2 posts tagged “post-modernism”

If you think about it, people in the professions are really just doing a supporting role. Doctors keep people healthy, lawyers.. well, theoretically they provide legal advice, acting as the lubricant in interpersonal dealings. Engineers? They work to better products. But to what end?

Companies that make products help their customers be more productive. Likewise with the extraction sector: they provide the raw materials needed by the industry; together they ensure that everyone else can do whatever it is they do. The public sector, in addition to being engaged in everything above themselves, provide a regulatory
framework: ideally shaping the market to be more optimum (make cars too cheap and you get traffic jam which defeat the work of the automotive industry in making better cars; make them too expensive and you stifle an entire industrial sector)

Creative people (artists, photographers, chefs) help us appreciate the finer things in life. But again is that the end? Or still only means to the end? The narrative from ancient Greece until now has been the delegation of mundane tasks so that the elite can indeed contemplate the finer things (they have their slaves; we have our sanitation
engineers, bakers, butchers, farmers, etc.).

Ironically, the only really productive people, the only ones that toil towards an understanding of the one thing that we eventually ask (when we are not busy merely surviving), namely, who are we, what are we
doing here .. the theologians and philosophers in the past, the astrophysicists, molecular biologists, geneticists, etc. are the ones that are not appreciated in all but the most developed worlds. Well,
perhaps the theologians, but in true Marxist fashion most religious figures are not properly theological anyway, providing a dumbed-down mass hallucination that is at best soporiphic and at the worst
demagoguery.

Are we there, then? Not quite. The universe evidently has self-organizing principles; non-religious spiritual thinkers have suggested that the universe evolves us in order to understand itself. But apart from the matter of scale, what is the difference between us creating a scaffolding (99.9% of humanity, most of them unaware) to support a select few that seeks understanding, with a universe where all these magnificent stars burn to cinders to support a scant few life-harbouring planets where contemplation can occur? It's all turtles, in a giant infinite pyramide.

Eventually one either seeks a spirito-theological solution (there must be something behind all this, it is not all meaningless. I lump the secular humanists here too), become cynical (there is nothing but the present so I might as well be in it for myself), or become nihilistic post-modernist (this d**n structural edifice we erected solved
nothing. G-d is dead, science is useless and I am clinging to my existential angst and engage in mutual masturbation with others of my kind).

Somehow the first is most appealing and the latter is the most.. pitiful. One realizes now why movies like Network and American Beauty became critical, even cultish, hits: they personify the psychosis that we all feel inside, and pay the ultimate price. We watch them and we get our temporary reprieve, our salvation from existential crisis, no matter how fleeting.

Howard Beale is our Jesus.

Most people would read this (Parisi and Terranova) and run away screaming; some people would beg the author to work with them:

I want to work with you
I want to learn from you
I want to.. share your water

If you think this is bad, Alan Sokal wrote an excellent compilation of post-modernist brain-addledness in his book Fashionable Nonsense. A must-read for those concerned about the regression in some academic circles to mediaevalism, in the name of egality and anti-establishmentarianism.

Sure would be interesting to do the equivalent of the Erdos number for the postmodernist crowd. We can call it the Lacan-Irigaray index, to name two of the most celebrated but erroneous false messiahs. Some people's desire for religious enlightenment gets turned into bitter anti-rationalist attacks, I suppose.