I'll be among the first to stand up and defend whatever Richard Dawkins has to say (because he provides a much-needed service: skepticism). However, I do appreciate postmodernism for its (accidental?) beauty. This is truly poetic stuff, collages made out of the well-wrought output of the highly educated.
You do have to suspend some of your higher-thinkng to appreciate postmodernism. But you have to do the same to enjoy Neuromancer, which could be seen as a postmodern conference-dump posing as a science fiction story.
So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.
> So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.
I think he is a wet blanket because he realizes that many of these post-modernists suck public money with their tenure and wield quite a bit of power over up and coming academics.
In other words, nobody minds the insane person as long as they are safely locked away in an asylum. However the same insane person becomes very dangerous once they have control and authority over people's careers, sit on academic committees, there are thousands hours spent by students who are told to "read and interpret" these crazy writings with the insinuation that these are the great philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Power will corrupt any interesting intellectual movement. Still, postmodernism cannot be discredited just because it does not make sense to people outside of its paradigm. It must have been quite irritating for the old art establishment when Abby Rockefeller put together the Museum of Modern Art... one among many cases of funding chasing what appears to be insane.
Lastly, I'd argue if people do not want to deal with what is "funded", they can rebel and create a new movement. This is how humanity moves forward.
> Still, postmodernism cannot be discredited just because it does not make sense to people outside of its paradigm.
The idea that outsiders do not understand pomo is handled well in the article. The physicists, specifically focused on mathematical and physics jargon in the writings. They concluded that it was complete gibberish. Stuff like 1 = sqrt(-1) and so on.
The claim that there are some for whom this stuff does make sense is a little scary, as that implies some kind of secret coded language that makes sense, but has to be decoded, or the fact that they are just as crazy as the author.
Poetry and fiction don't masquerade as serious philosophy. As long as this stuff dominates academic humanities and soaks up precious grant money I'll take all the wet blankets I can get.
You do have to suspend some of your higher-thinkng to appreciate postmodernism. But you have to do the same to enjoy Neuromancer, which could be seen as a postmodern conference-dump posing as a science fiction story.
So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.