Re: the arrogance of postmodern mumbo jumbo

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Bryant wrote:
>
> Stephen Barnard <steve@megafauna.com> wrote:
> >
> >>In May, 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, published a paper in
> >>_Social_Text_, a leading journal of cultural studies. The title of this
> >>paper was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
> >>Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."
>
> I've wondered if the collapse of socialism played a role in the
> development of nihilistic postmodern deconstructionism in the academic
> left. Is the timing of this school's emergence right for that explanation?
>
> Bryant

I don't really think so, Bryant. Postmodernism predates the collapse of
socialism. My own take on its popularity in academia is that it
provides a virtually inexhaustible source of publishable (though largely
unread) papers. That's the absurd thing about academia these days:
Everyone is writing papers and no one is reading them.

Another irresistable feature of the postmodern view of science is that
every math-disabled humanities professor who can't even balance his
checkbook can be skeptical and comtemptuous of the most abstruse
technical subjects, because, after all, they are just arbitrary social
constructs.

Steve Barnard

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