[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[david]

Ron said to dmb:


...It is like the art of discussion, or to be more precise, the art of persuasion has become lost. To all involved it's an either/or proposition. Science has been bundled with atheism. Religion uses relativism with devastating effectiveness in this aim. What's worse is science/atheism isn't helping it's case with letting the "facts" speak for themselves. All in all religion is winning the game of persuasion and science, critical thinking and reason have been hijacked to promote the myth of certainty and the absolute. ...



dmb says:

It looks like Lee McIntyre pretty much agrees with you, Ron. He has a book on the topic but also wrote a recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Attack on Truth: We're living in an age of Willful Ignorance". I especially like the part where he says, "some left-wing postmodernist criticisms of truth began 
to be picked up by right-wing ideologues who were looking for 
respectable cover".

 
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631/


"To see how we treat the concept 
of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. 
Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number 
of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine 
vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many 
commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all
 but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight."


"While many natural scientists declared the battle won and headed back
 to their labs, some left-wing postmodernist criticisms of truth began 
to be picked up by right-wing ideologues who were looking for 
respectable cover for their denial of climate change, evolution, and 
other scientifically accepted conclusions. Alan Sokal said he had hoped 
to shake up academic progressives, but suddenly one found hard-right 
conservatives sounding like Continental intellectuals. And that caused 
discombobulation on the left.
'Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as 
science studies?,' Bruno Latour, one of the founders of the field that 
contextualizes science, famously asked. 'Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does
 it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like
 it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for 
good?'

'But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists 
are coming after the natural scientists," the literary critic Michael 
Bérubé noted,
 "… and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an 
academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind'."


But Pirsig's classical Pragmatism doesn't have this problem and neither do James or Dewey. The next quote comes from a review of Larry Hickman's book, "Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey".


"On Hickman’s reading, Dewey is entirely 'post-postmodern,' since Dewey 
did reach some postmodernist conclusions (e.g. rejecting 
foundationalisms, metaphysical realisms, cultural hegemonies, grand 
narratives) only to travel even further to a positively coherent system 
of thought. Rorty and his postmodernist friends reveled in the romantic 
wild fields opened by radicalized relativisms of all kinds; Dewey, alas,
 was no radical. Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics, his biological theory
 of inquiry, his cultural historicism, his democratic 
progressivism—intertwined strands of stability explain why we really 
were never in an 'anything goes' or 'all is permitted' situation."


Hickman
 presents John Dewey as a thinker who "both anticipated some of the 
central insights of French-inspired postmodernism and, if he were alive 
today, would certainly be one of its most committed critics". As
 Hickman paints it, Richard Rorty was right to say that when 
certain postmodernists reach the end of the road they're traveling they 
will find Dewey there waiting for them. "On my view," Rorty wrote (in 
The Consequences of Pragmatism), "James and Dewey were not only waiting 
at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, 
but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and 
Deleuze are currently traveling."


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/csp/summary/v045/45.1.shook.html