I was recently accused of postmodern thinking, for which I’m grateful. I reject the allegation, but appreciate it. We need food to grow. In our intellectual diet, criticism is rarely served voluntarily. Mostly, we need a truffle pig to root it out; begging people for feedback. Every subtle jibe is an invitation to learn something.
This is what I learnt. Some of which surprised me.
Start at the start
We can’t become postmodern without first being modern. The modern period ran roughly - let’s pick the midpoint of a couple of centuries - from 1650 to 1950. It introduced the premacy of rational thought, and shifted the responsibility for making sense of the world from deities to individual humans. Quite a step up in responsibility, and certainly not everybody felt ready to take this career progression. It was discomfiting, and still is, for many to shoulder the burden of making sense of the world as individuals.
Modernism enveloped scientific thinking, and the industrial revolution. In particular, it has objective truth as its centrepiece.
Objective truth means this: the world out there is real. It’s not a fabrication of my convenience, or yours. Gravity is real. Light is real. Lattices in salt crystals are real. Electrons are real. Tension and compression in built structures are real. We can make observations and conduct experiments that reveal truths about the world, and those truths exist outside of ourselves, and for all of us. More than either water or blood, these are our bonds: this shared, real experience. Gil Scott Heron expresses it elegantly in his beautiful song Train from Washington:
You can depend on the stars and planets yeah
They’ll always tell you the truth
Postmodernism, on the other hand, rejects the existence of objective truth, and says that truth is constructed by each of us according to complex webs of relationships and experiences. That one truth can only be defined in terms of other truths surrounding it, and that these graphs of truths cannot be the same for all of us, just as we don’t all have the same friends.
Again, Gil Scott Herons captures this relativity of experience in Whitey on the Moon, an alternative celebration of the moon landing:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)
The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(‘cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
…
It’s no objective truth that the moon landing was a triumph of human ingenuity. Oscar Wilde offered us the possibility of looking at the stars from our vantage point in the gutter, but watching people spend money on a jaunt to the moon when you’re stuck there could leave a bitter taste.
False dichotomies
This dichotomy between modern and postmodern thinking seems a little unfair to me. I think both models are useful, but in different domains. Modernism is a powerful lense through which to regard the natural and physical world. Postmodernism has much more to say about social reality. It’s not clear to me that postmodernism rejects modernism. I think it is a shift in focus to a new subject. The perceived conflict arises when we try to explain everything we see in terms of one model. In that sense, I think postmodernism correctly rejects attempts to explain all of human behaviour in terms of reduction to foundational understanding of our biology, for example.
Regardless of whether postmodernism itself claims dominion over the natural world, tropes of postmodern thinking have bled all over things they shouldn’t have. When the human commanding the most information on the planet can earnestly claim that bleach injections might be effective antivirals, that’s postmodern relativism at work. The belief that his idea is as valid as anyone else’s, since there’s no objective yardstick of truth that can demonstrate otherwise. Perhaps these are the ravings of an atrophied brain, but they are ravings are gobbled up by a voting public that is implicitly tolerant of such flaccid thinking.
That’s my fundamental objection to this style of thought: it has been dumped flagrantly like fire retardant onto minds all over the place. Indiscriminantly. And as a result, minds that should be thinking, minds that should be questioning, minds that should be contributing to better political outcomes are stupified. They’ve been primed to believe that any idea is as good as any other, so they’ll willingly consume the first idea that comes along. That’s not healthy for society, in my extremely humble opinion.
First modernism stepped outside its remit in trying to explain everything with compositions of tiny atomic truths. Now postmodernism is conducting a revanche that I consider equally ill-advised.
But!
There are reasons for everything
In 1931, a weak spot in rational thought was discovered that may have invited this intellectual land grab. Kurt Gödel published the first of his incompleteness theorems, which demonstrated that there are things that are true, which we cannot prove to be true. Dreams of an unbounded empire of rational thought were destroyed. Starting with tiny atoms of truth, and building and composing, it turns out that we cannot construct every soaring edifice of truth.
This sounds underwhelming, but modernism had replaced the idea of a deity with the idea of rational thought. Gödel now showed that rational thought was not all-seeing or all-powerful either. Like the god of prior centuries, belief in the omnipotence of reason underpinned the construction of entire nations and political systems and movements in art and so on. This was a cataclysm. And after Gödel followed a whole series of results teaching us about the limits of computation, from Church, Turing and others.
Perhaps we could still fight an intellectual rearguard action, carving off the HEPA-filtered artificial cleanroom environment of pure reason, and arguing that science still works in the real world. It still gives us planes that fly, and medicines that cure, and that we could just abandon the untethered intellectuals of pure reason and continue as we were. But in 1961, Edward Lorenz began noticing similarly disturbing limitations to our ability to calculate in the real world. Lorenz made the discovery of a new idea, that came to be known as chaos theory. In certain circumstances, very simple systems can produce results that we cannot hope to predict.
I see this as an identical discovery to Gödel’s in this sense that it draws clear boundaries on the reach of computation to tell us about the world around us. So reason is not all powerful.
And there’s disappointment too
At the same time, throughout the 20th century, something else new was emerging. A kind of bear market for the products of science. Prior to the 20th century, science continuously produced so much increasing value that any discomfit about its limitations, or the implications it had for individual responsibility, could be happily swept aside. Science had always brought good news: a continuous expansion of human opportunity. Unrelenting growth in the economy of human possibility.
But in the 20th century, science began occasionally to also deliver bad news. We could destroy ourselves with our knowledge of atomic physics, demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We could deform ourselves terribly with our incomplete understanding of chemistry, demonstrated by the tragedy of the thalidomide babies. And now science, for the first time, is telling us that possibly we have to constrain our appetites, and reign in our dreams of infinite expansion, due to the clear scientific implications of climate change.
A perfect storm, then. Science is simultaneously found to have limitations, and to also be the bearer of both bad and good news. Like phosphates washing into dams create the conditions for an algal bloom, so too have these conditions prepared the way for irrationality to organise an attempted putsch on science.
This feels dangerous
We have a fundamental confusion about the domains in which different approaches to thinking about the world are applicable. This feels incredibly dangerous. We’re now living in a world supporting an improbable amount of human life, precisely because of science. To abandon science likely implies the abandonment of a huge amount of human life. To do so based on a misunderstanding will be a tragedy.
This is my overarching concern: at this point in time, early in the 21st century, the idea has been widely adopted that we’re free to believe in our own truth. There’s no objective truth out there. But people have forgotten that this approach is not universally applicable. The end result is that we have a vast supply of minds willing to accept all kinds of pseudo-knowledge without supporting evidence.
I’m being facile here with a very complex subject, but we’re in danger of the following chain of reasoning: there is no objective truth. Given that, we can assume one truth is as good as another. If that’s the case, any truth that we are handed will do (because it’s equal to all others).
This is an abrogation of our modernist responsibility to rationally consider things for ourselves. This takes us all the way back to receiving knowledge by revelation from a deity. Now, I’m not as strongly opposed to this idea as you might imagine. But we’d better be bloody careful about which deities we turn to for our revelations. The Word of Morrison, or Johnson, or Trump is not nearly good enough for us. Not even close.
I don’t say that out of dislike, or disagreement with their ideas, but because a flawed human mistranslating from the broken oracle that is a political party is a devastatingly suboptimal way to guide society. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Sooner or later we need to accept the truth of that.