Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ethics-l
Date:         Mon, 6 Apr 1992 10:41:03 EDT
From:         Ed Nilges <EGNILGES@PUCC.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Reply to RE: Software, progress, quality and professionalism
              4 Apr 1992 12:47:00 EST from <JDOWNEY@RCNVMS.RCN.MASS.EDU>

On Sat, 4 Apr 1992 12:47:00 EST JIM DOWNEY said:
>
>Again the reference to "you and I."  Are your beliefs around this
>issue so unshakable that they are indeed "truths"?  And since only
>"certain English teachers and French philosophers" share this
>knowledge with you, does that negate wisdom and insight from other
>languages, cultures and/or disciplines?
>
>It is here that the dynamics of Subjectivism, Relativism and Egoism
>can be seen to form elitism...  It is a process of exclusion of other
>views as having validity... Whether conscious and deliberate, or by
>faulty argument, or by unconscious designs, it excludes other ideas,
>other persons and other views, and offers a single set of ideas as
>"gospel" and a single person/group as "enlightened."

This is the familiar "politically correct" attack on truth-claims as
always and everywhere oppressive; how dare a "mere" programmer make
such vast claims; is this not reductionist, elitist, and (because
Ed is a male) chauvinistic to boot?  Jim, I do not subscribe to the
strange post-Modern viewpoint that logic and truth is ALWAYS, and
OF NECESSITY, the invention of dominant groups


     "devised at first to keep the strong in awe." (Richard III)


In spite of the fact that I am well read in texts that go by the names
of feminism and critical theory, in particular feminist critiques of
logic as a tool of male oppression (Reference 1), I view your crypto
Nietzchian critique with a large grain of salt.

Logic and truthclaims in the right historical hands have been a powerful
way for the downtrodden to overcome their downtrodden state, and what
IN REALITY shores up the power of white upper-middle-class males is not
logic and truth, but the upraised fist, vast armies, and texts that
(far from being logical) are uniformly incoherent.

I am bemused by the fact that your brand of academic skepticism is,
always and everywhere, directed against challenges from the left side
of the political spectrum.  Thus, Jerry Brown (with his numerous faults
that it is not the province of ETHICS-L to address) is attacked by
the comfortable centrist as a Nietzchian power seeker whereas this
criticism is not made of H. Ross Perot's challenge.  This is because
the criticism of otherwise compelling logical arguments as a brutal
attempt to dominate discourse "works better" against the left than
the right, for it is the left that knows its Nietzche and is more
apt to be silenced by such arguments.  These arguments are merely
rhetorical tricks.

If you are not qualified to address my substantive contention, that
technological discourse is in the process of being highjacked from
its source in the lower middle class and the counterculture to
commanding heights that shall use it to enslave rather than liberate,
say so.  For if I am right (and I would prefer not to be) then we
should discuss ways of reversing this trend.


REFERENCES

1.  Nye, Andrea: WORDS OF POWER, A Feminist Reading of the History
    of Logic.  New York, 1990: Routledge.
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