Twenty-seven students sat in desks arranged in a ring around the room. The professor sat with us at the part of the circle closest to the blackboard at the front of the room. His long, spindly legs stuck out from beneath the desk, grasshopper-like. The sheen from his vintage polished burgundy shoes matched the glare of sunlight streaming through the wide windows and reflecting off of his thick glasses. Dr. Karkaroff also sported a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. His erratic movements and lack of eye contact while talking intimated that his energies were being directed primarily inward to his thought processes.
He seemed a true scholar. And respectable – a good professor for a religious studies class. Earlier in class he had admitted that some of his methods of 
interpretation were insufficient to understand the Islamic text we were supposed to dissect. He was implementing a postmodern analysis – asking only what the text tells us about those who wrote it as opposed to what the author intended or posited as fact. One student had raised his hand. I waited to see whether he would agree or disagree with the professor.
“In order for us to approach the text this way, wouldn’t we have to assume that all the content has a purpose for being as it is? Intentionally arranged that way for a specific reason?”
Gears whirled in the professor’s head. “Yes. Which you’re saying would be inconsistent if we found particular features that appear a certain way for no apparent reason, which we have, in which case my approach cannot account for everything. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I agree with you.”
I assumed this meant we had decided that religious texts should be interpreted at least partially through a historical-critical lens, asking whether events described in the material actually occurred as the material said they did. I soon found out that I was mistaken.
Students around me began to attack the idea of a historical paradigm by commenting that even our view of history is subjective. “We find what we want to find,” one student proclaimed.
I wasn’t sure of that. Why do ardent atheists do historical research and then convert to Christianity if they are only looking to affirm their presuppositions? Conversely, why do devout churchgoers discover what they believe to be inconsistencies between their faith and facts before falling away? Certainly not everyone who undergoes this kind of metamorphosis subconsciously wished for what they ultimately received. But to an extent this is a reigning ideology in the classroom today, especially the college classroom, and especially in the humanities.
Article comments
1 - Bob Lloyd
One of the really damaging aspects of postmodernism was the attitude to science, depicting it as just one narrative amongst many. By undermining the validation of science against the real world, the impression was given that scientific knowledge was nothing more than the opinion of some scientists.
That has made it very difficult for complex scientific issues to be discussed sensibly in the media. Whenever a scientific issue arises, the media assumes that it consists only of opinions and therefore, in the interests of balance, finds someone who without evidence, holds a different opinion.
Similarly it encourages the growth of irrationalism such as is manifested in the beliefs in alternative medicine such as Reiki, which postulates the use of an undetectable energy. For those brought up in the postmodernist tradition, such a belief is every bit the equal of science. Already there are healing energy courses appearing in nursing training, utterly without any evidentiary basis. Since evidence is demoted to the rank of opinion, anything goes.
Science is validated against reality, by using testable hypotheses. Postmodernism cannot understand such a test process, as it fatally distrusts any kind of knowledge. Their intellectual suicide leaves postmodernists talking to each other in dusty corners of academia while the rest of the world moves on.
But the one thing they did get right is that social values, social morality, ethical judgements, are not static, they are not absolutes. They are socially and historically specific - there are no moral absolutes, simply those values which are socially acceptable and those which are not. This is a relativism which is the result of a social process, a social negotiation. However this discovery wasn't something original in postmodernism (it hasn't discovered anything), but a fairly old-fashioned, evidenced, result of studying social history.
Ironically, postmodernism gave an entire generation of the academic left an excuse to retire from political engagement into empty philosophy. Since all narratives were equivalent, they might as well just talk to themselves. So they do.