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Intelligent design

The New York Times reports that the forces of the Enlightenment have come at last to my humble Commonwealth:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

Now that’s what I call some of that there natural selection.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  I just couldn’t resist.

Seriously, Enlightenment, I’m sorry we postmodernists said so many mean things about you.  Can you forgive us?  Tell you what.  You get rid of that annoying “universalism as a stalking horse for imperialism” thing, and we’ll stop going around saying silly things like “reason is an instrument of terror.” Deal?

Cool.  Now let’s take this show on the road to Kansas.

Posted by on 11/09 at 09:14 AM

  1. Bruno Latour is starting to understand what is at stake.

    I still expect some version of postmodernism to be adopted by the Right wholesale.  It fits their agenda so perfectly.  When there is no reality, power holds all the cards.

    Posted by  on  11/09  at  11:05 AM

  2. Don’t consider this a victory for evolution. It is all about $. The people elected to the board are angry that money was spent on the crazy lawsuit.

    Posted by  on  11/09  at  11:18 AM

  3. Wow. I was taugt the Enlightenment was about secular values as well as rationality, as represented by the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, and Jefferson; Lyell and Darwin themselves sort of late Enlightenment figures. Postmods are now equating ID theory to Enlightenment. For some reason I don’t perceive postmod as aligned on the side of Darwin and evolution, but aligned on the side of madness .

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/09  at  12:42 PM

  4. Postmods are now equating ID theory to Enlightenment.

    No, not really.  Actually, it’s kinda the opposite:  the one semi-postmod who runs this here blog is celebrating the defeat of ID theory as a victory for Enlightenment.  Even though John David Stutt says this wasn’t a victory for evolution.  But then, he’s probably not a postmod anyway.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/09  at  01:02 PM

  5. Not a victory for evolution? Huh. So if the Dover voters had put all the Republican creationists into office, would that have been a victory for evolution?

    It’s funny how every advance reason makes is waved away as inconsequential.

    Here’s the deal: let’s just elect lots and lots of liberals and Democrats and evilutionists, and we’ll let all the conservatives and Republicans and creationists call it meaningless. I think that would be fair.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  11/09  at  01:23 PM

  6. Uh-oh, wait. Was my last comment too po-mo?

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  11/09  at  01:24 PM

  7. There seem to be two flavors to the postmod. attacks on Enlightenment: a critique of the rationalist and perhaps Hegelian type, and critique of the secular, Voltairean/Jeffersonian type. My point was that Darwin falls in the later camp methinks, however horrified he might have been were he to have visited le Chateau du Marquis de Arouet

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/09  at  01:29 PM

  8. "Tell you what.  You get rid of that annoying “universalism as a stalking horse for imperialism” thing, and we’ll stop going around saying silly things like “reason is an instrument of terror.” Deal?”

    This is one of those moments in a relationship where the other party says “I’ve been saying that for years!  Won’t you listen?”, isn’t it?

    Posted by Cosma  on  11/09  at  01:43 PM

  9. Now, Cosma, don’t go trying to reintroduce an incommensurability into the discussion, just when I’d finally resolved the dispute between postmodernism and the Enlightenment.  Yeesh.

    And PZ, no, comment 5 was just po-mo enough.  I know, it’s hard to tell when you’ve attained exactly the right degree of postmodernism, but this blog specializes in calibrating such things.  (By the way, your blog is smokin’ today.  Nice work.)

    Posted by Michael  on  11/09  at  01:52 PM

  10. By the way, if one does uphold some version of Enlightenment “rights” does one thereby support abortion?

    Republican or democrat: if the difference is mostly in regards to how they view the A-word, there is little difference. Jimmy Carter may be somewhat annoying or sentimental, but he had a decent point in regards to A-rights: politics is becoming a theater of the absurd if a democrat is now defined not by say his ideas on economics (i.e in short, opposed to the power of the wealthy and corporate Amerika) but by his views on abortion. The CA democrats are all patting themselves on their backs that 73 was defeated: how wonderful that 13-14 yr old girls can continue to safely abort without having to tell that bastard Daddy or the bitch Mom.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/09  at  02:07 PM

  11. Why are we always taking sides?  Oh, yeah.  Sorry, mon mauvais.  And for the record, I am not, nor was I ever, a drunken fart.

    Posted by Rene Descartes  on  11/09  at  02:21 PM

  12. Even before i read the Latour post, my first thoughts were regarding the “inside.” Substituting “interior” for “intelligent” seems somehow so appropriate.  Is it not that we are fighting against an extreme intellect makeover?  Those folks seem to really really want us all to have the same happy conforming interior design in our pretty little heads.  Where are the good witches of enlightened reason and rigorous scientific inquiry when we really need them in Kansas?  Curse those evil witches of creationism as science and the dark ages of papal infallability who wish to steal the ruby slippers.  And why isn’t Toto barking louder??

    Posted by  on  11/09  at  06:01 PM

  13. Dr. Berube:

    I’d be interested in hearing your take on Dr. Steve Fuller’s shilling for the IDists in Dover--def. not an Enlightenment fan.  What say you?

    Kumar

    Posted by  on  11/09  at  11:36 PM

  14. Two words, Kumar.  Bizarre and misguided.

    spyder:  you’re suggesting we need Evolutionary Eye for the Creationist Guy?  Or Glenda?

    Posted by Michael  on  11/09  at  11:44 PM

  15. The Latour essay is fascinating.  I think this:  “Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them?”
    ...is the key sentence.  The answer is yes.  Neglecting that’s the fundamental mistake made by people, mostly academics, who proliferate new targets of criticism, new categories of oppressive discourse that can be found in nearly everything prior.  Rightwing deployment of some idea is not an irrecoverable contamination of it, and the right’s wrongness is explanatorily prior to their latest discursive strategies.  Thus when people locate the central problem in, for example, either the acceptance or the rejection of an Enlightenment frame, they’re mistaken.

    (Ah, a base-superstructure thesis!  Flee while you can, before the gulags appear!)

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  12:07 AM

  16. I don’t see why these are the two options: insane religious fundamentlism or secular faith in progress through objective science.  Science is better than that!  It could just be what I’m reading at the moment, but Bergson seems to present an alternative between these two.  I’m not trying to troll.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  12:46 AM

  17. Kalkin, I posted the link to the Latour essay because I think that it’s an important step towards the realization of how left-wing postmodernism has prepared the way for the right.  But I don’t think that it fully gets there.  Latour spends the too much of the essay making excuses, it isn’t clear what difference supporting matters of concern instead of attacking matters of fact would make, and his final proposal comes down to the usual Theorist’s incoherent jumble of poorly understood methods taken from social science—“multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence”.  It’s interesting because he’s realized that there’s a problem, but I see nothing in the essay that would favor biologists over intelligent designers if you took it seriously and did not start out with an implicit trust in science.

    When you reject an Enlightenment frame, the other major varieties you’re left with are premodern and postmodern ones.  The Right has been trying premodern ones up until the Bush administration, but they’re starting to learn.  The point is that if you assume the bad guys are bad and will use anything handy, postmodernism is a more useful tool for them, because under postmodernism, nothing can be proved, nothing can be argued, no evidence of anything can exist, truth can not be spoken to power.  As the aide to Bush said to Suskind in the article that inspired the phrase reality-based community: “‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’”

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  01:11 AM

  18. Rich,

    I didn’t know it was that simple!  Three choices: premodern, modern, postmodern.  That really helps.  Now we just need to go about deciding who is who and we’re set (I’m thinking Chomsky modern [yay!], Derrida postmodern [boo!], Zizek premodern [borrrrinngg]).  You know they do this kind of worldview study at Olivet Nazarene University, but they have a forth one for Christianity.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  02:59 AM

  19. I can’t help reading every article you write with a french accent. Are you from Quebec? =)

    Posted by Federico Contreras  on  11/10  at  04:21 AM

  20. Federico, I was born in New York City, but my name (and my father’s side) is French-Canadian.

    Anthony:  It could just be what I’m reading at the moment, but Bergson seems to present an alternative between these two.  I’m not trying to troll.

    This blog has a very strict no-Bergson policy.  You have been warned.  We will tolerate no Bergson trolls.

    And Rich, thanks, but I ain’t taking that bait either.  We don’t debate propositions like “postmodernism says there is no reality” on this Baudrillard-eschewing blog, especially since we’ve already written at some length on the subject without saying such silly things.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/10  at  10:16 AM

  21. Michael, I know of and have read your previous post on brute facts vs. social facts, and I thought it was fine.  But the problem is that postmodernism offers no discourse by which disagreements about which are which can be settled.  In short, the left doesn’t get to control the right’s development of postmodern ideas.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  10:53 AM

  22. Thanks for reading that stuff, Rich!  You had me wondering for a moment whether you thought I was one of those “welcome to the desert of the Real” folks.

    But see, I don’t think there is a discourse that can settle things once and for all.  I do wish (as I hope I’ve made clear on this resolutely secular blog) that more people would agree to adjudicate disputes by means of rational, reciprocal, intersubjective exchange, but there are still plenty of people for whom reason is subordinate to something else, and what are we going to do about them?

    As for the right’s savvy redeployment of postmodernist anti-universalism, I believe Meera Nanda is all over this question.  Compellingly so.

    I thrash all this out in chapter six of Liberal Arts, by the way.  Just fyi.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/10  at  11:31 AM

  23. Rich,

    Just because postmodernism (and I have no idea what it is you mean by that since everyone and their mother has a different conception) doesn’t offer a discourse by which disagreements can be settled does not mean that the Enlightenment does.  Or science for that matter.  The act of thinking is not simply finding that discourse that finally gives us all the answers.  Even brute facts are subject to change (physics teachers have told me so, so there!).  So saying that the left can’t control what the right does is tantaumount to announcing that I cannot control whether or not the earth will be blown up by an alien race bent on making room for a intergalactic superhighway.  Perhap any attempt to reinstate a kind of Enlighenment absolutism is really an attempt to be an autoritarian Left.  Now, you may be ok with that (I don’t know that you are), but I’m not because it isn’t faithful to the mutabilitie of truth.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  11:46 AM

  24. College kids are better served by reading Behe’s ideas (and their refutations) than by studying postmod or most literary drivel, that’s for sure: and one can argue that not from a nutcase protestant view but from a secular standpoiunt. As far as the smorgasbord of facts goes, try the highly complex facts associated with the enzymatic process of eyesight, or of blood clotting.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/10  at  11:47 AM

  25. I look forward to reading _Liberal Arts_.

    The “reason is subordinate to something else” folks have to be told that when they’re dealing with brute facts, they’re wrong.  Scientific discourse can settle things, if not “once and for all”, at least temporarily, because the universe functions as a corrective to mistaken ideas about brute facts.  Without that assumption, I don’t see why Bruno Latour’s suggested solution works.

    I think that left-wing postmodernists should come up with a defense against their ideas being appropriated by the right, since they are still ahead of the right in sophistication of use of these ideas at this time.  Meera Nanda (whose work I really should read more of) seems to be mostly focussed on non-U.S. appropriations.  At present, the U.S. right wing is still fairly primitive in its re-use of postmodernism.  (For instance, the quote “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” keeps the leftist idea of the U.S. as empire and simply inverts the value judgement that empires are bad, which postmodernism in itself does not really support).  Future uses will involve more wholesale seperation of postmodernism from the implicit value system that used to go along with it.  Before then, it would be good if people had an easily understandable reason why the right shouldn’t be able to do this.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  12:03 PM

  26. Yeah postmods have succeeded in carrying on the tradition of cultural relativism (as opposed to Einsteinian relativity), but at this point it’s called “mutability.” Try putting your hand in some pure HNO3 once a week and testing your mutability hypothesis, Gump. 

    (or be safe and stick with yr sunday school certificate)

    Posted by MT  on  11/10  at  12:06 PM

  27. J.,

    Again, you completely miss the point.  Or you never tried.  Either way.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  12:39 PM

  28. No, you miss the point. A few instances of theories evolving (have you finished Kuhn’s “Structure”? ) does not entail relativism across the board. Besides you don’t have a clue about the difference between truths of facts and axiomatic/analtyical truths.  There are regularly occuring facts-- that undiluted HN03 WILL burn flesh--and a statement about that--"if you put your hand in pure HN03, it will burn” is verifiable, confirmable. Hume or a postmod might claim it is not necessary, but if it burns 1000/1000 times than it looks necessary to most--including the chemistry department. It is only postmods and theists who are enraptured with the “mutability” thesis. Most science--like the Periodic table--depends on, and is predicated on, the regular occurrence of specific facts--K will nor stop reacting with H20. That’s a fact. The theories/explanations may change (not much after they are established) but the facts exist in nature, objectively, and independently of mind, regardless of what a few deluded cafe-romantics dream of.  (And when a rational person becomes ill, he confirms his belief of this objectivity of facts by calling the medical facts expert--an MD--of course the Xtian or religious bonehead might start to pray and thus die or cause his sick family member to die). Facts and empiricism in general are objectionable primarily to those few rich or foolish enough to indulge in aesthetics or platonism.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/10  at  12:59 PM

  29. I’ve got one thing to say about this: ID going down at the polls is more viscerally satisfying than winning or losing another lawsuit.

    Perhaps the ACLU should attempt victory in the polls before resorting to lawsuits.  It’s good that the cranks occasionally get reminded that they really are the minority.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  04:33 PM

  30. J to the son,

    No, you missed the point because I’m not arguing that rolling around in a fire pit isn’t going to burn me.  I never did. 

    It’s a shame you’ve always been an asshole or I could actually learn something from you.  I’m serious - if you weren’t such a prick you might have actually made friends.  Instead you’re just very, very cocky even when you haven’t read the book.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  07:39 PM

  31. Anthony, Anthony.  Postmodernism’s repudiation of chemistry is well known—there’s no need to go over that barren terrain again.

    Just remember.  There is no HNO3.

    Posted by  on  11/10  at  11:58 PM

  32. The postmod clown college hasn’t repudiated anything.  One can define the elements however you want--H, Hydrogen, by atomic number, “Negordyh"--but they exist, independently of mind: the Periodic table is predicated (correctly predicated) on what Searle calls “external realism,” the most bitter pill for the aesthete to swallow (apart from deductive logic perhaps).  What is really amazing is that there are still dimwits like Neo who think that that reaction is not actually occurring (tell that to the corps of engineers) AND that the statements used to describe/explain such processes don’t really refer ( tho the postmod, fickle as a whore, continually relies on referential and verifiable uses of language, as in Neo’s whine above)

    Posted by MT  on  11/11  at  12:11 AM

  33. MT: Note Neo’s sarcasm.  Also, the craziest of crazy literature professor’s I’ve heard of don’t repudiate chemistry.

    Michael: You should be ashamed not to be one of those “‘welcome to the desert of the Real’ folks.” It’s a beautiful phrase.  Sometimes, when I’m bored, I just repeat it to myself.

    Rich: My argument was that the right is happy to reappropriate any kind of rhetoric, that of the Enlightenment or that of opposition to it.  As any good anti-pomo-ist ought to agree, the way in which an issue is thought about and discussed is not its heart.  And as any good pomo type ought to agree, language is a shifty and untrustworthy thing like that.

    Toad: My reflexive reaction to reading “you don’t have a clue about the difference between truths of facts and axiomatic/analtyical truths” is to suggest you read this, if you haven’t already: http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
    Don’t worry, Quine is not a postmodernist by any measure.  I’m not sure if it has any relevance to the thread, really, but like I said, reflexes.

    Posted by  on  11/11  at  12:39 AM

  34. yass re-reading I thought it might be satire/irony.  es tooot mir leid

    Posted by mt  on  11/11  at  01:35 AM

  35. Don’t celebrate too much.  In the long run Michael, the religious zealots, corporations, and postmodernists will win.  We will have your little nihilist wet dream.  Superstition will reign. 

    I for one am really happy about intelligent design.  The insanity of it is ever more proof of political consequences of relativism.  The Discovery Center uses Kuhn’s ideas.  This is great!  ID is like gay rights.  At this point it is a matter of time. 

    I am sure that Michael will be really excited when Republican and Corporate interests finish the job that the powerless postmodernists have been trying to accomplish.  Once and for all the death of science.  Nobody to cure AIDS.  Nope.  The next generation will be trying to prove that god made the grass green. Drug companies can finally focus more on lifestyle drugs and GMO’s.  This might lead to more jobs for the lot of cultural studies professors who have a fetish over “theory” and little interest in studying culture. 

    Michael will have his victory march.  Relativism will win.  The death of science needed that slight jab from postmodernists for the final knock out punch.

    Posted by  on  11/11  at  03:17 AM

  36. Josh, you sound like someone who’s been doing some serious, diligent reading of my work on postmodernism.  But I can’t haggle with you right now—I have to get back to killing science.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/11  at  10:17 AM

  37. As they thread descends into trolling indistinguishable from tiresome parody, I thought Kalkin’s “the craziest of crazy literature professors I’ve heard of don’t repudiate chemistry” was rather funny.  It’s always physics and biology, why do the chemists always get left out?  Well, not so fast.  This article has, in addition to such gems as that chemists are 24% of mad scientists in movies, one of my favorite sentences of the last week:

    “He showed how America’s enthusiasm for everything plastic—and by extension chemistry—has been complicated by environmental doubts and by the plasticity of the postmodern existence.”

    Dr. Sokal—to the deequivocator, stat!

    Posted by  on  11/11  at  10:26 AM

  38. Another lecturer traced America’s ambivalent involvement with plastic and how this has shaped public perceptions of chemistry. Focusing mostly on the post-World War II period, Jeffrey Meikle (Austin, TX, USA) explored the strategies used by manufacturers and promoters to gain public acceptance for plastic and discussed the symbolic hold of plastic on the popular imagination. He showed how America’s enthusiasm for everything plastic—and by extension chemistry—has been complicated by environmental doubts and by the plasticity of the postmodern existence.

    Uh, before we go bugging Alan Sokal about this one, Rich—you have seen The Graduate, right?  Just asking.

    Plastics, my boy, plastics!

    Posted by Michael  on  11/11  at  10:48 AM

  39. Rich, you’re neither philosopher nor wit, and your endless pretentious “voice of Literary Authori-TAY” posts would get your ass kicked promptly anywhere except in some English deparment full of like-minded narcissistic fops.

    I’d like to read your “argument”, either pro or con, on the IDT debate. That’d be good for some yuks.

    Your writing, Rich P., exemplifies what’s wrong with the the current belle-lettrist infestation. Stick to your “Henry James for Gay Decontructionists Reader"---Verstehen Sie das? 

    (and I don’t have a problem with Quine’s “Two Dogmas"--instituting that “confirmation by the whole domain of research and science” and there’d be lots of lit. people getting their Apple/UNIX certs or something. )

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/11  at  11:20 AM

  40. Yes, I’ve seen _The Graduate_, and I’d guess that in Meikle’s book he also calls on, as representative of the previous era, the dream of getting out of the small town through plastics as exemplar of progress in _It’s a Wonderful Life_.  “I don’t want any plastics! I don’t want any ground floors [...]” But really, you don’t think the sentence in the comment above is funny?  “Plasticity” usually means “the capacity for being molded or altered”, and in the context of “the plasticity of postmodern existence” does not seem to have anything to do with plastic per se.  No one thinks that postmodern existence is made out of long-chain hydrocarbons.  So this looks like the classic confusion of a science term reused as metaphor without exclusion of its scientific meaning that Sokal parodied.

    Here’s another example sentence from Meikle’s book about this subject, taken from Amazon:
    “the narrative itself takes on a certain plasticity, touching in turn on the histories of technology and invention, of industry and marketing, of industrial design and consumer culture”.  Here it’s not funny because it looks like a publisher’s heavy-handed ad copy, but the same equivocation is present.

    Posted by  on  11/11  at  11:24 AM

  41. Well, it wasn’t that funny.  Just kinda clumsy.

    Me, I want to know why postmodernism is letting astrophysics off the hook.  Now there’s a science we really need to destroy once and for all.

    And Jason, control yourself, please.

    Posted by  on  11/11  at  11:29 AM

  42. Oh, I’m in control-- what you fail to understand is that the “Emperor of Postmodernism has no clothes.” It’s thought there is some viable body of knowledge associated with postmod which is plausible or useful (can’t be “true” since truth is not truth in postmod, right?) and that simply isn’t the case. There are the few ethical or political cliches of postmod (vaguely leftist and mulitculturalism) which are not all established .

    And tho I don’t hold to IDT, it’s interesting to read endless posts opposed to it which never hint at the core ideas: irreducible complexity, for one.  No one said it was done by Jee-sus: but if you get 10,000 blackjacks in a row (the probability of various cellular structures arising randomly is like 1/1,000,000+) then you might start to think the game was rigged. But postmods, not so apt at inference, would not get it--nor are they much for blackjack I assume.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/11  at  11:45 AM

  43. With astrophysics, it’s paraphrased as “That Big Bang phrase *must* be a metaphor, it just must be.”

    You don’t think that referring to the plasticity of postmodern existence as though it is actual plastic is funny?  I imagined a sort of Philip K Dick world in which you turn around and everything has been replaced by large plastic cutouts.  Well, to each their own.

    If you do think this kind of thing is funny, or at least exasperating, I highly recommend Zizek’s _The Parallax View_, which at least from the promo looks like it could be hours of amusement.  A sample quote from the promotional material:

    “Zizek is interested in the ‘parallax gap’ separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an ‘impossible short circuit’ of levels that can never meet.”

    Yes, the parallax gap makes a short circuit—not too many people are talented enough to bring *electrical engineering* in to their pseudoscientific metaphors gone wild.  Please, no one tell Zizek that anyone with two functioning eyes uses their own “parallax gap” for depth perception (oh no, an impossible short circuit!). or that the wave-particle duality is really very poorly described using parallax as a metaphor, since the whole point of parallax is that the object looks the same from two different places but appears in a different position with regard to the background.

    Posted by  on  11/11  at  12:33 PM

  44. what you fail to understand is that the “Emperor of Postmodernism has no clothes.”

    I didn’t fail to understand it, Jason—I’d just never heard it put that way before.  Thanks.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/11  at  06:04 PM

  45. You’re welcome, Doc. btw I think your leftie-libertarian approach to bloggin’ is superior to--and shows more heart than--the tea-swiller-control phreak modus operandi of the usual postmod joint. Better a few yawps barbaric than Bukharin-sheen.

    Posted by Mister Toad  on  11/11  at  10:58 PM

  46. "Here’s the deal: let’s just elect lots and lots of liberals and Democrats and evilutionists,”

    That pesky ‘s in let’s - ay, there’s the rub.

    The “us” who chat here, and our fellow logoholics nationwide, couldn’t fill the pews of a single megachurch.

    Broaden the ‘s ... but how?

    - Love,
    Someone getting right the hell out of academia before I turn into one of you.

    Posted by  on  11/15  at  05:40 AM

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