It’s ironic to see gender ideologues swimming at the bottom of the postmodernist morass at the same time appealing to ideological and industry captured experts and science, the ruse of peer review (i.e., gate keeping), etc.—along with their circle jerk professional associations—to justify the greatest medical scandal in world history, namely so-called “gender affirming care.” (See The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism; Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)
It’s ironic, as well, given that the only useful thing about postmodernism—to be sure, noting the problem of discursive formation as power projection is not original to the claptrap—is that it warns “folx” about taking as truth knowledge production by government institutions and business firms. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Corporate Character of Scientism; Eugenics 2.0; COVID-19 and the Corporate State; Science Versus Scientism: How to Spot the Difference.)
It’s as if none on the self-declared left have read postmodernist philosopher Sandra Harding’s landmark 1992 essay “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity’” (published in Social Research), where, after quoting historian Robert Proctor, who writes—
“It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences…. Yet in an important sense the Nazis might indeed be said to have ‘depoliticized’ science (and many other areas of culture). The Nazis depoliticized science by de- stroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the ‘Führer principle’ replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences. The Nazis ‘depoliticized’ problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms…. Politics pursued in the name of science or health provided a powerful weapon in the Nazi ideological arsenal.”
—Harding adds: “The institutionalized, normalized politics of male supremacy, class exploitation, racism, and imperialism, while only occasionally initiated through the kind of violent politics practiced by the Nazis, similarly ‘depoliticize’ Western scientific institutions and practices, thereby shaping our images of the natural and social worlds and legitimating past and future exploitative public policies.”
On the other side from postmodernism, Immanuel Wallerstein, in his 1997 American Journal of Sociology paper, “Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society,” mocked the early hopes of positivists who thought “they could be modern philosopher-kings,” the same ilk pushing the technocracy woke progressives adore so much (another irony in the light of their attempt at revolutionary posturing, in full and embarrassing display on today’s college campuses). In the light of history, Wallerstein tells us, their self-aggrandizement proved “totally vain” and they became the “handmaidens of governmental reformism” (not to mention corporate profit).
“When they did this openly, they called it ‘applied social science,’” Wallerstein writes. “But for the most part they did this abashedly, asserting that their role was merely to do the research, and that it was up to others—the political persons—to draw from this research the conclusions that seemed to derive from this research. In short, the neutrality of the scholar became the fig leaf of their shame in having eaten the apple of knowledge.”
Indeed. Neutrality is ideology. Objectivity is what we strive for in science. Tragically, in the epoch of the corporate state, with its administrative rule and technocratic control, the enterprise has become thoroughly corrupted. Of the sciences that feign objectivity, medical science is the worst. Even the captured FDA has to recall thousands of pharmaceuticals, devices, and procedures annually to make the appearance of legitimacy.
Sometimes I think that if the views of flat earthers generated mega-profits, or there was no therapeutic competitor to Scientology, the corporatists would find a way to shoehorn those species of hokum into the academic literature, too.
freedom and reason 