A great series of posts from Jane Galt and Den Beste on why Liberal folks in the humanities and Classical Liberals in the biz / science / tech worlds have such a hard time communicating with each other:

Jane writes:

I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought. And the reaction I get when explaining, say, rent control -- that somehow I'm just being mean, and that if I wanted to, I could make it so that imposing rent control improved the housing stock rather than destroying it.  (vv - emphasis mine)

In the world view Jane lambasts, a given definition of reality is just an intellectual fad sweeping the hallowed, Ivy-lined halls.   It is infinitely malleable and if we all get together and think good thoughts, we can somehow escape the bounds of our current reality.   Note the specific emphasis on the word current -- it underlies the notion that structures we see in place today are accidental (a result of power structures, for ex.) rather than intrinsic (a result of directionally evolving influences like science & econ).  It reinforces the arbitrariness and equivalence of different / alternative realities.   

In all these cases, it's people's intentions which come first and the reality which follows rather than the other way around.  Listen closely to the rhetoric from these folks and you'll see this causal inversion everywhere.   Very Post Modern.

The alternate world view -- mine, Jane's, Den Beste's, and many others -- has been coined the tragic view.   The term intentionally borrows from the Greek & literary sense of the world -- it implies an unyielding destiny in the face of human intentions and an intrinsic suceptibility to flaws (especially self deception!) in the characters of men. 

This doesn't imply that we're simply rudderless ships tossed about by the waves.   In fact, it's likely this extreme, paper tiger representation of the tragic view that makes the PoMo elite react so emotionally to the entire world view.   "<stomping feet> But why don't you want to help me find a way to have rent control AND enough housing for everyone!"  The emotional futility and angst they feel when confronted by Jane is cuz they're positive that the only thing standing in the way of solving their problem is getting enough people - particularly ones with power - to agree to solve it.   And there's Jane front and center.   Let's not even get into George W. Bush.   

Like a good scientist, or engineer, we do have the ability to create our reality but this ability is bounded by our ability to commune with reality first.  And in that process we simultaneously reveal something about both our abilities and reality itself (I sound like one of my all-time fav books -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).   Sure we can build triumphs of the human spirit like Space Shuttles but there are a finite number of potential designs.   Den Beste chimes in:

Engineers cannot afford any kind of delusions; it costs too damned much. One of my readers referred once to my "ruthless engineer's pragmatism" and that's exactly right. We must be pragmatic, because any other view of the world leads to failure. So we have to be ruthless about pragmatism because we have no choice. That's why, for instance, we constantly check one another's work and are very free with criticism of it. It's why we don't mind (much) when someone shows that we're wrong.

But because we engineers (who are actually mostly responsible for the modern world as we know it, certainly far more so than experts in literature) are both "ruthlessly pragmatic" and strongly results oriented, it means that our world view is just about as different as it possibly can be from the fuzzy English-lit sensibility Jane describes. The only thing that matters to us is results. The only thing we reward is concrete achievement.