what it looks like from our end. The claim that Einstein’s E=mc2 is a “sexed equation” because it gives prominence to a single speed, in this case, the speed of light. Lacan’s claim that the square root of negative one is equivalent to an erectile organ. The embracing of wholesale quantum mechanics and vacuum energy flux without the faintest idea what such statements entail. And, last but not least, the wholesale mauling of the Axiom of Choice. Of course, I could go on for a bit, but none of the claims makes any more sense to us.
Here, of course, comes the conflict. PoMos expect the world to either be astonished by their brilliance (if people are honest) or to rise against them (if they are members of the establishment). They seem to do this to draw attention to themselves. In Science, however, the response has been to treat the PoMos the same way we treat people who post on internet forums seventy-three times in one night claiming to have found a full theory of Quantum Gravity. That is, for the most part, people ignore them. After all, if we spent all our time talking to every yahoo who could dial into a physics department, we would hardly have any time to ourselves at all. But sometimes we respond with derision. Even worse, we tend to ignore their ideas totally, and snicker at them behind their backs. This, of course, means war.
These two sides, I fear, are doomed never to meet in the middle. Even among the academically sincere and intellectually talented side of Post-Modernism, the gap in basic assumptions, in worldview, and in approach is so different between them and science that there is very little that can be done to bridge it. Since Science can’t say anything about the Humanities (after all, it’s definitely out of our purview), we might as well avoid each other and stay the hell away. It keeps the peace. But, there is a tendency among some members of the Humanities to claim jurisdiction over all areas of knowledge, and who publish a great many critiques of science.
This gets the hackles up from time to time. My first exposure to this was in a book I picked up in the local co-op bookstore to read about critiques of science, written from a feminist perspective. One of the first things I had to object to was, in the case of the physical sciences and mathematics, that the validity of those fields was undermined by their gender ratio. Now, I have no problem with increasing programs and motivation so that more women enter those fields, but to claim that the results produced up until now are less valid because of the gender imbalance seemed too peculiar to be true. Does that mean that Gauss’s Law is more logically correct if it is named after a woman? How is atomic theory (part of the current set a result of a brilliant woman after whom the physics building is named at UCSD) any more exact or descriptive should it have been developed by a more gender-mixed staff? For a long time I remained convinced that what we had here was a failure of communication, an incorrect impression of what had happened, that I had implied a spin and intent that had never existed in the first place. It took a long time for me to realize that this author meant precisely that.
There is something in being told how to do your job, your specialty, and what you love, by someone who not only knows nothing about the subject, but disagrees with it because it interferes with a peculiar belief of theirs that they hold to be inviolate, that sets people’s teeth on edge. It’s why being proselytized about evolution by the bible beaters gets the biologists and paleontologists on edge, because now they’re being told what they see and how to do their job by people who hold their own belief strongly, and refuse to even learn the basics. It’s probably the basis behind an increasing amount of sharp rejoinders from the Sciences to the Humanities, ones that are sometimes returned in kind.
For American universities, this can only end badly for the Humanities, since the Sciences pay a lot of their way at large universities (and even at some small ones). With the financial controls increasingly in the hands of science faculty, they can make ever more demands. To attack them head on, and without a valid argument, simply because you want to challenge the establishment, is probably one of the stupider things you can do, and invites retaliation. Of course, they won’t do anything rash; most of them understand the value of a Humanities education, but the next time the Engineering department manages to get funding cut to a new Humanities building in exchange for revamping some laboratories you may want to thank your local Post-Modernist Fanatic. With a knife.