I am not a part of any elite, and I have no great power, influence or esteem in society. I am an outsider. I have spent my whole adult life on the fringes of western society.
I think we’ve drifted quite a long way off topic.
For the record…the originators of postmodernism most certainly were part of an intellectual elite. And the purveyors of woke ideology are mostly middle class.
Martin, I love your Bourdieu presentation and I eagerly followed each of the threads on that topic. This is an excellent case in point. Bourdieu is generally considered a postmodern author (although not necessarily aligned with all the other authors also generally considered postmodern). I would not wish to ground my entire social theory on the work of Bourdieu, because I believe later theorists work better for that purpose. But Bourdieu has many valuable insights I would gladly incorporate into current social thinking.
Do they depend on an assumption of anti-realism?
If the actual insights do not rest on false assumptions then they can stand on their own merits, and be incorporated without any problems. I am certainly not saying we should make a list of authors, decide who to label postmodern, and then burn all their books. What I am saying is this:
(1) Postmodernism is, in general, based on a number of assumptions which are not reliable and cannot be incorporated into the new paradigm.
(2) Therefore we should not start by trying to incorporate postmodern thinking, in general, into the new paradigm. This rules out “oscillating” in and out of postmodern thinking, and it also rules out any sort of synthesis which preserves anti-realism or hostility to truth or great societal goals.
It does not follow that everything that might be categorised as postmodern should be rejected. Of course it doesn’t…I’m also rejecting materialism and growth-based economics, which is fully in line with postmodern thinking – it arrives at the same conclusion, but for different reasons. I’m rejecting materialism and growth-based economics because I think they are logically incoherent and systematically detached from reality (respectively).
Would love to chat about this over voice or video sometime. Big topic, and I find that people tend to prefer talking to me about involved topics more that way than over text, where I can be quite sharp (unintentionally)…
I am currently going to the effort of drafting a reply to a different post of yours, also of significant substance… enjoy reading your questioning… wanna just say, I do think there are answers.
I suppose I do want clarity for something generally, myself, concerning your (2) —
What is 2R if not a pluralistic label for the new eudaimonic acceleration?
I think you might be misunderstanding what this new movement is (which until I learn otherwise I will continue to refer to by “2R”), and it seems like this may be due to not understanding where post-modernist critique was right. I understand that may be annoying to hear, but I’m curious… by what bases do you consider pomo discreditable?
I don’t currently have voice/video on my aging PC, but I can use my wife’s Mac if I can plan it in advance. I do prefer doing it by text though. I can cope with blunt answers. I also want this discussion to take place in public because I think there’s probably quite a few people who need to read it. And take part, preferably.
It is not like I will take them personally. What we are trying to do here is not easy or simple, and the political aspect is the most difficult of all. A lot of well-meaning people will find it very difficult to let their political ideals meet the reality of the coming collapse.
What is 2R if not a pluralistic label for the new eudaimonic acceleration?
I think you might be misunderstanding what this new movement is (which until I learn otherwise I will continue to refer to by “2R”), and it seems like this may be due to not understanding where post-modernist critique was right. I understand that may be annoying to hear, but I’m curious… by what bases do you consider pomo discreditable?
Firstly this movement is currently still trying to define itself, so nobody should rush into accusing others of not understanding what it “is”. Right now we are discussing what it should be. The question of to what extent PoMo features in the new paradigm is a crucial question to which there is currently no consensus about the answer.
Of course the PoMo “critique” was right about some things, but even that wasn’t necessarily for the right reasons (even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day…) In other words, I agree with postmodernists about certain things even though I arrived at those conclusions via different methods or paths.
The problems with Pomo are both theoretical and practical. The theoretical problem is that it begins with a denial of truth and realism which it does not even attempt to support. This is part of the difference between analytical and continental philosophy – from Nietzsche onwards, the latter never felt any need to support its arguments analytically, and postmodernism is the most extreme version of this tendency. In other words far too much of it is just made up nonsense. There is nothing like enough respect for realism or rationalism.
The practical problem is that rather than making society better by challenging the dominant power structures, it has in fact shattered the opposition into thousands of warring pieces, which has played straight into the hands of the real power structures. The people who meet at Davos every years to decide the future of everybody else aren’t threatened by PoMo identity politics – it suits them just fine, because it makes sure no movement can ever arise which could threaten their stranglehold on the real decisionmaking.
PoMo has also been defeated in the culture war that it started. It tried to impose radical anti-realistic anti-scientific nonsense on society, and it used authoritarian methods, including bullying and cancel culture, to do this. The bulk of Western society resisted, and now PoMo (ie “woke politics”) has been defeated politically, and is being routed (and not just in the US).
So there you have it. I think PoMo is intellectually dishonest and practically self-defeating and damaging to Western society. I see it as the final stage of the epistemological madness of the West – the leading edge of the West’s descent into a psychotic hell.
I believe the new movement will be partly fuelled by the demise of postmodernism. I think that a widespread recognition of exactly what postmodernism is, and exactly what is wrong with it, is absolutely essential.
Not just postmodernism. It is really important to understand that. Exactly the same must apply to two other things – growth-based economics (including Capitalism as we understand it) and metaphysical materialism. I think we need to start again – from the beginning (epistemologically) – having explicitly agreed to reject all three of those things to “clear up” the starting point. It is necessary to level the playing field – to stop people attempting to smuggle false assumptions from failed systems into the new paradigm.
I think that 2R needs to be justified from first principles. We need to be clear where it starts, and when it lets ideas in then we need to be sure what the epistemological basis is for accepting those thing – or parts of those things.
"[quote=“Martin, post:1, topic:123”]
Social structures are enduring and regular patterns of social arrangements and overarching systems that organise and give form to social life. Social structures come into being from the relationships and interactions between individuals and groups.
Social structures are shaped by the dispositions of individuals and the dynamics of power defined by the accumulation of various forms of capital within Social fields.
[/quote]
That’s the beginning of @Martin 's thread on Bourdieu - Presentation Summary. To learn more about what Bourdieu does and does not say, please check that all out.
OK, that may well be a good example of the problem. Here we have a definition of social structures which begins without any reference whatsoever to biology, evolution, or the natural behaviour of animals like humans. It makes no attempt to start with hard science. It goes straight into philosophical-political-psychological stuff. This is how we ended up with gender ideology.
I do not trust the methodology. And you’re right, for me this does basically apply to the whole of “continental philosophy”. It is not that everything is wrong, but that it is simply not worth the effort of wading through the nonsense in search of something of value. If you can show me the valuable stuff then I might be interested. I don’t want to be told to “read the source material”, any more than I want to be told the read the Bible. Once you have lost faith in a particular source, why go back there? I can’t think of a single postmodern text I have read which was actually worth reading.
Please try to convince me what I’ve got wrong. What, exactly, am I missing? Where is the baby? All I can see is bathwater, and I feel like you are telling me to go and dive in the bath in search of a baby I’m not convinced is there. Please sum it up in your own words. What is the baby I’m looking for?
The academy has operated in silos for decades if not centuries, so that is typical of social science in general, not just Bourdieu’s version of it. Conventional neo-liberal economics is an outstanding case in point - see anything Peter Pogany wrote about that.
The search for ultimate foundations in thermodynamics, particle physics, empirical cosmology, etc. is pretty typical of current metamodern systems like UTOK. Azarian’s The Romance of Reality is the most commonly cited narrative for this general perspective of life from matter, mind from life, and culture from mind through energy, entropy, and emergence. So far so good?
I’m pretty active in the UTOK community, but the gaping hole there is a complete lack of detail about how society works. My job in that community (self-appointed, but needed nonetheless) is to articulate social theory aligned with the community’s pre-existing naturalistic ontological base.
Some writers I have identified that are socially sophisticated, but aligned to evolutionary naturalism and the laws of thermodyamics include:
All of these are empirically grounded and physical science informed. Together they sketch out the rudiments of a historical narrative about social structural evolution that runs deeper than fashionable opinion. But there is plenty of valuable work in history and social science in general that does not make explicit reference to the cosmological evolutionary story. Those dots must be connected by current theory, in so far as such dots need connected at all.
My approach to Bourdieu is to a) listen to what he has to say, b) digest it and think it over, c) determine if there is anything there that might be useful for cosmologically-informed social theory, d) keep what’s good, e) ignore the rest, f) if it’s wrong, show why it’s wrong. To cite just one example, Bourdieu’s treatment of “habitus” is very interesting. I can pretty easily align that with UTOK thinking about minded animals and the biological core of human behavior. But UTOK as it currently exists is not especially interested in the sorts of social history that motivate Bourdieu, so if “habitus” (or any related idea) makes its way into the UTOK milieu, it will be because someone like me did the intellectual carpentry needed to fit it in.
I never cared much about postmodern theorizing in real time during the decades in which it was being written. But now that I am active in social theory (for metacrisis reasons) circling back on the past five or so decades of social theory and looking for useable content seems more advisable than starting everything over from scratch.
The search for ultimate foundations in thermodynamics, particle physics, empirical cosmology, etc. is pretty typical of current metamodern systems like UTOK. Azarian’s The Romance of Reality is the most commonly cited narrative for this general perspective of life from matter, mind from life, and culture from mind through energy, entropy, and emergence. So far so good?
No. That assumes materialism. The relationship between life and mind is not linear in this respect. It is partly retrocausal/teleological. We cannot explain mind purely in terms of biology. The recognition of this (that materialism is false) is one of the essential steps required for this paradigm shift.
My job in that community (self-appointed, but needed nonetheless) is to articulate social theory aligned with the community’s pre-existing naturalistic ontological base.
That is a hopeless task. We need to start with an examination of the definition of naturalism and supernaturalism. The current definitions are broken in a critical way. We have to distinguish between “probabilistic supernaturalism” and “physics-busting supernaturalism”. I call them praeternatural and hypernatural, and get rid of the term “supernatural”. The new paradigm is going to have recognise that praeternatural phenomena are real – at least one example can be known to all (teleology in evolution) and arguably a second (free will). There are others (eg synchronicity), but these are only knowable subjectively. We therefore need a New Epistemic Deal. We need both skeptics and mystics on the Council of Ecocivilisation.
Those dots must be connected by current theory, in so far as such dots need connected at all.
I think we need to start again. The current theory is inadequate and a better one is now available. Only recently became available, but all the parts are now in existence.
But now that I am active in social theory (for metacrisis reasons) circling back on the past five or so decades of social theory and looking for useable content seems more advisable than starting everything over from scratch.
If the foundational assumptions are wrong then we need to sort those out before we start looking for useable content. It is absolutely essential to start at the beginning, in terms of epistemology.
Again…I must stress that this is currently possible in a way it previously was not. It required groundbreaking work from at least two people who I will keep talking about: Thomas Nagel and Henry Stapp.
Excuse me … did you not above just complain about “without any reference whatsoever to biology, evolution, or the natural behaviour of animals like humans. It makes no attempt to start with hard science.”
What you mean by “hard science” must be entirely different than what the rest of the world means by hard science.
Excuse me … did you not above just complain about “without any reference whatsoever to biology, evolution, or the natural behaviour of animals like humans. It makes no attempt to start with hard science.”
What you mean by “hard science” must be entirely different than what the rest of the world means by hard science.
Yes. I’m right and the rest of the world is wrong. I’m 2R and they aren’t.
The core of my position is that I am a hardline scientific realist (an epistemic structural realist) – this is where the hard science comes in – but I also believe that all forms of materialism and physicalism are either logically inconsistent (incoherent) or insane (eliminativism, which denies the existence of consciousness).
I defend hard science, and I always start with hard science, but it is a post-materialistic form of hard science.
I am saying it possible to combine hard science and magical realism in the same reality. With no conflict. I believe this sort of epistemology must be the foundation of 2R.
Natural causality determines the evolution of the wave function.
Occult (“praeternatural”) causality determines how and when the wave function collapses.
We need a New Epistemic Deal to weave this together in the new paradigm.
Yes, I am very much in broad agreement with “The Romance of Reality” (although I have not read it). From what I’ve seen there are some differences in the details, but these probably look like hair-splitting to most other people. The point is that the general direction is the right one, and we need many more people pulling in this direction before a consensus on details starts to emerge.
The re-enchantment of reality is another theme in my own book.
I was a hardcore Dawkinsian who went on to experience extreme “paranormal” phenomena (not just synchronicity – that’s just the first hints of it.) Then I had to figure out how to combine my previous worldview with what I had experienced. Then I spent the best part of 20 years trying to work out how to put it in a book and explain it to other people (which included abandoning my software career to study philosophy).
Why do we have to talk about evolution all the time? The description of the principle of evolution is just a “common sense” observation and doesn’t explain everything. It ignores the metaphysical prime mover. The evolution is not the reason “why” - evolution is only an attempt to describe “how” - but only in terms of mechanical steps of something we’re clueless about. It’s a human way of rationalising a natural phenomenon.
Why would you be suggesting that steps should be taken towards turning science into a religion is unclear. That’s is exactly what postmodernism tried to counteract. Why can’t you allow for a possibility that something you might think is “nonsense” is actually you hitting your limitations or you not being ready for it?
Social structures are described as social constructs because they are not built around objective values and beliefs. I don’t believe that there’s “human nature”, “natural behaviour” as objective concepts - unless we turn to religion or somehow tap into the recipe book of the global unified consciousness.
Why do we have to talk about evolution all the time?
Because it is a major part of the explanation of how living systems work.
The description of the principle of evolution is just a “common sense” observation and doesn’t explain everything.
It doesn’t claim to explain everything. Some people try to use it to explain more than it is capable of explaining, but these people aren’t just motivated by science. They are scientific materialists. Materialism is wrong, but evolutionary theory isn’t. It does need to be radically reformed though. This is part of the reason why Thomas Nagel is so important to 2R.
It ignores the metaphysical prime mover.
That is materialism, not science. Science doesn’t answer metaphysical questions.
Why would you be suggesting that steps should be taken towards turning science into a religion is unclear.
I’m not doing that. I am saying science and mysticism can co-exist peacefully and synergistically in the same reality and in the same ideological system. I am saying we need both of them, and we need to understand how they fit together.
I do not need postmodernism for this. On the contrary, postmodernism is anti-scientific and therefore a major problem. Postmodernism is the wrong solution to this problem. It doesn’t work as a solution – rather, it causes even more problems.
Why can’t you allow for a possibility that something you might think is “nonsense” is actually you hitting your limitations or you not being ready for it?
That’s what postmodernists always say when people refuse to accept the nonsense. It’s part of the dynamic, and always has been.
JK Rowling: X
The reason we haven’t been won over by these talking points and remain so tragically ‘uneducated’ isn’t that we’ve failed to grasp the sophistication of your world view. It’s that we think you’re talking unadulterated bullshit and making fools of yourselves.
Social structures are described as social constructs because they are not built around objective values and beliefs
I agree.
Have you checked out Science and Nonduality?
Is that the name of a book?
I am a little bit cautious about the term “non-duality”, because it is a term from Eastern philosophy which does not translate well into Western philosophy. A more appropriate Western term might be “neutral monism”. The problem is that materialism and idealism appear to be “not dualism” — except actually they are a hangover from Cartesian dualism – they are one half of dualism with the other crudely chopped off.
I have seen too many people equate non-dualism with materialism, basically.
It’s this. Paranormal is on the agenda. So is science.
Looks good. It’s all pointing in the same direction.
“Paranormal” is another word that doesn’t make it into my formulation of a meta-ideology for 2R. It usually comes with implications that “science might go there one day”. For me, praeternatural phenomena will never fall under the remit of naturalistic science. That is why I think we need to make accommodation for both skeptics and mystics in a New Epistemic Deal. The skeptics need to accept that such things are not impossible, even if science has not (and can’t) prove their existence. The mystics need to accept that they shouldn’t even want science to go there – let mysticism be mystical.