BACK TO ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALITY REDUX:  Hoodwinked by Postmodernist
Moonbeams and Social Constructivist Fairy Dust

(2) Chris: >>I don't know; Marxism is a utopian discourse, and attracted
followers through a romantic notion of a better future of hunting, fishing,
and criticizing. Postmodernism (wherever it is) proposes none of this. The
analogy seems pretty far stretched. What about: "The appeal of postmodernism
to the politically discontented"?!?!? Again, most of the folks I know who
would count as the "politically discontented" think
deconstruction is what happens when your favorite bar gets torn down.  I
think Dr. Stinson has spent a little
too much time on campus.<<

Clay:  "Marxism is a utopian discourse, and attracted followers through a
romantic notion of a better future of hunting, fishing, and criticizing."???
Maybe so, at *some* point in it's nascent evolution for some very small
groups of people and societies, and/or in the vain imaginings of
Postmodernists, but most assuredly NOT for most of post-WWII history. Please
do consider telling that mind-boggingly-Tall-Tale to the totalitarian regime
that is, and was, Chinese Communism, as well as Stalin, Lenin, Kruschev,
Leonid Brezhnev (IFF they were still alive) and to the odious members, past
and present, of the KGB in Russia and also to legions of other 20th century
despotic Communists and Communist regimes outside the USA that perpetrated
their horrors on their own people and on countries that came under mordant
Communist-totalitarian influence and/or dominance.

So, on the contrary, I think *Chris* has spent too much time reading books
and Postmodernist Inanity, living more, as it were, in his head and in his
academic Postmodern reveries, than factoring into his thinking and
Weltanschauung  (i) objective physical reality, (ii) cold hard fact, (iii)
the way people really are, and (iv) human nature, to be able to discern the
difference between these Edenic Romantic Fairy Tales (Marxist or otherwise)
from Truth itself.

Postmodernism is indeed not the rhetoric among the
non-university-educated-"politically discontented," mostly, I will grant (in
all probability) – and this is an incredibly fortuitous state of affairs.
But if you think that at Academe and among educated political activists,
Postmodernism, in one guise on another, is not the rhetoric and ideology of
the "politically discontented" in very large measure, then you have not read
enough AIDS activist, feminist activist, and Afrocentrist activist, and
radical ecology activist literature, nor have listened *closely enough* to
what these folks have to say in person.

Given below is a sampling (proverbially, the tip of the iceberg really) from
Postmodernist thinkers pandering their "wisdom" on AIDS:

"This [orthodox] view of science not only obscures the power relations
between science and public policy; it is fatal to people in danger of HIV
infection and catastrophic for the communities and nations in the developing
worlds which are currently and inextricably the objects of scientific
research on AIDS.  It masks the way in which medical research reconstructs
colonial relationships under the dual guise of scientific objectivity and
effort for the 'good of mankind.'  It obscures the ways in which pressure to
adopt the organizational scheme of science as representative of lived
experience reinscribes the hierarchies of social difference.  And finally,
it reads as progress the destruction of vernaculars and the adoption of
scientific language."  [from AIDS and Theory, page 16, Daniel Harris quoting
Cindy Patton]

AND

"My first thesis is that a psychoanalytic perspective on AIDS must begin by
acknowledge that each of us is living with AIDS: we are all PWAS (Persons
with Aids) insofar as AIDS is structured, radically and precisely, as the
unconscious real of the social field of contemporary America.

…The analogy of social psychosis enables us to understand AIDS as a
condition of the body politic, an index of the socialized body of the
American subject caught in a network of signifiers that renders it
vulnerable to AIDS precisely because, by refusing a signifier for AIDS, it
faces the prospect  that what is foreclosed in the symbolic will return in
the real.  By persistently representing itself as having a 'general
population' that remains largely immune to the incidence of AIDS, America
pushes AIDS…to the outside of its psychic and social economies…" [from The
Psychoanalysis of Aids, Tim Dean, 84ff]

AND

"Given both time and space, the structure of delays and relays, no human
being is sheltered from AIDS.  This possibility is thus installed at the
heart of the social bond as intersubjectivity, the mortal and indestructible
trace of a third.  Not the third as the condition of the symbolic and of the
law, but as the destructuring structuration of the social bond." [Jacques
Derrida, "Rhetorique de la drogue," Quoted in Alexander G. Duttmann, "What
Will Have Been Said about AIDS," page 102]


*Zaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!!!*  All this Postmodernist and
Postmodernist-influenced verbiage about AIDS is worthless, pretentious, and
vacuous nonsense and double-speak.  The new protease inhibitors and other
anti-AIDS drugs [e.g., delavirdine mesylate, didanosine (ddl), indinavir
sulfate, lamivudine, nelfinavir mesylate, nevirapine, ribavirin, ritonavir,
sqauinavir mesylate, stavudine (2,3 didehydro-3-deoxythymidine,d4T), and
dideoxycytidine] is WORTH more than all the
Postmodernist-influenced-POLITICAL-AIDS-activism taken *en masse* – which is
NOT to say that sound + systematic rationality + rigorous Scientific +
Enlightenment-based AIDS activism is for naught;  for, as we have seen,
science really has come up with some incredibly novel anti-AIDS wonder drugs
of late (viz., those just mentioned); and, I *hear,* that some novel new
AIDS vaccines are now in the first stages or so of clinical trials in
humans.

THE Critical Point
Postmodernist-influenced AIDS Activism was/is effete (and quite harmful in
its impact on clinical trials methodology of new anti-AIDS drugs) and
straitened in the extreme because it embraced/embraces the Postmodernist
view, due to magical and superstitious thinking, that control over discourse
equates to control over physical actuality when, as we know, sound
mechanical intuitions about how the physical world works are the correct
ones.  Just ask any lit-crit acolyte or Postmodernist what contribution to
AIDS antiviral pharmacology has been made by ANY Postmodernist OR even if
they understand the underlying mechanisms of action of the new anti-AIDS
antiviral drugs OR if they know that a MAJOR reason that effective anti-AIDS
drugs were not out sooner was that the necessary conditions for the
development of these new drugs had not yet been made, viz., the construction
of the requisite theoretical models, new and highly sophisticated medical
and laboratory technology, plus progress in the fields of genetics,
cytogenetics, molecular biology, antiviral pharmacology, and other germane
scientific disciplines.

Here, then, is the essence of yet another error in Chris' argumentation; and
it is one that manifests ignorance of basic medical science:  Simply
throwing billions of dollars at a particular disease does not necessitate
the expeditious finding of either (i) a cure, or (ii) the medical means to
control said affliction.  This is why, in spite of all the money spent on
Cancer Research OVER MANY DECADES, we are just now starting to have some
real and promising break-through drugs to treat it thanks to those
developments in medicine and related fields that I mentioned above, among
others.  I might also mention that over these same decades, many refinements
in the *traditional chemotherapeutic treatment* of cancer has dramatically
improved, resulting in many cures, remissions, and robust control of the
disease, for many types of cancers, that simply was not possible before.

I could multiply, manyfold over, quite similar examples, ad nauseam, to
illustrate that Postmodernism has stultified the hopes and chances of many
for living with AIDS because they bought in to the contemporary delusions
about "alternative medicine" thanks, in no small part, to New Age
Superstition specifically, and generic superstition and just plain medical
and scientific ignorance, generally.  But I hope that I won't have to dredge
up those other examples – for the above examples are wholly typical and
quintessential of what the "sages" of Postmodernism, and
Postmodernist-influenced activists, have come up with in response to AIDS
and most other politicized + "theorized" real-world-problems and
afflictions.  Compared to recent developments in molecular biology,
genetics, and antiviral pharmacology, all the academic careers that
Postmodernism and AIDS served to launch, are worthless.  ONE *significant*
scientific development (in this case, one new drug or class of drugs) in
pharmacology (e.g., the fairly new Fluoroquinolone antibacterial
antibiotics), is worth more than all the Derridas and Postmodernists
combined, and for all eternity. [see "drug facts and comparisons, 1999
edition," Wolters Kluwer, pages 2502 – 2614]

So, IS there an "appeal of postmodernism to the politically discontented"?
The question is decidedly vague and nonspecific – and as stated, hard to
answer *if not further and adequately qualified.*  But my answer is that IF
we make the proper *distinctions,* we do have a determinate answer.
Specifically, the answer is this: "No, not insofar as we are talking about
individuals *outside* of activists, government officials, graduate students
at Academe, and professors at Academe influenced by Postmodernist doctrine
and 'subversion' rhetoric – in short, those NOT influenced by this
Postmodernist ideological silliness regarding AIDS."  However, the answer is
"Yes, insofar as we are talking about individuals inside these circles and
educated individuals who *have* been influenced by Postmodernists and their
doctrines."


(3) Clay:

>>Postmodernist Humanists as the New Cognitive and Hermeneutical Gurus of
High Magic and Egregious
Higher Superstition:

Postmodernist philosophy in all of its variegated forms "flatteringly
concedes a high degree of power to the skills and habits of mind of literary
critics.  The practice of close, exegetical reading, of hermeneutics, is
elevated and greatly ennobled by Derrida and his followers.  No longer is it
seen as a quaint academic hobby-horse for insular specialists, intent on
picking the last bit of meat from the bones of Jane Austen or Herman
Melville.  Rather, it has now become the key to a full comprehension of the
profoundest matters of truth and meaning, the mantic art of understanding
humanity and the universe at their very foundations.  *At a stroke, the
status of literary studies as a genteel backwater of the world of affairs is
reversed;  and the image of sophisticated critics as a new *Dr. Faustus,*
conjuring the secrets from the remotest circles of heaven and hell, is set
in its place.*  Like all great *con men,* the high priests of deconstruction
and the like are flatterers."* [Higher Superstition:  The Academic Left and
its Quarrels with Science, by Paul R. Gross, and Norman Levitt, The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1998, pages 84—85.]<<


Chris:  >>I'm not sure what is being said here. Is it that there is too much
emphasis upon textual representation? Help!<<

Clay:  I believe you know what this means.  You recur to the Postmodernist
and lit-crit buzzword "too much emphasis upon textual representation" for me
to believe that, as you say,  you, in all seriousness, do not know what this
passage alludes to.  King's Gambit Declined.


(4) Chris: >>Since this is the science-as-CULTURE list serve (emphasis mine)
lets take seriously Martin Reign's claim in "Doing Physics" that Snow's two
world thesis is past it's time, and physics is more of a subculture than a
separate realm.<<

Clay:  Sheer bluff, grad-school-puffery, and un-argued-for assertions.
First of all, the very name of this forum, viz., "science-as-CULTURE" is
either oxymoronic on the one hand, or  completely question-begging on the
other.  It (i.e., the name of this forum: "sci-as-CULTURE") is oxymoronic to
the extent that those who named this forum, and the propounders and
panderers of the doctrines that serve as its implicit (tacit,
taken-for-granted) intellectual infrastructure, cannot seem to distinguish
between (i) something that arises out of, or comes to be known/discovered
through, Scientific Investigation, Scientific Methodology, Scientific
Theories, and Technology, with the related (ii)
objectively-existing-and-real-world thing/things and/or
objectively-existing-and-real-world phenomenon/phenomena itself/themselves
(e.g., antibiotics, protease inhibitors, lasers, transistors, computer
programs, DNA, black holes, white dwarfs, gravitational lenses, quarks,
neutron stars, neutrinos, positrons, microorganisms, etc.) created on the
one hand, OR discovered on the other that, one last time, are the objective
and real-world-existing (a) by-products,  OR (b) discoveries, made by
Science and scientists.  Moreover, IT is question-begging to the extent that
our Postmodern Neo-Sophists and Word Smiths simply decree that "science IS
culture" without evidencing the LEAST significant knowledge of science, and
without even the beginnings of a convincing and systematic argument (or
systematic set of arguments)  that this is so.

Regarding the "two cultures," I say that the truth with regard to this issue
is that, with ever-greater determinateness, there is emerging precisely "the
two cultures":  one increasingly scientifically literate and scientifically
virtuosic, and the other not.  And a frenetically vociferous minority of the
highly educated who are, simultaneously, not scientifically literate, are
exactly those who propound arguments like (4) without adducing the slightest
evidence that such arguments are sound (in the strict logical sense of the
word) or evincing the most meager indications they KNOW enough SCIENCE to
make, even remotely, a convincing case (for "sci-as-culture").  Possibly
Madison Avenue could use argumentation of this species to market more vapid
pop-merchandise, cook up more fluff superstar movie celebrities, publish and
sell more New Age Superstition books, and contrive more convincing ads for
Psychic Hot Lines to con the public.

Like all Con Men, great or not, Postmodernists are Name Droppers and
Vaporous Dilettantes, perfectly and fatuously content to build Castles in
the Air (so long as they are careful enough in their Ariel Engineering),
offering us Moon Beams and Fairy Dust, Chimerical Utopias and The
Metaphysical Life – in short, RHETORIC, "theory," and FEELINGS – IN THE
PLACE OF real-world rectifications and real-world solutions to equally real
ills, afflictions, and exceedingly grave problems – environmental, social,
disease epidemics and pandemics, ethnic genocide (inter alia).

Sorry, but this kind of argumentation founders like a ship made of the
thickest lead.

As a corollary to all that I have said, I add this one final point.  Such
hallucinatory and vain imaginings and imaginations, hallucinatory language,
and hallucinatory theorizing that is utterly *de rigueur* with Postmodernism
and Postmodernists, mandates the most minute, rigorous, and  complete
scrutiny possible by intellectuals in and out of science and, moreover, if
and when necessary, swift public censure by ALL who value our intellectual
future, systematic Enlightenment rationality, inquiry based on evidence and
dispassionate reason, real justice, democracy run rationally, and common
sense as well.  Our future as a species on this earth depends, most
critically and right now, upon preserving the integrity of our Enlightenment
and Scientific Heritage.


Regards,

Clay Stinson