maybe it's because the whole thing is a red herring.
talk about a hodgepodge--west here brings together "leftist" anti-evolutionary rhetoric with opposition to gm crops as if they're somehow part of a coherent leftist (dare we say communist?) ideology. talk about conspiracy theories. you'd think the muticulties were actually behind the porto alegre summit.
what, i wonder, would mr. west do with a zizek or a haraway? how many leftists actually see richard dawkins as a torquemada?
j
On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 11:33 AM, michael pugliese wrote:
>
> http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006D867.htm
> And then there was postmodernism...
> by Patrick West
>
> If creationism is on the rise in the UK, blame the academic left
> as much as
> the religious right.
>
> For a generation now, the academic left has been engaged in a
> war against
> science as we know it: propagating the notion that science is
> an inherently
> Western concept, that it is culturally perspectival, but most
> of all, after
> Werner Heisenberg, that it is an imperfect and thoroughly flawed
>
> 'discourse'.
>
> The general public's distrust of science and scientists in general,
> whether
> it be over genetically modified (GM) crops or cloning, is not
> merely a fad,
> whipped up by the media. The public's flight into homeopathy,
> healing
> crystals and alternative medicine represents a deeper distrust
> of science, a
> flight that has been fuelled from the top down by thousands of
> undergraduate
> professors who claim that 'science' (inverted commas are mandatory)
> is but
> another Western, logocentric discourse that tells us more about
> who is doing
> the observing than what is observed.
>
> Creationism may now be given the legitimacy it needs not because
>
> fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise, but because postmodernism
>
> reigns.
>
> Although some today are prone to dismiss postmodernism as a craze
> of the
> early-1990s, there is little evidence that we do not still live
> in a
> relativist age, despite Blair and Bush's attempt to force the
> language of
> 'good' and 'evil' into the international sphere. From the heights
> of
> academia, where textuality, relativism and cultural perspectivism
> rule, to
> the lowly language of social policy, where difference and diversity
> have
> become modern-day mantras, we do indeed appear to live in times
> of inverted
> commas.
>
> 'Feminist scientists' concluded that science was an intrinsically
> masculine
> enterprise
> Add a dose of demotic populism to this relativist posturing,
> and there can
> be no defence of science in the face of creationism. To attempt
> such a
> defence is to risk accusations of 'intolerance' and 'elitism':
> it is an
> affront to pluralism and a proverbial kick in the face of diversity.
> 'But
> science is just another form of religion', I remember two undergraduates
>
> chiding me at university. In the words of the headmaster of Emmanuel
> City
> Technology College in Gateshead, the school at the centre of
> the recent
> creationism-teaching row in the UK: 'both creation and evolution
> are faith
> positions.'
>
> The postmodern movement of the past quarter century has promoted
> the idea
> that there is no such thing as truth; there is only interpretation.
> And
> curiously enough, to begin with, many postmodernists actually
> took
> inspiration from scientific developments. Initially influential
> was
> Heisenberg's principle, which stated that the more precisely
> one located the
> position of a particle, the less you could ascertain about its
> momentum (and
> vice versa). In addition was Albert Einstein's theory of relativity,
> which -
> it seemed - suggested that how one saw the cosmos depended upon
> the point
> from which one was looking.
>
> While Einstein seemed to give a nod to what anthropologists had
> long been
> arguing - that what is observed is fatally influenced by who
> is doing the
> observing - Heisenberg's principal was taken to mean that science
> itself was
> an imperfect discipline. Relativity suited the agenda of the
> relativists.
> Chaos theory (butterflies flapping their wings in Kansas, etc)
> and Benoit
> Mandelbrot's fractals became totems of a movement that sought
> to question
> the notion of a knowable universe. As Mandelbrot shows, the closer
> you go in
> on a map of Britain, the longer and more intricate becomes the
> coastline,
> until, at sub-atomic level, it becomes impossible. Ergo, the
> more science
> looks, the less it will find. Postmodernists take innocent scientific
>
> metaphors such as chaos, uncertainty and relativity at face value,
> as if to
> suggest that science is literally chaotic, uncertain, and subjective.
>
>
> Instrumental was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
>
> (1962), which forwarded the notion that science changes or advances
> not
> merely because of new discoveries, but when society itself changes.
>
> 'Feminist scientists' reached the conclusion that not only was
> science
> controlled by men - it was an intrinsically masculine enterprise.
> Quoting
> Francis Bacon's call to 'place Nature on the rack in order to
> force her to
> yield her secrets', they suggested that 'science' reflected a
> patriarchal
> need to dominate, categorise and penetrate. After Michel Foucault,
> it was
> declared that science was but a phallogocentric power game -
>
> 'phallogocentric' being postmodernism's way of saying that logic
> itself is a
> masculinist conspiracy.
>
> Of course, it was not proper scientists advocating as much, but
> academics
> and educationalists. A 1992 draft of the new National Science
> Standards in
> the USA announced that these standards would be 'based on the
> postmodernist
> view [that] questions the objectivity of observation and the
> truth of
> scientific knowledge'. Although these actual words were eventually
> dropped
> from the final 1996 draft, its ethos has been maintained in the
> form of
> 'standpoint epistemologies'.
>
> Multicultural scientists are championing creationism in the name
> of
> 'diversity'
> 'What makes a belief true', says a leading standpoint epistemologist,
> Trevor
> Pinch of Cornell University, 'is not its correspondence with
> an element of
> reality, but its adoption and authentications by the relevant
> community'
> (1). After all, 'many pictures can be painted, and...the sociologist
> of
> science cannot say that any picture is a better representation
> of Nature
> than any other'. In short, it does not matter what a scientist
> says, it
> matters what colour he is, or if he is a she.
>
> In the words of one 1999 journal article published in the USA
> for
> mathematics teachers, the reason why some Navajo schoolchildren
> were failing
> at the subject was that 'the Western world developed the notion
> of fractions
> and decimals out of need to divide or segment a whole. The Navajo
> world view
> consistently appears not to segment the whole of an entity'.
> Teachers of Nav
> ajo children were encouraged to deal with concepts more 'naturally
>
> compatible with Navajo spatial knowledge', such as 'non-Euclidean
> geometry,
> motion theories, and/or fundamentals of calculus' (2). Poor kids:
> calculus
> before fractions.
>
> In 1996, the 'International Study Group on Ethnomathematics'
> released a
> paper calling for the teaching of 'multicultural mathematics'
> in schools. It
> was nonsense, the paper suggested, to talk of some being 'good
> at maths' or
> some not. It ridiculed the 'so-called Pythagorean theorem' and
> called for a
> 'culturally responsive pedagogy'. By 1997, more than three quarters
> of
> teachers in the USA had implemented 'Ethnomathematic' guidelines.
>
>
> According to Meera Nanda, writing in Noretta Koertge's book A
> House Built on
> Sand: Exposing Postmodern Myths About Science, Hindu nationalists
> in India
> have been appropriating multicultural science to proclaim 'local
> ways of
> knowing' - which means downgrading algebra (which is too Islamic
> or Western)
> and putting in its place 'Vedic mathematics': rule-of-thumb
> computational
>
> formulas derived from Sanskrit verses.
>
> Koertge had documented particularly how the quest for 'female-friendly
>
> science' has brought us down some peculiar avenues. In a 1996
> conference of
> the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she
> noted how one
> feminist explained why research into the mechanics of solids
> was undertaken
> at a far earlier stage than that of fluid dynamics. Men were
> more
> comfortable working with rigid environments which reflected their
> 'sex
> organs that protrude and become rigid', and were uneasy with
> fluidity
> itself, which reminded them too much of menstrual blood and vaginal
>
> secretions. 'In the same way that women are erased within masculinist
>
> theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids had
> been erased
> from science, existing only as not-solids', she explained.
>
> The academic left and the religious right are suspicious of reason
>
> Yet in America, home of both the 'multicultural scientists' and
>
> creationists, it is the latter which solicit the greatest outrage.
>
> Presumably, being Christian and mainly white, creationists represent
> in the
> multicultural mind two power groups that have held hegemony over
> the world.
> This view, however, fails to recognise that many Muslims are
> similarly
> creationists. During the recent Emmanuel College debate, A Majid
> Katme of
> Islamic Concern added his voice, to the effect that: 'There are
> clearly huge
> holes in the fossil records, and missing links in the theory.
> Only true
> sciences do fit with the divine teachings, no false ones or theories
> like
> Darwin theory.'
>
> The disturbing corollary of the antipathy directed only at white
> Christians
> is that the Left - both rational and multicultural - only seems
> to make
> noises when white children are being taught damaging falsehoods.
> When black
> or Asian children are taught palpable nonsense, are we meant
> to raise our
> hands and say, 'It's their culture'?
>
> Yet according to Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition:
> The
> Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science (1994), multicultural
> scientists
> are going so far as actually to champion creationism, all in
> the name of
> 'diversity'. One prominent advocate of multicultural science
> teaching in the
> USA has endorsed teaching creation myths in American classrooms,
> not merely
> Jewish and Christian versions, but 'many traditional Native American,
>
> African, and Eastern religions'.
>
> Perhaps this unholy alliance is not so surprising. The academic
> left and the
> religious right share many facets. They are suspicious of reason,
> hold to
> the notion that truth is dependent on the individual or group,
> and that
> culture-specific answers are equally if not more valid than universal
> ones
> based on evidence. They are both anti-modernists, distinguished
> only by
> their prefixes: one being 'pre-', the other 'post-'. Both groups
> deride
> those who 'believe' in evolution as intolerant, expressing a
> kind of liberal
> rationalist fundamentalism - that zoologist Richard Dawkins is
> a kind of
> modern-day Torquemada. Rationalism, they say, is not the anti-ideology
> it
> professes to be, but a doctrine of its own.
>
> This is unsupportable rhetoric. You show me an anti-logocentric
> philosopher
> or a bible-belt anti-scientist who has travelled by plane or
> been treated in
> hospital and I will show you a hypocrite. I can show you Christians
> who
> believe in evolution. Can creationists show me an atheist who
> believes in
> creationism?
>
> There is a tiny minority of non-religious creationists
> Well, in truth, there is a tiny minority of non-religious creationists.
> A
> group of ultra-sceptics call themselves adherents to 'Intelligent
> Design',
> while even a section of the neoconservative, libertarian right
> in America
> have questioned evolution, such as was seen in Robert Bork's
> Slouching
> Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Design, or Michael
> Behe's
> Darwin's Black Box.
>
> Neoconservatives, the multicultural left and the religious right
> all want to
> downgrade evolution because they have their own political agendas
> to
> pursue - respectively, because it is the cause of moral decline;
> it is
> Western and hegemonic; and it disagrees with a Protestant literal-minded
>
> interpretation of the Bible. They will say evolution, being a
> non-empirical
> branch of science, is mere 'theory'.
>
> Such sophistry would have great implications for geology, biology,
>
> archaeology, astrophysics and physics. We have never witnessed
> the shifting
> of continents, the birth of stars or the movements of subatomic
> particles.
> Does this mean these things have not happened? Anti-modernists
> don't so much
> say 'if a tree falls down in a forest and there's nobody there
> to hear it,
> does it make a noise?'. They pronounce: 'if a tree falls down
> in a forest
> and nobody sees it, then it has not fallen down.'
>
> Ultimately, postmodern scientists rest their ideas upon metaphors,
> not upon
> what actually happens in science. They assume that just because
> there is
> chaos theory, uncertainty and irrational numbers, that science
> is
> incomplete, chaotic, relativistic and irrational. As any practising
>
> scientist will tell you, this is simply not true.
>
> In one respect, after Kuhn, they do have a point. If science
> reflects the
> society from which it emanates, then 'postmodern science' reflects
> a wider
> cultural malaise: our desperate disenchantment with the values
> of the
> Enlightenment and the West's worrying descent into irrationalism
> and
> superstition.
>
> Anyhow, happy Easter. Here's to one man who is on record saying
> he believes
> in evolution: the Pope. How strange that many of those in charge
> of so many
> children's education do not.
>
>