[Critical-Realism] FZ's Thingy

["Tim Murphy" <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FZ's Thingy,

I have had a pretty deep scan of it and my first reaction is that is a
mechanistic description of the political collective unconscious with all
kinds of stuff brought in to bolster the idea but very contradictory in that
he uses wave metaphors, brings in arbitrary schema or talks about forces or
particles or philosophy as and when it suits.
 
It is really a hodgepodge of stuff written in a cheeky POMO style
masquerading an Neo-Marxian that seeks to explode or disassemble any kind of
focus on what can be done. Leave it to the forces of unconscious history and
it will play out according the next wave as it "rises phoenix like" etc.
Meanwhile I have to fill up my SUV, drop some bombs on Iraq, tweak my AI and
feed the Cyborgs (on bio-ethanol).
 
I mean if you were honestly trying to do what FZ claims, surely you would
build a small area of material, test it with others and then add to it
incrementally, You would also add praxis of some sort and a feedback
mechanism.

There is actually nothing new or revolutionary about it except it's
overextension. It is not tight, well argued or coherent. In fact it is
rather like a long conversation with himself, almost stream of consciousness
stuff.

In short it is an attempt to colonise several complex areas of discourse and
insert various hooks and canards in order to master and control the
discussion of what American collective psychological history is and what to
do about it in the face of the expansion of the Empire. It is a big smoke
and mirrors job.

Being from the school of thought which holds that that individual or
collective consciousness (and the unconscious) is formed by external
circumstances (albeit dialectically) and not the other way around I do not
trust the motives of someone who is a Morman and who works for the USAF in
Neural Cybernetics.

I mean FZ can't have had a conversion to meaningful spirituality, peace and
socialism or genuine democratic capitalism of some sort and accepted class,
gender and racial equality, therefore it is either a massive scam or joke or
if FZ is serious his ego is bigger than that of Zaphod Beeblebrox (larger
than the known universe :), his id is continuing to over consume and kill
and his super ego is worried about what is really in his unconscious and is
looking for a hiding place inside an infinite hologram.

As for Fred's conversion on the road to Damascus from POMO to CR, I don't
believe a word of it. He is still smarting from the good slapping that Alan
Sokal personally administered to him as can be seen from how it still
rankles with him.

The whole point about POMO is that things mean what you want them to mean
despite what they really do mean and if you don't know what they mean well
it doesn't matter since they can mean what you want them to mean anyway. 

POMO is really DOUBLETHINK.

Here is Orwell's definition of doublethink from his novel 1984:

Doublethink
 
"To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to
deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of
the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."

Reagan, Thatcher, Bush and Blair are classic POMO figures, so is Pope
Ben-Edict and Osama Bin Laden, so are the Mormons and so is Heaven's Gate.

Roger Caldwell has argued* this against POMO and for Critical Realism: 

"Critical realism ... rescues us from the postmodernist nightmare and
restores us to reality. We cannot manage without a concept of truth. There
is (as most of us thought all along) a pre-existing external reality about
which it is the job of science to tell us. True, we must be cautious about
claims to objective reality, alert to ideological distortions, and aware
that the world is a messier, more complicated place than the accounts of
physicists would suggest. This does not mean that such claims cannot
plausibly be made. A central plank of critical realism is that science can
no longer be considered as just another myth or story."

Try as you might Fred you can't POMOsify CR. Your overextended tract is a
kind of POMO amoeba in Marxist drag wriggling and shape shifting and trying
to digest the inedible. Eventually you will run out of energy and dry out.

Even if you are beginning to somewhat understand CR you will not find the
holy grail or the philosophers stone. Better minds than yours or mine have
probed these themes without discovering a simple key. The answers are
nuanced and complex and evolving.

Actually I think you are deeply alarmed by CR and the fact that there is
indeed such a system of evaluating the truth.


Tim

*
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue42/42caldwell1.htm

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