TECHNOLOGIES OF CONTROL TRANSCEND DECONSTRUCTION.

It's fine to play around with ideas, as long as you understand that playing with them ought be different from implementing them.  The academic community has long transgressed that boundary.  "There's a longer post coming on how too much 'sophisticated' opinion is regressing to the medieval, as in identifying and denouncing heretics rather than engaging the controversies. The incantations include 'the science' and 'our democracy.'"  It's been a year-plus since that post, and I've probably carried on about that concept numerous times.

That post concluded, "That's what fifty years of loose talk about 'social construction' and 'power systems' gets you."  Today's good news is that somebody with a much bigger platform than I is raising the same objections.  Former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard followed up on her aloha to the Democrats with "People in power are denying objective truth."  That came during a speech to the Independent Women's Forum.

[W]hat happens in our society when we have people in the highest positions of power who deny the existence of objective truth? What happens is then there is no such thing as truth. There is no such thing as reality. Truth becomes whatever the people in power at any given moment want it to be. We lose the foundation of reality when we cannot acknowledge that there is such a thing as truth, whether it is the truth of a biological fact of a difference between men and women, or the other truths that we’re dealing with in our everyday lives. The forces against the work that all of you are doing are strong. It takes courage now to do the things that seemed obvious and simple before. The fomenting of fear, trying to bully us into compliance, trying to bully us into self-censorship, is ever present everywhere we go.

I'll let the philosophers chew over the fine points of that.  The denial of coherent beliefs has long been a thing.  I submit, dear reader, that in the same way that any other logical rules of construction become a technology of control, so too will the lack of any logical rules of construction.  How, though, did we get there.  It might have started with postmodern philosophy.

An American Council on Science and Health editorial advocates that Scientists Should Fight Postmodern Public Values.  Inasmuch as what passes as postmodern philosophy is a radical skepticism that questions coherent beliefs of any kind (reality might be more subtle) one might ask, rudely or not, how can the absence of any value be a value?

That's the next step: radical skepticism as a positive proposition (defend as carefully as you can the basis for your conclusion) is not the same thing as radical skepticism as the normative proposition, your truth is invalid.  Culture-studies normativity intrudes on the skepticism.  What happens next is not amusing.  "[Scholarship is] defensible only to the extent that researchers conduct their work with a sober sense of purpose and in a way that respects the moral status of other people. The other, which may have its roots in postmodern thinking, is that science per se disrespects the moral status of other people: pick any pejorative ending in -centric and reflect."  (But the former representative's speech primarily addressed the disrespect of the moral status of people born female: do we accuse the dominant ideology of transcentrism?)

On to the deconstruction of established ways of knowing.

It is time for my weekly reminder, dear reader, that human interactions are by definition "historically produced," and that there are social constructions that confer evolutionary advantage, as well as social constructions that do not.

The culture-studies types cannot wrap their brains around the idea that social constructions are emergent, and the evolutionary advantage that adheres to participants who participate in those constructions creates their "power" rather than their power creating the construction.

Let's give the representative props for unmasking the deconstruction.

Put another way, if you interrogate (to use another academic term of art I despise) the practice rigorously enough, the Manipulating Ruling Class will confess.  The unmasking is often the confession of a tight prior, e.g. existing institutions exist solely to confer privilege to favored people, Trump voters are deplorable.  But sometimes when you get done digging through the Haufen Mist, there's no pony in there.

If ever there was a time for people with public platforms to call attention, it is now!  The "technologies of control" reference I make in the title is an ancient radical wheeze about good grammar.  The culture studies mob have attempted to make arithmetic yet another technology of control. "Students struggle with mathematics because there's insufficient social justice in the pedagogy, which is not the same thing as insufficient social justice in the content."  That will not end well. "Deconstruct the institutions of prosperity at your peril, particularly if you hope to have more people sharing in that prosperity."

That is not the way of the academy.

Apparently a working mathematician with a good instinct for provoking people teased, "2+2=4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values." The hair-splitting that anyone who has ever helped a faculty committee design a Platonically perfect bike shed is familiar with followed.

That might have been in fun, but celebrating the shaman is not a good idea.  Yes, until the Germ Theory of Disease, what the shaman did might have had as good a chance as what the European style doctor did, but the superiority of the Germ Theory as a basis for medicine, and the white coat that signalled cleanliness, ought not be deconstructed just because somebody's feeling guilty.

White coats, the students said, are themselves a “symbol of power, prestige, and dominance.” Therefore, students will “strive to reclaim their identity as a symbol of responsibility, humility, and loving kindness.”

“We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the health care system,” the students said, according to a video of the ceremony.

Pray that others with large platforms join the representative in saying Enough!