Postmodernism has taken some heat in recent years. Anyone with the capacity to say I don’t know who has taken a close look at it since it first emerged from mid-twentieth century France has considered it, at best, very silly, and some of them have bothered to say as much publicly.
Folks across the political and intellectual spectrum have sought to lay all sorts of crimes at the feet of this odd brand of gibberish. Everything from the rise of Donald Trump to the erosion of democratic order has been linked to the scourge of postmodern pedantry. I myself have joined in the abuse.
Practitioners have found their egos pricked. Understandably. For a variety of reasons, they have dedicated their lives to a field that relishes in obfuscation and obscurantism.
Anthropologist Stuart Chambers thinks the critics have got it all wrong. His defense of postmodernism is a well written piece, which eschews the tortuous linguistic gymnastics widely recognized as emblematic of postmodern thinking. Instead, Chambers makes his case in clear, simple prose. It inspired me to interrogate my own position. In clear, simple prose, Chambers makes a solid case for the idea that a lot of the criticism has been hyperbolic.
However, Chambers fundamentally mistakes the nature of the scientific process and, ultimately, fails to advance a convincing case that postmodernism is useful. While Lyotard and Barthes might not be among the four horsemen of the apocalypse, they have produced a body of work that can—relative to the basic aim of questioning assumptions about the world and finding out what is true—most charitably be described as worthless.
Objectivity, Crackpots and Science
Is science objective? The simplistic view is that science is the uncorrupted pursuit of unassailable truth. Most scientists, however, have spent enough time immersed in the messy, hardscrabble world of scientific practice to recognize that such a view is, at best, a caricature and, at worst, leads non-scientists to fundamentally mistake the nature and scope of the scientific enterprise.
Science is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Individual scientists are riddled with biases and blind spots. Their views are subtly influenced by their sociopolitical contexts. The scope of their thought and investigation is substantially curtailed by the limits of extant knowledge and technology, some of which might well be faulty. But science is also a structured in a way that imbues it with peculiar properties. It can produce mistakes, but, to a degree unmatched by any other discipline, it is uniquely designed to identify those mistakes. Though imperfect, science is—by a considerable margin—the most powerful knowledge-gaining mechanism humans have ever devised.
Many of those with an ideological axe to grind against science like to point out the historical flaws in scientific thought and the failings of individual scientists. Chambers bases the core of his critique on this approach. For him, the history of scientific racism belies any claim to objectivity. Blinkered by the prevailing wisdom of their times, plenty of nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientists saw race as part of the natural order—with white people at the top of the racial hierarchy.
But scientific racism was abandoned as scientists learned more about the world. The assumptions that inspired racist thought were undermined by improved understandings of human genetics and culture. Race science wasn’t cast into the colossal dustbin of failed ideas because critical studies scholars told scientists that they should question their assumptions—it was repudiated because the scientific enterprise itself revealed those assumptions to be untrue.
The same is true of Chambers’ other examples. Conversion therapy was tossed out—alongside that whole slippery mess folks call psychoanalysis—when it was recognized to be a pseudoscientific monstrosity. It is true that coalitions of doctors opposed physician-assisted suicide in Canada. Note here that, outside of research institutions, doctors are not engaged in the business of discovering or refining ideas about how the world works and are not, therefore, scientists. But, even if they were, that some individuals disguise their theological preferences as scientific reasoning is nothing new. This doesn’t undermine any claim to disciplinary objectivity. It simply restates the obvious: individual scientists are human beings and, like other human beings, they are sometimes wrong.
Why Science Is Special
Criticism of this sort is superficial. Chambers does not seem to know what science is or how it operates. This is understandable—few people do.
Most of us have been taught about something called the scientific method. It goes something like this: do a bit of research, form a hypothesis, perform an experiment, then check whether or not the results of your experiment match what you’d predict from your hypothesis. Someone who knows only this understands the scientific process roughly as well as someone who knows the basic elements of story—character, setting, plot, conflict—understands literature.
Science can never be fully understood without first recognizing that it is a process. Individual scientists participate in that process. They study for years until they are ready to keep up with the process as it currently stands. Then they hop in and try to contribute to science, perhaps by speeding things up or pointing them in a subtly different direction. Rarely, they’ll completely reorder an entire paradigm, sending their discipline in a completely new direction. Sometimes, they’ll even retard the process by stubbornly refusing to relinquish harebrained ideas. Whatever their contribution, all scientists eventually get old and retire or die, but the process continues, always seeking new evidence and rooting out conceptual errors. It never arrives at a final destination. Absolute certainty is nowhere to be found.
This is true even in the most robust sciences. In a mature science like physics, all theory is boiled down to the rigorous language of mathematics. That means that, when it is time to experiment, expectations can be expressed with extreme precision. To a degree, this makes the relationship between prediction and observation axiomatic: if a physicist has done her mathematics and calibrated her instruments correctly, a result can say something definitive about the theory it’s designed to interrogate: a result that deviates substantially from predicted values tells researchers that something is amiss. With highly corroborated and heavily mathematized theories, tolerances can get really tight, with p-values in the thousandth—or even billionth—decimal place.
But, even with a theory like general relativity, whose predictions have been tested and confirmed countless times, scientists still don’t claim to have discovered the final, unimpeachable description of space and time. In fact, most physicists will probably tell you that, at very vast or very tiny scales, the physics of general relativity is useless, if not entirely wrong. General relativity is one of the most successful theoretical frameworks ever devised, but it is not true beyond all doubt. There’s more reason to be confident in general relativity than there is to be confident about any of the comforting assumptions we use to get through the day—my spouse loves me, my job is secure, I’ll see my family again in the evening—but, in the strictest sense, it is not true beyond doubt.
All this uncertainty amplifies as you alter your level of description from that of the world of massive objects and elementary particles. At other levels of resolution—where things become looser, more dynamic and complicated—our picture of the world gets a whole lot fuzzier. By the time you get to the science of human behavior, things start getting incredibly messy.
For social and behavioral scientists, the sort of precision available to hard science seems almost unattainable. Provisionality here isn’t just a tacit understanding or a way of reconciling the tools we’ve got with the universe we inhabit. When it comes to questions about what people do and why they do it, even our best explanations are provisional. Psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists accept that the best that they can do will probably only result in a loose approximation of the full truth.
They forge ahead knowing that even their failures will be instructive. Science is all about asking are you sure? As David Hull argues—in line with earlier thinking by Imre Lakatos, Paul Thagard and Thomas Kuhn—the whole thing unfolds in a pseudo-Darwinian process. Scientists are embedded in incentive structures that reward them for poking holes in one another’s thinking, even if they are too biased to spot fatal weaknesses in their own output. Scientists work toward a shared goal—to build or discover increasingly faithful descriptions of and explanations for the world we inhabit—within a complex environment of competition and cooperation.
What Is Postmodernism Good For?
Science is an imperfect and sometimes clumsy process. Entire disciplines can be temporarily misled or even completely derailed by cultural biases that individual researchers fail to spot. Fortunately, the process of scientific discovery prevents erroneous thinking from remaining hidden for long. Misguided schools of thought are always eventually identified and discarded. Not because cultural critics tell scientists they are on the wrong track, but because the process of scientific discovery is remarkably adept at continually asking itself are you sure? and rooting out rotten ideas.
Nothing like this can take place in the world of postmodernism. Because postmodernists reject the idea of a final arbiter, such as a universally accessible and ultimately knowable reality against which claims can be evaluated, when postmodernists ask themselves are you sure? they can never really know the answer. Postmodernism lacks an anchor point for error correction. As a result, it is fundamentally illegitimate—and ultimately pointless—as an intellectual enterprise. It is, at best, a self-perpetuating indulgence, ostensibly doing the work scientific disciplines naturally do on their own.
But, while good scientists always strive to make their work both useful and intelligible to a world beyond their native disciplines, postmodernists and critical studies enthusiasts are perpetually engaged in a convoluted, circular performance for the like-minded. They play what appears to be an esoteric and sophisticated game, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be hide and seek—with a rulebook written in High Elvish and riddled with redundancies, contradictions and extraneous passages.
In repudiating the notion that truths are fixed for eternity, postmodernism denies itself the capacity to course correct. Its students may pay lip service to the crude notion that some truths are better than others. But, without recourse to something universal and knowable outside their individual and social contexts, they’ll never be able to tell which truths those are.
This is true even for conditional facts and the explanations they feed. Many realities are highly conditional. The idea of human rights, for example, is a relatively recent invention, which emerged in a specific cultural and historical context. That doesn’t mean that the value and consequences of the idea aren’t open to careful empirical evaluation, even if the idea itself might morph and expand over time. However, without recourse to something universal and knowable—something that can be accessed, shared and understood, despite the influence of cultural context and individual personality—such a reckoning becomes impossible.
Postmodernism has yet to state any epistemological footing or methodological toolkit that gives it special license as a way of asking, are you sure? There’s nothing to suggest it is a useful approach. Scores upon scores of essays have advanced the field no further than the principles articulated by René Descartes 380 years ago, in the opening chunk of his Meditations on First Philosophy. Postmodernism has nothing to offer that improves upon reflection, reason and dialogue—tools fully accessible to everyone, even if they’ve never cracked open a work by Foucault or Derrida or occupied a university position. Identifying what postmodernism is good for is incredibly tricky. From the outside, that entire school of thinkers looks like a bunch of naked emperors arguing over who has the best outfit.
Ways of Knowing Versus Ways of Confusing
Science recognizes that our understanding of truth is conditional, approximate and uncertain, but that it rests on the fundamental, commonsensical and thoroughly parsimonious contention that truths exist and that we can, with practice, use the data provided by our senses to tell when we’ve got a little closer to them. Biological evolution is not a conditional truth. Our conception of it may grow and change as we come to understand more about how it works, but the process itself is a non-negotiable fact of the natural universe. The same is true of fundamental physics. F=MA will remain a valid description of the way material objects behave, regardless of how society shifts and changes.
What we need to ask ourselves is not whether science is a perfectly objective machine for generating irrefutable truths. It isn’t. No scientist worthy of the name would argue otherwise. The real questions are: is science more objective than other methods?; is it better at describing and explaining observations than other methods?; and does it get closer to objective truth than other methods? The answer to all of the above is a resounding yes!
There’s no room for serious debate on this point. When we seek to treat or cure a disease, do we turn to the Pope? When we want to put a satellite into orbit or a human on the moon, do we consult critical studies professors? When we want to investigate the high energy world of elementary particles, do we pour over the wisdom of ancient mystics? When we want to develop alternatives to burning hydrocarbons for energy—or get a sense of what will happen if we don’t—do we give funding to postmodern scholars?
Individual scientists are not perfectly objective. They apply an often ad hoc, continuously evolving assemblage of imperfect methods to their pursuit of truth. But they are constantly asking themselves and each other, are you sure?—and the fundamental structure of the scientific process makes them better at both asking and answering that question than anyone else. Their enterprise demands humility before the unknown as its basic entry requirement. Scientists work at the frontiers of knowledge, knowing full well they may never make any headway.
As Richard Feynman put it, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts … the first principle is not to fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Science is about setting a community of very smart people the task of figuring out what is true and holding their feet to the fire. This last task is easier said than done, but it ultimately boils down to comparing scientific ideas to the observable world and asking whether or not they hold up. With science, we take a good look at how we think the world works and ask ourselves, are you sure?
The history of science has been one long series of debunking assumptions. We take many scientific truths for granted today, but very few of science’s robust explanations are intuitively obvious or self-evident. The earth is 4.6 billion years old. The landmasses we inhabit are cosmically ephemeral and constantly moving. All known life is derived from a single common ancestor, which lived more than 3.5 billion years ago. Time is not a physical constant, but speeds up or slows down according to the relative motion of observers. The universe is almost unfathomably ancient, and everything in it was once compressed into a single dense, hot singularity. Everything—including us—is made up of a modest handful of elementary fields and particles. The behavior of those particles is probabilistic. Objects we interact with on a daily basis are, like us, mostly empty space. All scientific progress has come from asking ourselves are you sure? and bravely admitting that no, we are not.
Science is not a perfect method for finding the truth. But it is the only method we have for getting anywhere close to it. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is just a way of getting paid to churn out badly written academic essays that no one who doesn’t also call herself a postmodernist will ever read.
48 comments
I cannot applaud this essay enough. I am sufficiently old to have seen first-hand how postmodernism has scourged the humanities and more specifically literary criticism over the last three decades and how shallow falacies have been used to give postmodernism an epistemological currency it never had in the first place. When I first read Sokal and Bricmont’s now famous Intellectual Impostures in the early 2000s, I ingenuously thought, ‘well, this is it for postmodernism. Now they will all run like hell to hide themselves in some remote hole in the tundra.’ Needless to say was I wrong… That after all these years a number of very basic things concerning science and how our knowledge works still need explaining is proof of how deeply postmodernism has damaged our universities and of how much the obvious needs repeating. So, once again, a great thank you to Zane Beal for this piece.
There are two parts to existence. The scientific realities and facts which tries to explain nature. Then there are the rules of ethics and morality invented by humans to allow for a society to flourish. These occupy two different realms. Both are needed. Science very humbly says it tries to explain the how, but not the ought. The ought, or our system of values, i.e. the second realm is COMPLETELY arbitrary. There are no rules descended from the heavens, and no rules in nature, that can tell us what the ought must be. The social value system is often arrived by consensus in liberal democratic society, and by force and the sword in authoritarian society, and by cheap theology and spiritualism in theocratic society. Either way there are no premises to the value system. Ultimately, any premise has to be arbitrary. Just like all the rules in a soccer game are arbitrary and do not descend from scientific or mathematical theories.
So now we have the postmodernists who have developed their own metaphysics and value system, and who wish to impose that by coercion and the sword. The recent unrest points to that. Postmodern philosophy is the foundation to critical theory. And critical theory has become the new religion. I disagree that postmodernism has had no impact. It certainly has been a godsend for the critical theorist, and all the “Studies” derivatives that has resulted in the mass indoctrination of naive and pseudo-educated youth.
Where is the society that decided it was OKAY to murder your fellow citizen, steal their shit, and rape their wife? If morality is “COMPLETELY arbitrary” as you so confidently assert, then surely some such society must have existed at some point in human history.
Interesting comments , some of which I had difficulty understanding because of my lack of education outside my narrow area of expertise which is in the area of offender prediction of recidivism, offender treatment and the effects of prison life often using meta-analysis. Given my limitations, I thought some of the commentary on science being useful because I am concerned with what works/useful to help agencies and individuals in need the raison d’etre of program evaluation..I also liked the comment that science plays the percentages.Indeed, you never can be absolutely sure but when the confidence intervals around a result from a set of experiments are very narrow then the chances of a result being overturned is very narrow.
Where a postmodern analysis would be valuable is to determine where results are inflated due to small sample sizes, sloppy methodology,fiddling with statistics/p-hacking, and the pernicious and powerful influence of personal factors ( who the funders of the research are, publication pressures) and outright faking .But, then this is already being done by non-postmodern scholars who have the science chops to detect these problems..
Postmodernism has provided a framework for those who think of themselves as liberal to turn against 1) freedom of speech and thought, 2) due process for the accused, 3) a longstanding moral objection to witch hunts and kangaroo courts, to name but a few. Leaving no one to credibly defend these values but libertarians (who for their part have provided a consistent and full throated defence of each of these, and I thank the for it).
I’d say that’s more than just a pointless indulgence.
I was trained in postmodern Cultural Anthropology. I have had to retrain myself after I left college. In my experience, postmodernism completely ruined Anthropology’s ability to produce any useful data or proportions about human nature, behavior, and culture. Anthropologists these days are more likely to write about the field’s place within an oppressive hierarchy than talk about culture from an observational, data-driven perspective. Social justice paradigms made everything worse. Anthropologists are scared to death of being accused of scientific racism, tokenization, cultural appropriation, or god-forbid one of an endless forms of microaggressions. I left college knowing more about postmodernism itself rather than knowing anything concrete about the human world or specific cultures. In fact, I was afraid to learn anything about a culture (yes, I know in postmodern language, “a” culture is oppressive and reductive) out of fear of being accused of racism. That’s just not a healthy place to be in for anyone or for society as a whole.
Your mention of “oppressive hierarchy” and “social justice paradigms” suggests that you are confusing postmodernism with poststructuralism. I can think of only two plausibly postmodernist works in anthropology: Taussig’s classic Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man — in particular Part 1 — and Tobin’s slightly tongue-in-cheek article “HRAF as Radical Text” from 1990. Apart from that I can think of none. Your examples illustrate anthropology’s interest poststructuralism, which is intended in part to expose the political and power relations behind observations, and which is quite different from postmodernism.
Science is a philosophy that posits that there is an external objective truth that can be modeled. The model allows description of that reality. Over time, the models have become increasingly precise, that is reproducible. A good model explains what we know and allows us to predict what we don’t know. A better model uses less assumptions and inputs. An excellent model resolves paradox: two things that are both true and yet cannot both be true given our level of understanding. Resolution of paradox yields a much deeper insight into reality. But these are models; they are intellectual constructs. By nature, they are not experiential. They are excellent at answering the question of how; they cannot answer the question of why. And to sentient beings, the why is more important than the how.
Science and technology have allowed many the luxury of asking the why. Having been raised in the secularism of the age they have rejected transcendent reality. And in rejection of transcendent reality, they have embraced a life without meaning. And in embracing a life without meaning, they find existence itself intolerable. It strikes me that they are narcissistic nihilists desperately desire to experience reality and in a sense challenge the Universe to answer this call. The more cynical post-modernist is the modern day Pontius Pilate asking “what is truth” and answering it with “political power comes from the end of gun”.
I like your post. The first paragraph is a fair summary of how you see science working, and one that’s consistent with how I see things. In the second paragraph, you and I diverge. I don’t reject the idea of a transcendent reality, I just don’t see any need for it. It’s not that I embrace a life without meaning, it’s that I don’t see how meaning applies. What does “meaning” mean in this context? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that and I’ve concluded that the only meaning that life has is the experience of that life. Enough of that.
Thanks.
“Time is not a physical constant, but speeds up or slows down according to the relative motion of observers.”
No. Observers see things progressing faster or slower through time according to their relative motion.
“The universe is almost unfathomably ancient, and everything in it was once compressed into a single dense, hot singularity.”
No. There is no evidence that variables such as density and temperature existed at the beginning of the universe.
“Objects we interact with on a daily basis are, like us, mostly empty space.”
No. Objects are filled with probability.
Inaccuracies such as yours are why people think science is a myth.
Physical processes occur at slower and slower rates as objects approach the speed of light.
13.8 billion years ago, everything in the universe was compressed into a hot, dense state. This is not a statement about the “beginning of the universe”.
Probability is framework for describing likelihoods. Object can behave probabilistically. They can’t be filled with probability.
Many people doubt the conclusions of science and the efficacy of the process. No one thinks science itself is a myth.
Please don’t respond. Read a book instead.
“Physical processes occur at slower and slower rates as objects approach the speed of light.”
That’s what I said. Processes slow down. That makes a lot more sense than “time” slowing down as you said in the OP.
“13.8 billion years ago, everything in the universe was compressed into a hot, dense state. This is not a statement about the “beginning of the universe”.”
It was in the OP, when you said “singularity”.
“Probability is framework for describing likelihoods. Object can behave probabilistically. They can’t be filled with probability.”
A photo of an array of atoms shows them blurred throughout the region, because of the probability of detecting them at various positions.
“Many people doubt the conclusions of science and the efficacy of the process. No one thinks science itself is a myth.”
The White House is full of people who think it is. Or at least claim to.
“Please don’t respond. Read a book instead.”
You’re trying to intimidate me?
I found this a bit of a straw man attack on academic blowhards, that can posit their verbiage because they have no real questions to ask that would not disturb their coteries of irrelevance. And real life need not impinge on their empty culture codes of insignificance.
Post Modernism and it’s equally sterile partner Scientism , have no answers to the big questions of truth, meaning, purpose and epistemic importance that concern all of us.
If climate change exists, then why does Obama get money to buy a beach house? If it were true, he’d not get mortgages or insurance surely?
If Covid 19 is a danger if a hairdresser wants to open, but is perfectly safe if you want to march on a suitably approved cause?
These are philosophical questions that real people ask, but you empty vessels would never dare ask.
Einstein did say that religion without science is lame, science without religion is blind .
You mention truths, but not Truth, or even veracity
With no origin , no personal significance to life, and no consequences for your life until destiny calls? You’re just missing the point
That this world is known, knowable. Reasoned and reasonable. And without the Judeo- Christian heritage that Newton etc built on? Well, all you’ve got is Branson , Musk and Gates…..
“If climate change exists, then why does Obama get money to buy a beach house?”
Why not? Nobody should be required to give up their lifestyle to get permission to speak the truth. It would be a good question to ask why Obama didn’t ban oil wells, but a beach house is irrelevant.
“If Covid 19 is a danger if a hairdresser wants to open, but is perfectly safe if you want to march on a suitably approved cause?”
Whoever said it’s safe? It’s a choice between being allowed to stay in the protest and getting an illness that may have few if any symptoms and that you may be able to recover from, or getting killed or permanently brutally wounded by someone trying to make you leave.
“With no origin , no personal significance to life, and no consequences for your life until destiny calls?”
There’s plenty known about the origins of the world, and plenty of significant destinies to embark on. If you don’t like them, too bad.
“That this world is known, knowable. Reasoned and reasonable.”
Knowable, but not reasonable. Reason is a human invention.
“And without the Judeo- Christian heritage that Newton etc built on?”
They built on calculus, which was invented by Gurus in India. It has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian history.
Post Modernism and it’s equally sterile partner Scientism , have no answers to the big questions of truth, meaning, purpose and epistemic importance that concern all of us.
I do agree with this.
If climate change exists, then why does Obama get money to buy a beach house? If it were true, he’d not get mortgages or insurance surely?
Hypocrisy by individuals can explain this behavior. Wealthy liberals do not practice what they preach and find ways to compartmentalise. But we all compartmentalise for something. It’s human nature.
If Covid 19 is a danger if a hairdresser wants to open, but is perfectly safe if you want to march on a suitably approved cause?
Political blindspots explain this. And also nobody told the protestors it was safe. They decided that on their own. the COVID-19 precautions (which vary by state) have always remained the same. People just choose not to listen to them when it suits their agenda. We all do this. So if you’re comparing hair salons and protests, make sure the comparison is within a region that has the same rules. if you’re comparing one state that doesn’t care, to a state with mandatory business closures, then you’re being irrational.
These are philosophical questions that real people ask, but you empty vessels would never dare ask.
Wrong. I ask these questions a lot. But you might be right that most scientists (and more often science journalists) are blind to their own authoritarian undertones and don’t realize the messages they send to people through their views on the social implications of the work they do.
I’m not arguing with you necessarily. I see your perspective. I’m just adding information to it. It’s okay if you do not like what I’m saying though. It’s your life.
“the COVID-19 precautions (which vary by state) have always remained the same. ”
I did not type that very clearly and shouldn’t have hit send without proofreading. I am sorry. I meant The actual COVID-19 rules for businesses and the public vary by state, but the overall recommendations (which are not rules and are based on the obvious realities of how infectious diseases spread, not on politics) have remained the same.
I enjoyed both your article and the Chamber’s article you linked to. I found Chamber’s views more convincing – more nuanced and open. Or is that him being post-modern? Yours, on the other hand, was a polemic. As you described the march of science, I kept hearing the inspiring music rising in the background as you described the noble march of science. Maybe something by John Williams.
Scientific racism did not end because of dedicated scientists fighting against the scourge of prejudice. It ended, to the extent it did, because of changes in society that changed underlying assumptions. Is that a post-modern interpretation? I must admit the whole concept has always been confusing to me.
I’m sorry if I am putting words in your mouth, but science does not have a privileged connection to truth. It is valuable, not because it is true, but because it is useful. I have no trouble agreeing that it is very useful. I’m an engineer. Are there post-modern engineer’s? We care about what works, if I may generalize, not what is true. Science works – Sometimes? Often? Always? Usually? I think that this kind of attitude towards science and truth is more clear-eyed and respectful of human knowledge and understanding than the rigid reductionism and so-called objectivity of many really smart, competent, successful scientists.
Thanks for the chance to think about these things again.
T. Clarke I’m interested to know your background – you have an unusual opinion and I’m wondering the roots of it?
Why is science useful? Because there is an objective world that all scientists refer to when advancing ideas. If there wasn’t – science would be as useful as postmodernism.
This is my response to Bighead, if I may be some familiar.
I’m from science – ever since I was a little kid. I remember when I first grasped the idea of materialism and determinism, probably when I was 12 or 13, I thought I had reached the bottom of the whole thing. It seemed so self-evident. I also remember when I was 17 and learned about the dual nature of light. Why? Why? Why? Ah hah! It’s just because!
My father was an engineer. My grand-father was an engineer. My brothers are both engineers. I was born to be an engineer. Engineers care about what works, not so much what is true. I guess that’s pragmatism. Truth is a tool, at least in a practical, scientific viewpoint.
Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but reading the Tao Te Ching had a big effect on me. Intellectually, I think it compliments science better than a more materialistic, reductionistic viewpoint.
This way of thinking is not from outer space and it’s not some sort of peace and light mumbo jumbo. It’s also not an unusual way of thinking, although it’s not so common with scientists, especially physics and other hard scientists.
T. Clark – no ‘e’ I now notice. Interesting to hear your background and the evolution of your views. I come from a very “science-y” family as well – both parents physics and math teachers, older brothers all in hard sciences with PhD’s. I did a masters in physics before diverting into medicine.
I see your points, and agree that scientific reductionism hits limits of human understanding. Theodore Dalrymple does a wonderful job of talking about this. I just finished his “Admirable Evasions” book which was quite interesting.
That said, I don’t think that truth is a reason to endorse post-modernism. Science is a basis for rational argumentation, and as long as it’s used to argue things that are arguable by science (eg: “boys have much different testosterone levels than girls, which makes them physically different, which means we should have separate women’s and men’s sports”) then I think science, and not post-modern argumentation (eg: “male and female are social constructs, gender is a spectrum, and people should be able to choose their gender for any purpose including sport, and if you don’t agree it’s just because you don’t understand things as well as me and are locked in your outdated trans-exclusive scientific way of thinking”).
When science wanders out of its lane (eg: “I can prove there is no god, or higher power, and if you think otherwise it’s just because you don’t understand things as well as me and are locked in your outdated spiritual-religious way of thinking”) then it starts to suck and get in the way of human flourishing. Can you tell I’m not a big Hitchens/Dawkins fan? 🙂
Post-modernism offers nothing to human society as it is, at its very base, unarguable and unprovable. There is a Kafka-trap where if you argue with it, it proves you are less intelligent and don’t understand the arguments. It’s a dead end from the start for discussing anything. Science is a great “medium” or framework for discussing how an iPhone works, why boats float, why planets circle stars, or why a bullet really hurts.
The post-modernists in my university in Canada have made it clear to me that my belief that there is no longer SYSTEMIC racism here is only based on my racism: because I fail to see racism it proves I’m racist. In the words of Douglas Murray I find this “deranging”.
Thanks for making me think, as did the article.
T. Clarke, You’re characterization of my views strongly suggests you didn’t actually read what I wrote. Or, if you did, you misunderstood it.
With regard to your view that science doesn’t have a privileged connection to the truth, I suspect our difference of opinion there might boil down to a disconnect over what we think it means for a claim to be true.
I agree with your claim that that science is valuable because it is useful, but go a bit further: science is useful because it is true, or, to put it in any way that more closely aligns with my actual views, science is useful because it is better at developing descriptions of and explanations for phenomena, with higher fidelity to objective reality, than any other method.
Bighead and Peter Blaney:
I feel like I am hijacking this thread and taking it off in a direction that wasn’t intended. I won’t take it any farther.
Just a quick response to Peter – The existence of objective reality is a metaphysical assumption. No, I don’t mean related to God. I mean an underlying assumption about the nature of reality. It is not needed in order for science to be useful and productive.
My argument (not really an argument because I think you would agree) that science objectively IS useful and productive, at least to some extent. It’s hard to argue with that given the food we eat, water we drink, cars we drive, roads we drive them on, and even the computers we are typing this on are products of that. On the other hand, post-modernism serves no useful purpose I can see, other than sowing the seeds of resentment and division in society.
The “is there an objective reality” discussion is a different one and I agree it’s beyond the scope of this thread.
Zane – I still didn’t believe it was real but through the wonders of google I found it. All I can say is oh… my… god. My wife is a brilliant writer and came in the top 1%-ile in reading comprehension on her MCATs (she has been a psychiatrist for 18 years). She cannot make heads or tails of it. It is a word-salad (a great psychiatric term that describes the speech of people with certain mental disorders – in this case the mental disorder of post-modernism)
Zane – sorry, I didn’t see your post until I sent out my last one. I read your whole article. Perhaps I did misunderstand.
See my response to Peter Blaney on objective reality.
T Clark — I agree, the existence of an objective reality is a metaphysical assumption. It is not, however, unmotivated. It is—to the extant of my limited knowledge—the most parsimonious and consistent way of explaining much of what we call human experience, along with the usefulness of things like science.
Bighead, these claims do have a scientific basis. They only seem not to because the postmodernists have rephrased them to make them sound ridiculous. It’s the same tactic that creationists use when they rephrase evolution.
Yeah, collin237, demagogues love to straw-man their foes, often with subtle equivocations (e.g., as if science *purports* to bring utopia).
That “race science” or “scientific socialism” hijack the label “science”, is no more the fault of science, than that the history of Communism should lead us to quake in our boots, whenever an outfit emerges that could reasonably be called a “commune”.
Yeah, Bighead, science does what it *purports* to (in “its lane”), better than any alternative known alternative.
So what, if it doesn’t get us to Ultimate Objectivity, as was sought by Plato, the Scholastics, etc.?
What good do PostMods do, in any such regard, that wasn’t done for us by Hume centuries ago?
Yeah, I can’t (as per Hume’s famous example) PROVE that Queen Liz I won’t rise from the dead, or that she won’t then cast spells upon us, or send us to the eternal Lake of Fire.
And, I can’t prove, that every millennium (or some such), the Gods don’t take a vote, on whether they’ll repeal F = MA.
I’ll just have to make do, playing the percentages as I understand them, and ignoring the postMods’ sophistic demagoguery.
If memory serves, most postMods rarely deign to actually address the arguments of their critics, other than Lacan, who was at times able to avoid a straw-man orgy.
From what I can tell, this straw-man tendency has picked up much speed, since Lacan’s death.
A bridge is useful, if the bridge doesn’t comply with basic laws of physics (truth/objectivity) its going to collapse. A ‘post modern engineer’ sounds like the start of a joke.
Great article. Your thesis also has empirical support in both the SOKAL and “new” SOKAL affairs. Without a reference point, “peer review” is merely the borrowing of a scientific term to dress the PoMo pseudo-sciences in veneer of credibility.
I agree with other comments (above) that you may be underestimating the “scourge” part – a glance at the world today is all it takes. The competing narratives of legacy media which override journalistic neutrality; the WHO and CDC issuing conflicting statements re: COVID; the oversimplification of FBI crime statistics to draw opposite conclusions about police violence against black Americans — though there is a “truth” to be found at the core of all of these questions, average people no longer trust politicians, the media, scientists, or almost any profession to tell the truth. How many times have 3244 current / former “subject matter experts” co-signed a letter to denounce a position only to have 758 current / former “other experts of the same subject” rejoin with their own letter? Normal people don’t have time to become subject matter experts in everything, so “truth” is inaccessible and it is easier to believe nothing.
If post-modernism can be said to have had any use, it is in having perfected the Science of propaganda. So perhaps both useful and a scourge.
“Postmodernism, on the other hand, is just a way of getting paid to churn out badly written academic essays that no one who doesn’t also call herself a postmodernist will ever read.”
As an anthropologist you are certainly familiar with the differences between Malinowski’s work in the Trobriands and Annette Weiner’s work in the same communities on Kiriwina.
I can’t really comment on the extent to which postmodernism can be considered a scourge in the realm of science, but once you start to consider its influence on post colonial theory, critical race theory, privilege theory, cultural appropriation theory, intersectionality, white fragility theory etc all of whom have embrace the rejection of truth, universal values and the potential for individual human agency, it’s pretty obviously a scourge.
I do find it deeply depressing that so many academic’s careers have been completely derailed and wasted on pointless errands because, for reasons that will remain forever lost to someone like me, they found some breed of postmodern thought attractive.
As far as its effect on society at large, I think postmodernism’ effects are relatively modest. Associated ideas appear more prevalent than they really are because a lot of journalistic outlets and politicians can’t tell the difference between Twitter and the world at large.
I honestly can’t tell if this is satire or not. Are you really saying that fields like postcolonialism are a bad thing? And that postmodernism, the philosophy which puts individual experience above grand narratives, rejects the potential for individual agency?
“I honestly can’t tell if this is satire or not. Are you really saying that fields like postcolonialism are a bad thing? And that postmodernism, the philosophy which puts individual experience above grand narratives, rejects the potential for individual agency?“
Yes, I’m saying post colonialism is a bad thing. What isn’t impenetrable jargon largely relies on cherry picking from history to create a narrative. Politically it’s effect has been pernicious. That supporters love to conflate it with anti-colonialism hasn’t helped.
Given one of the grand theories rejected is the idea of a common humanity and the idea of self as rational moral agent that isn’t merely conditional on culture, history and power…yeah.
Anyway, your argument needs to be with proponents of Various critical theories who routinely dismiss the importance of individual human agency as opposed to seeing everything as ‘structural’.
“As far as its effect on society at large, I think postmodernism’ effects are relatively modest. Associated ideas appear more prevalent than they really are because a lot of journalistic outlets and politicians can’t tell the difference between Twitter and the world at large.”
That school children are going to be indoctrinated with the ideas of the 1619 project who’s ideological basis clearly traces back through a number of academic theories to roots in post modernism & post structuralism would suggest otherwise, as would I imagine anyone who’s been forced at point of excommunication from the ranks of decent folk to undergo implicit bias training.
PS: although I find it surprising that you don’t find this type of writing useful. (I am not making this up – it’s a real quote)
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. Judith Butler
In reference to the critical studies/postmodern streak that runs through a lot of anthropology, I once jokingly told a friend it was a great career choice because you could get paid to churn out bullshit and there was no good way for anyone to call you on it. Apparently that friend took it as career advice, because they went on to pursue a PhD on the following inscrutable nonsense:
“A genealogy of us-based educational inclusions, segregations, and exclusions, specifically in the context of nation-building and early national compulsory schooling – this project refuses the reaction and reiteration of reform as solutions/alleviations or even radical oppositions to normative conceptions of violence in schools. Instead, this thesis considers schooling as violence. With a commitment to abolition with no end, [this person] is neither seeking nor offering a way out of this violence in order to stay with violence to imagine a thinking and being otherwise, including recognizing those ways that are already here.”
Zane – that is a real quotation? Where did you get it from?
In reference to the cultural studies/postmodern streak that runs through a lot of anthropology, I once jokingly told a friend it was a great career choice because you could get paid to churn out ridiculous nonsense and no one could really call you on it. Apparently that friend took it as career advice. They went on to pursue a PhD in education, focused on the following:
“A genealogy of us-based educational inclusions, segregations, and exclusions, specifically in the context of nation-building and early national compulsory schooling—this project refuses the reaction and reiteration of reform as solutions/alleviations or even radical oppositions to normative conceptions of violence in schools. Instead, this thesis considers schooling as violence. With a commitment to abolition with no end, [this person] is neither seeks nor offers a way out of this violence in order to stay with violence to imagine a thinking and being otherwise, including recognizing those ways that are already here.”
Chris, that quotation is very much real. It comes from my friend’s description of his work on the department website at the university where he’s studying. I don’t feel comfortable calling the fellow out directly.
Regarding Zane’s quote from his Anthropologist friend: the bulk of my undergraduate degree in Anthropology consisted of this nonsense. Looking back, it is really disappointing to me because I didn’t actually learn anything. Postmodernism’s denial of some objective truth is ridiculous. Plus, no employer could read my writing for a while. It is academic narcissism at its worst.
This is why I’m actually reverting back to original studies and ethnographies in Anthropology that are more descriptive and less esoteric, because I actually learn something about the world I’m living in rather than constantly being reminded there is no such thing as the truth over and over again. I find the works of earlier Anthropologists much easier to read and digest and most importantly informative. I have to search far and wide through the contemporary literature to find anything remotely comprehensive or useful.
It truly is very disappointing.
Great article. Thanks so much for taking the time to write it. I found it objective while managing to be respectful, a balance I rarely achieve when talking about postmodernism. I find that the holier-than-thouness of many of a postmodern bent that I have met makes it hard for me to critique them in a reasonable fashion. Thanks for doing it for me!
Great article. It does an excellent job to contrast the epistemic claims (and limitations) of science vs. postmodernism.
To the extent that these thinkers have been influence to the theories that obfuscate the scientific method, its application, and how many and who engage with it, it may very well be considered a scourge.
Postmodern lenses coax our moral, and tribalistic nature, rally support for narratives with both clear and unclear interests, and exploit the associated pitfalls of our psychology that ultimately derail us from the track that is demonstrably superior in the way of discovery.
I hold a harder stance and don’t feel particularly unjustified in doing so seeing the way moral righteousness, condemnation, and repentance stifle inquiry today.
Look at Nature mag, the whole framing and justification for #ShutDownSTEM, the loss of funding, careers etc. in our institutes of higher learning for not capitulating to the ever expanding tenants of woke religiosity.
This article would’ve been timelier at the turn of the century perhaps. Not in 2020
That’s not postmodernism. That’s good-old-fashioned liberal arts. The contents of morality have changed, but the basic concept that scientists are expected to be moral has been around for centuries.
And #ShutDownSTEM was only one day, June 10. It was already over when you wrote your post!