A tall, athletically built sophomore lifted her hand into the air. The instructor nodded his assent and asked her to speak.
“But what foundation do you base that belief on? If it doesn’t have reasons to back it up that are concrete, then why should we read the Qur’an and other scriptures like that? But if does, then aren’t those reasons examples of how things must be grounded in facts?”
He chuckled. I think he liked these kinds of discussions.
“Well, that’s the beauty of it. If I did that I would be my own counterexample, so I can’t offer those kinds of facts, and again I’m okay with that. I have a different framework that doesn’t need to be proven, that’s not an issue within it. Kant revolutionized Western thinking in this way when he articulated his perception of the autonomous self.” He paused for a moment of self-reflection. “I suppose that I’ve been conditioned to think this way through my background in religious studies.
"Programs like this one view meaning and truth as something different than fact. My whole training is not to ask whether a certain scripture is true, but why it is told in a particular way. We read texts not for what the text tells us about its content, but for what it tells us about its authors and audience.”
When Dr. Karkaroff talked about Western culture in that way, it seemed almost impossible that the invisible, weighty hand of postmodernism would ever be removed from our culture’s institutions. Some would argue that this is a good thing. After all, there is merit in my professor’s last statement – a religious text can tell you a lot of useful information about the culture it was written in.
That being said, it is not necessary to throw out the concept of objectivism from the realm of academia in order to analyze a text’s cultural context. As I thought about this I scribbled observations about the words of my professor and peers on a yellow legal tablet. There were quotations, arrows, and hastily sketched star bullet points between the blue lines. In my peripheral vision I saw the young man who had already spoken raise his hand for a third time.
“I certainly agree with you that Kant greatly influenced Western culture. He did this by enforcing what Francis Schaeffer called a two-story dichotomy of facts and values, in which you have relativistic values on the top and the rest of life on the bottom. But I have a beef with this framework in that it’s completely inconsistent – we don’t live the rest of our lives as if there was no such thing as objective truth. I don’t understand why we grant amnesty to this particular genre of writing when it is entirely out of sync with how we address the rest of reality.”
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.