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ike comments on Open thread 7th september - 13th september - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (146)
(Reposted from the previous OT)
As others have pointed out traditional liberalism and "live and let live" long predates post-modernism. On the other hand, the recent surge of "liberalism" really anti-nominalism masquerading as liberalism. Is caused by the "no objective truth" attitude of post modernism.
So you agree with him? In that case, what could you show me that will convince me of this?
Do you mean antinomianism?
(If so, I think your characterization of it is obviously wrong; there are plenty of moral principles there, even if you find them extremely bad moral principles.)
The cemeteries of the world show where the hard boundary of objective truth lies.
I'm not sure what this is meant to prove. Ike didn't say here that the professor claimed that postmodernism is true.
I think you'll need to do a fair bit of epistemic work just to get the claim into a state about which you can ask this question. What does it mean for a concept to be responsible for a change in society? What predictions do you make based on it?
But that's for your own beliefs. In terms of convincing (or having fun debating with) a professor, I'd ignore the causality and credit-for-popularity aspect and go "what in fuck makes you think 'live and let live' is postmodern, rather than classically liberal"?
Looking at the google n-gram chart for Live and Let Live, I'd say the idea got very popular in the first half of the 20th, but was around much longer. Unless the prof is claiming postmodernism started in the 1920s, I think he's in a tricky spot.
This is partly what I did say, and as mentioned, they think it can be both, and postmodernism is responsible for more recent changes. They also seem to be associating moral relativism with postmodernism.
It doesn't seem so far out to agree that postmodernism has this concept; a Google search for "postmodernism live and let live" has several books saying it's a postmodernism ideal.
From the third result (for me at least).
I don't think I'll win this particular debate by misdirection.
For a complete but not very useful answer, "the counterfactual in which postmodernist philosophy never came into being has less acceptance of those concepts". Or "there's a causal link from postmodernism to a substantial portion of the population accepting such concepts".
I'm not really sure of predictions to make; that's why I'm asking. Maybe polls would show a correlate between belief in specific ideas unique to postmodernism and " live and let live" (or proxies thereof)?
Still needs unpacking. What does "never came into being" mean for a belief cluster with many components that predate the label by a long way? "If these beliefs didn't become popular, they wouldn't be popular" is kind of hard to argue against. "novel aspect X of postmodernism caused faster/more complete acceptance of the classical liberal values" could be an interesting debate, and I don't know of any X that's a slam dunk to be both new with postmodernism and important to "live and let live" as a societal attitude.
Pretty much this, with X being "no objective truth" (or moral relativism.)
Widespread popularity of drugs predates WWI, let alone postmodernism, which became popular (outside architecture) only after 1960s (mostly in 1970s).
Yes, and at the time the social response to this was too ban them.
He said that polls show the younger someone is, the more likely they are to support legalization, and this appears to be true. You can't explain that with anything going back to 1910.
I think that it is likely that pre-WWI drug usage levels survived during 1920s-1940s in certain subcultures, such as. jazz scene, who influenced beatniks, who, among others, were among those who formed the zeitgeist of 1960s and drug culture. Up until that point, postmodernists cannot be said to have any influence, because most works of philosophers most often associated with postmodernism (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida)came only in late 1960s and 1970s. Many 1960s hippies became influential members of society, university professors, and I think that was what gradually pushed drugs into mainstream. Can we call them postmodernists? Well, some of them probably were, but was it a significant number? I'd say that people like Timothy Leary were much more important than Jacques Derrida
Edit: and I think that popularity of drugs among rockstars must have influenced young people as well.
What post-dictions does this make?