Here and in the earlier article on “decline-ism” he seems to adopt the Whig interpretation of history. Every day and in every way we’re getting better and better. Sounding much like Barack Hussein Obama in fact. This is the familiar line of Reason Magazine and the irrational cult of “Dynamism”, perpetrated by Virgina Postrel.

This is completely incompatible with conservatism and is a fault in Roger Kimball’s thinking and writing. The Closing of the American Mind is surely a work of “decline-ism”.

Reason Magazine by the way receives government funding so it is socialist as well.

Proposed by Amory Lovins of “Soft Energy Paths” fame, it posits that saving energy is more valuable than making energy and our financial systems should reward the “producers” of negawatts with real cash. This concept fuels large cash transfers from taxpayers and utility ratepayers to subsidize energy conservation implementation.

The problem is that negawats have no accounting constraint. Negawatts are purely intention and of that, there is an infinite supply. Hence, it is ripe for rip-off. Even the National Academy of Sciences admits that there is no reliable way to measure negawatts and hence any rewards are without firm basis. Enron pulled a few good negawatt plays off Californians during their 2001 electricity crisis and picked up a few million in return, all from strictly paper plays.

This effort is a response to the charge to single out the silliest argument in the last 25 or so years from an academic that has reverberated in the larger intellectual world. For this accolade I choose body of work from one Daniel Dennett, distinguished author of Brainstorms, Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves, and Breaking the Spell. One can construe my comments to apply mostly to the Darwin tome, though it is the common theme among the works that will be the focus of my observations.

And that theme is Dennett’s unabashed scientism. This term can be seen through the newly pressed volume entitled “How Successful is Naturalism” (Georg Gasser, ed., 2007) in which two forms of naturalism are discussed and dissected. The first, let’s call it “hard naturalism” is the worldview: that only material things exist and these can only be known by scientific methods; that there is no such thing as freedom, consciousness, first person experience, or anything transcendental because only the real is real; and that humanism is swallowed up by reduction to scientific objectivity and its naturalistic ethics. This is scientism—it is the be all and end all—a metaphysic, a closed system of known truth of everything and it is self-justifying. In contrast there is a version of naturalism, let’s call it “soft naturalism” which holds that science is not self-justifying because its grounding insights and precepts are philosophical (i.e., not subject to scientific verification); is not the basis for total human self-understanding; does not reduce first person experience to third person accounts. This form of naturalism is open-ended, fallible, and its metaphysical foundations are subject to constant revision. This second approach will be the implicit framework of the following criticisms. In other words, I will hold to this form of naturalism while criticizing its reified cousin.

However, rather than criticizing Dennett from this foreign viewpoint, I will engage in what philosophers used to call “immanent critique” which, after the French invasion, is now termed “deconstruction”. That is, I will try to show that this view comes apart at the seams because it is internally incoherent and its worldview ends up being just one more tired dogmatism.

The first hurdle that hard naturalists like Dennett must overcome is what Jurgen Habermas tirelessly points out about a host of metaphysical beliefs: they are performative contradictions—that is, the claim that science is the source of all truth and meaning cannot itself be verified according to the methods of science because it is an assumption of the practice of science. Thus the very raison d’etre of the enterprise of science is itself not scientific, but philosophical.

Second, Dennett’s claim that evolution, that dangerous idea, is the only possible explanation for the world as we know it is circular because only empirical evidence can establish anything about the world. But evidentialism is not the standard for all of science. Mathematical string theory may never be verified, nor will the contents, if any, of black holes. And, again, the principle of verification is not established by verification, rather it is a pragmatic position of scientists who do science. It is a precept, just like Occam’s Razor, of the conduct of science.

Given these arguments, and others, one begins to see a picture of scientism as a metaphysical just so story. A through analysis of the substantive and methodological foundations of science will show that they are fanciful creations. They are, as Kolakowski argued, mythic or mythopoetical creations They are aesthetic objects for they reflect an aesthetic stance–the products of the human mind as nurtured within its cultural context. As stories, they can be supported by empirical evidence and inference to a point as well as by good and cogent reasons. Above all, however, they are supported by the feelings—some known and some less so–that invariably accompanies these ideas and gives them their valence. For if we did not care about them,if they had no import, why would we bother talking about them? It is this sensuousness and the creative nature of the judgments that posit these norms that determines their mythical nature.

The dangerous idea then is not Darwin’s but of Dennett the scientismist, who mystifies and transmutes science into an untenable scientism. Yet the reach of these tales, as seen in the works of Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens, is considerable. Scientism is not nor will it ever be the moral equivalent for an enchanted worldview because its story of the reduction of everything human to scientific evidence and its objectification of human subjectivity is but a story full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

“In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”

And I believe that her faculty advisor was recently charged with rape. If guilty, he probably had a good ideological reason.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124674

2) I disagree that Fukuyama’s propositions is or was silly. Since the collapse of the USSR, no alternative to liberal democracy is put forward anywhere. There are conflicts, but they are between liberal democracy and plain old corruption and tyranny masquerading as liberal democracy (with the limited exception of Islamic fundamentalism).

3) It may seem cavalier to dismiss fascism and Communism as mere distractions, or World War II as a momentary eddy in the current of liberal democracy. But the fact is that fascism started in 1920, and by 1945 was completely destroyed, without any major impact on the world outside Europe. (Japanese imperialism was a separate phenomenon, and was even in World War II regarded as a lesser threat to be dealt with later. Nor did it ever command material resources comparable to the U.S., the USSR, or the British Empire.) Communism was a more serious challenge; but its limits were shown in the 1930s, when even in the depths of the Depression, not one country adopted Communism, and Communism was a fringe movement in all but a few.

Now if one wants a genuinely silly idea, I would propose the “Black Athena” thesis of Martin Bernal and other
Afrocentric scholars, which has the advantage of being constructed of falsehoods from the beginning.

The argument against Lomborg could only be carried out in bad faith. It’s disgraceful that the argument appealed to so many academics.