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Postmodernism isn’t a scourge on civil society -- it’s just a pointless indulgence

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https://areomagazine.com/2020/06/11/post...ndulgence/

EXCERPTS (Zane Beal): 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.

[...] 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 [...] 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. [...] 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 [...] Postmodernism has nothing to offer that improves upon reflection, reason and dialogue -- tools fully accessible to everyone ... From the outside, that entire school of thinkers looks like a bunch of naked emperors arguing over who has the best outfit... (MORE - details)
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