by JOHN HALLE
The pushback to my CounterPunch piece “The Two Cultures: Can the Left Bridge the Gap?” reminded me of what is often said about Dada- that each generation discovers it for itself and imagines that it is discovering something new. What flooded over my social media transom in reaction to it amounted to a flash back to the academic dadaism of my early college years. All of the buzzwords which defined the early 80s came rushing back: paradigm shift, Thomas Kuhn, normal science, Feyerabend, the penetrability of cognition by perception, social constructivism, Husserl, the inference/observation distinction, etc.
These notions were now being circulated by fresh faced twenty somethings, as I was when I was hyping them back then. Of course, I was running with a herd, and so are they now. It was not until a few years later that lingering doubts that I only dimly understood what I was reading became impossible to ignore and were later confirmed.
Of course, post modernism had always been in the cross hairs of reactionaries, dead set on destroying all manifestations of sixties radicalism from the moment it appeared. Included among these were bad faith critiques of postmodernism emanating from Hilton Kramer, Roger Scruton and George H.W. Bush whose 1988 University of Michigan speech (where I was a student at the time) kicked off the right wing backlash against academic “political correctness”-all these were easily dismissed.
The criticism which mattered came from within-from who those who saw post-modernism as a perversion of the left’s roots in the enlightenment and in rationality and rational discourse.
Chomsky’s seminal 1995 paper Science/Rationality/ was foremost among these and so it was natural to return to the positions which Chomsky felt it necessary to argue against then. Among these was the view of science as
thoroughly embedded in capitalist colonialism, . . . used to create new forms of control … screening out feeling, recreating the Other as object to be manipulated . . . the subjective is described as irrelevant or un-scientific (by those for whom) to feel was to be anti-science … There is something inherently wrong with science (which is) used for astoundingly destructive purposes…to create new forms of control mediated through political and economic power. (While) claim(ing) to a monopoly of knowledge . . . (its conclusions are grounded in) superstition, belief, prejudice. . . (offering no better guidance than) the world of story and myth creation.
Chomsky, as noted, made short work of these and other related absurdities. Given that he did so almost two decades ago, it seemed reasonable in my piece to follow up by asking whether Chomsky’s concerns had been addressed.
Counterpunch for more