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"Live your best life. Dream big. Live fully." -- Oprah Winfrey


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India’s Congress Party’s big win in the recent election has as much significance for citizens of that country as it does for citizens of the world. It shows that democracy and development can go hand in hand, according author Sadanand Dhume. A country that is slated to grow above 5 percent amid the financial crisis is a model for developing nations. That India can do this while sporting the world’s largest democracy, enjoying the world’s largest voter turnout, all the while exhibiting substantial pluralism, is a lesson that democracy is not simply a western phenomenon. But the significance is not simply a triumph of ideas. Congress’s win shows that India’s citizens have voted for a middle path of equitable globalization – a globalization that benefits the elites and poor alike. Note that the Congress Party’s main opponents were on the right, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a largely Hindu nationalist party, and the left. With a near majority, Congress will have the opportunity to alter the landscape further, though the leadership has shown a conservatism in the past that is likely to prevent precipitous changes. In the end, the success of India’s middle path in integrating with the world is proof that democracy, development and globalization can coexist and help broad masses of people. – YaleGlobal


///////////////////To put it in other words, the web of scientific knowledge is reliable (while not being either perfect or absolutely objective) because it works: one can keep examining facts, and even questioning assumptions, while still discovering new things about the world, making the web both more self-consistent and a better reflection of the way the world (presumably) really is. It is because of the reliability of science and technology that people like Foucault and Bathes (and, I assume, Fish) can count on their bank account getting fatter with every royalty check. No “faith” needed.

As always in the case of postmodernism, a perfectly reasonable and potentially interesting idea (the non-independence of facts and theories, which was not discovered by postmodernists) gets blown out of proportion to justify an insane conclusion (that science is the same as religion, or that reason and faith are on the same epistemological level), a conclusion that very likely the author himself does not believe. A famous quip by philosopher Bertrand Russell comes to mind: I wish that all philosophers who do not believe in the existence of walls would get into a car and drive straight into a wall (any would do) at a speed proportional to their skepticism concerning the existence of the wall itself. We would at least get rid of a lot of bad philosophers, or literary critics.



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