The Far Left in A Nutshell -- The antiglobalization postmodernist left is easy to understand if you see the position as a way to bring the following unstable convictions into equilibrium.

Old Left:

(1) Logic, reason and evidence (science) is good.
(2) Progress is good.
(3) Socialism is supported by logic, reason and evidence (it's scientific!).
(4) Socialism is good.
(5) Capitalism is evil.

Together with Unavoidable Data:

-- Socialism is undermined by logic, reason and evidence (see Mises, Hayek, history).
-- Capitalism leads to progress, while socialism hinders it.

Leaves these options for the leftist:

(a) Reject (3), (4), and (5).
(b) Reject (1), (2) and (3).

The PoMo left takes option (b), rejecting logic, reason and evidence (it's an oppressive, patriarchal, capitalistic construct, etc.) and rejecting the desirability of progress (let's have "sustainable" stasis instead.) Further, they must abandon the claim that socialism has rational support. Thus you get:

PoMo Left:

(1') Logic, reason and evidence (science) is a myth.
(2') Progress is destructive.
(3') Socialism is supported by ????.
(4') Socialism is good.
(5') Capitalism is evil.

But clearly, (b) is the much more desperate option. What about (3')? Having dispensed with rational grounds for support, how can one argue that this bundle of convictions isn't just arbitrary? Well, you can't. And, strangely, it seems that original impetus to support socialism came from a more or less earnest belief in the desirability of material progress. Giving up on the desirability of progress is like setting one's heart on driving to Miami, discovering that one has gotten on the wrong road, and therefore deciding that Miami's a lousy place to go. You'd think you'd just switch roads. Why did people do this?

My hypothesis:

The earnest, progress-loving left came to identify support for socialism and rancor against capitalism as the criterion for personal virtue. So people in this coalition built their identity around this attitude, took pride in themselves as moral, and identified as immoral outsiders people who supported capitalism. When the case for socialism collapsed, coalition members were faced with a crisis. First, their sense of identity and virtue was threatened. It is hard enough to admit that you were wrong when you thought you were right. It's really, really hard to admit that you were in fact bad when you thought you were good. Second, if one were to change one's mind about socialism, then one would lose one's network of social support, and that's frightening. So, anything that allowed the maintenance of one's sense of virtue, and one's belonging in the virtuous community, was welcomed -- although from the outside, it appears ridiculous and desperate.

This suggests that the views of the PoMo left won't really stick to generations that came up after the theoretical and historical collapse of socialism -- even though the PoMo left is largely in charge of educating the young. A vague feeling that leftishness has something to do with goodness does hang in the air, but the kids don't really grasp the animus against reason, progress and the market, and so they are relatively easily swayed by experience and argument.

Well, it's a big nutshell. What can I say?

Factual Correctness -- Jonah Goldberg's NRO piece on PoMo and the PC WTC firefighter sculpture is pretty funny. One can do a lot with words, but Jonah's right, literary intellectuals do seem to resent the fact that you can't power airplanes with adverbs.

Snap, Crackle, Popper -- It's bizarre that glass-eating mercenary independent scholar, Rafe Champion, suggests that I am a "true believer" for not developing a critical preference for Popperianism. I'm tempted to say, "Right back at ya, buddy." I grew up philsophically among Ayn Rand devotees, and I sense a similarity in conviction among the Randians and Popperians like Rafe. I'm sure Rafe can appreciate that Popper's epistemology just makes very little sense to me, and that I don't consider his counterarguments "effective".

Indeed, I am at a loss to understand how a "critical preference" for some proposition P over some proposition Q, is anything but the belief that P is more probable relative to one's evidence than Q. What other basis for a rational preference is there? If P is more "corroborated", then I need to have it explained how one can assign ordinal rankings of corroboration that do not correspond even roughly to degrees of probability. Corroboration is supposed to be a historical measure of experimental survival. Popper claims that it is rational to prefer the hypothesis that is more corroborated. But why should this preference be rational unless it is in fact the case that theories that have survived a lot of experimental tests are more likely to be true than theories that haven't.

Anyway, I think I'm done beating on Popper, at least on the pages of The Fly Bottle. I understand that this kind of topic drives off a lot of readers. However, I do think this kind of issue is important, both for its own sake and for its implications. I am convinced that post-modern epistemologies are driven by politics. When it was shown by reason and evidence that communism is both ineffective and deadly, the folks on the far left had a choice: either give up communism or give up reason and evidence. The PoMos chose the latter. Of course, PoMo epistemology supports libertarianism just as easily as it supports Marxism, yet notice the overwhelming absence of libertarian postmodernists. When you've got reason and evidence on your side, like libertarians, you've got very little motivation to throw them away. Anyway, my point is that it is not only important to argue for libertarianism against the anti-reason PoMo left and the anti-reason Mystic right, but it is also important to make the case for reason itself as the proper basis for the political argument. If you can get folks to accept the proper standards of reason and evidence, you're already way ahead in the argument with postmodernists and mystics. My practical problem with Popperianism is that I don't think it really sets up intelligible standards of reason and evidence from which to argue against the dark forces of the left and right.