Modernism in art and architecture, and postmodernism in philosophy are, like religion, insults to human intelligence. Unfortunately, many people fall for their hollow propaganda.
The "Sokal Affair" was a hoax whereby a man called Alan Sokal submitted a postmodern-sounding article to a postmodern journal. It turns out that the English you hear isn't just unintelligible to you, but it's unintelligible to the people at the journal as well. But if it's unintelligible, it must be profound, right? The journal quickly accepted it, not knowing that it was all fake B.S. They then got embarrassed when they were told that it was pompous-sounding drivel.
Religion has done the same thing. When people can't understand something, they generally think it's much more profound than if they can understand it. If a priest speaks Latin, wears some weird costume, and sprinkles water on people, that is much more mysterious, and hence more intellectual and esoteric. If you just have on a T-shirt and say those same things in English, it loses a lot of its magic. That's one reason why the Catholic Church fought against the Bible being printed in the vernacular languages, and why mass was said in Latin until recently. This is also the reason for chants and so on.
"In the Darwinian perspective, order is not immanent in reality, but it is a self-affirming aspect of reality in so far as it is experienced by situated subjects. However, it is not so much reality that is self-affirming, but the creative order structuring reality which manifests itself to us. Being-whole, as opposed to being-one, underwrites our fundamental sense of locatedness and particularity in the universe."
The hoax below, by Dr. Maarten Boudry, was directed at postmodernist religious conferences. This time, two conferences accepted an abstract made of pure gibberish made to sound philosophical. Some of the abstract is excerpted below. See the actual article for more.
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