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===Allegory, fairy stories and the hubris of taking things literally=== | ===Allegory, fairy stories and the hubris of taking things literally=== | ||
We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons? | We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons? | ||
===[[Critical Theory]], [[post-modernism]], and the death of objective truth=== | |||
They say every successful conspiracy theory contains a grain of truth. They have to be be something for even credulous people to glom onto. | |||
Critical Theory’s grain of truth, ironically, is that there is no truth. This is its debt to postmodernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept. | |||
The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical Theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical Theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones. | |||
The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray and recently Matthew Syed) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just ''are'' true. No amount of identifying with an alternative Theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window. | |||
On the other hand [XXX] made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has critical Theory escape its postmodern origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the high modernists. These people are uber rationalists and inhabit a world which seeks to solve all all problems by top-down computation. Theory has escaped its usual can finds in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using there rationalist framework to to advance what is a a fairly radical political agenda. Critical theory is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has displaced the capitalist assumptions altogether. | |||
That's not altogether a bad thing — although the | |||
practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another. | |||
The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not ''false'' (that would be a paradox right?) So much as ''incoherent''. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language. | |||
And languages are intrinsically ambiguous. This is the tragedy and the triumph of the human condition. | |||
The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright. | |||
The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective. | |||
===Power structures are all around us=== | |||