It’s weird how much this is not my experience with academia.
I spent _way_ too long getting my BS at a state school, then I worked for Cornell as a programmer in an engineering grad school for several years, and now all my friends are grad students, instructors, and post-docs. Like there was literally no one else at my last barbecue, but I don’t know anyone who talks like this, and I have never seen protests or commotion on campus.
I guess it might be because I mostly know engineering students, but I’m having trouble locating this epidemic of societal breakdown everyone seems to be talking about...
I did my undergrad 10 years ago in a very large US college. Now I'm back doing grad in a different very large US college. The people the author is talking about do exist, but I would estimate there's about 100 of them in my college of ~39,000. And even then, how many of them will still be that way 5 years out of college?
It existed at my smallish Canadian university back in the '90s, using much of the same language. Postmodern left-wing student radicalism isn't some new phenomenon. What is new is the reach of the internet and my guess is a lot of this silliness is magnified by that medium.
In the late 90s at UC Riverside, the hostility was palpable. The campus required every student to take a course on "ethnic studies."
The course demonized whites over the usual gripes, slavery, Native Americans, US Mexico war, Columbus, Captain Cook, etc. This was not presented in its historical context, just agonizing, emotionally manipulative details. Native societies were always presented as near utopias before the arrival of whites. What was so odd to me, my two instructors (Prof and PHD candidate), were both White.
It was very clear that I was supposed to feel guilt and shame for being white. The course absolutely poisoned the campus since nearly everyone had to take it.
I remember a La Raza (a Hispanic racist organization to be honest). Marching, angrily for in-state tuition for illegal aliens (UC System has two fee structures-- a discounted one for California residents, and one for non-California residents). It was insanity because foreign nationals who had followed the rules would pay more, as would out of state citizens, but those arguably least entitled to public resources also paid the least.
As always, any rational discussion, or even nuanced agreement was demonized. You either agreed 100% or were the scum of the earth.
I have never, nor will I ever feel guilty for being white. I also didn't do any of the things shitty things that happened in the past, NOR WAS IT DONE TO THE PEOPLE who seemed to be blaming me for their personal problems.
I was in my early 20s, was offered a great PHD program (by UCR standards), and while many many factors went into the decision, I knew I didn't want to spend another 3 or 4 years with people who by and large hated me.
Agreed. It was at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in the '90s as well, and it was helped along by the campus newspaper. (It always struck me as odd that this campus newspaper would regularly win student journalism awards when its reporters clearly had an agenda and made no efforts to hide their bias or persuasive efforts from readers.)
I volunteered at a few food co-ops and student-run cafes during both undergrad and graduate school. It got me out of my bubble of science/technology classmates and exposed me to a lot of this world. There was never any bad behaviour, just plenty of students getting as serious about post-modern and feminist theory as I was about my science.
> [...] as he spoke about free speech and political correctness at McMaster University
The protests were not at the University of Toronto, but against a professor employed by the University of Toronto :) See the opening paragraph of your linked article.
Articles like this seem to deliberately blur categories so as to describe large portions of academia as uncharitably as possible. "Postmodernism" has never been a term with a consistent definition, but even given that, certain claims in this article are contradictory or outright nonsensical.
"Postmodernists have tried to hijack biology, have taken over large parts of political science, almost all of anthropology, history and English," Maitra concludes, "and have proliferated self-referential journals, citation circles, non-replicable research ..."
What would it even mean for English research to be "non-replicable"? In fact, the replication crisis has struck social psychology harder than any of the fields mentioned.
The implication throughout is that students are passive here: activism is something that their professors talk them into. This was not at all my experience at university, and it doesn't match what I've read about many contemporary protests. I'd be curious whether it matches the experience of anyone here on HN.
I'd argue that most of these students who supposedly think there is "no truth" have very specific views of what is and is not true, and that their views are violently opposed to those of the author. The last time there was intense campus protest, the issues were civil rights and the Vietnam war. No doubt, in today's climate protesters engaging on those issues would be likewise condemned as postmodernists believing in "no truth."
I upvoted this article because it describes a problem on college campuses that I have only become aware of recently.
That said, it misrepresents the Berkeley riots in a deceptive way. The rioters were not students; they were masked, black-clad members of Antifa and a movement called Black Bloc.
I sympathize with journalists’ struggle to provide a coherent narrative, but rewriting history only serves to weaken the author’s point by anyone with first or secondhand knowledge of the events described in the article.
Just FYI, the author is Michael Shermer, founder and Editor in Chief of Sceptic Magazine, which also includes Richard Dawkins on its editorial board (along with some other intellectual heavyweights ).
I think we should be careful about getting caught up in empty rants against the boogieman du jour, even if many people here feel like the author. It would be great to read a serious critique and defense of postmodernism, and if someone wants to allege that it has a widespread following on campuses, and that the sort of anecdotes in the editorial are widespread and that they are connected to postmodernism, they should present serious evidence of it. If we want to read about postmodernism, let's exercise our intellectual curiosity and learn about it, good and bad.
I'm disappointed in Scientific American for publishing a piece so lacking in any serious basis or reasoning. It's a rant of anecdotes; I'm not sure the author knows what postmodernism is - they seem to attribute to it 'everything liberal that I don't understand'. Such low-quality outbursts reinforce among people in the sciences ignorance of the humanities.
Someone famous once said: 'Dogs bark at those whom they do now know.'
This article makes its case very poorly and misrepresents a few things. It's not at all clear who the "postmodernists" are; it appears to be any professor not in a STEM field. It goes through a bunch of unconnected anecdotes that, yes, illustrate a pattern and then says "this is bad, and it's due to postmodernism".
In the parts where it attempts to make an argument, it misrepresents:
>> This is a shift in Marxist theory from class conflict to identity politics conflict; instead of judging people by the content of their character, they are now to be judged by the color of their skin (or their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera).
I hear this talking point a lot, but that argument is a straw-man. The argument is not that people should be "judged by the color of their skin". The point is that they already are, frequently in subtle ways. You therefore have to address these things explicitly if you're to have any hope of counteracting them. If you don't, you're perpetuating the status quo without addressing how we got to it or what its problems might be.[1]
>> Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted
Are they actually being taught that "there is no truth"? I suspect that it's more like "The way we frame and talk about 'truth' is itself the result of political and social forces, and that framework of conservation is worth examining critically." I haven't read enough postmodernist philosophy to be sure. Neither, I suspect, has the author of the OP.
As for the "everyone is racist" thing, this is, again, frequently misrepresented. It conjures up images of professors telling their students that everybody is throwing around racial slurs behind their backs. The actual point is that our society suffers from systemic racism, and everybody living in it plays a part, and it's important to be conscious of that part.
Listen, maybe you disagree with all of this. You're allowed. But if you want to argue, you should argue against the strongest points being made, rather than the points drawn from articles written by people whose goal is to point and laugh. Recognize that, if you've never opened up a book on gender theory or literary criticism, then you are maybe not qualified to reject the entire fields out of hand.
> As for the "everyone is racist" thing, this is, again, frequently misrepresented. It conjures up images of professors telling their students that everybody is throwing around racial slurs behind their backs. The actual point is that our society suffers from systemic racism, and everybody living in it plays a part, and it's important to be conscious of that part.
Have you considered that "everyone is racist", while a misrepresentation of what is said, is what is taken away by some students?
Talking to a few professional academics I know, my impression has been that postmodernism is out of fashion in academia. I was disappointed because it seems like exactly what we are missing now (and in fact I thought the abandonment of postmodernism might be a cause of our problems):
A fundamental rejection of the supremacy of ideologies and absolute truths, and recognizing that at all their foundations are flawed human perceptions and self-serving assumptions. And the acceptance that yes, that includes the person in the mirror and their cherished beliefs.
This website really seems to have an agenda and isn't a source I would qualify as good journalism.
For anyone who's interested in the story, here's an interview with the professor. Admittedly, from an interviewer who's pretty on board with her ideas.
Thanks for the link -- I had not seen that before.
Still, it does not look like she backs away from her statements. For example, she says:
> So, just like, there’s not a lot of incentive for Whites to interrogate Whiteness as the norm and as the right way to have society set up, there’s not a lot of incentive for mathematicians and math teachers to interrogate this unearned status that mathematics has in society.
Do you disagree? Do you think the original article that I linked mischaracterized the Professor's statements and opinions?
No, I was actually pretty surprised by how ridiculous some of her statements sounded. Still, encouraging traffic to a site like campusreform.com makes me feel queasy.
This might be the most wacky quote from the interview:
> For instance, in Papua New Guinea they have a base 16 system and … it’s the body … the body is the calculator…so, when somebody’s counting it’s the body that’s being enacted. So, what does that mean when we receive a singular version of mathematics both from the point of view of European mathematics, but also from the point of view of what counts as school mathematics.
And we have base 24 and base 60 on clocks. Straight from Babylon.
So what? Base 10 is not a modern invention either.
School mathematics teaches mostly about white people because a lot of actually written down math was for by them. (By them we still use a bunch of theorems and notations invented by Chinese and Arabs. Some Indian too.) The problem is related to other people not using written media as much and/ or taking a back seat during 18th through early 20th century. This is changing again, where Chinese and Indian mathematicians are getting well known again.
Why not say Zimbabwean? Answer is trivial, economics and wars.
If you want to laugh at her argument, maybe link to her actual work[1], and recognize that the fact that the page you link doesn't is a clue that they're not interested in having people seriously engage with it, or even examine it at all.
"They do link to it," you say, "but it's behind a paywall!". Yes, the anthology they link is behind a paywall. But the actual article is freely available (and is also 4 years old). I uncovered this with about 2 minutes of googling.
Is this really the standard of discourse you want to uphold?
The more interesting question is what role did the recoil against postmodernism play in the election of Donald Trump? You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression. They are quite literally unreasonable. This is not a trivial concern - since they can't be reasoned with I know of several people who took a "Fuck it. Burn it." approach to the election of Donald Trump (I don't agree with that strategy, but that's another matter). That's purely anecdotal, but it does make one wonder what role it played on sending Donald Trump to the White House and what role it might play on his staying there in 2021.
Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
That is a fantastic quote from a truly great American thinker.
You could add to it the quote from Ron Suskind's article from an unnamed Bush administration official:
"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'" [1]
This is a very 'postmodern' statement, but coming from the Right and from a government official able to wield the power of the State rather than a poor undergraduate or marginalized assistant professor of humanities.
Arguably postmodernist thought has been so effective in describing contemporary social reality that it has been fully absorbed by the cultural/political Right. Claims of "fake news" alt-right social media memes, totalizing institutional critique -- these all are 'weaponized' forms and tactics from the postmodern Left, but now as mainstream tool of right-wing political action.
I also think it could be seen as realpolitik. I depends on how strongly you take "we create our own reality". Even Postmodernism has a kind of 'classical' version that emerges historically from Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche.
I can assure you that if 'postmodernist professors' were calling the shots, the world would look far different than it does. For better or for worse I can't say. But very different.
It seems like the article goes from talking about the reasonable parts of modern liberal belief (LGBT people have the right to exist, racism is still something that exists and happens to minorities, etc) to going dangerously close to the redpill minefield when they start using extreme examples ("cissexual heteropatriarchy" is a phrase I've literally never heard) and the idea that one instance where fighting against things I think we can all agree are bad (racism, sexism, etc) were taken too far means the entire idea of fighting those things is reprehensible.
It seems like that's the real problem now - it's not whether or not these problems exist, or whether they're worth fighting, but rather to what extent they should be fought.
If you haven't been to a college campus in awhile you would be shocked at the recent gap between 'general' liberal beliefs (legalize pot, gay marriage, increased welfare) and 'post-modern' liberal beliefs, which boil down to increasingly abstract accusations of structural racism/sexism/transism/other isms.
That you don't recognize the phrase 'cissexual heteropatriarchy' seems to suggest this, because that's a term that many college administrations recognize, accept, and dole out punishments on, and even questioning that logic will put your education in jeopardy. Basically it's cultural extortion.
Academic ideas often precede cultural and social changes. While the terms in question were previously unknown outside academia and restricted to the postmodern milieu, they are now terms I hear quite often among relatively recent university graduates, even in the software industry. It isn't surprising. After all, one way to influence social changes, good or bad, is by influencing students who then take what they've been taught with them into the broader world.
On a related note, you might find Richard Rorty's essay "Universality and Truth" (found in "Rorty and His Critics") interesting. In it, he makes it clear that either you hold to liberal and secular views on the subjects at hand, or you're a “bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalist" and therefore ought to be ridiculed (and ought to have your children taught to see you in that light as well). Sadly, this extremist bifurcation of the world seems to be reflected in the unsophisticated politics of our times.
What a difference a decade or two makes, isn't it? I started my undergrad in the late nineties at a state university known primarily for liberal arts. The expectation as a liberal / progressive student was that you wrestled with hard, distasteful, nuanced topics.
Now, if you teach undergraduate students, you need to weigh whether or not it's worth fending off complaints for not issuing trigger warnings. I have friends who used to teach undergraduate classes, who now avoid doing so because of the aggressive fragility manifested by (some) students.
As an avowed progressive, I find this trend really distasteful.
I come to campus five days a week, and have done so for many years, and I never encounter people talking about cissexual heteropatriarchy (never heard of it TBH). Humanities disciplines are about 10% of all professors, and of those, a minority spend their time talking about those things.
How about some concrete examples of all of that? If it’s that common you should be able to reference them like crazy. Show me evidence of this growing pattern.
Just finished grad school at Big State University. Almost weekly both prior and after the election there were rallies and protests (some related to Trump, some not) where the demonstrators would wax on about “systemic white supremacy” and “cisheteropatriarchy”. White students would ceremoniously “acknowledge their privilege” by publicly declaring themselves an ally. They even had someone with an excel tracker to note who was declaring themselves an “ally” (probably collecting emails for future organizing, I would guess). At one of these things, a female student took the mic and talked about the pain she feels for being “white passing”, which I took to mean that people don’t see her as a minority but as White merely because of her skin color - a startling claim. Professors were starting to put “safe space” stickers on their office doors (I have pictures), and people were wearing safety pins after the election to signal that they are a “safe” person to interact with.
This is absolutely a cult now, and an increasingly a mainstream one. It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how mainstream it was there but it was localized, it seems, to the undergrad institution.
The comment lists several ideas, but doesn't really what the problems are. It just presumes that the problems are self-evident.
> "systemic white supremacy” and “cisheteropatriarchy”
For example, the idea that there is systemic white supremacy in the U.S. is hard to challenge - the evidence is overwhelming - nor is the proposition that many white people are unaware of it (the 'privilege').
Cisheteropatriarchy means, based just on reading the word here, merely the obvious fact that politics is dominated by heterosexuals whose gender identities are 'near' the stereotypes (i.e., they are not transexual, etc.). It's hard to name anyone in power who doesn't fit that description.
I'd love it if we could talk about the ideas, and had some curiosity about them, rather than just dismissing it all as a "cult".
> safe spaces
That doesn't sound objectionable on its face, and in a society with a lot of racism and sexism, it might be a good idea. I've talked to black people who say they very often feel vulnerable - they never know what someone might do, and if something happens the black person often will get the blame (and be fired, arrested, kicked out of the restaurant, etc.). The Weinstein Company could have used some safe spaces. What harm is it doing?
Sorry, I don’t believe in this new religion. This idea that white supremacy is “systemic” is not at all self evident, and pretending that it is portends that individual white people have some kind of original sin, forever, for past racial transgressions. I do not buy this, and it’s dangerous to teach people this. It’s dangerous because immediately people attribute personal failures and successes, at least in part if not in whole, to external immutable factors. It denies individual agency.
As for safe spaces, intentionally insulating people from “triggering” things seems like the exact opposite thing to do if you’re trying to build a society of resilient, dynamic individuals. I’m sorry your friends have experienced racism in real life. That’s awful. However, I fail to see how safe spaces have anything to do with either diagnosing or treating the problem. How would a safe space have stopped Weinstein, exactly? I have no idea.
The argument for systemic racism isn't anything like some sort of "original sin" for white people. Black people were legally second-class citizens, denied access to the education and employment of white citizens. The consequences of segregation did not evaporate with the civil rights movement. It will take several generations to escape that shadow.
That is the 'systemic' part of systemic racism. The opportunities that I was provided were in part based on the opportunities that my parents were provided.
Yes, people will blame 'systemic racism' for their personal failures; people will blame God, or the weather, because people will blame anything for their failures. I don't think that is an argument to ignore reality.
As for the "triggering" thing, I somewhat agree. On the one hand, you are going to math class to learn math, not to have flashbacks to past trauma; on the other hand, it seems absurd to slap an "ingredients" label on social interactions so people who are allergic to certain topics can steer clear. I think this is an area where society is still refining its tools, and the current 'safe spaces' wont be the way we collectively settle on dealing with these issues.
>It will take several generations to escape that shadow.
How many? Because this ideology most certainly doesn’t put an expiration date on white privilege and “systemic” white supremacy. There’s no way anyone would agree on a date, and even if they did it would be necessarily arbitrary so as to be rendered meaningless.
>The opportunities that I was provided were in part based on the opportunities that my parents were provided.
And the lesson to be gleaned from this is to work hard so you can provide a good life for you and yours, not make people feel bad (which is what inevitably happens) for their prior generations’ successes.
>Yes, people will blame 'systemic racism' for their personal failures; people will blame God, or the weather, because people will blame anything for their failures. I don't think that is an argument to ignore reality.
It’s not a reason to ignore reality, and it’s also certainly not a reason to invent new ones. The last thing we need children thinking today, with all the external stimuli they get from social media, is that they did or didn’t achieve something because of their privilege or lack there of.
Calling it an ideology is an easy way out and baseless. There is plenty of fact and research to support it.
> How many [generations]?
I don't see the point of predicting it. It's happening now. Ignoring the problem or denying it won't fix it.
> the lesson to be gleaned from this is to work hard so you can provide a good life for you and yours
The opportunity to do that is what people are after. Many minorities don't have that opportunity. The government provides poor schools, they are discriminated against by the justice system, the job market, and throughout society.
> invent new [realities]
Widespread discrimination against minorities is in no way new and does not need to be invented; again the facts and research are overwhelming.
> The last thing we need children thinking today, with all the external stimuli they get from social media, is that they did or didn’t achieve something because of their privilege or lack there of.
The last thing we need is for that to be true. We should work to create the society you envision, rather than just insisting it exists.
Not really a factual argument. To call these ideas or support for them "new" is to overlook decades and centuries of history. Civil rights and postmodernism are older than probably most people reading HN.
> For example, the idea that there is systemic white supremacy in the U.S. is hard to challenge
What is there to challenge? What is the claim, even?
> politics is dominated by heterosexuals
For years we fought against discrimination based on sexual orientation because it wasn't relevant. Were we wrong? Is sexual orientation an important aspect of a person's identity that should factor into our decisions?
> safe spaces. What harm is it doing?
You might as well ask what harm racial segregation does, since that is often the proposal, although they would never use the word segregation. But it is often suggested that we should set aside public space where people who claim membership in certain ethnic groups can be temporarily free from "Whiteness", under the assumption that they are persecuted.
Or, what harm does it do when people equate criticism with violence, and try to be "safe" from it?
I'll assume that you are asking serious questions and want a serious conversation. No offense is intended, but I'm not interested in the sort of trolling conversation that often happens. It would be great to have an intelligent discussion about it!
The fundamental answer is the issue is not discrimination, but power; discrimination is just one bad outcome of the problem of political power. Minorities naturally lack political power (being outnumbered) and therefore are politically vulnerable and subject to abuse, including discrimination. There is a long history of terrible abuse happening that I don't have to recount, but a conceptually perfect example is some U.S. state legislatures where the majority votes to restrict voting by minority citizens. Protecting minorities so they have the same liberty and opportunity as everyone else is the objective.
It's philosophically and rhetorically interesting to call it all "discrimination" and debate the differences, but about theory of language - what meanings does a word have and to what extent does the using the same word mean that the things we describe are the same; the map is not the territory and that's still talking about the wrong word. The issue and the word, in practical reality, is power.
>> politics is dominated by heterosexuals
> For years we fought against discrimination based on sexual orientation because it wasn't relevant. Were we wrong? Is sexual orientation an important aspect of a person's identity that should factor into our decisions?
Again, it's a power issue. People who don't have a seat at the table of power generally don't have their concerns addressed; that's a fundamental reason why democracy is important - it's the only way to address everyone's issues. They aren't addressed because hateful people can abuse the minority, who have no recourse without power; because others don't care about the minority; and because even good-willed people don't really understand what the minority needs or has experienced. I learned the same in IT - the system will be designed to meet the needs of the people at the table; if you exclude department X, their needs will be mostly ignored.
Heterosexuals have plenty of seats at that table (almost all of them!); their needs and experiences will be addressed. The idea is to give others a voice too. One example that comes to mind is the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, where governments for years ignored an epidemic killing masses of people, but those were people without a seat at the table. Another is stop-and-frisk practices in some US cities, where African-Americans in poor neighborhoods are humiliated by law enforcement; if it happened to someone with access to power - if a banker on Wall Street was made to drop his pants for a search, the program would end before he or she zipped them back up.
The same issue, the power issue, applies to the other points in the parent, so I'll stop here to avoid redundancy.
> what harm does it do when people equate criticism with violence, and try to be "safe" from it?
I don't see this happening too much. Could you cite some examples? I usually see it applied to hate speech and other actual discrimination. If it is happening more broadly, what do its practitioners say? I don't know enough to understand it.
You don't have to scroll to find headline:
Feminist professor finds 'traditional science' is rooted in racism.
But you should scroll so you can get a feel for the breadth and depth of this phenomenon. Those abstracts are a hell of a read, if you can wade through it.
The original argument has plenty of examples. Evergreen College wanted a "day of freedom" and forced a biology professor to resign.
Just yesterday, a crazy SJW math professor said that math was inherently racist and cisgendered, and bemoaned that the social sciences didn't get as much funding as math. [1]
Also, Berkeley and Stanford students complained so loudly and violently that Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter did not speak (from the article)
A pattern within something as vast as our higher education system, and that’s it? Followed by the classic deflection of all those without a leg stand on, “find it yourself” to boot?
This site has such incredible ups, but the downs are equally staggering and disheartening.
You realize that your posturing, followed by denial of the evidence given to you that doesn't fit the narrative you entered the thread with, is exactly the problem that people are talking about here?
I have experienced this first hand in New Jersey, Boston, and Colorado. It seems to me that the only people who don't see a pattern are the people creating the pattern.
Claiming that you are right and someone else is wrong because they don't have evidence is posturing. It means the default in your mind is that you are correct and have to be proven false.
There is a pattern because individuals across the country are seeing these things happen first hand. The people in this thread are evidence. Asking for links for every claim is the exact thing the GP was talking about.
> You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression.
> You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression.
You are evidence that this is happening.
Even a cursory glance at my posting history would make a mockery of that claim. Drop the empty rhetoric, bring in the evidence.
> Even a cursory glance at my posting history would make a mockery of that claim. Drop the empty rhetoric, bring in the evidence.
Hah! Just looking at your posting history _in this thread_ would lay waste to your statement. You said that people had to prove to you widely known facts. Fine. When people gave you evidence in terms of links, you dismissed the links and said in a huge educational system, how is this a pattern?
That's a neat rhetorical trick by the way. If the evidence is too specific and easily substantiated, it doesn't indicate a pattern. A broadly based claim is dismissed as rumors and anecdote, and obviously not specific enough to be evidence. Head you win, tails I lose. Nice.
I'm looking forward to seeing you respond to the other specifics that we brought up. Probably not evidence of a pattern eh?
> This site has such incredible ups, but the downs are equally staggering and disheartening.
You do know your comment is funny, and even funnier because you have no idea that we're all laughing at you?
> "You do know your comment is funny, and even funnier because you have no idea that we're all laughing at you?"
Regardless of how wrongheaded you feel another commenter may be, it's never okay to treat someone uncivilly like this. If you don't think they're worth conversing with, that's fine. In that case, just refrain from commenting. It does no one any good to lower the level of discourse.
I completely understand what you're getting at, but I'm curious to know what kind of evidence you would accept. Does the linked Scientific American article do anything for you?
I hate moral panics too, but in my opinion the stories of people such Allison Stranger, Laura Kipnis, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, etc., are decent evidence of a dangerous trend.
Evidence supporting the claims in terms of degree and scope. I find most telling of all the fact that I’ve gotten every kind of response except that. Twitter links, anecdote, and being told that I should just search for myself, in other words a lot of bullshit.
I find it very hard to believe that suddenly this particular group of people need The concept of burden of proof and evidence explained to them.
No true Scotsman eh? What would constitute a pattern for you?
For me it's a pattern of repeated behavior.
Don't even know why we're debating facts here, nobody disputes that when Milo attempted to speak at Berkeley, bloody riots ensued. They burned out a lot of telegraph. Also, when Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter attempted to speak, the Berkeley PD stopped them for speaking. [0][1]
The first few dozen results on Rochelle Gutierrez were that she claimed that math was racist. An article from the Washington Times, which is not exactly a right wing rag. [2][3]
To bring up mentions from long ago, here's a wikipedia link to the Sokal Hoax. Alan Sokal, a physics professor, thought that a paper that was shot through with nonsense as long as it hewed to the left's ideological views, would get published by a scholarly journal. And so it did. [4]
Also, University of Wisconsin's speech code in 1999. All the left leaning humanities professors wanted star chambers where they could try and punish people who didn't agree with them. [5]
I don't even know why I'm bothering to respond, as you're going to brush all these facts off as not representative of a pattern of the left trying to crush all dissenting a speech, and then bemoan all the members of hacker news who disagree with you as "downs" as "deflections"
you would be shocked at the recent gap between 'general' liberal beliefs (legalize pot, gay marriage, increased welfare) and 'post-modern' liberal beliefs
I have, and I'm not, because this is basically a boogey-man. "Post-modern beliefs" are mostly pretty straight forward criticism that shouldn't be controversial to a thoughtful person.
Edit: To be clear, I don't mean that their validity shouldn't be controversial, but that they are a normal part of the debating that is happening all the time in Universities and isn't some sort of intellectual disease. I might not be a libertarian, but I'm not appalled that anyone could believe in libertarianism.
It's hard to deny that there is at least some part of our concepts of race and gender that aren't based in biology, but in social patterns. Are they entirely socially constructed? I don't think so.
If you've spent your entire life wiring your brain to fight "oppression", what do you do after the war has been won decisively?
It's not easy to rewire your brain. This is especially true when your job depends upon the existence of "oppression" and you have no other marketable skills.
Look how much hate Bernie Sanders—a man who fought for equality his whole life—is getting from the left. He’s being called racist, sexist, etc., and not just by some straw man versions of liberals.
What hate is he getting from the left? I have seen center-left DNC members throw insults his way, but they would very much be on the right of his views (especially economically).
All that article established was that some undetermined amount of Clinton fanatics accused Sanders of using sexist language for political gain (to promote Clinton’s presidential candidacy).
Your previous comment implies the criticism was more widespread and with more breadth.
It is in response to a high volume of online harassment and crude comments toward Clinton and her supporters (by a small and extremely vocal minority of Sanders fanatics).
It is a lamentable that the vast majority of Sanders supporters do not behave this way and don’t deserve the label.
Yes, but it's used by his opponents to his right within the Democratic Party as a guilt-by-association attack to make those in the electorate on the left uncomfortable with him, it's not actually an attack from the left.
> start using extreme examples ("cissexual heteropatriarchy" is a phrase I've literally never heard)
Count yourself lucky. Seriously.
These people totally exist. For instance: I have an white 20-something acquaintance who posted a photo of a decoration [1] he either made or received that was all full stuff like "In this house we fight cisgendered heteropatriarchy." They are very dogmatic and enthralled by a pseudo-religious ideology complete with devils (e.g. whiteness), saints (e.g. feminism), forms of penitent flagellation, etc.
> It seems like that's the real problem now - it's not whether or not these problems exist, or whether they're worth fighting, but rather to what extent they should be fought.
Or whether the battle should be led by monomaniacal ideologues.
If you can't tell, I'm not one of these people, but I spent a lot of time around them (and am pretty exhausted from it).
> reasonable parts of modern liberal belief [vs.] the redpill minefield when they start using extreme examples
The things you call "reasonable" were "redpill minefield" to prior generations. Even women working was radical. Segregation was widely accepted. Homosexuality was illegal - nobody was talking about marriage, except probably some college campus radicals.
It's a regular pattern: In college, we are open to new ideas and form their beliefs; we challenge the existing orthodoxies and wonder how the older generation can possibly support obvious evils, not understanding they were radical at the time. Then we move on and retain those beliefs: we aren't challenged on our ideas and aren't exposed to new ones, at least not nearly as much and as radically as in college. The new generation goes to college, challenges our settled ideas, and we suddenly are in the position we criticized before: Now, we say, they are going too far.
And so change often only happens as fast as generations come and go. Marijuana legalization took waiting for the old generation to die out. Old white people - i.e., the old generation - make up much of the Tea Party (if that's still a thing) and the reactionary GOP.
I think the language is off-putting, but that has nothing to do with the value of the ideas (if I read it correctly the meaning of "cissexual heteropatriarchy", which is new to me too, is that politics is dominated by heterosexuals who fit their gender stereotypes (i.e., aren't transsexual, etc.) - really not such a radical thought). I agree the ideas are challenging, but that certainly is not a signal of their value - other than possibly being a positive signal. If we want society to move forward faster than the generational pace, then we can't play the role of the comfortable, older generation - we're going to have to step way outside our comfort zones and into the redpill minefield.
Throwing in two cents from the world of politics, a lot of people voted in opposition to what they saw was a culture out of control. I think this is evident by the areas that votes for Trump, and the demographics. Trump pulled broadly from many segments of society.
> The more interesting question is what role did the recoil against postmodernism play in the election of Donald Trump?
While it figures in the propaganda a lot, I don't think it's all that important; for broad (such as it is) base of Trump support, reaction against modernism is probably more germane than that against postmodernism.
And the forces behind the movement seem very strongly influenced by postmodern dialectical approaches, though obviously the key conflict they arrange analysis around are different than those of the more widely acknowledged leftist post-modernists.
Reaction against post-modernism seems likely to influence a fairly narrow intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) slice of the movement.
Perhaps you’re right. But, even if they don’t spend time reading and debating Derrida it sounds plausible to me that they’d react negatively to the consequences of Postmodernism - whether they know that’s what it is doesn’t matter.
Speaking anecdotally, the majority of the people I know for which this applies are college students and majoring in mathematics or the hard sciences. It appears the Two Cultures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures) are becoming further estranged from one another.
A whole lot of the people propagandizing them spend a lot of time talking about it. I agree that “being influenced by propaganda about X” and “thinking about X” are not the same thing.
But then, with that distinction in mind, I don't think Trump voters, in general, spend a lot of time thinking about political and social issues at all.
"...postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed."
Science doesn't need a conception of objective reality or absolute truth to work. Evidence is still evidence even without absolute truth or objective reality. In fact, the scientific method is crucially reliant on the intersubjectivity of scientists, not direct access to a supposed external truth/reality. It's also a fact that this reliance on subjectivity indicates the ways science can fail. Science is not a platonic ideal, it is a human process. Human processes can fail due to human factors. These failures can have horrendous implications for society: atrocities are committed in the name of science.
When Richard Feynman talks about cargo cult science [1], everyone agrees that he has made a deep point about the process by which science is done and is clearly in favor of science. All the same, it is possible to criticize science as a contextual, social construct in order to find the ways it can fail while still being in favor of science. A great deal of postmodern philosophy falls into this camp, but you won't learn that by cherry-picking summaries from wikipedia that say less than you think they say.
Aside below
In mathematics, the fact that there is no absolute truth is merely a technical fact. Tarski's undefinability theorem [2] says that arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic. This is easy to see: Arithmetic makes use of arbitrarily nested quantifiers. If arithmetic truth were an arithmetic statement, then it would necessarily have some finite number of alternating quantifiers (forall A. exists B. forall C. ...), but the truth of a formula with a greater number of alternations can't be defined by such a truth formula of lesser complexity. Like all results of this sort, they are just an application of the diagonalization argument.
This result is the same for all theories of non-trivial expressivity. There is no way around this, you cannot formalize truth. You can only push the notion of truth out into a meta-level, which again has an unformalizable notion of truth. This is not a deep philosophical failure, it's just a technical aspect of mathematics.
If mathematics cannot pin down absolute truth, what hope does the concept have in far more complicated situations? It's a useful heuristic but when you look at it closely enough, you see its incoherence. I'm glad that there are philosophers out there who critically engage with the social implications of this incoherence.
> Science doesn't need a conception of objective reality or absolute truth to work.
It needs a concept of objective reality, but it doesn't require belief that concept is true, or anything more than a foundational element of a pragmatically useful contingent model.
> In mathematics, the fact that there is no absolute truth is merely a technical fact.
What? No, it's not. Your attempt to justify this with the statement that "arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic" fails, because that's not the same thing as a there being "no absolute truth" in mathematics.
> because that's not the same thing as a there being "no absolute truth" in mathematics.
what else is this going to mean? "absolute truth" in mathematics should be a mathematical concept. Is that not the definition of "in mathematics"? I don't think you should accuse me of moving the goalposts when they aren't clearly... posted.
"Absolute truth" has nothing to do with a mathematical definition of truth. Simple English Wikipedia [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_truth] even lists several mathematical truths as examples of absolute truths:
> For example, there are no round squares. There are also no square circles. The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
> Sara Giordano argues that "traditional science" relies on "a colonial and racialized form of power," and must be replaced with an "anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.”
In this paper, I argue that those of us who have left the Sciences proper and moved to feminist studies spaces have continued to do science through our teaching. In a moment when the impulse to do real science is palpitating in our feminist hearts, I suggest that we critically examine the political stakes of our affective attachments and detachments from s/Science(s). I consider what it means to be attached to a Science that earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery. I argue that passion for science may act to strengthen the relationship between Science and Truth and conversely, willful refusal and failure may be used to break the bond. I offer critical science literacy as a practice that can directly challenge the epistemic authority of Science and be read as "doing science" or more broadly as "rewriting knowledge."
Honestly, sounds nothing like the original link which is a poorly written polemic that is obviously done in bad faith (at least to me). I think the abstract is interesting enough that I'll read the paper myself and come to my own conclusions once I have spare time.
What a bad thesis. Does she mean western science which is older than 15th century and a reaction against religious enslavement of ideas? Or Chinese science from BC?
Out perhaps just industrial revolution, which is just a tiny chunk of whole science?
I suspect this is some form of argument from ignorance or cherry picking.
The argument "comes from slavery" can be applied to everything. If it is about science fuelling colonialism, perhaps, but the same thing can be said about both capitalism, feudalism and more. People have often used gains of all kinds to further selfish agenda at the cost of others.
I’d venture to say most, if not all, make some variation of the claim “Truth is relative”, which in isolation isn’t that profound of a statement to make. But when it’s much of the foundation of your ideology it leads you to very dark places.
"Truth is absolute" leads to dark places as well. It was the absoluteness of the """immortal science of marxism-leninism""" which gave ideological cover for Stalin's atrocities, and the """application""" of Darwin's theory to the structure of society which gave legitimacy to the ruling classes of the imperial states over their colonies. Saying truth is relative is a statement about the operationality of truth, its status as an aspect of human reasoning, which is fallible, which has no basis in the absolute.
The proposed antidote is exactly the solution supposed by the scientific method: the intersubjective corroboration of individual observations, evidence, reasoning. However, this plainly reveals where truth, science, can fail: It is in this corroboration where atrocities in the name of some transparent, universally available truth are smuggled into society. That is why postmodern thinkers take the footing that they do.
Especially when in the post-war period it was more and more obvious how massive the contradictions were within both liberalism and marxism as they were idealized, and the world as it actually was.
That link gives some context to the tension between postmodernism and relativism. A claim that postmodernism is based on the idea that "truth is relative" is a pretty severe overreach; even the most radical of influential postmodernists are going to be epistemic relativists, not truth relativists (even Derrida was baffled by accusations that he didn't believe in objective truth.)
Reviews by professional philosophers of Sokal's book criticize it harshly as worse-than-skimming of the texts the book claims to treat. Sokal's claim to fame in the anti-postmodernism conversation is the Sokal affair which was deliberately overblown: Sokal created a nonsensical paper pretending to draw philosophical conclusions from quantum gravity and shopped it around. He managed to find a journal that would publish it: One that wasn't peer reviewed at the time the Sokal affair happened. Even worse, the journal asked him to clarify his writing, which he refused to do, further weakening the implications of his stunt.
The Bogdanov affair [1] should be noted as a scandal in physics, one similar to the Sokal affair, though it wasn't a deliberate attempt to discredit the academic rigor of the physics community.
There are extremely good criticisms of postmodern scholarship. For example, criticizing the impenetrability of pomo jargon which is optimized for communication between experts is perfectly legitimate. It's also true that at times when authors are being sloppy it is misconstrued as an attempt to be provocative. On the other hand, authors like Deleuze were trying to be provocative.
Post-modernism inherently critiques many of the assumptions underlying the practice of traditional science, including the objectivity and reliability of evidence.
For the most part (though extremes that go beyond this can be found) this isn't an attack on science and empiricism as useful techniques, but more a cautionary critique that it is impossible to completely avoid subjectivity and cultural influence, and that that cannot, in the general case, be safely ignored.
There is no content here, only moral panic of precisely the kind the author is claiming to denounce: "Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills."
The college students and professors who are supposedly descending into frenzied irrationality are actually spending their days talking, writing, and thinking about these issues in sophisticated ways. The moral panic about such people is just political maneuvering.
I'm ashamed to be a postmodernist because of these assholes.
Postmodernists supposedly say "there is no truth." But that sounds an awful lot like a truth! Anybody who thinks only Sith deal in absolutes is going to have a bad time.
Postmodernism still works once logic and critical thought are applied, but it stops being an excuse for bullshit.
Postmodernism is still a useful philosophical concept-the idea of fluidity is important when debating abstract ideas. it's when hard maths and science are literally changed as a result of perceived injustices that society becomes destabilized
>> 12 of the 13 academics at U.C. Berkeley who signed a letter to the chancellor protesting Yiannopoulos were from “Critical theory, Gender studies and Post-Colonial/Postmodernist/Marxist background.” This is a shift in Marxist theory from class conflict to identity politics conflict; instead of judging people by the content of their character, they are now to be judged by the color of their skin (or their ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera).
So Yiannopoulos' critics object to his identity as a white gay man, rather than the hate speech he proliferates? Nice try
I spent _way_ too long getting my BS at a state school, then I worked for Cornell as a programmer in an engineering grad school for several years, and now all my friends are grad students, instructors, and post-docs. Like there was literally no one else at my last barbecue, but I don’t know anyone who talks like this, and I have never seen protests or commotion on campus.
I guess it might be because I mostly know engineering students, but I’m having trouble locating this epidemic of societal breakdown everyone seems to be talking about...