Answers to questions

In these responses to readers emails, Sardar talks about something he calls transmodernism. He explains it something like this.

Our limited logic has trapped us in a dualistic thinking - this or that, but not both, or bits of both. Thus, either we are for tradition or against it, for modernity or against it.

This is just plain wrong, for a start. Thinking logically doesn't mean you have to be entirely for or against any general concept. The logical approach would be to unpick the concepts of tradition and modernity for a subtler analysis. I think he may be confusing logic with atomism, but even then he's way off base.

Transmodernity goes "beyond" and "above" both modernity and tradition but incorporates the positive aspects of both, creating a new synthesis, he continues. The main problem with that sentence is the word new. I personally like to 'innovate' with transbreakfastism, incorporating the positive aspects of muesli and toast. No boring old 'either-or' literalism for me in the mornings. I wouldn't go around imagining that applying the Hegelian dialectic to a thesis and an antithesis was groundbreaking, though.

He then explains postmodernism, and its dislike of the notion of Truth, and points out that this is in conflict with traditional ideas such as faith. Again, I'm still waiting to be informed, but it certainly isn't false.

To 'synthesise' modernity with tradition, he offers - wait for it - chaos theory. Transmodernism is the transfer of modernity from the edge of chaos into a new order of society. As such, transmodernism and tradition are not two opposing worldviews but a new synthesis of both.

If this argument turned up in PZ Myers' Inbox, it would get published on the Pharyngula website under the heading I get email. Chaos theory isn't some kind of carte blanche for metaphorical vagueness. It's based on precise mathematics, in a determinist model. Nothing is more annoying to scientists than people who co-opt semi-digested portions of science and regurgitate them in areas they aren't in any way connected with.

If he simply means that he wants to take the good in tradition and retain it, while rejecting the bad, he should say so. He's grasping for something more though - complex systems at the edge of chaos have the ability to spontaneously self-organise themselves into a higher order; in other words the system "evolves" spontaneously into a new mode of existence, he says.

At least he put evolves in inverted commas. I think he's talking about emergence, the idea that complex systems develop properties which aren't encoded in any individual component. Flocks of birds, for instance, will show complex patterns even if the rules of behaviour any individual bird follows are simple.

But complex systems don't necessarily 'evolve' more levels of complexity. Some complex systems remain stable, some 'devolve' and some go extinct.

And some ideas just aren't synthesisable. For instance, the idea that everything is open to doubt is simply incompatible with the idea that some books are perfect beyond doubt. Hoping for a synthesis here is like putting a tarantula in a glass case with a tarantula hawk, and hoping for a transtarantula hawk. These ideas will inevitably display mutual hostility, until at some point one of them eats the other.

Of course, there are aspects of traditionalism, whatever that is, which are indeed valuable. Just not the idea of a perfect book.

You can see what he wants. He wants the two sides of his life to make sense together. He wants to be a British Muslim, and for eachh part of that phrase to make sense in the context of the other. I do sympathise. I live among British Muslims, and I see how hard it is for the kids. Mainly, though, I see how hard it is for the wives.

And you can't merge perfection. Perfection is an obsidian block, that free thought flows round without merging. Until it eventually wears it away.