An alternative fact of one’s own
Alan Sokal points out (not for the first time) a certain insouciance about the difference between facts and fantasies.
For millennia—since at least ancient Greece—philosophers have debated what constitutes knowledge and how one can legitimately acquire it. But when philosophers returned from their seminars back into the real world, even the most ardent anti-realists generally adopted the common-sense view that there do exist objective facts—situations in the external world that are independent of our beliefs—and that, sometimes at least, we can obtain reasonably reliable knowledge of those objective facts, through evidence and reasoning.
But, starting about 40 years ago, a small coterie of social-constructivist sociologists of science began to break this consensus, with radical claims like:
-The validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence.
-The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge.
-For the relativist (such as ourselves) there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such.
These ideas were in turn picked up by postmodernist scholars—mostly in departments of literature, it must be said, not philosophy—and from there percolated into the rest of society. There, they became part of the mother’s milk—the unexamined conventional wisdom—of some sectors of the “woke” left. “There is no objective, neutral reality,” writes Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling White Fragility.
What goes around, comes around. Now everyone—Trumpists included—can have their own “alternative facts.”
Which, he emphasizes, isn’t to say that Trumpists are students of postmodernism or that postmodernists are to blame for Trumpism, but:
When all is said and done, postmodernist academics and their activist followers are not to blame for any of the evils of today’s right wing. What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it.
Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don’t know how to put it back in.
He doesn’t mention the ideology of fungible sex/gender, which is why I just did. Same genie, same bottle, same difficulty putting it back.
On my initial reading, I thought it said the giraffe was out of the bottle. That would be a good thing; bottles are not good places for giraffes. And in fact, in my alternate universe, I am going to claim loudly and with hostile repetition, that there has in fact never been a genie in a bottle, it has always been a giraffe in a bottle, and your genie is only real in your own socially constructed universe.
I call bullshit. It’s a game or a stance, a boutique belief. They cannot actually believe this, otherwise they would be incapable of acting in the world at all. No flying to conferences, or symposia in other countries; no getting behind the wheel of a car. If they really thought this was true, they couldn’t even cross the fucking street. Any humans in the paleolithic past who failed to recognize the existence of an external reality would have left no descendents because they would have been EATEN. These poseurs are just lucky that they happen to live in a time, and within a culture, that allows them to hold positions in which they can afford the luxury of pretending this is the case, and that they can feel so much more clever than, and superior to, the rest of us ignorant, deluded suckers in doing so. But you can’t build a functioning society without some belief in an underlying reality within which, and with which, one can interact. These great thinkers are entirely dependent on the rest of us stupidly continuing to believe, and behave, as if there was an objective reality underlying all our work and effort. Somebody has to stock the grocery shelves. It’s similar to the way genderists need the rest of us to be boring and “cis” so that they can boldly rise above us as brave and stunning trans heroes.
And talk about privilege: I daresay that these geniuses would find it a bit harder to indulge in this sort of solopsistic wankery if they were in some dirt poor country, living on the street, with a family to support, with no idea when-or if- they might might again find something to eat. Tell someone in that situation that there’s “no such thing as objective reality.”
YNnB: Wokeness has been described elsewhere as a “luxury belief system”; i.e., one has to reach a certain level of security in order to adopt it.
I like this passage because it is a slap in the face to all the post-modernists and deconstructionists who run around claiming that words have no meaning.
The ACLU is upset about Republican efforts to mold curriculum in certain areas. They preface this on Facebook:
I agree with them in regard to discussion of systemic racism. I have issues with critical race theory’s emphasis on subjective experience and viewpoint and its dismissal of objective fact, something Sokal discusses as well. I am not sure how right wingers think of that, but perhaps it does enable the “alternative facts” claim.
I am, well, not surprised, but dismayed by the ACLU claimed support for free speech about gender. What they mean, of course, is freedom to indoctrinate into gender ideology, not freedom to criticize the concept of gender identity and to teach actual biological science. Nope, the latter is “hate speech”, can’t have any of that.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/state-lawmakers-are-trying-to-ban-talk-about-race-in-schools/
The only way to handle people like this in my experience is to feed them their own medicine. For one thing, to say that there are no objective truths (or, if there are, that we cannot possibly know anything about them) amounts to saying that there’s no reason to listen to what they are saying, or even denying that there are such people as “them”* or such a thing as “what they are saying”. And even if there were, if no way of interpreting the words coming out of their mouths (or, more likely their keyboards) is any more or less “honest” or “accurate” than any other, I might as well interpret everything they’re saying as “Mommy, my chair is broken”, or “Polly wants a cracker”, of “oink oink!”.
*I also like asking if they think I exist, or if they’re just talking to a voice (or visual impression of text on a computer screen) inside their own heads.
(And of course, the standard retort: If there are no objective truths, it cannot be objectively true that there are no objective truths)
The murky, truth-evading, language of pseudo-progressives keeps trailing back to the anti-rational, blood and soil drivel of pre-Nazi German reactionaries. The ‘woke’ seem to be sleeping when asked about just what authority they are accepting for all these claims against truth and science.
“And talk about privilege: I daresay that these geniuses would find it a bit harder to indulge in this sort of solopsistic wankery if they were in some dirt poor country, living on the street, with a family to support, with no idea when-or if- they might might again find something to eat. Tell someone in that situation that there’s “no such thing as objective reality.””
Actually, in the case study you mention, the solution is easy. Become a PRIEST in the local religion and you can profitably expound on all the alternative facts about the world and be fed and supported very, very well. The priesthood is the ORIGINAL alternative reality gang. At least priests and their belief systems inspire beautiful music and art and, in some cases, social welfare institutions. What has a radical sociology department ever inspired?