This Article Does Not Exist — a blast from the past GUEST post from January 2011

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Because today has been one of those days, I was looking for a post I could re-run.  Something from a couple of years ago.  But I came across a guest post by my older son, Robert, and I couldn’t resist it.  And yeah, three years and change later, he STILL thinks he’s an elephant in cunning disguise*

This article does not exist or how not to practice zoology, by Robert A. Hoyt

* A guest post by Robert Anson Hoyt aka #1 son — who has suspected he’s an elephant since he was about two, in the same way I’ve often suspected I’m a cat. So excuse the pachiderm-o-centric imagery. He is what he is. :) And, oh, yeah, he does overthink it. (Wipes furtive tear.) My boy.*

Postmodern Blues
Or: This Article Does Not Exist
Also: How Not to Practice Zoology

I’ll be blunt. Postmodernism makes me itch. There are very few viewpoints on this planet that annoy me to the extent that postmodernism does. Postmodernism actually manages to be worse than Nihilism.

Oh, you think they’re the same? They aren’t, and I’ll tell you why. Sure, a Nihilist will raise their nose and tell you that all values are subjective. But it takes a Postmodernist to look at the Nihilist and tell them that – not because of the ideas they asserted, but merely because they asserted ideas – they are wrong.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand my position, let me lead you back through the mists of time to Hell, also known as my high school classroom. I am, for my sins, an IB graduate, and like all IB graduates, that meant I had to participate in a class called Theory of Knowledge. I won’t lead you through the details as to what the class was supposed to teach, because no matter what it was, it didn’t succeed.

Not to say the class taught me nothing, it just didn’t teach me anything the prim and proper IB heads in France would dream of putting on their brochure. It took me along the bowels of the nightmare carnival from Hell known as postmodernism, showing me in loving detail its every blemish, often saying those were features rather than bugs. Then it spit me out into the world with a philosophical certainty etched in my heart that – many demons though I might have – I will never resort to postmodernism.

Let us take the first parable chosen by TOK class. It concerns several wise men, all of them totally blind, observing an elephant by hand. One feels the trunk, and proclaims that an elephant is like a snake. One feels the leg and says it is like a tree. One feels the side, and suggests it is like a wall. One feels the tusk, and proclaims it is pointy like a spear. Then, because all of them has a different answer, they get in a flaming row. The very postmodern moral: the elephant can be likened to the truth, and the men to people searching for truth, such that each understands a part of it, but none of them all of it.

This sounds very sage, of course, until you start poking at it. I’ll admit up front that the very metaphor itself annoyed me. What, for example, qualifies these men as “wise” if their general approach to learning about an object is to poke it and then immediately assert opinions? Is this how postmodernists think people do science? If that object was a bear trap, would their scientific opinion be that you shouldn’t poke it? Or are they normally wise, but today they were very drunk? Does that explain why they thought it would be a good idea to rub an elephant? Then again, perhaps their aforementioned method of gaining information pissed off the villagers so much that they’re trying to get the men trampled, because the village maidens are really tired of them “looking for information” in their bosoms? For that matter, just why hasn’t the elephant trampled them? Is it just so confused that old men are coming from the woodwork to rub it that it hasn’t thought up an appropriate reaction?

I realize that’s nitpicking, so let’s consider what the story is actually supposed to mean, instead. There is some central truth, and a variety of people examining it. The people come away with observations that are all partially true, but none are entirely true. And here’s the problem, right away. This may be postmodernism’s explanation of science, but in a strange way, it isn’t what postmodernism actually believes. Postmodernism asserts that all points of view are just reflections of the people making them. The men in the parable were making concrete, verifiable, but incomplete observations. But if the parable really wanted to express postmodernism properly, the village idiot would have come by and observed that the elephant was covered in feathers, and therefore like a chicken. (And then, if it were real, all the old men would have beat him with sticks. And rightly so.)

But wait, I need to explain why postmodernism believes that all points of view are reflections of the people making them. It has to do with a given society defining things in certain ways that make people observe things using specific patterns. And the postmodernists engage in a variety of little games to attempt to explain away reality by using this statement. Of course, for all that they argue that reality is just patterns of social constructs and individual observations, I notice that the current number of postmodernists to have successfully jumped off a building and flown via arguing that gravity doesn’t exist, or doesn’t work the same if you come from a different culture, or if you call it by a different name, remains at zero. But the problem with postmodernists is that, even if one of them tried it, even if you and every other person on Earth watched them splatter on the ground, their very devoted postmodernist friends would just say that it was possible that within that person’s perception, they flew.

What made this even worse was that the postmodernists at some point got science. This is laughable to begin with, since postmodernism was supposed to be a counter-response to the rigidity of scientific thought. And what branch did they select as their own? Quantum physics, of course. The thing that attracted postmodernists to quantum physics, like flies to a jar of honey, was that very little beyond the basics is properly understandable without post-doctoral education. But the general ideas presented by many famous experiments, if not the actual mechanisms behind them, were very useful. The idea that the observer affects the observed alone was intriguing to postmodernists. Finally, they could get credibility.

After all, this was essentially their central thesis. With a little due diligence and a thick dose of illogical thought, that was what postmodernism could use to infect the sciences. And while from the perspective of the sciences it never succeeded (thank heavens, or we might get wooden rockets powered entirely by the belief of the builders that they could fly), from the perspective of the humanities, they have had the forces of science on the run since that time. Being a self-admitted reaction to the philosophies behind science, they could have asked for nothing more. And when you get right down to it, it demonstrated to what lengths postmodernism was willing to go to become an all-embracing philosophy.

By now, I hope you’re starting to realize the problem with postmodernism. For a social movement working to span ever vaster swathes of academia, it’s frighteningly empty. By intent, it has no substance. Everyone has had the experience of arguing with a postmodernist on the playground in elementary school. Remember the imaginary battle you had with someone at some point, where you said your robot had one hundred missiles, and they said they had a thousand, and so on until infinity-plus-one? No matter what the argument, the postmodernist writes everything off as no more than a perspective: there is no goalpost they can’t move, no fact they cannot disprove through a simple twist of mental gymnastics. For the postmodernist, being right requires very little thought and certainly no actual understanding. Infinity plus one can be bigger than infinity if you believe it is, in other words.

But you see, the ultimate strength of postmodernism is also its ultimate weakness. Definitionally, postmodernism should not be capable of existing. Because the postmodernists, as proud as they are of believing no one perspective is correct, are taking a perspective. Postmodernists do not truly believe all perspectives are equally valid. They believe that their perspective — that all perspectives are equally valid – is correct.

Now, of course, the true postmodernist can easily overcome that little hurdle by becoming what you might call a post-postmodernist, believing that the belief that all perspectives are equally valid is simultaneously correct, and incorrect. Of course, many would argue these are mutually exclusive but (trust me, if you ever meet one, you’ll find this out the hard way), this does not deter them. The problem becomes that one can also believe that post-postmodernism is incorrect. And so, to embrace the ever-expanding range of opinions, our nascent post-post-postmodernist arrives at his new philosophy, only to realize that even as he took the new position a new opposition instantly appeared.

In other words, postmodernism manages to be so faulty as a philosophy that it has something previously available only to computer programs: a memory leak. In an attempt to perform its function, post-modernism must necessarily continue expanding ad infinitum, never capable of holding itself under any umbrella or even fully defining itself.

Our crafty post-modernist might try to escape by challenging this directly, simply saying that postmodernism does not have to do this. Of course, our opinion that it does is equally valid, they say condescendingly. But wait: we don’t believe both opinions are equally valid. Sweat appears. That opinion too is equally valid. And now the pattern has emerged, and we’re back in the swing of it. We don’t believe that all three options are equally valid.

We could chase every possible such thread to infinity around postmodernism, but we really don’t need to, for I can already see the proponents rallying. Proving that postmodernism is inherently prone to running to infinity in this way doesn’t prove it’s wrong, per se. We could chase that, too, to infinity, but we don’t really need to. Remember, the whole point of postmodernism is that it can’t be proved wrong. It can’t be proved right, either, but that’s a very minor setback for any philosophy. The infinity game, however, lays bare the mechanism that is the death of postmodernism.

Postmodernism must, always and ever, avoid taking a position. Functionally, therefore, it is exactly as useful as taking no position at all. For a philosophy with such a loud mouth, it’s amazing that it has nothing whatsoever to say. Some postmodernists will defend it as making people more aware of the positions that others hold, but the instant they assert that opinion, they fail as postmodernists. And if they want to regain the title, then they cannot defend postmodernism, but must flee into infinity again, frantically accepting the indictments of it.

In the end, the problem that people who assert that no objective truth exists run into is that, to take their own favorite parable, that would mean there is no elephant. But even in the absence of an elephant, mankind is a species made for producing elephants. It doesn’t really matter, in some ways, whether anyone could objectively define good, evil, justice or truth. Saying that they can’t find an objective truth misses the point entirely, because humanity in general can feel those elephants; even if no one person can define them because of their personal bias, true, but more importantly, even if those elephants do not exist.

If that sounds suspiciously postmodern, it’s really not. Postmodernism purports to desire more diversity of opinions, but as a philosophy it forces you to abandon all opinions and accept theirs. It purports to desire more purity in defining knowledge, but it puts empirical evidence on par with the babble of the junkie on a streetcorner. It is inherently deceitful, always doing the exact opposite of its stated goals. I’m not sure I could ever get far enough away from that.

Rather than pummel the issue with my own words, let me sum up the issue by quoting Terry Pratchett’s character Death in the Hogfather: “Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.”. What Pratchett touched was not merely the essence of humanity, but the antithesis of postmodernism… which should be a serious warning to us.

We create the elephants that people feel because as humans, we desire them. They help give us something to live up to: standards that raise us above what we might otherwise be. Rules that we live by. You can’t find objective truth for these things, but not for the reasons the postmodernists think. Each person’s definition of these words is personal, it’s true, but each person also has a stake in the larger elephant. That larger elephant is simply how people everywhere act according to these words. That system is inherently correctable. Because we create the elephant, it changes as we do. Because we live according it, we change as it does. It is not objective because nowhere did it ever claim to be objective. Just the opposite. These are the ideas that humans establish so that they will know they are more than simply human in species.

These are not religious ideas, per se. These are the ideas you need to even understand something like religion, or complex secular ideas like “decency”. Rather than concentrating on the question of whether any person’s bit is valid, it’s more important to question whether the elephant they create, in terms of the actions it inspires, is doing good or ill. That’s critical, because someone could evolve the purest, most moral philosophy on Earth, but if no one buys it, it means nothing. The FIRST priority of a philosophy, even and especially postmodernism, is and must be gaining a stake in the larger elephant, and our first priority must be to fight, therefore, those contributors to it that are most harmful. And depending on the answer, the next question is how to change it. And that’s another argument, to be judged by the lights of other elephants, but in this case, it doesn’t really matter.

Because postmodernism, which likes to claim that all these ideas are equally valid, forgets the ultimate purpose of the ideas humanity forms. Some ideas are inherently contrary to the survival of the human race, and by calling them all equal you are destroying the purpose of humanity’s guiding lights. If you let it, it will make you swallow honey and poison in equal measure and declare the two exactly the same. It shows no understanding of why questions of truth and justice exist in the first place. But unlike nihilism, it forges that belief into a single overarching idea. In doing so, it tries to “win” the argument. And to a postmodernist, winning is more important that the survival of the species.

In short, postmodernism fails for multiple reasons. Part of why it fails is that it is internally inconsistent and impossible to define. But it also fails because it does everything in its power to avoid taking a definite position, and so completely loses all usefulness. And finally, it is contrary to the very purpose of philosophy and ultimately creates great potential to harm humanity.

Despite all this, however, postmodernism can be insidious. Many people are tempted by the ability to win every battle, even if they realize on some level that it means losing the war. It appeals, certainly, to those who have always wanted to feel as though they are a little smarter than everybody else, most especially if this is far from the truth. It appeals to the jaded and the cynical, who feel that they can finally rise above every conflict of ideals, where both sides always look alike to them. It appeals to those who want the safety in numbers it offers, to those who can impress a professor with it, to those who think their high-minded rhetoric will help them get girls. Some put it on and wear it like fashionable clothing but never really buy it, others take the dangerous step of accepting it.

But from the minds of those who see through the postmodern facade, a little baby elephant has also been born. That elephant stands in the path of the diseased old bull of postmodernism and trumpets defiance, not because it is objectively right, but because it is right by human standards. For the good of our species, we must contribute all we can to keep that baby elephant alive. In part, it stands for the very ideals that are best in humanity. But more than that, it stands for the idea that humanity could have ideals at all.

Remember this, if you take nothing else away from this article. If that elephant should ever die, if postmodernism should ever ultimately win, then we will be walking down a difficult, deceptive, and dangerous path. And when we walk down that path, there is no guarantee we will ever be able to turn back.

106 thoughts on “This Article Does Not Exist — a blast from the past GUEST post from January 2011”

  1. So that’s what that philosophy is called. I hadn’t known that.

    I think the main reason it appeals to people is because it lets them feel superior and “enlightened”.

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  2. He’s missing the driving principle of post-modernism – if you wave your hands around and bury your meaningless drivel in enough technical jargon, you can get grant money without doing any actual work.

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  3. Old African proverb:

    Q: “How do you eat an elephant?”

    A: “Mouthful by mouthful.”

    Sounds like the ultimate answer to post-modernism to me . . .

    ;-)

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    1. So the solution is to resort to cannibalism and devour the post-modernists? :-) I was fed enough of their drivel in a few college classes; thinking back on who was delivering it, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to devour them. (Thankfully, most of the professors I had didn’t seriously buy into post-modernism, either.)

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      1. Devour? Good grief no, they’re toxic. But I understand that they can be incinerated to help power NHS hospitals.

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        2. Or this suggestion of RES’s from two years ago:

          Inveigle the post-modernist into denying the concept of truth.Punch the post-modernist in the nose.Deny punching the post-modernist and accuse the p-m of ideological imperialism in attempting to impose their version of “Truth.”Repeat as necessary.

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        3. Or this suggestion of RES’s from two years ago:

          1. Inveigle the post-modernist into denying the concept of truth.

          2. Punch the post-modernist in the nose.

          3. Deny punching the post-modernist and accuse the p-m of ideological imperialism in attempting to impose their version of “Truth.”

          4. Repeat as necessary.

          (Repost, because furshlugginer WordPress eats ‹ol› tags.)

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          1. Oh dear. I perceive a lack of personal growth in my response to postmodernism.

            Oh well, the proper approach to stable cleaning has not changed fundamentally in over three millennia.

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            1. I was thinking a similar bit of abuse:
              Steal Post Modernist’s wallet.
              It doesn’t really have to go much further than that. But if it does.
              When P-M insists the money is his, then say, if it’s still his, then it can’t have been stolen. His money just happens to be in my pocket.

              “All Property is theft” isn’t really a post modernist idea, but I find it similarly annoying.

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  6. Really enjoyed this post Robert–
    When I finally earned my degree (in English Lit) in 2003 (Yea, I was almost 40), the post-modernist opinions were already engrained in the literature classes. The professors who bought the philosophy were hard to deal with when writing papers. (awkward sentence)… Anyway, I also walked smack-dab into that philosophy when I was trying to get my poetry published. No wonder most people don’t want to read poetry today. Much of it is senseless.

    I called the other group de-constructionists (they were probably nihilists– or something similar). They were trying to write poetry that was ugly and hard to understand. It was “fashionable.”
    So yea, I learned from my humanities degree that I liked to write. I also learned that many of the liberal degrees (including art, poetry, English, and humanities) have been ruined by those philosophies.

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    1. The professors have been stuck in that rut for some time. Lit and art — gah! — drove me out in short order. (Remind me sometime to talk about the graduate installation in the art building: cardboard and the rubber nipples from baby bottles. And randomness. I’m still not sure which boiled the blood more, the installation, or the folks standing around admiring/justifying it.)

      There’s several flavors of self-referential philosophies that orbit the same relativist swamp. All infectious, all irritating, and all over the liberal arts.

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      1. Definitely gray goo– I know that when I look at art, I am not impressed with some of the selections. I go back to people who paint more inspirational scenes. I did enjoy the Surrealists– Monet?

        As for poetry, I have been publishing in poetry for a few decades now and now in certain literary mags if you don’t have an MFA or a Masters or PHD in English lit, then you are NOT published there. I was in competition with one of my lit professors– and was getting published where she couldn’t without the PHD requirement. I don’t play that game anymore. It is too stressful.

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        1. Credentialing ought be reserved for teaching (though current credentials don’t really qualify many for teaching) and research. Art ought be judged on its own, without reference to the qualities of the artist (I include poetry in art). Once they start looking at credentials (or ‘fame’) prior to looking at the work…

          Why waste time submitting to such idiots?

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          1. I agree– Some of the best professors I had taught in private schools before teaching in college. My worst teaching professor only taught in college– so yea, credentialing is passing a written test written by a credentialer who doesn’t always know the subject matter anyway– imho. I am seeing that in electronics now too.

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            1. From what FlyingMike and TXRed said the other day, it’s happening in pilot training. Freshly minted wing-jockeys playing instructor and waiting on a seat in the big birds…

              Not that that’s scary or anything. It just sticks with me.

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        2. I found the best inspiration to do art was…to go to a modern art museum, starting with the “best and brightest”. Yep, when I was good and enraged, and overwhelmed with the idea “*I* could do better than that at age 7 without really trying! Why don’t we show them what a mediocre artist can do when EFFORT is involved!” Turns out, I’m a much better writer than I ever was an artist. Besides it’s hard to kick people who are so wrong there’s just no where to even start, and kicking unreasoning animals is wrong. If they can’t *get* Grass *is* Green, there IS nowhere to start.

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          1. Right at the moment, grass is brown. ;-)

            On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:02 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

            > fontofworlds commented: “I found the best inspiration to do art > was…to go to a modern art museum, starting with the “best and brightest”. > Yep, when I was good and enraged, and overwhelmed with the idea “*I* could > do better than that at age 7 without really trying! Why don’t we ” >

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            1. It is a reference to the opening dialogue for Summa Theologica, where a theoretical situation of a child looking out a window and sees grass that is green, and the child knows without being taught that the grass, being green, actually says something about the grass. It’s live and true state is green even if it’s not green now. That’s the big big difference between classical and modern philosophy– the moderns in their wisdom cannot tell the difference between a rabbit or a brick imagined and a brick or a rabbit seen.

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              1. I remember C.S. Lewis saying something like seeing through the window to the garden is a good thing. But they’re trying to see through the garden, which is going far too far. I expect he said it much better than I did, though.

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          2. Yea– I did try to get noticed with my poetry and yes– GRASS ISN’T GREEN to them. So it looks like I am going to be an obscure mediocre poet even though I can write circles around most of the big name poets out there. (okay… maybe I am arrogant– *sigh)

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            2. You will be found later, when those scouring the internets have gotten a better education with which to understand you. There will be a renaissance, and “lost artists” will be found, including the riches of gutenberg and archive.org.

              I’m probably dreaming, but humans tend to run like that. Look at J S Bach. He was liked in his time, but only loved by 19th Century musical historians who finally understood what he was really doing.

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      2. My college had recently installed an art building, and the museum actually had some nice selections (including a Chihuly chandelier over a seating area—great place to just hang out.) I think this is partly because the local ceramics professor was very annoyed at the perception of ceramics as “easy” and would require all first-semester students to learn the science and chemical compositions of the clays and firing them, and he was a stickler for actual craft—and while I wasn’t acquainted with the other art professors, it seems the lot of them were more interested in technique than a vapid “creativity.”

        I particularly remember walking in there once to see a beautiful large pot just sitting there, and I couldn’t resist leaning over and blowing a nice edge tone over the lip…

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        1. Ah — an art building with actual artists (and a Chihuly!!) Such longing I feel…

          I actually dealt with more true craftsmen/artists at the community college. Not that there weren’t some good ones at university, they were just surrounded by nimrods (Not the mighty hunter kind, the other ones. Unless — they were hunting BS, because they were bringing loads of that in every day).

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        2. EMU was like that. I won’t say they don’t exist, but I know that U of M was typically vapid, and inherited their core elite student body from EMU students looking for more impressive letters to put on their degree after having learned the real deal at a cheaper school. They were so close they could take the hit of moving to Michigan while they were still paying a lower price for education.

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  7. Something I forgot to say in my comment– The order of the Elephant is the highest honor given in Denmark. The order has been around since 1580– my infinity is the panthers (leopards) btw.

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      4. Well, the Danish aren’t all bad. One of the bywords for diligence against the Moorish threat was Danish, and he (unlike Barbossa) had the real world reputation for morality and keeping his word on that whole “returning when he’s needed” thing. He also reliably kicked moorish a** extremely well.

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  8. So . . . Post modernism is in Schrodiger’s box? Both valid and invalid until someone actually looks inside, collapsing all the possibilities into the one reality? Ooo! Let me at the box . . . no, wait. You know, I always wondered why the cat was either alive or dead. I figured there was an even possibility she’d had kittens and there were seven cats in the box. Or maybe infinity+1 . . . Who know how many philosophies are in that box?

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    1. To repeat a joke I saw either here or on MGC:
      A police officer has pulled over Schrodinger and is searching his car.

      “Did you know you have a dead cat in there?” the cop asked Schrödinger.

      “Well, now I do.”

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  9. Huh. I just realized postmodernism and the pickup artist rationale are exactly the same thing. How amusing! I wonder if I can use one as a bludgeon against the other and vice versa. Then they can argue with each other and I can hang out with the elephants in peace.

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    1. A lot of blog trolls, too; they make an attack, and when it’s answered, they run off in a different way.

      Actually, I think the post-modernist thing is just an attempt to formalize and justify a human failing…..

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    2. Blog and Concern trolls are often using Postmodernism– frankly I just call it sophistry. It’s an old heresy come back to bite us. The bitter clever clods who want ever to be safe and above all will find it, and use it. Now they’ve gotten cartell status thanks to the universities. Sounds like something Socrates would recognize.

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  10. “But you see, the ultimate strength of postmodernism is also its ultimate weakness. Definitionally, postmodernism should not be capable of existing. Because the postmodernists, as proud as they are of believing no one perspective is correct, are taking a perspective. Postmodernists do not truly believe all perspectives are equally valid. They believe that their perspective — that all perspectives are equally valid – is correct.” Nailed po-mo in the best way possible, by showing how self-defeating it is, but also I think, refutes Vinge’s argument behind the (still coming, will still be coming in 50 years, with almost religious certainty) “Singularity” in a round-about way.

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    1. My favorite approach to the technological singularity is post martial arts singularity Ranma fanfic. Or Dragon Ball fanfic, or whatever your favorite flavor is.

      ‘My flashback would let me counter your latest technique, except that your flashback counters my counter…’

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      1. I stopped watching Naruto when Naruto had a flashback to a time when Hinata was having a flashback, in the middle of an Arena Battle (I HATE Arena Battles with a passion).

        Naruto has more flashbacks than Timothy Leary.

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  11. Postmodernism in two words: Sez you!

    Postmodernism in three* words: That’s your opinion.

    I once had an argument with a postmodernist. It ended with him repeatedly striking me on the fist with his nose, jaw and solar plexus. While he claims I struck him, isn’t all a matter of perspective? I will admit to annoyance over his breaking my favorite pool cue by head-butting it.

    A quieter form of defeating postmodernism can be achieved by informing the postmodernist you can demonstrate the invalidity of his philosophy if only he will give you five dollars. Once you have received the five, inform the postmodernist that you can demonstrate the invalidity of his philosophy if only he will give you five dollars. If he claims he already gave you five dollars, well, that is his opinion. Repeat as necessary.

    *or four, depending on whether you deem a contraction a single word.

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    1. Well… a) it was our local school, nearest the house. b) everyone assured us it would have great advantages for getting into college. We knew he was brilliant, we just didn’t have the money to send him to private school. Also, he was bored out of his gourd in regular classes and had already taken over his biology and physics class. the teacher let him teach them (in sixth grade) because she was terrified of his correcting her. It was putting him in IB or shooting him. In retrospect, shooting him might have been kinder.
      Two notes though: 1) the books of his brother who went through a “regular” curriculum (just dual highs school college) were MORE left-slanted. 2) there was no advantage in college admissions. On the contrary, they took the grades as those of the regular division. And Robert who graduated fourth in his IB class had a B+ average (partly because of an operation in his sophmore year that caused him to miss three weeks of school and be loopy for another two.) So… they treated it as B+ in normal curriculum, where he was making an easy A…
      Sigh. Never mind. If we knew then what we know now, we’d just have taken him out and homeschooled the boy who-was-studying-college-level-chem-for-fun in 7th grade.

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      1. Cripple a lad by boring him or by warping him — the result is essentially the same. The most important lesson a student learns in the public schools is to march in step with the blob. “Superior mediocrity is our goal!”

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          1. It’s used that way, but there really are crazy people who have to be prevented from hurting folks– we can either try to remove them from society, or kill them. I prefer the latter.
            Right now, we’re mostly pretending they don’t exist, and then acting like the poor folks with serious brain issues are the same as violent thugs who kill for kicks.

            Possibly the problem is that good but active 7 year old boys are safer than 17-to-24 year old mostly guys who randomly corner their mothers with a knife because The Voices Say So.

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            1. I agree. And because the mechanism is horribly misused, the real dangers to society are ignored, or fall between the cracks. Then, we get horrible tragedies where the only thing you can do is put them down like a dog before more people die.

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            2. ARGH! I meant FORMER, not LATTER– at least before they go and, say, shoot up a grade school.

              Some expressions of “crazy” you just can’t wave off as “he’s ill.”

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      1. I have to wonder why Danny Choo posted that. Is something that all of us who are creative feel. I know I have, in some ways. I got lucky in school and my parents didn’t try keep me in a box.

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  16. I had not realized just how far p-m-ism had sunk into history until one evening in grad school when a prof informed us that simply observing and taking measurements at a local nature preserve affected the preserve. Yes, the act of looking at the grass and sticking a measuring stick into the creek caused changes to the grass and creek. Because Heisenberg. *shakes head*

    Thankfully, the most otherwise far-out profs had worked in the real world before jumping into academia, and while they taught us the basics of p-m-ism, they also pointed out that there are times when a document or record means just what it says. No Derrida fans in the department, although the guys doing modern Europe thought that Foucault had a few useful ideas.

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    1. Technically yes, but then, so does he telling you so affect the preserve. In neither case measurably.

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    2. The error you grass measuring prof falls prey to is not recognizing that there is no change — change is an illusion foisted on us by sequentialist heresy. When you view reality properly, as a series of moments in the space-time continuum you realize that each such moment is unique and individual and to force a connection between points, to view them in sequence, is to create an illusion of motion, of change, where none exists. It is the same principle as creates an illusion of motion in a series of pencil drawings on separate sheets of paper, rifled quickly.

      It is only by embracing the simultaneous reality that we can achieve true enlightenment.

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      1. Ah, no, no, we were not measuring the grass. Merely looking at the grass altered the grass. That’s what really made me think, “ohhhhhhhh kaaaay. How did I miss Rod Serling’s introduction to this class?”

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        1. I believe you have explained the state forest management plans followed in my state over the past 15 years. Thank you.

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                1. I do know that many of the mud dams built in Nevada are being surveyed and some of them are being demolished. Hubby is in emergency management. It has to be done because the dams are silting up and will go with our without our intervention. With our intervention, then less problems for the towns below.

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                  1. We have folks up here talking about getting rid of the dams on the Columbia.

                    AKA, a major source of electricity, and the water that grows their food.

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                    1. But Hydro doesn’t count as green energy because… Salmon! And because Shut up!

                      And they wanna save the salmon, but they don’t want to trap or kill the sea lions that hang out at the bottom of the fish ladder and eat them. Because Nature! And because Shut Up!

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                    3. Well, taking down the Columbia dams might lead to Portland washing away. On the negative side the survivors will probably move into Beaverton.

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                    1. Oh no– not true. I was putting together the Hazard Mitigation plan in 2007 (or thereabouts) and I knew the people doing the surveying. I was given pictures. Many of these mud dams were ready to go.

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          2. The ones my folks are dealing with have explicitly stated that they’re managing to promote song birds, and one of their shiny new bird experts was waxing poetic about how bald eagles only eat fish… a pop fly from where one was “cleaning up” a dead cow.

            (They also help tidy up the messes after a birth; there’s a good half dozen in the main birthing field. They’ll fight the crows for mousing rights when we’re haying, too.)

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        2. Well, strictly speaking, in some of the actual hard sciences, the whole matter of measuring altering the system can be important. That is part of why experimental design can be tricky and challenging. (Every measurement has limits on its precision and accuracy. Error is an inherent part of measurement.)

          Yes, if you can see the grass, you are transferring thermal energy to it by radiation. Barring exceptional circumstances, the only ones who will care about that probably think you can boil a kettle of ice water with a match.

          The sort of measurement problems I run into through the news in the hard sciences tend to be more matters of carelessness and ignorance than altering things by measurement.

          I’ll repeat my usual thing about how we cannot say that we know the average temperature of the earth inside the range the AWG folks are talking about. By geometry, a generous estimate for the volume we can easily measure is one percent or less of the non gas portions. (This is assuming perfect spheres, I haven’t gotten around to checking the error in the assumption yet.)

          That said, wiring the Earth with a 3D thermocouple grid probably would have some impact on wildlife. (Only a shell, because we likely don’t have the materials technology to go too deep.)

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        3. I’ve tried to explain how macroscopic dynamical systems are almost always too robust for the perturbation introduced by measurement or observation to have significance. The kind of person who wants to confuse those systems with quantum systems runs screaming at the mere threat that I might start writing down differential equations.

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  17. The thing about the elephant is that we only know their problem because we can see the elephant. (Or have heard it described to us, or been able to feel a model of one, if actually blind.)

    If one wise man described it as big, rotund, with thick legs, big leaf-like ears, and a long nose — a second as rotund, but smaller (still big) with thick legs, small ears and a horn on its nose — a third as tall, with an enormously long neck and long thin legs — the first is describing the elephant, the second a rhino, the third a giraffe. Which is to say that one is right and the other two wrong.

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  18. I think it’s kind of fitting… the version of the “wise men and an elephant” I was taught, fable-like, went a bit differently.

    The three (normal, sensible) men are unable to see, but each manages to feel part of the elephant. One the trunk, one the back, one a leg.

    They come out and try to figure out what was there– one says it’s like a snake, one like a tree, one like a rock.

    The moral as my mom told it was that you can be totally correct and not have the whole picture– especially if there was an unusual limit on what you were finding out. To convey the sense, a retelling would probably have the folks as being very knowledgeable but humble enough to recognize it doesn’t carry across, and give them a reason for where they started on the elephant.

    I think this is a telling counterpoint to the “three wise fools” version of postmodernism because it’s closer to reality…but nowhere near as handy for “oh that’s just your opinion” dismissals.

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    1. I think the issue here is that the other version posits as the definition of “wise men” contemporary cable television pundits.

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    2. I run into that quite a bit in the systems world. When you have really big systems, where each sub system is developed and mastered by a specialist who really don’t have the interest or expertise to understand the rest of the parts of the system you’ve actually got a full time job assembling the elephant.

      And then there’ the part when you are trying to reconstruct how a system worked from subset of the documents and parts used to put it together in the first place. Sure it works, but nobody knows when they stopped updating this menu, or if that command was supposed to do what it just did (or even if that was a bug or a feature).

      I’ve also noticed it is all to easy to take a perfectly useful concept or parable, and go hurtling off into the weeds with it.

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      1. According to what I’ve read this perfectly describes the problems with the Obamadon’tcare Unaffordable Health Care web sites — the front end didn’t know what the back end was doing and the gingerbread covering obscured the absence of structure to support the interface.

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    3. What I remember as taking away from the wise-men-and-elephant-by-parts fable was a deeper understanding of the forest-and-trees viewpoint: surrounded by trees, one sees trees, but go beyond the borders and look back, Ah-HAH! Forest.

      Boundary conditions do go oh-so-far toward human understanding, after all. We are a product and a process, after all is said and done. Here’s to the process continuing for a Very Long Time!

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  19. I got thinking about this last night, and wondered why the wise guys didn’t ask the elephant handler what the elephant was like.

    After all, it had to be a domesticated elephant, since a wild elephant would be unlikely to let six blind wise guys anywhere near it, and if they did get near it, they might not then be able to get away.

    (OTOH, I may have displayed how little I really know about elephants.)

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  21. If nothing is true, then everything could be true. That means that nothing is falsible. Which lead to comments like this:
    “Yes he is. Democrats, who were always small-R republicans anyway, have become the new Rockefeller/Eisenhower Republicans. The former Republican Party became the Republikans, a delusional and reactionary party with a revolutionary bent more at him in 1930s Europe than 21st century, well, anywhere.”
    However, I think Paterson should not have given up. He probably could have beaten Paladino easily. And Paterson actually had most of Cuomos positives (e.g., gay marriage) with few of the more glaring negatives. Hell, Paterson was probably less authoritarian in general”
    From this:
    http://secondavenuesagas.com/2014/03/31/cuomo-seals-the-deal-for-a-30-million-transit-raid/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SecondAveSagas+%28Second+Ave.+Sagas+%7C+Blogging+the+NYC+Subways%29
    With post modernist you don’t have to PROVE that Republicans are crazy, you just have to say that they are. After all nobody can prove that they are not.

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  22. There’s a thing here that most people miss, and I don’t understand why: The elephant parable, as postmodernists tell it, implicitly puts the postmodernist in the role of an outside observer who can see the elephant.

    I have been told that the tale originally was used by Brahmin priests explaining the Hindu theory of knowledge, who were not shy about putting themselves in that position. That is not surprising because Hindu theology (although I’m filtering this through the Hare Krishna missionaries I used to talk with in college) explicitly states that all sensory observations are wrong, or at least incomplete, and reasoning based on them cannot lead to true knowledge, and implies that true knowledge must must come from the priesthood. I am pretty sure the concept was superficially close enough to what postmodernists believe that they grabbed the parable from there.

    In any case, the only possible use of the parable is to tell the hearers that their understanding of truth must be wrong, and demonstrate the superiority of the teller’s understanding of truth. That contradicts the postmodern tenet that all understandings of truth are equally valid.

    Postmodernists are very strange creatures. They can’t even make their didactic parables match their philosophies.

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