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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)

I recall hearing of this sort of phenomenon before... although to add further confusion to the mix (before I've read the piece in question), mathematicians don't necessarily consider their field a "science" (Actually, given the applicability of mathematics not only to absolute truth but to traditionalist aesthetic principles, particularly in art, architecture, music and even literature, I would agree wholeheartedly, and I would submit the mathematical incompetence of many liberal arts students these days is in no small way correlated--either as cause, effect, or side effect--to the generally low quality of contemporary arts. Certainly it explains the strange fascination with asymmetry and absurdism.)
3/6/2008 07:19 AM | Unregistered CommenterNGPM
Actually,Dan has it wrong! Historian John Lukacs does a wonderful job putting objectivity in its proper place, relying on Heisenberg's physics to do the job. For a fellow familiar with Voegelin and Lukacs, I'm somewhat surprised by this assertion.

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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