Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Don'ts

I was going to post a link to my latest critique to the "Gene Expression"ists themselves but when I saw that their list of "Don't"s for commentors included prohibitions on "Snark... political correctness, ostentatious appeals to authority, obnoxious appeals to expertise, [and] social constructionism" I realized there was just no damn point.

For one thing, a day without snark is like a day without sunshine.

But a blanket nix on "social constructionism" on top of that?

This kind of naive realist theocratic prohibition conjoined with their pooh-poohing of "political correctness" (which, rather like the "postmodern" I fear, is a term pretty much without content, except as a smokescreen behind which people with whom one disagrees can vanish to be the more readily replaced by clownish cartoons mouthing self-referential incoherences far easier to demolish than would be their actual claims and discomfiting critiques) alerts me to the fact that "my kind" probably just wouldn't be much appreciated in their little salon, much is the pity.

Given all this, I suspect any appeals to "expertise" or "authority" I might make would likewise be judged "ostentatious" and "obnoxious," as night follows day.

Morality, as Wilde would say, is an attitude we adopt toward those we dislike. (I wonder if that was ostentatious of me to say so, obnoxious, or both?)

All that is as it should be.

What I do find obnoxious myself is that all of this rampaging moralism on their part is likely imagined by them to be the farthest thing from the kind of parochial, smug self-righteousness they attribute to the purveyors of the "fashionable nonsense" of "politically correct" "social constructivist" academics and their ilk.

Yes, dearest darlingmost readers, by "fashionable nonsense" these folks tend to mean precisely the kinds of things humanistic/post-humanist, critical/cultural theoretical, rhetoricist, antiessentialist, multiculturalish intellectual-types like yours truly write and take seriously (and which very possibly you hanker after as well, reader dear, if you find yourself returning to this place with any kind of regularity), but which few of them indeed take the time to read themselves seriously enough to engage with in any kind of sympathetic or even critical way.

Why is it so often the case that so many of the ones to whom you would want to look for allies in the cause of championing a more scientific and hence more democratic culture seem at once so susceptible to bamboozlement by the kinds of scientism that confuse prescriptions for descriptions, confuse parochialism for the defense of truth, and self-congratulation for modesty itself?

I swear, it's the kind of thing that makes a site like Edge.org, say, almost unreadable for me much of the time, though I dearly want to get behind any site that publishes heroes of mine like Freeman Dyson, Jeron Lanier, and Bruce Sterling on any kind of regular basis.

How could an online community that takes as its very point of departure a recognition of the pernicious impact of the sociocultural divide Snow diagnosed in his "Two Cultures" argument, then go on to propose as its own "solution" to that dilemma the creation of a so-called "third culture" consisting almost entirely of members and methodologies and vocabularies from just one side of that divide, who then imperially re-write in their own image all the quandaries and concerns of the other side to the extent that they grasp them or care about them in the first place, and then declare this some kind of triumphant synthesis or compromise-formation or detent? I mean, what is it with these people?

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