Higher Superstition Quotes

“Muddleheadedness has always been the sovereign force in human affairs—a force far more potent than malevolence or nobility. It lubricates our hurtful impulses and ties our best intentions in knots. It blunts our wisdom, misdirects our compassion, clouds whatever insights into the human condition we manage to acquire. It is the chief artisan of the unintended consequences that constitute human history.”
― Paul R. Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

“We believe that the health of a culture is measured in part by the vigor with which its immune system responds to nonsense.”
― Paul R. Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

“What one is muddled about may well be the consequence of one’s specific relation to society, politics, and history.”
― Paul R. Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

“The confidence of the postmodern cultural critic is the confidence of a generalizer who excuses himself from many of the usual obligations of erudition. Under this dispensation, a wide variety of disciplines may be addressed and pronounced upon without requiring a detailed familiarity with the facts and logic around which they are organized.”
― Paul R. Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

“Contrasted to the Enlightenment ideal of a unified epistemology that discovers the foundational truths of physical and biological phenomena and unites them with an accurate understanding of humanity in its psychological, social, political, and aesthetic aspects, postmodern skepticism rejects the possibility of enduring universal knowledge in any area. It holds that all knowledge is local, or “situated,” the product of interaction of a social class, rigidly circumscribed by its interests and prejudices, with the historical conditions of its existence. There is no knowledge, then; there are merely stories, “narratives,” devised to satisfy the human need to make some sense of the world.”
― Paul R. Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

“Postmodernism is grounded in the assumption that the ideological system sustaining the cultural and material practices of Western European civilization is bankrupt and on the point of collapse. It claims that the intellectual schemata of the Enlightenment have been abraded by history to the point that nothing but a skeleton remains, held together by unreflective habit, incapable of accommodating the creative impulses of the future.”
― Paul R. Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science