Thread by @AcadFreedom

Will now read a few articles by @Plato4Now @Quillette

Starting with this one

quillette.com/2017/12/07/imp…

"The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles."

"What’s at stake? According to Michael Aaron, writing after the battle at Evergreen, the campus war is symptomatic of a broader clash of three worldviews contesting the future of our culture: traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism...

... The traditionalists, he writes, “do not like the direction in which modernity is headed, and so are looking to go back to an earlier time when they believe society was better”."

"He concedes that the election of Trump has empowered them, but he believes “they have largely been pushed to the fringes in terms of their social influence.” [This is an] illusion. Traditionalists are very influential in the national culture of the U.S.A."

"Aaron is right, then, if by “social influence” he means the society of the academy, where many of the intelligent, informed, and innovative conversations about the future occur. With a few notable exceptions, traditionalists of that sort are marginal to these conversations."

"“It is between the modernists and postmodernists,” Aaron rightly claims, “where the future of society is being fought,” and the battlefield is indeed the university."

"“Postmodernists,” he says, “eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials.” That’s as good a short summary as any...

..., and Aaron adduces plenty of examples to show how this philosophical attitude ripples through the beliefs and behavior of people who may never have read Foucault, Derrida, or Lyotard."

"Evergreen is indeed the reductio ad absurdum of postmodernism as a viable ideology for a functioning university. Students wandering campus with baseball bats in search of a professor, administrators not permitting campus police to protect him, more than fifty faculty members...

... demanding his punishment for taking his argument to the media … this is madness, and it will inevitably self-destruct, if it hasn’t already. But that does not invalidate postmodern critiques of modernism and its aspiration to seek objective truth."

"“Truths are illusions,” Nietzsche wrote, “which we have forgotten are illusions.” Societies no less than individuals deceive themselves in order to believe a flattering ‘truth’; the same holds for our whole species."

"An empirical science is only as reliable as the community that sustains it. How reliable, then, is the scientific community? In its own self-conception, needless to say, it is quite reliable. Phrenology and “scientific” racism are sad chapters in its history...

...; yet it was empirical science in the end that discredited them. With merit, scientists thus take pride in their rationality. However irrational they may be at times, especially when they speak outside their specialties...

..., when they speak within them nowadays, they put aside their feelings, identities, and private ambitions to be objective, dispassionate, rational. Or so they feel."

"When people hold beliefs, they actively seek evidence to confirm those beliefs, while ignoring contrary evidence. Correlatively, they ignore evidence that supports rival beliefs, while actively seeking evidence against them. The mechanism is known as myside bias."

"On the face of it, myside bias in human reasoning presents a challenge to Darwinism. Wouldn’t it have been more advantageous for our species to have developed reasoning that was oriented toward the truth rather than toward myside’s belief? Wouldn’t a species doomed...

... to always trust its own beliefs, no matter how wrong, eventually lose the struggle for survival? No. An orientation of reasoning toward truth would appear to be more advantageous only when we imagine an individual reasoning and trying to find the truth on his own."

"Our distant ancestors, however, were rarely left to their own devices. Instead, they reasoned in groups. Rather than everyone in a group considering the problem—a collective, if you will, of individual reasoners—it was more efficient for camps within the group to argue."

"Each camp’s inquiry would be compromised by myside bias, but the whole group would benefit from highly motivated advocates on both sides of the question."

"When you can supply reasons, not to mention objections to rival views, if your arguments prove persuasive, people begin to trust you, you gain status within the group, and thus power. Your power will erode, by contrast, if the beliefs for which you have argued...

... turn out to be false. If this happens often, your power will be gone. So reason must heed reality to work its purpose. But its purpose is not to heed reality. Its purpose is to acquire status and power."

"Foucault was thus onto something when he said that “‘truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it.” Following Nietzsche’s little essay, though, he went too far...

... For even if our claims to knowledge and truth are all justified within social institutions, even if they are all proposed by humans guilty of myside bias and greedy for honor, they are not all thereby illusions...

.... Some of them are wrong, to be sure, but some of them are right. Such exaggeration has cost postmodern philosophy much credibility among circumspect thinkers."

"Foucault wrote histories that exposed practices, institutions, and ideologies of truth and justice as in fact regimes of power. In other words, he showed them to be pretentious and hypocritical, and he was very often right."

"Accordingly, to call for a return to modernism, as if postmodernism has simply been a temporary fit of cultural madness, is itself an illusion."

"If advocates of postmodernism are not saying that its philosophies and politics are at least better than their modernist rivals, what are they saying?

Even when this theoretical problem is ignored, the egalitarian pretenses of its advocates are belied...

... by the politics of both its founders and its recent permutations. Nietzsche was a proto-fascist, celebrating war as healthy for a state, slavery a requirement for its greatness...

... Foucault, for his part, supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary movement, writing that it “impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics”."

"As the culture becomes more doubtful of scientific legitimacy—whether through postmodern philosophy, the rise of fundamentalism and superstition, or some other means—proponents of empirical science cannot remain indifferent to these doubts if the practice is to flourish."