Post-Modern Kirk
Please read my friend and colleague Dan McCarthy on The PoMo Russell Kirk in the latest Reason.
One of McCarthy's observations strikes me as extremely important:
There is indeed common ground here between Kirkian traditionalists and postmodernists. Both camps try to conscript the uncertainty principle, mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Einstein’s relativity into attacks on objectivity in other fields. The Kirkians and postmodernists share a fallacy, and ironically it is a species of scientism: They wrongly apply the ideas of advanced physics and mathematics to history. It turns out that when “science” casts doubt on objectivity, the otherwise science-skeptical Kirkians and postmodernists are all for it.
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Reader Comments (4)
Acknowledging the indeterminacy inherent in the Baconian scientific model, which quantum physics does quite successfully,is a direct correction of scientism,which tends to ignore the participant nature of scientific experiment.
Dan's exegesis is backwards here; and it's an unfortunate slight to kirk's memory to mis-characterize his thought in such a rag as reason...
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