Olde School: THE NOTHING THAT REFLECTS: Post-Postmodernism and "Crank 2"

Roger Ebert recommended this blog article on the movie Crank: High Voltage and post-postmodernism. Both of which seem horribly wrong headed at first glance. And for better or worse, I'd read it three times before I began to get an inkling that there was something to its arguments (or that it was actually making an argument).

What I understand so far is this: where postmodernism expresses the "tragic dimension of modernity," post-postmodernism asserts that "nothing matters anymore." Where the former "reifies modernism with its sense of humor", the latter "does not laugh for or at us." One is a red giant, the other a black hole. The postmodernist is a "critic," the post-postmodernist a "crank." Pure noise. Grand Guignol standing in for detached absurdity.

And so we can read stuff like this:

Yet, Post-Postmodernism is not any of those old styles ('Surrealism,' 'DaDa,' or any of that) from the European ancien regime, but is simply indeed, "mash-up" and nothing any more pre-supposing than that. If late Tarentino often slips into a mawkishly backward-gazing Postmodernism ("Kill Bill") then Tarentino's good friend and fellow 'grindhouse' autuer, Robert Rodriquez is far less mawkish about race, identity, and essence, as would be any colored man with good sense who must deal with the vagaries of artistic expression within the cut throat Hollywood system. At any rate, Rodriguez seems more certainly a direct influence on Neveldine's and Taylor's style than Tarentino is. Witness the offensive bathos of Tarentino's "Jackie Brown," workerly talents of veteran actors Pam Grier and Samuel Jackson notwithstanding. Rodriguez's far more laconic, more polymorphously perverse style (for he presents violence in a filmic world that suggests a cold medium where Tarentino's implied medium is more pubescent, breathless, and hot). Rodriguez's cinematic sensibility is closer to that of Nev and Tay than to that of the more adolescent Tarentino. One need only consider that Rodriguez's embodiment of female sexuality and eroticism is the fulsome, fecund Salma Hayek, while Tarentino's embodiment of female sexuality and eroticism is the homoerotic, flatly androgynous and vaguely Aryan Uma Thurman. Not that Nev and Tay's choice of bland blonde, Amy Smart is any more colorful than Thurman, but one simply notes the obvious similarities between Neveldine/Taylor and Rodriguez, where ouvre are concerned.

Which is to say, that the hothouse atmosphere of Tarantino's postmodern imagination is sickly and closed-off from the world. It is nerdy and weak. Rodriguez's post-postmodernism by contrast is robust and virile, and encourages participation through its recklessness and thoughtlessness. It's High School. Glee for people who misunderstand Nietzsche.

(And of course while Tarantino pines for Uma, Rodriguez always gets the girl. Jocks win.)

Violence, cinematic violence, in this view, has no tragic dimension. It neither wounds nor redeems. It cannot transform, it only metastasizes. Post-postmodernism therefore simultaneously plays with and destroys our ability to organize ideas. It gives us too much. It overproduces, overgenerates. We can formulate any number of associations, catch countless inside jokes, navigate six degrees of referentiality, but when there is no organizing principle, no disputed truth, no symbolic order, there is nothing to be learned. The play of meaning never ends, the story has no satisfying resolution. And in the end, if we have lost the primordial wound, then there is nothing to heal, nothing to overcome. So on with the vivisections!

Like all anti-art, it reminds us of the vitality, indifference, and ugliness of the world outside our heads.

Maybe.

Because not only is the imagination here secondary and fanciful, but it seeks to brutalize and bully us with its post-post-post-ness. It is ecstatically cruel, and not really all that good. What people really respond to is the unseriousness of it, the over-the-top-ness of it. It is drunk on its own stupidity and cheapness. But so is everything else in this culture (from the Palins to Youtube to Jersey Shore), so who needs it?

The unwitting celebration of the what-the-fuck-edness of it all is not an aesthetic. It's just the internet. It's cable. It's the Tea Party. Every soul-crushingly infantile meme, mash-up, and LOL.

So we need more art, more glamour, more existential angst. Not less. We need more shows like Mad Men and Deadwood and yes even comedies like Party Down where tragedy permeates everything, the language, the time and place, even the furniture. We need something that reminds us that the nightmare of history is still one from which we'd like to wake up.

The Future as Literary Category

The earlier post about Mamatas, Kunkel, Wood, etc., got me thinking about the role of the individual in the artistic enterprise. In the Kunkel/Wood view of things High Realist fiction is about the psychological realism of well drawn characters. High Modernism is also about the individual, but it takes a fragmented stream of consciousness approach where psychology is less stable and more flowing. Post-modernism works against the idea of the individual to show how social forces shape circumstances. But like modernism it uses strategies of fragmentation and disconnection to show how things fall apart, and anarchist miracles and coincidence to show how they come back together. What then would a truly collectivist, coherent literature look like? It would look like myth or religion where the emphasis is on the transcendent and the apotheosis of meaning. So for lack of a better term, I'll call this pre-modernism.

In summary:

• Realism: Individualistic, Coherent - Psychology
• Modernism: Individualistic, Fragmented - Stream of Consciousness
• Pre-Modernism: Collectivist, Coherent - Transcendental
  
• Post-Modernism: Collectivist, Fragmented - Post-human

So if sci-fi is related to post-modernism, and PoMo is collectivist and fragmented, then the organizing principles that will define The Future, will also be collectivist and fragmented. Anarcho-Socialism, or something like that. Everyone working for the common good, but in a highly unregulated, decentralized way. Once the scarcity problem is solved, we'll all live in The Culture.

Genre Conventions and Structuralism

The Literacity blog goes way out on a limb in hopes of finding something worthwhile in the horror genre. In this case, the quest for something called a "metastructure:"*

The archetypal mystery plot is not a metastructure; neither is the idea of cosmic horror. The former is too small; it is a genre convention. The latter is too vague, but it gets us closer still.

The concept of magic in high fantasy is a metastructure: most high fantasy novels, from Tolkein to Pullman, treat magic in roughly the same way: not everyone can use magic; one learns a spell, then casts it; it often manifests as some sort of a light show; certain creatures can only be harmed by magic; I'm sure you could contribute to the list. Each of these traits on its own would be a convention, or perhaps part of one; taken together, they form a metastructure for the way high fantasy readers expect magic to work. Elements may be modified, stretched, or shuffled around, but the basic essence of what makes high fantasy magic recognizable remains consistent across decades and continents.

It's good stuff as always, but I don't think "metastructures" exist the way they're described here. Genres have their conventions, and within a genre, authors can create and share fictional universes with internally consistent mythologies (Middle-Earth, The Cthulu Mythos, Star Trek, etc.), but I don't think there is a single mythology that ties them all together.

Tolkien and Pullman may share a few genre conventions but their universes and approach to magic are very different. As any fantasy writer knows, your formula for how magic works (spell book or blood sacrifice, wizards or humans) is every bit as important as a science fiction writer deciding on the rules for FTL space travel.

On the other hand, if Magic truly is the metastructure that links all of the fantasy genre conventions together, then I think for horror you'll have to go for something equally vague like "Death." If there is a single, common element, that's it.

In which case I might argue that this metastructural view of Death gives rise to horror conventions like:

• Death personified: ghosts and monsters, killers and demons
• Death as a place: underworlds, tombs, abattoirs, wastelands, and the beyond
  
• Life after Death: supernatural events, hauntings, and curses
• Death in action: murder, torture, ritual, mayhem and apocalypse
  
• The philosophy of Death: nihilism, the occult, obsession, morbid thoughts, and cosmic dread

From here writers have developed the rules and conventions of a good horror story:

1. The main character is an ordinary every-person who is not necessarily well-equipped to deal with the extreme circumstances in which they find themselves.
   
2. The main character is not an adventurer or hero, but a potential victim.
3. The events of the story are in contrast with every day life. The real world is invaded by the supernatural. A maniac is on the loose.
   
4. The setting and atmosphere of the story highlight the sense of unsettledness, dread, and malevolence. Suspense builds and builds into fear and terror.
   
5. The main character is often psychologically fragile and in danger of not being believed by other characters who are still grounded in reality.
6. The main character is often physically isolated, powerless, and vulnerable.
   
7. The antagonist is unstoppable, single-minded, and indestructible.
8. The antagonist can be delayed, deferred, appeased, or sent back, but never truly defeated.
9. The antagonist always comes back.
10. And so on.
    

Going a step further, you get more conventional representations like ghosts and haunted houses, graveyards and the living dead, the ancient tomb that should not have been opened, the magic words that should not have been spoken, demonic possession, witches and inquisitors, dungeons and iron maidens, broken down cars on lonely country roads, teenagers and psycho killers, etc., etc.

Once you get to the level of Cenobites vs. the Vampire Lestat, or Aliens vs. Predator, you've dipped back down into universe-specific mythologies, or, more interestingly, metafictions like Alan Moore's Black Dossier ("What Ho, Gods of the Abyss"**), and pretty much the whole of postmodern fiction with its mash-ups, camp humor, pastiches, and intertextual shenanigans.

The real issue here is that there are so many stories out there, so many different takes on the material that what's needed is a curator like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman to help us separate the good stuff from the junk, and provide a single narrative thread that links one work to the next: all the way from European folk-tales and legends, to the early ghost stories and gothic tales, to the modern novel and short story. What writers want is to know that they are part of a community of the like-minded, that they are building on and contributing to a tradition of story-telling that reaches deep into the human past, and will continue long after they've written their last line.

----------------------------
* I know what's meant by the term "metastructure," but it seems like an unnecessary neologism when there is already literary structuralism to contend with. This is from the Wikipedia: "Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories and myths, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth." I suppose one way of looking at this topic is the search for ur-myths in genre literature rather than shared universes.

----------------------------
** The Black Dossier (part of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series) links the whole of fantastic literature into a single mythology (or metastructure): including ancient mythology, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Charlie Chaplin, James Bond, Television, Comic Books, etc., etc. -- even Jack Kerouac gets pulled into the meta-soup. "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss" is a brilliant pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster (and if you can do that, you can do anything).

Necessity and Nemesis

More from Roberto Calasso. In some versions of the myth, Zeus seduces Nemesis (a representative of Ananke and necessity, this time as a figure of retribution). From this seduction, comes Helen of Troy.

The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble in Zeus's reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen's lifetime. It was marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men could go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony pg 127).

In this telling, the birth of Helen is the catalyst for all of history: first the age of heroes, battles, turmoil and great deeds, and later the age of men, poetry, storytelling and art which follows. Helen is the synthesis of necessity and beauty (chance), and embodies all of the conflict and contradiction that this convergence suggests. The face that launched 1000 ships indeed, and the Iliad, The Odyssey, and all of western literature down to the present day.

With Zeus's challenge to the law, we have in this one figure the source of all human conflict:

• Fascism - the aesthetization of politics
• Marxism - cultural critique as science
• Christianism / Islamic imperialism - religion as politics (mythology as law)
  
• Communism - politics as religion
• Social Darwinism - aesthetization of science

Anytime idealism is forced upon reality, or the descriptive becomes prescriptive, we are witnessing the rebirth of Helen.

Conflict Schematic

The Limits of Richard Dawkins

This essay of Dawkins's, written against a sort of strawman postmodernism, is the sort of ignorant self-satisfied nonsense that he's supposed to be against. If this is how he sounds to religious folks, it's no wonder the atheist movement suffers.

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense.

The first sentence is true, but the rest of the paragraph is nonsense. The best way to understand the way Postmodernists "play" at things is best distinguished from the way scientists "work" at things. It is the classical distinction between fate and destiny, between fortune and necessity - one force is random and playful, the other linear and ineluctuable. One is Zeus, the deceitful, cunning, shaping changing god of seduction. The other side is Ananke, Nemesis, necessity.

Postmodernism looks for the possible, however improbable in the same way that science uses probability to determine the likelihood of any possible outcome.

What's interesting is that both are motivated by skepticism toward transcendental meaning, the supernatural, the logocentric. Choose your word. The absolute truth that postmodernists deny is the same one Dawkins claims is a delusion. So it's a mystery to me why hardcore scientific atheists are so offended by it. More importantly the so-called Sokal hoax only appears to debunk postmodernism by virtue of the author's lack of sincerity. He's only aping postmodern language so therefore it can't be true. It's like a creationist using Intelligent Design to undermine evolutionary theory by introducing unprovable assertions into scientific discourse: it ultimately says more about the author of the hoax than it does about the theory.

Ultimately, science focuses on the accumulation of facts and postmodernism on the accumulation of meaning. The one side is a process for gathering information, and the other for interpreting and understanding. Both are designed to challenge our received notions about the world around us and force us to look at things from new and sometimes difficult perspectives.

Dawkins's ultimate greivance is that, unlike science, postmodernism is unnecessarily obscure. In comments to his article he writes:

I can imagine only one defence, which might go something like this. "The technical language of quantum theory, too, is extremely hard to understand. Here is a paragraph from a learned journal of quantum theory. Please furnish us with a translation into clear and meaningful English." I accept that this challenge might be impossible to meet. So, what is the difference? The difference is that quantum theory makes predictions about experimental measurements in the real world, which are verified to an accuracy equivalent (in Richard Feynman's vivid analogy) to specifying the width of North America to within one hairsbreadth. That's how quantum theory buys the right to be unintelligible to non-specialists.

But this is necessity talking. Postmodernity uses specialized language to express the way meaning can be turned against itself. This is not mathematics. These are tropes. It's the difference between physics and poetry. One gives us the outcome we expect through experiment and repetition, the other undermines our preconceptions in order to lead us in unexpected directions. The specialized language of postmodernism is meant to take us outside ourselves, alienate us from meaning, break and bend understanding, in order to give us insight into possibilities not governed by prediction and the measurement of gross objects to within one hairsbreadth.

The point is to measure the meaning of North America: history, propaganda, industry, idealism, violence, beauty, ambition, and dream. All the things that Dawkins can't no matter how objective or accurate his predictions.

Ultimately this may be a revision of the separation of religion and science into distinct and discreet worlds. But unlike religion, the humanities (which is all postmodern theory really is) do not offer any ultimate truths, just new ways to ask questions and think about the world.

Propaganda and the Simulacrum of War

Glenn Greewald on a rhetorical shift in the War in Iraq. This time the propaganda is for real:

All of this seems based upon the premise that for the last four years, we have had a strategy of simply leaving "Al Qaeda" in peace, just letting them be. But now, we have a new Commander, Gen. David G. Petraeus, who has dramatically embraced a bold, innovative, new strategy: "Let's get Al Qaeda." That, in turn, is what accounts for the rhetorical shift.

But that explanation is just ridiculous on its face, particularly in light of how many times we have heard in the past that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, that we have disrupted it ability to operate, that we have decapitated its leadership, through all of our highly successful offensive Iraqi actions against them. And that is to say nothing of the truly laughable notion that we are able to identify dead bodies as belonging to "Al Qaeda members" ("68 Al Qaeda militants killed!").

More importantly, all of this depends upon an underhanded and deceitful conflation of (a) the Iraqi Sunnis who decided to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq" as they battled against the U.S. occupation of their country, and (b) the "Al Qaeda" led by Osama bin Laden which flew planes into U.S. buildings on 9/11. In every way that matters, those two entities are universes apart. But for obvious reasons, the political consequences of equating them are enormous. To conflate them is, as I said on Saturday, misleading and propagandistic in the extreme. For one article after the next to bolster that conflation is so journalistically irresponsible that it is hard to put into words.

But let us focus on the underlying and most significant point of all of this. This sudden shift in describing the "enemy" in Iraq as "Al Qaeda" is the by-product of a very familiar information-producing system: namely, the administration formulates narratives, the President announces them, his top officials and military commanders recite them endlessly, and then establishment "journalists" not only write them down, but rely exclusively -- and uncritically -- on those narratives to report events. As I noted on Saturday, particularly in the Update citing the work of other bloggers who have been tracking this rhetorical shift for several months, this is exactly how the transformation of the "War in Iraq" into the newly unveiled "U.S. War Against Al Qeada" was manufactured and disseminated.

Whatever else is true, all of these new reports about the glorious victories we are achieving against "Qaeda fighters" in Iraq are the by-product of this exact system. These reports rely exclusively, or overwhelmingly, on the claims of military commanders selected by the Bush administration to communicate "information" to the media.

The longer the war goes on, the more postmodern it becomes, and the more simulated and Baudrillardian the reality of the war becomes for the consumers of these narratives: the American people. Whatever the reality is for the Iraqis and the soldiers, we are being distanced from it, removed from it. The rhetorical shift is cynical, and conservapedia-esque in its hostility toward fact.

As Baudrillard wrote after the first Gulf War:

The question is not whether one is for or against the war, but whether one is for or against the reality of war. Analysis must not be sacrificed to the expression of anger. It must be directed against reality, against manifestness -- here against the manifest reality of this war.

Like the WMDs before them, this new enemy does not exist. If the administration and the complicit media continue down this path, the war itself will cease to exist. It will all be an illusion. The war is no longer about fighting and defeating an enemy. It is about manipulating the perception of a war to deter us from understanding what is happening on the ground in Iraq and in the administration (which may or may not be a war as we understood earlier conflicts). The fictionalized narrative which says that we are fighting a war against Al Qaeda is an attempt to lobotomize the people while deferring the unpleasantness of the manifest reality of the war. As long as the conflict is contained in this permanent state of suspension and ambiguity, the inevitability of total victory without cost remains the dominant and most pleasing narrative. No others need be entertained.

Terry Eagleton's Meaning of Life

Terry Eagleton gets on my last nerve. He is essentially someone who is very bitter about postmodernism because of the fact that it leaves no room for the hardcore revolutionary Marxism he prefers and has basically been trying to get back at it ever since. His brand of thought is to postmodernism what Intelligent Design is to Evolution. He's not trying to prove anything, he's just muddying the waters.

So in Salon today we have his new essay stretched to book length proportions and an eager reviewer ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. The most annoying part of the review come when the reviewer takes on his strawman version of the postmodernist as an ultra-constructivist:

This "constructivism" is a form of the "relativism" that cultural conservatives in this county love to denounce, so some might be surprised to see the left-wing Eagleton condemning it, too. (In fact, Eagleton has been criticizing deconstructionism and its spinoffs for decades.) Eagleton strenuously objects to the constructivist rejection of absolute or inherent meanings. "Nobody actually believes this," he remarks of constructivism, and he's right about that in more ways than he realizes. Outside of academia, hardly anyone even pretends to believe in this stuff, so seeing it eviscerated isn't as important to the civilian reader as Eagleton seems to think. Of course we all realize that, to use Eagleton's example, "it just would not work for us to 'construct' tigers as coy and cuddly"; that's idiotic. Complicated identities like gender roles are another matter; we know they're at least partly configurable because they've changed in the course of history.

Yes well, few people pretend to believe this stuff, because no one argues things this way. No one would argue that the "essential nature" of a tiger is constructed in our minds. No one argues for a world conjured out of thin air by language.

But we could argue that the meaning of a tiger is a cultural construct. A killer, a monster, or a big cat? How your culture views them will tell you a lot about whether you are more likely to hunt them to extinction or grant them protected status in a nature preserve. Even the reviewer gets confused between what gender roles are (cultural constructs) and how that's different from whether one is anatomically male or female (your essential nature as it were).

The review then continues with:

Eagleton goes on to cite the scholar Frank Farrell, who has linked the postmodern insistence on an infinitely malleable reality to roots in early Protestantism. The old Catholic idea that things have "essences" or "determinate natures" could not be reconciled philosophically with the doctrine of an all-powerful God; any given thing's inherent nature would limit what God could do with it. "God's arbitrary will," as Eagleton puts it, cannot be constrained, so things can only be what they are "because of his say-so, not because of themselves." In this belief Eagleton sees the seeds of the 20th century's "cult of the will."

Which I guess is Eagleton's way of undermining the deconstructionist's argument from Platonism and Logocentrism, but again all it really does is muddy the waters. The idea that deconstruction begins with some obscure branch of Protestantism is absurd. I couldn't even Google Frank Farrell to find out what he actually says. The truth is that deconstruction begins right in the heart of western thought with Derrida's astonishing reading of Plato and the New Testament. The cult of the will, of course, is pure Nietzsche.

It just goes on and on with one bad idea after another:

To Eagleton, postmodernism, with its repudiation of inherent or "deep" meanings, is, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, a variation on the same theme. To get back to the question driving his book, the motto "Life is what you make it" may sound banal, but it reeks of a similar hubris. It "reflects an individualist bias common to the modern age" by insisting that we all find our own meaning of life in a personal, private realm. But if meaning has its own roots in language, then claiming this, Eagleton argues, is like claiming that everyone gets to make up their own personal meanings for words.

In terms of postmodernism this paragraph is complete nonsense. You can see the "individualist bias" in the Decadents and in some strains of Modernism, but in postmodernism there is a very clear notion that our own identities are culturally constructed, and that it is very difficult to be the master of one's destiny when your own sense of the world is mediated through your culture.

His real problem with the sort of individualism that he incorrectly extends to postmodernism, is that it rejects generalization and universal values. And without universal values there's no global proletariat, no class struggle, no revolution, and no Marxist utopia. Even if you're sympathetic to his call for social activism and the moral value of working for the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned, this is no way to argue for it.

So fine, "meaning is in fact the product of a transaction between us and reality," as Eagleton is quoted. No one ever said it wasn't. The real issue is what happens in that transaction, and what meaning you come up with. If the world is a text we read for meaning, we lose our ability to make predictions and vice versa. Perhaps philosophers should think less like readers and more like authors.

The Postmodern Paradox

Blogger Russell Cole is in despair over the continued success of Biblical Fundamentalism and blames his postmodern world-view for his complacency:

However, under the influence of the last 6 years of consistently unsuccessful domestic and foreign policies, emanating from a regime that fancies itself as faithed-based, with a President who obviously has no concern for pending environmental turmoil, who, after all, claims that evolutionary theory has yet to acquire empirical substantiation, I am beginning to question my questioning of reality.

My response, which I posted in his comments section, is that we need to remember that Fundamentalism is religion’s panicked response to Postmodern skepticism and our ability to understand the Bible as one myth among many. Religion at its worst is monolithic and totalitarian. Science at its best is skeptical and open-minded. The important thing to keep in mind is that being tolerant of other views does not mean you have to remain passive when those views are harmful, antagonistic, or just plain wrong.

I look forward to the day when postmodernism and science realize that they share the same approach to understanding and investigating the world. They only became enemies when some post-modernists began to see monolithic and totalitarian tendencies in scientific discourse. That is to say, when a description of the way the world is, becomes a description of the way the world ought to be. When genuine science like evolutionary theory becomes a pseudo science like the "Social Darwinism". When the science that leads to our understanding of the earth's climate becomes the political football of the Global Warming debate.

I think the scientific community has actually been very responsive to the substance of the critique though they have rejected the gotcha tone. For instance Evolutionary Psychology, a science that is just begging to be mis-used, is very careful to distinguish between is and ought when it attempts to explain certain aspects of human behavior like violent behavior and gender roles. By and large scientists today resist the temptation to turn a set of scientific facts into a dogmatic set of truths.

The real problem is this word "truth". To most people it means the opposite of false, a fact that is not in error. For instance, you can say with great certainty that John is 6'2'' tall. That's true. Not even Baudrillard would dispute that statement. But if you say John's height is "manly", well now you've opened up a cultural can of worms. If you say John's height makes him inferior to others, the veracity of that statement will be based on the height-bias of your culture (one would hope that you're a scout for the NBA looking for the next great big man, and not some sort of crazy person).

Most of science deals with the former kind of truth, religion with the latter. Postmodernism, to me, is an attempt to describe the tension between these two views.

What's Wrong with Not Knowing What You're Talking About?

Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg ham-handedly attempt to discuss "Darwinism".

My response posted in their comments section:

These guys should stick to what they know and try not to discuss difficult topics based on things they vaguely remember from their school days.

First they can't seem to distinguish between evolutionary theory, the works of Charles Darwin, and the discredited fallacies of so-called Social Darwinism. Most people who know the Creationism/Intelligent Design debate recognize "Darwinism" as a right-wing code word.

Secondly, the mostly forgotten po-mo critique of science that was alluded to was not about afro-centrism or whatever they said. It was about scientific meta-narratives and was an attempt to examine the limits of scientific knowledge. The po-mo position was skeptical about science's claims of objectivity and absolute truth. It was also troubled by how science was used to legitimize political power and justify the status quo. Right or wrong, I think this is sort of close to Goldberg's view.

Now feel free to debate the politics.