Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont is a refute to postmodernist. It didn’t take much convincing for me to buy the premise. I think that the postmodernist (and those that act as such but are unaware of the term) are one of the biggest threats to intellectual pursuits and truth.
As the authors point out, their aim is not to show that the social sciences are unnecessary, but to point out that a few people use scientism and blatant distortions of science to further their agendas. This is rampant on college campuses throughout America at this time. Professors are being harassed to the point that they can no longer teach. Micro-aggressions (whatever the fuck those are) are being utilized to steer the discussions away from anything these postmodernists don’t want to hear. They are “offended” by everything, to the point that we can no longer talk about biology in a classic context because the terms male and female are supposedly “social constructs”. All of this I believe is complete bullshit.
These aren’t even the authors main points. Hell, I didn’t even finish the book. Once they got into deconstructing specific objections to literary works of specific persons I read a few and called it good. I do that typically with books that repeatedly hammer home the same point. Thanks guys, sold, no need to go further.
The main point of their objections hold without question as far as I’m concerned. You can’t bastardize science and mathematics to feed yourself confirmation bias. You can’t tell me that biology and mathematics are wrong because your offended that it doesn’t fit your worldview. You can’t sensor thought, that is a deep dark hole to go down. It follows logically that if you eliminate some teachings because they are offensive you soon have to eliminate all teachings. That is not a world that I want to live in.
The world is not a kind place. It’s best to recognize that early and remind yourself often. Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it isn’t true or contain some form of truth to be recognized. Some things I will never understand or comprehend. That by no means, mean those ideas should be censored, banned, or their proponents harassed. We need to break this trend before we are all living in a backwards world. Perhaps all it will take is handing out copies of Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps too many people skipped reading this as a requirement in high school. Perhaps there is a corollary to Walter Lippmann’s quote “where all men think alike, no one thinks very much”; where no one is allowed to think independently, no one thinks very much…
Deep Thoughts 