I have often argued with my friends trained in the humanities that I think Postmodernism is a crappy bullshit theory and a stupid way of looking at reality, for they often confuse between opinion and fact. It looks like I am not the only one to feel this way. This is an interesting article I found online here, which summarizes my feelings quite well.
===============================================Intellectual adolescence
FROM CYNICISM TO POSTMODERNISM | Contrarianism has a proud intellectual heritage, but in its postmodern flowering it merely became juvenile, complacently smashing up the entire interlocking crossword puzzle of human knowledge.
Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
Editors, www.butterfliesandwheels.com, and authors of Why Truth Matters (2006).
The very name “postmodernism” seems designed to stake out the territory of the latest hottest thing, the farthest point on the chart plus one. But there is a sense in which postmodernism seems not novel at all but just another example in a recurring pattern that goes back as far as we can squint. Postmodernism is notoriously elusive of definition, but if we take it to include, at a minimum, a suspicion of grand narratives, an urge to problematise everything (especially whatever seems least problematic), anti-foundationalism or relativism in knowledge as well as ethics, and a “playful” or “ironic” view of truth, then history presents a good many people who resemble postmodernists and schools of thought that resemble postmodernism.
There have always been people who look at the world and social arrangements, and decide to do everything by contraries. There have also always been people with a more nuanced view of the matter, but who have been represented by others as doing everything by contraries. Socrates the ironist was portrayed by Aristophanes as just such a philosophical over-turner of apple carts, one who inspired sons to rebel against their fathers, contradicting their every word and challenging conventional wisdom to the point of absurdity. Aristophanes’ Socrates in The Clouds was a caricature (and there is a story that Socrates was in the audience and laughed uproariously), but the caricature may have influenced the capital charges against Socrates that he did not believe in the gods that Athens believed in, but introduced new gods, and that he corrupted the youth of the city.
The outcome was bad for Socrates’ immediate well-being, but it probably (with Plato’s help) did a lot for his long-term fame. Doing things by contraries often works that way. It can be a serious effort to look behind appearances and think critically about custom and habit, and it can also be a way to get attention, whether admiring or disdainful.
The 6th century BC Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama also, according to the legend, did things by contraries, as did other ascetics and wandering sages throughout history, right up to Thoreau and Gandhi and Ted Kaczynski. Since most people want comfort and prosperity and (if possible) luxury, those who voluntarily turn their backs on that sort of life and choose poverty and discomfort are necessarily being contrarian. Diogenes the cynic, whom Plato called Socrates run mad, was another such: he held that the distinction between virtue and vice was the only one that mattered and that other conventional distinctions (public and private, raw and cooked, yours and mine) were worthless—in other words, he “problematised binary distinctions.”
Cynicism became a widespread movement or school of thought in the Hellenistic world. One New Testament scholar argues that Jesus was a home-grown Cynic and that many of the sayings that strike Christians as novel and unique are in fact neither, but rather good conventional cynicism: they generally amount to doing or advocating doing the opposite of the (socially, as opposed to cynically) conventional thing. Turning the other cheek, giving the shirt as well as the cloak, talking to a woman from Samaria, healing on the Sabbath, letting the dead bury the dead, rejecting the stoning of a woman taken in adultery—they’re all contraries.
HOWEVER, DOING things by contraries is an easier matter in pre-industrial societies than it is in modern (or postmodern) ones, in which economic and vocational complexity are associated with myriad shifting overlapping groups and micro-cultures, with varying norms and expectations. What is contrarianism in one context may be the most slavish conformity in another. At a family gathering or high school reunion or neighbourhood potluck, the post-colonialist sex-positive queer theoretical opinions may be thrillingly exotic, but back at the coal face, at department meetings or when teaching liminality and hybridity 101, they are not all that startling.
In other words, to the extent that the underlying project is that of being the one radical who will never be out-radicalled, of being the new Nietzsche or Freud by finding previously unproblematised power structures to problematise, then… the task can be a daunting one. It’s late in the game. The players have been here for a long time, they’ve gone over the ground again and again, they’ve turned up everything—all the gold and emeralds, even the coal and limestone and gravel, were dug up and carted off long ago. However long one looks, however patiently one digs and scratches and turns over, there may simply be nothing left to find. A nondescript bit of stone or scrap of bark isn’t going to do much good. The field is just played out.
The only recourse left seems to be to problematise the field itself. What is the field then? What is the ground the problematisers stand on? Knowledge itself, reality itself, truth itself; science and reason, the foundations of modern knowledge and practice. It becomes necessary to question or deconstruct or deny not just the criteria for science and reason, but science and reason themselves, as in this article from 2001:
This paper offers a postmodern “deconstruction” of basic physical theory, which is the cause and effect of classical physics specified by Newton’s laws of motion...This deconstruction of “Newtonian text,” which demonstrates that the presumed causality of external forces in classical physics indeed is a social construct (as postmodern sociology claims all theory to be), refutes the presupposition of natural science about the objectivist foundations of modern scientific discourse.1
An article on evidence-based medicine published in 2006 offers some even stronger claims:
Within the healthcare disciplines, a powerful evidence-based discourse has produced a plethora of correlates, such as specialised journals and best practice guidelines...Unmasking the hidden politics of evidence-based discourse is paramount, and it is this task that forms the basis of our critique...[T]he objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.2
This article was sharply criticised by the Guardian science columnist Ben Goldacre, among others, and the International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare published a reply to the criticisms which began with this explanation of postmodernism:
The postmodernist thinking that has characterised a number of academic disciplines in the last two or so decades of the 20th century—and is still alive and well in some quarters—has played an important role in creating new ways of developing ideas in the arts, science and culture. The relativism on which it is founded, and the “liberation” from sacred cows it seeks, have a place in healthcare and health science. At its simplest…postmodernism is a response to modernity—the period where science was trusted and represented progress—and essentially focuses on questioning the centrality of both science and established canons, disciplines and institutions to achieving progress. The nature of “truth” is a recurring concern to postmodernists, who generally purport that there are no truths but multiple realities and that understandings of the human condition are dynamic and diverse. The notion that no one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced) is a tenet of postmodernist critique and analysis.3
It is easy to find instances of this kind of theoretical and epistemological egalitarianism. In anthropology, for example, approaches that are broadly postmodern are common, and are associated with a general move against what are seen as the totalising and oppressive aspects of Western science. Thus, Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross point out that many books have been published within the discipline, in which anthropology is seen
to facilitate colonialism and other repressive relationships…to contribute to the abuse of indigenous peoples by romanticised descriptions of their culture that failed to take account of their threatened status, and to permit racially and culturally alien outsiders to produce and market false, misleading, and even exploitative caricatures of other societies.4
Postmodernism provides an escape from anthropology’s supposedly reactionary heart. Since postmodernists can claim, variously, that there are multiple realities (all of them socially constructed); that truth-claims are necessarily embedded in particular language-games or discourses or power relations; that to suppose that language refers to the world at all is to be committed to a naïve “metaphysics of presence”; so it is possible simply to assert that anthropology must cast off its imperialist past, reject the scientific paradigm, and reinvent itself as a morally engaged discipline.
This might sound like hyperbole, but it is not. Louise Lamphere, for example, a past president of the American Anthropological Association, claims that there is an “urgent need” for an “engaged anthropology,” within which moral commitment trumps impersonal scientific concern, and where the communities that anthropologists work with are treated as equal partners in the research process.
There are a host of critical social issues that anthropologists are currently researching where our qualitative methodologies, in-depth field research, and knowledge of local languages and cultures gives us vital insights into the sources of social problems and also of potential remedies for some very pressing societal dilemmas.5
Similarly, Nancy Sheper-Hughes claims that a critical anthropology will “assert the subjectivity of knowable phenomena” and propose “reflection as a valid category and method of discovery” (author’s italics). Moreover, she argues that anthropologists should become “negative” workers, practice “barefoot anthropology,” and “disrupt expected academic roles and statuses.”6
This desire among anthropologists to radicalise their subject, and to reject the hegemony of scientific orthodoxy, can lead them to articulate positions that are highly counterintuitive. Frederique Apffel Marglin, for example, in her essay “Smallpox in Two Cultures,” writes about the campaign by colonial administrators in the 19th century and the Indian government in the 1970s to vaccinate the Indian people against smallpox. She does not stop at making the reasonable point that colonial officials and the Indian government were tactless in telling those who resisted vaccination that they were superstitious and irrational. Her aim is larger: “to challenge science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge which renders obsolete more traditional systems of thought.”
She mounts her challenge by problematising the binary opposition that Western medicine invokes—not unreasonably, one might think—between disease and health, death and life, and she contrasts it unfavourably with the traditional Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox.
In absolutely negativising disease, suffering and death, in opposing these to health and life in a mutually exclusive manner, the scientific medical system of knowledge can separate in individuals and in populations what is absolutely bad, the enemy to be eradicated, from what is good, health and life. In the process it can and does objectify people with all the repressive political possibilities that objectification opens.7
There is something rather stunning about a level of science-phobia that sees “negativising” disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. It is extraordinary that Marglin, even for a moment, countenances the possibility that human suffering might be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren't for the intervention of an oppressive system of Western medicine.
Marglin’s ruminations have had little, if any, impact on programmes of vaccination. Indeed, it was precisely such a concerted programme that eradicated smallpox, long considered to be the worst of the infectious diseases, from the world in the late 1970s. However, there are other cases where this kind of epistemic relativism and scepticism about the possibility of truth has had more sinister effects.
For one thing, there is pervasive confusion about what knowledge is; about what the standards of justification are, what evidence is valid and what is not, why it matters, and similar very basic issues. At a time when scientific literacy is of ever-increasing importance, a sophisticatedly ironic view of science and reason is not useful. It helps foster the endemic journalistic idea that for every “issue” there are precisely two sides and that both must be heard, which results in fake “controversies” in which one side has all the evidence and the other side has mere assertion, yet the putative controversy runs and runs.
There was for instance the pseudo-scandal in the UK about the MMR vaccine and its alleged implication in causing autism. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a research scientist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a paper showing that he had found traces of the measles virus in the intestines of twelve children with autism. He suggested that the MMR vaccine was dangerous, but he had no real evidence for the suggestion; nevertheless there was a panic about the MMR, a drop in vaccination rates, and an increase in measles—a dangerous disease.
Public scientific literacy is further threatened, especially in the US, by demands from some religious groups that schools teach intelligent design in addition to or instead of evolutionary biology. There is an ever-growing mountain of evidence in support of the latter and none in support of the former, yet the news media and even reputable publishers such as Cambridge University Press continue to treat the matter as a genuine controversy and the proponents of ID as epistemically respectable parties to a debate.
Another claim which has worked its way into the broader culture is that Einstein’s wife Mileva Marić was his unacknowledged collaborator for much of the most productive part of his career. There is essentially no evidence for this claim (nothing more than Einstein’s use of the word “our” in connection with his work in a few of his letters to Marić), as the physicist Allen Esterson has shown in great detail,8 yet advocates for Marić’s role, again, claim parity with historians of science and Einstein scholars unimpressed by speculation about what Marić might have done. The US public broadcaster PBS, part of whose mission is to be an educational service, features a documentary about Marić that Esterson has shown to be riddled with errors.9
Just two weeks ago, another television documentary made claims that DNA evidence and statistics show that a tomb in Jerusalem is that of “Jesus’s family.” Again, there is no real evidence;10 again, the claim is an absurd one that nevertheless gets a great deal of media and public attention, most of it all too serious and credulous.
The Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt noted a similar confusion last year, after the editors of the Daily Northwestern decided to run a column by electrical engineering professor and Holocaust denier Arthur Butz “‘in order,” they said, “to “facilitate a more educated debate over Butz’s beliefs.’”
That is akin to facilitating a debate between flat earthers and scientists or between people who said there was no slavery and historians of slavery. Butz’s beliefs are documented lies. Don’t take my word on it. Take that of the Royal High Court of Justice and two different Courts of Appeal.
Lipstadt sums up:
Let the likes of Butz and Irving go on talking to neo-Nazis and other deniers. That is their right. Neither the Daily nor any other paper has an obligation to publish such lies.11
But one of the consequences of epistemological relativism is such widespread confusion about what constitutes knowledge or a legitimate claim to knowledge, and what does not. Knowledge becomes confused with fairness, and fairness becomes the idea that both sides deserve a hearing, and not just a hearing but active publicity.
THE IMPULSE which leads postmodernists, and others, to valorise epistemological relativism is easy to understand. It is rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism. It is bad enough that Western countries grow fat on the poverty of everyone else; it simply cannot be tolerated that their scientists, philosophers, and centres of learning also determine what methods and tools should be considered the best for finding out about the world. After all, to allow that this was true would be to add epistemic power—the power to determine what counts as knowledge—to the economic, political and military power that Western countries already possess. The solution then is simply to privilege the knowledge claims of people who are in various ways marginalised and oppressed. After all, if nothing else, it is surely obvious that they will know more about their own situation than representatives of the forces that oppress them.
The trouble is, though, that it isn’t obvious. There is no reason to suppose that simply because people are downtrodden they will possess true beliefs about their situation and the world that has conspired to put them in it. Smallpox is a virus: the fact that some people consider it to be associated with a goddess doesn’t make it any less a virus. Similarly, an electrical storm is a natural weather phenomenon; the fact that some people have believed it to be a sign of the wrath of the gods, doesn’t make it any less a natural weather phenomenon. Put simply, the world has a reality that is independent of the claims that people make of it. Being oppressed and marginalised doesn’t automatically put people in a good position to get a grasp on it.
OF COURSE, the likely response to this from any halfway sophisticated postmodernist will simply be to deny that there is this kind of a mind-independent reality. Consider, for example, the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour. In his book, Pandora’s Hope, he seems to argue—though much of his prose is deliberately opaque—that the objects of scientific knowledge exist only to the extent that they are articulated through the manifold mediations which constitute scientific practice. Thus, for instance, he claims that the proposition “It refers to something there” indicates the safety, fluidity, traceability, and stability of a transverse series of aligned intermediaries, not an impossible correspondence between two far-apart vertical domains.12
Needless to say, it is supposed that this kind of contrarian thinking has a number of radical implications. Latour insists, for example, that existence is not an all or nothing property. Rather, an entity gains in reality the more it is associated with other entities which in their turn collaborate with it. Moreover, we should never say “‘it exists’ or ‘it does not exist’”13 (unless, it seems, we’re Bruno Latour, answering a question posed in our own book a few pages earlier about whether ferments existed before Pasteur made them up; then we can reply: “‘No, they did not exist before he came along’—an answer that is obvious, natural, and even, as I will show, commonsensical!”).14
Latour’s general way of proceeding is to employ an absurdly ornate and rhetorical writing style in order to muddy a number of conceptual waters, presumably with the hope that in this way the banal will be rendered profound. Particularly, he likes to blur the distinction between our knowledge of objects and the objects themselves (what Susan Haack calls “the passes-for fallacy”). Here is an example taken from his discussion of a paper by Louis Pasteur which deals with the discovery of a yeast related to lactic acid fermentation:
The capacities of the natural world are modified between the beginning and the end of the story. At the start of the paper the reader lives in a world in which the relation between organic matter and ferments is that of contact and decay…At the end the reader lives in a world in which a ferment is as active as any other already identified life form…15
It hardly needs saying that Latour simply asserts here what he needs to demonstrate: namely, that the external world is somehow affected by the process of coming to know about it. Presumably what he is pretending that he is not saying is that the world seems different once we know certain things about it. Very well, but this is just obvious. The rhetorical trick he employs to disguise this truism, or to give it the veneer of profundity, is simply to pretend that he is talking about the world itself rather than our knowledge or experience of it.
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont complain precisely about Latour’s tendency to mix up statements about knowledge with statements about things in their Intellectual Impostures. Here is Latour’s offending statement:
Since the settlement of controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not the consequence, we can never use the outcome—Nature—to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.16
This is what Sokal and Bricmont had to say about this sleight of hand:
Note how Latour slips, without comment or argument, from “Nature’s representation” in the first half of this sentence to “Nature” tout court in the second half. If we were to read “Nature’s representation” in both halves, then we’d have the truism that scientists’ representations of Nature (that is, their theories) are arrived at by a social process, and that the course and outcome of that social process can’t be explained simply by its outcomes.17
Latour, then, employs a shoddy epistemology, a dodgy grasp of logic, and a fondness for an overblown turn of phrase, in the service of a contrarian project, the main aim of which seems to be to render the obvious mysterious and the banal profound.
THERE IS THE THOUGHT that the kinds of issues that we have been discussing in this essay are mainly local and parochial; that yes, these are important concerns within the academy, but that they are of little relevance to the lives of people outside of it. However, such a view is mistaken. There are good reasons for everybody to resist postmodernist nihilism about the possibility of truth and knowledge.
One compelling reason is that the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge is at least as likely to be liberating as it is to be oppressive or colonialist. Historically, the recognition of a sharp difference between justified assertion and mere assertion tout court has been a force for liberation and progress, and against arbitrary power and illegitimate institutions. Meera Nanda puts it like this:
Having grown up in a provincial town in Northern India, I considered my education in science a source of personal enlightenment. Natural science, especially molecular biology, had given me a whole different perspective on the underlying cosmology of the religious and cultural traditions I was raised in. Science gave me good reasons to say a principled “No!” to many of my inherited beliefs about God, nature, women, duties and rights, purity and pollution, social status, and my relationship with my fellow citizens. I had…found the courage to assert the right to fulfil my own destiny, because I learned to demand good reasons for the demands that were put on me.18
Contrarianism, nihilism, the overturning of tables and interrogation of all foundations have their uses, but they also have their risks. There is always risk in demolition work: one may destroy something of great value that cannot be replaced.
With all the special pains and miseries of human life, we have advantages not possessed by even the cleverest of animals. We can tell each other what happened when one of us was absent, we can discuss memories, we can plan the future; we can mourn, we can explain, we can imagine, mutually as well as singly. We have language, and we have writing and other forms of recording. This means that we can generate cumulative knowledge that is beyond the reach of any other animal on the planet. It took us millions of years to realise this talent and put it to use, but we now have a heritage of knowledge and science built up over centuries: a vast interlocking crossword puzzle, in Susan Haack’s metaphor. That heritage is of great practical benefit, of course, but it is also of great non-instrumental value, in the same sort of way as music and art, drama and poetry, cathedrals and Bamiyan buddhas.
If we are going to throw all this away, if we are going to play the contrarian card, then a cautionary principle applies: we have to have good reasons for thinking that what we are throwing away is not something of great value. In its adolescent excess, in its desire to shock, to titillate, to push against boundaries and convention, postmodernism come nowhere near meeting this cautionary demand.
OPHELIA BENSON & JEREMY STANGROOM
Editors, www.butterfliesandwheels.com, and authors of Why Truth Matters (2006).
Footnotes:
1. L. Frederick Zaman III, ‘Postmodern Deconstruction Of Newtonian Science: A Physical-to-social Transposition Of Causality’, Theory & Science, 2001, http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol002.001/05zaman.html, accessed March 1 2007
2. Dave Holmes RN PhD, Stuart J Murray PhD, Amélie Perron RN
PhD(cand) and Geneviève Rail PhD, ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism’, International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 2006, 4 (3), 180-186.
3. Alan Pearson RN MSc PhD FAAG FRCN, ‘Scientists, postmodernists or fascists?’, International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 4 (4), 385–391 http://www.badscience.net/?p=338#more-338, accessed March 1 2007
4. Tomas A. Gregor and Daniel A. Gross, ‘Guilt by Association: the Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Association’s Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado’, American Anthropologist, 106 (4), p. 688.
5. Louise Lamphere, ‘Perils and Prospects for an Engaged Anthropology: A View from the US’, Social Anthropology, 11 (2), p. 143.
6. Cited in Gregor and Gross, op cit, p. 689 & p. 690.
7. F.A. Marglin, ‘Smallpox in two Systems of Knowledge’, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, eds. F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
8. Allen Esterson, ‘Mileva Marić: Einstein’s Wife,’ Butterflies and Wheels, March 6 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=182
9. Allen Esterson, ‘Einstein’s Wife: A challenge to PBS,’ Butterflies and Wheels, July 5 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=201
10. R Joseph Hoffmann, ‘The Bones of Our Lord,’ Butterflies and Wheels, February 26 2007 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=233
‘”Faccidents”: Bad Assumptions and the Jesus Tomb Debacle,’ Butterflies and Wheels, March 7 2007 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=235
11. Deborah Lipstadt, ‘Distortions are not Worth Debating,’ Butterflies and Wheels, February 21 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=174
12. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press 1999, p. 149.
13. Ibid., p. 159.
14. Ibid., p. 154.
15. Ibid., p. 117.
16. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, Profile Books [1998] 2003, p. 85.
17. Ibid.
18. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward, Rutgers University Press 2003, p. xi.
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