Dr. Karkaroff held his pen still between both thumbs and forefingers; it was a bridge between his hands. He nodded slowly as he spoke.
“That’s very perceptive, and the religious studies department is certainly guilty of placing a different sort of framework on values and religion than other parts of life… Yes. I think that’s a very good critique of the religious studies department.”
With that he dismissed our class, and we went about rearranging the desks into the grid pattern in which they were originally set up. I was happy that our instructor was so candid in admitting the shortcomings of his ideologies, and I hoped that the words of my peers would cause him to reconsider some of his thoughts.
I believe that is a definite possibility for him, but I am not so sure in the case of other educators and leaders across America and the world today. This is troublesome to me because postmodern relativism inevitably filters down into moral and religious relativism. The pluralism that results from this is heralded by some as the arrival of a better way of life that promises peace, but for others it seems like an escape from reason and a falling away from objective truths that have eternal significance.
I fall into the latter camp. I recognize that the ideas taught today carry heavy consequences for those who live tomorrow, and I want my posterity to learn not only to think right things but also to learn how to think rightly, which I believe requires an awareness of absolutes. As such, I hope that people will continue to challenge the governing ideologies of most educational institutions like the one I attend. I hope that in doing so they would see that objectivism is neither a right-wing construct nor a ball and chain, but a part of the liberation of both the individual and societal mind.
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.