From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 21:17:10 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of Damien Broderick
> Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 7:20 PM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: RE: Postmodernists have nothing useful to contribute (was:
> Americaneducation)
>
>
> At 04:10 PM 9/2/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>
> >Bruno
> >Latour, notorious arch-post-modernist, while discussing the
> >to him ridiculous contention of French scientists in 1976
> >that Ramses II died of tuberculosis, "How could Ramses II
> >die in 1213 B.C. from a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch
> >in 1882?". Post-modernism really can mess up some people's
> >thinking.
>
> I'd like to see the precise context of Bruno's comment; it certainly would
> not have been intended to imply that the bug didn't exist until a 19th C
> white guy gave it a name. But if he did (inexplicably), people were making
> that kind of stupid remark long before modernism was posted. In a second or
> third year English essay I submitted back at the dawn of history, I
> analyzed WUTHERING HEIGHTS in parlor Freudian terms. (We weren't taught
> that dirty sex stuff back then, of course, not in prim, realistic
> Orstrylya.) Heathcliff as rampant Id, that sort of thing. My prim,
> realistic tutor marked this piece of cod hermeneutics with bold red,
> explaining that this was impossible since Freud had not made his
> discoveries at the time the book was written. I screamed and ran around my
> room. But maybe she was telling me that Freud had made it all up and there
> was no such Thing in the real world as an Id, and so Bronte could not have
> been describing it out of her own self-knowledge, as I had implied.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
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