Whose Reality is it?

The post-modern premise is based on the idea that "reality is a construct." To the left this means that reality is a cultural construct whose dimensions are imposed by the powerful upon the disenfranchised. It is a theory based on a modicum of factual data. That is, our brains and minds do indeed interpret sensory and other data to build an internal model of reality and no two people experience the world in precisely the same way; this basic reality is then torqued, by way of a philosophical short-circuit that misrepresents and misunderstands the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to conclude that reality itself must of necessity be a construct. One of the reasons academia has been accelerating their trend toward irrelevancy is that those who insist that macro-reality is indeterminate who do not live in the same universe as the hoi polloi whose common sense tells them that while no one may ever be able to define reality out to an infinite number of decimal points, we can make certain predictions and assumptions about reality that do not rely on quite such an exquisite level of detail.

Alan Sokal should have put the stake through the heart of leftist post-modernism but alas, highly intellectualized nonsense has proven highly resistant to eradication.

Since the advent of the world wide web and the internet, there have been arguments advanced that the real time fact checking that is facilitated by the internet and the blogosphere has diminished the power of the press and governments to control the "reality" that most people see. Richard Fernandez makes the argument explicit in The end of authenticity and the rise of skepticism:

... the Internet, and in particular the blogosphere, has become an unofficial part of the news cycle. It's importance at fact checking has now reached the stage where it is relevant to ask whether with the availability of so many digital image and audio manipulation techniques to fraudsters any meaningful 'news' is still possible without the accompanying near real-time analysis by Internet pundits. The day-after scrutiny has become so much a part of the 'news' generation process that news would be significantly less reliable without it. Whether the task consists in noticing that Barack Obama is shaded too black in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad or observing that 'missiles' found in Afghan ruins are really unexploded 155 mm artillery shells, no major news story is accepted out of the box any more until it is prodded, poked and assayed.

When the blogosphere debunked Scott Beauchamp's reportage at New Republic, they were doing the editors not a disservice, but a favor. The plasticity of the video, audio and print record of events now means that traditional editors need an active an skeptical audience to tell them if their own sources are telling the truth.

Richard suggests that our ability to fact check the Media, the backbone of our essential perceptual apparatus, means that overt fraud and manipulation of the reality we see is becoming more difficult to pull off and perpetuate. I wish he were correct but fear that our skeptical view of the world is being overwhelmed by a more insidious and near irresistible force working against reality.

There is reason for concern that, in fact, the left is winning the argument, that our reality is increasingly a construct and the connection between the physical world and our mental picture of reality is becoming more tenuous. This is not an auspicious development.

Many people, when commenting about the future of Europe, note that "demography is destiny." The rapidly growing population of Muslim immigrants, poorly assimilated, will eventually change the character of that continent as the native populations fail to reproduce themselves. Since culture is the summing of character, and an enervated Europe fails to champion their own history and culture, character will inevitably take on the attributes of the individuals who comprise it. This is already happening as Europe abandons its commitment to freedom. An example was cited yesterday by Klein Verzet:

When the Islamic world hit Denmark during what has been named the cartoon riots. The other European countries did not pull together and left Denmark isolated. Will it now be different, with the release of Islam critical film Fitna? Read shiver:

Today the Swedish minister Carl Bildt of foreign affairs came out in support for the Dutch government. Saying he supported censorship, freedom of expression does not include offending other people.

Graham Watson, leader of the liberals in euro parliament also is in favour of censorship. He even thinks Europe needs a censor, who could approve or disapprove films like Fitna. Although he recognizes that "the Internet creates freedom anarchy". And thus: "we need more effective ways to regulate the internet".

As the world becomes more connected and large groups of people continue to identify with their tribe rather than with more abstract philosophical and political ideals, we will evolve in the direction where might may no longer make right, but where demography may well establish concensus reality. In such a cultural milieu, doubting voices may be silenced.

Richard Landes has spent impressive amounts of time and energy trying to undo some of the damage of what is increasingly looking like overt fraud in Pallywood. He calls his blog the Augean Stables:

This blog takes its name from the Fifth Labor of Herakles, to clean the stables of Augeas, where thousands of cattle had left so much un-cleaned dung that the whole Peloponnesus smelled of it. At Second Draft, our discovery of both Pallywood and the Al-Durah Affair have led us to realize that — at least where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned — our MSM represent a veritable Augean Stables of accumulated misreporting. We dedicate this weblog to exploring the many aspects of our MSM’s problem, not only those concerned with the Middle East problem, but more broadly with the many ways in which our media’s errors and our media’s extraordinary resistance to admitting their errors, have contributed and continue to contribute to the serious problems that plague our globe in this young 21st century.

The incredible amount of work required to address this one distortion only hints at the scope of the potential problme and it may well be possible that the MSM will ultimately prove to be the smaller part of the problem.

The internet, indeed much of our modern technology, empowers individuals. When a large enough mass of individuals insists that the sky is green there will be myriad learned intellectuals who will support their view; the sky will effectively be green even as contrarian blogs insist it is really blue. The question becomes: will it matter if the sky is blue when no one pays attention to that small band of doubters and deniers who insist it is not green?

From Global Warming to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to Iraq, Iran and nuclear weapons, Europe and free speech, and a host of other issues, attempts are being made every day to silence those who disagree with the prevailing conventional wisdom. As the internet matures and a higher and higher percentage of people connect the trend toward reality being defined by consensus will increase. When most people have minimal knowledge in math, science, logic, and critical thinking, will reality have any chance of competing with the new consensus reality? It is a troubling question. Far too many people are far too ready to believe nonsense for anyone to take comfort in this development.