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PRESIDENT BUSH CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH
National Review Online ^ | 01/15/04 | Mark Goldblatt

Posted on 1/16/2004, 3:24:28 AM by jocon307

Academic Anti-Bushism Why the hallowed halls of learning are filled with Bush haters.

By Mark Goldblatt

If you want to glimpse why tenured intellectuals, here and abroad, so often detest the Bush administration, you need look no further than recent remarks by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. On the subject of negative media reports out of Iraq, Rumsfeld last month said, "I see what the people in that region are seeing, and so much of it is untrue, so much of it is viciously biased, and parades around as the truth.... And do I think ultimately truth wins out? You bet. I mean, our whole system is based on that, that we can take untruth and, over time, the truth is heard, and it begins to register, and people begin to behave off it. And people who tell untruths ultimately are punished. They're punished, if they're in the journalism business, because people don't read them anymore; they don't tune in. They're punished, if they're in government, by being defeated or deposed."

Implicit in Rumsfeld's comments is what philosophers call epistemological optimism. It's the belief that truth — defined as the correspondence between what's thought or said with a reality that exists independently of what's thought or said — can be had. In other words, if I state "The moon orbits the earth," that statement can then be crosschecked against conditions in the world and judged either true or not true. Rumsfeld's confidence that "truth wins out" (perhaps a garbled version of the truth will out) depends on epistemological optimism.

This would be no more than a pedantic point except that the last several decades of academic philosophy have been dominated by epistemological pessimism — that is, the belief that propositions cannot be judged against an independently existing reality because reality doesn't exist independently of what we think or say. Truth, in the sense that Rumsfeld is invoking it, is thus never objective because the way we see the world is hopelessly constrained by the way we've been trained to see it. The suggestion that truth wins out has been dismissed by a steady stream of continental thinkers, and their American disciples, as the height of intellectual naïveté. In their minds, what determines truth is not correspondence with reality but political utility; we decide a proposition is true only if it directly or indirectly serves our interests. Different "discourse communities," accordingly, will always construct their own realities and determine their own truths. Sure, "the moon orbits the earth" is true in Western culture. But a tribe of aborigines may decide that the moon is a goddess who comes out at night; that is their truth. The critical point is that neither of these truths is "truer" than the other because reality is socially constructed, not objectively discernable.

The names most often associated with this worldview — i.e., that reality is socially constructed, and that objective truth cannot be had — constitutes a glittering who's who of late 20th-century thinkers in France and America: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Jean Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish. What these very different thinkers have in common is epistemological pessimism. Several of them, it must be noted, have explicitly denied that they are relativists — though none can quite explain how their rejection of the possibility of objective truth differs from outright relativism. Nor can they explain how their rejection of the possibility of objective truth does not admit, say, Holocaust denial as an equally legitimate "counter-narrative" to the prevailing view of recent history.

It would be difficult to overstate the influence of epistemological pessimism on European and American campuses, each replete with its own postmodern fiefdom in which Einstein's objectively verifiable theory of general relativity morphs into the absurd, self-negating notion of the general relativity of truth, and in which Heisenberg's rigorously reasoned uncertainty principle is bastardized into the idea that nothing is certain. A quarter century ago, it seemed a cutting-edge insight for the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak to declare that "The human being has nothing more to go on than a collection of nerve stimuli. And...the nerve stimuli are explained and described through the categories of figuration that masquerade as the categories of 'truth'"; or for the perspectivist critic Jane Tompkins to assure her readers that "there really are no facts except as they are embedded in some particular way of seeing the world"; or for the feminist theologian Mary Daly to decry "the eternal masculine stereotype, which implies hyperrationality, 'objectivity,' aggressivity, the possession of dominating and manipulative attitudes toward persons and environment and the tendency to construct boundaries between the self...and 'the other.'" Yesterday's cutting edge is today's conventional wisdom. Sophisticated postmodernists no longer talk about "truth" or "facts" or "objectivity" with a straight face.

But President Bush and the members of his administration do. Not only do they believe that truth can be had, they believe they have it — at least with respect to the war on terror. It's a truth, moreover, that doesn't need to be "problematized" or "deconstructed." That truth is this: Saddam Hussein's Pan-Arabism and Osama bin Laden's Islamism are both, literally, dead ends. Either sanity will prevail in the Islamic world, in which case Muslims will embrace this truth and reject Islamicism, or insanity will prevail in the Islamic world, in which case Muslims will reject it...and suffer.

In the cities of Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan, the Bush team is doing its level best to bring people to their senses. That effort has earned Bush relentless derision in the literary salons of Paris and in faculty lounges across the United States. History will take note of this phenomenon, and it will be their lasting shame, not his.

Mark Goldblatt is the author of Africa Speaks. Visit his website at MarkGoldblatt.com.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: bush; bushdoctrine; islam; postmodernism; relativism; truth
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An excellent round-up of all the falsehoods promoted by the left today, and, in contrast, rejected by Bush & Co.
1 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:24:29 AM by jocon307
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To: jocon307
I deal with this stuff all the time, and he's absolutely right. The only name I would quarrel with is Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts in the theory of science became highly influential among scholars in the humanities, but they abused his argument for their own purposes. Kuhn himself was very unhappy at the way his book had been misused.

I think you could take Kuhn of the list and add Nietzsche instead. Also Sartre, who was unfashionable among the poststructuralists but nevertheless influenced them strongly.
2 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:32:38 AM by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: jocon307
bump
3 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:32:57 AM by woofie
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To: jocon307
The idea that truth could be determined politically, rather than rationally, gave George Orwell the screaming horrors. Thus 1984.
4 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:41:26 AM by Snake65 (Osama Bin Decomposing)
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To: Cicero
I support your switching Kuhn and Nietzsche. The latter's nihilism is closely allied with 'epistemological pessimism', and the latter was probably derivative of it.
5 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:44:51 AM by expatpat
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To: jocon307
Excellent read,

Thanks for posting this

6 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:45:25 AM by MJY1288 (WITHOUT DOUBLE STANDARDS, LIBERALS WOULDN'T HAVE ANY !)
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To: Cicero
As Auden said:

"And when the young Immanuel Kant
Was asked to kiss his aunt
He obey the categorical Must,
But only just.

7 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:46:39 AM by CasearianDaoist
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To: jocon307
Nice clear explanation for Bush-hating and liberal world view. But then, those who believe in objective truth usually do think more clearly than the deconstructionists.
8 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:48:17 AM by jwalburg (Question Patriotism!)
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To: Snake65
Yes, and it even spread into the semi-soft sciences, as in the global-warming controversy. The hard sciences are, or at least were, based on the fundamental axiom that there IS a scientific truth, and that, through careful theorizing and comparison with careful experiments, we can converge on that truth, though slowly. This approach is what pulled us out of the superstition of the Dark Ages, and IMO its abandonment is starting to push us back.
9 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:51:25 AM by expatpat
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To: TheStickman
ping for you. Great post
10 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:51:40 AM by visualops
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To: jwalburg
those who believe in objective truth usually do think more clearly than the deconstructionists.

Yes, a good analogy is being able to carry out some difficult physical task when on a fairly sound footing, compared with trying do so standing on a slippery mess.

11 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:56:02 AM by expatpat
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To: CasearianDaoist
The Unknown Citizen
W. H. Auden






(This Marble MonumentIs Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
12 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:57:13 AM by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: expatpat
If you haven't read Crichton's January 17, 2003 speech on that very subject, do yourself a favor and check out his Caltech lecture.
13 posted on 1/16/2004, 3:59:11 AM by Snake65 (Osama Bin Decomposing)
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To: jocon307
And another high-brow article that, evenb though it makes perfect sense, will never be seen by the sheep.
14 posted on 1/16/2004, 4:05:21 AM by Old Sarge (Operation Noble Eagle - We Watch, So You Don't Have To.)
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To: CasearianDaoist
And as Cleese said,

Immanuel Kant
was a real pissant
who was very rarely stable...

15 posted on 1/16/2004, 4:07:01 AM by Old Sarge (Operation Noble Eagle - We Watch, So You Don't Have To.)
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To: Old Sarge
The last several decades of academic philosophy have been dominated by epistemological pessimism — that is, the belief that propositions cannot be judged against an independently existing reality because reality doesn't exist independently of what we think or say. -Mark Goldblatt

The application of epistemological optimism/pessimism to Bush and his critics in academia makes a nice column, but I don't find it to be a very profound insight. Jonah Goldberg has a much better three-dimensional understanding of 20th century philosophy.

The author does not even credit Martin Heidegger for the seminal insight that language is constitutive of (shared) reality. These insights are critical for the post-Cartesian understanding of thought. I agree Derrida and Rorty et al have been barfing up the wrong trees. But the author does not scratch the surface of explaining why.

16 posted on 1/16/2004, 4:23:24 AM by NutCrackerBoy
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To: Snake65
Thanks. Yes, I've read Michael Crichton's talk -- he's great. He's written some mediocre novels, but some very good ones.
17 posted on 1/16/2004, 4:30:50 AM by expatpat
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To: jocon307
Bump
18 posted on 1/16/2004, 4:34:05 AM by auboy (If you totally agree with me, you must be nuts.)
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To: jocon307
The chocolate ration has been raised to twenty grammes a week....
19 posted on 1/16/2004, 4:50:42 AM by Zipporah (Write inTancredo in 2004)
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To: All
^
20 posted on 1/16/2004, 5:15:51 AM by jla
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