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Dagon comments on Open thread 7th september - 13th september - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Elo 06 September 2015 10:27PM

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Comment author: ike 07 September 2015 04:14:20AM 3 points [-]

(Reposted from the previous OT)

One of my professors claimed that postmodernism, and particularly its concept of "no objective truth", is responsible for much of the recent liberalism of society, through the idea of "live and let live". (Specific examples given were attitudes towards legalization of gay marriage and drugs.) I pointed out that libertarianism and liberalism predated postmodernism historically, and they said that that's true, but you can still trace the popularity back to postmodernism.

Is this historically accurate? If not, is there something I can point to that would convince them? It seems to me that the shift in society is much more a shift on the object level questions than on the meta level "should we ban things we disagree with", but I don't know very much recent history of philosophy (it isn't strictly their field either, so I'm justified in not taking them at face value).

Comment author: Dagon 07 September 2015 04:31:01AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: ike 07 September 2015 05:33:35AM 0 points [-]

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

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.

Postmodernism involves a new kind of tolerance for learning to live and let live.

From the third result (for me at least).

I don't think I'll win this particular debate by misdirection.

What does it mean for a concept to be responsible for a change in society?

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)?

Comment author: Dagon 07 September 2015 10:32:21PM 0 points [-]

"the counterfactual in which postmodernist philosophy never came into being has less acceptance of those concepts"

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.

Comment author: ike 07 September 2015 11:14:14PM 0 points [-]

"novel aspect X of postmodernism caused faster/more complete acceptance of the classical liberal values"

Pretty much this, with X being "no objective truth" (or moral relativism.)

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