I copied this text from the source, which for the life of me I cannot now recall.
However Bob BROCKIE will be well known to Wellingtonians and readers of The DomPost so maybe that was where it came from, and I hope Bob approves of the wider dissemination of his views. You will note that there is nice accordance between his and mine. The rot is truly awful.
WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE - The Dominion Post 13/09/2010
OPINION: LONG SHADOW OF PHILOSOPHERS
Scientists the world over are dismayed that so many people are turning against science.
OK - thalidomide, Chernobyl, Bhopal and mad cow disease didn't win science any friends but something else has set many citizens against scientists.
The distrust and badmouthing is mainly the work of two dead Frenchmen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the 1960s and 1970s these two philosophers argued that everybody's opinions are of equal value - that the opinion of a rocket scientist and a Stone Age tribesman were equally valid.
It followed then, they said, that nobody is in a position to criticise or challenge anybody else.
The Frenchmen also argued that there is no such thing as a fact.
They believed that everybody sees things from a different perspective depending on their age, skin colour, sex, their social status, temperament and so on, and that everybody's personal take on the world is as valid as anybody else's.
Among other things, our philosophers tried to knock science off its authoritative perch. They claimed science is just a collection of myths on an equal footing with the rest of the world's myths.
To the Frenchmen, the myths of the Yanomamo in the Amazon, the Papuan highlander and Maori are as valid as science and must all be accorded equal respect.
These ideas, known broadly as post- modernism, spread like wildfire through the universities in the 80s and 90s, generating a vast literature of impenetrable complexity (for some fun see Google: Postmodernist Generator).
Like reef-fish, linguists, art teachers, political scientists, architects, historians, psychologists, musicians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists swam with the current.
Postmodernism empowered feminists, gays and minority groups of all stripes, and educationalists spread the word from universities to schools and the wider community.
In 1996, a clever hoax exposed Foucault and Derrida as pretentious impostors and postmodernism as a sham (see Google: Sokal Hoax). Since then, the trendy ideology has faded in the universities but it still flourishes in our schools and the wider community.
Today, looking around New Zealand, we see that everybody must be consulted before making decisions. No sooner have scientists suggested a rational way forward than authorities must ask everybody else for their views.
Irrational conspiracy theorists, scaremongers, eco and religious fundamentalists, mystics, tohungas, technophobes, chemophobes and anti-scientists must be afforded the same respect as the scientists.
Neither can we challenge a person's beliefs in these postmodernist days. Politicians, public servants and teachers can lose their jobs if they challenge the veracity of religious claptrap or Maori myth.
Although these views defy any rational underpinning, we're urged to respect their beliefs. You can also find yourself socially isolated if you speak up in favour of scientifically approved fluoridation and vaccination campaigns, genetic engineering, chemical fertilisers, cellphone towers, 1080 poison and nuclear power stations.
Foucault, Derrida and their hierophants have cast a baleful shadow over New Zealand.
They dismiss the hard-won advances of the European intellectual enlightenment and return us to the Stone Age, with its superstition, touchy-feelism, anecdotal, nature-knows- best, seat-of-the-pants thinking.
