Postmodernism And The Social Contract

Good morning and thank you for visiting my blog. I am going to plunge in without pre-amble. I have a lot that I want to say.

Once again, I am going to talk about postmodernism. So the first question is: "What is postmodernism?".  

There are many explanations of postmodernism online and in numerous books, but I find them unnecessarily complicated. So I’ll give you my fast and loose version of postmodernism instead.

Postmodernism says that humans are creatures of their cultures. A person’s way of thinking is almost entirely programmed into her or him by that person’s culture. You tend very much to be the kind of person that you grew up around when your mind was first being formed. You are a blend of your role models – parents, teachers, coaches, etc. You also have other ideas about how people ought to try to live, ideas that in your culture are considered "good". These ideas got programmed into your young mind by the communications going on around you. Fifty thousand years ago, the media that were influencing kids were only drawings on cave walls and stories told around campfires. But they still deeply shaped kids’ thinking.  

We are all children of our cultures. How much so? According to the postmoderns, culture so completely determines what we are able to think and not think that any talk about getting outside of culture and seeing the world with completely unbiased eyes is silly. Such seeing and any thinking you might believe could come from it are out of the question. I am an old, white, heterosexual, Canadian male, living in Canada in what humans all over the world now call 2016 C.E., the “common era”. My Canadianisms totally saturate and regulate what I am able to think and not think.

At this point, you may ask: “But what about the findings of Science? Aren’t they the same for all of us?” The postmoderns say no. They ask: “Whose Science? Your culture’s Science? There are many bodies of knowledge in cultures all over the world that could accurately be called the 'Science' of those cultures. Why should any one of them be considered more reasonable, informed, or useful than any of the others?”

Then you might say: “Look at the results Western Science has gotten over the past four centuries. How could anyone doubt Western-style Science works. It gets results.”

In response, postmoderns reply: “The people of other nations like their own ways, their own skills and stories and banks of knowledge. Some of them have lived for centuries by their own ways and have done just fine. No one has a right to tell them they need to change.”

At this point, you can probably see where the argument is headed. The question becomes: “Is it morally wrong for us to use our culture’s technology to interfere in other cultures.”?

And so, at last, we come to the biggest question: “What are right and wrong?” Or even: “Are there any such things as right and wrong?”

I’ve written on this topic here many times. If you visit here regularly, you know I disagree with postmodernism at this point. I believe our basic concepts of right and wrong can be grounded in the physical universe itself. 

Courage and wisdom have become values that we believe in and try to live up to because over thousands of years and millions of people, these concepts, learned and lived by whole tribes, enabled those tribes to survive. The surviving happened because courage and wisdom in balance enable those who believe in them to handle one of the basic principles of the universe, the one that physicists call “entropy”. 

In a similar way, freedom and love are the values we have learned because they enable us to handle another basic property of the physical universe, namely its uncertainty.

Let me say that again: courage and wisdom, learned and lived, enable us to deal with the inescapable uphillness of life. That’s what entropy means in the lives of ordinary folk. Life is hard. It’s full of work. Get used to it. 

Then, freedom and love, learned and lived, enable us to respond to the uncertainty of the universe, which is caused by the quantum nature of matter.  The cutting edge scientists in Physics only began to understand quantum theory in the last ninety years. But it’s effect on our lives as we live them day by day has always been there. 

Life is hard, says entropy. Yes, says quantum theory, but life is also nuts. Things go sideways every so often in spite of our best laid plans and hardest labors.

So for me, the basic values – courage, wisdom, freedom, and love – are grounded in the forces of physical reality.

In other words, the postmoderns are mistaken at this point. Right and wrong are not arbitrary, old fashioned notions that postmodern thinkers must learn to do without. Values are grounded in the physical universe, and if we had no values, we would die out in a generation. Or more likely, we would have to start again and repeat the history of our ancestors with all of the pain that that history brought to the people who lived it.

But the situation with postmodernism gets worse.

Unfortunately, postmodernism and its proponents have not let the matter rest there. The net result of their activities in universities all over the world is that thousands of young people are learning there is no way to reconcile different cultures or the values they endorse. In fact – and here comes the kicker - even to try to analyze other cultures is presumptuous and hurtful. We may observe and record how others live, but that’s it. 

Comparing cultures and trying to develop a general theory of culture must be avoided at all costs. Any group that thinks it has found a grand theory, always comes to believes it can impose its own so-called 'superior' culture on others. Therefore, the decent thing to do is not even start to try to draw up grand theories of human society. Let each culture go its own way and leave the others alone.

However, I believe we can’t leave the debate at that. If we do, the real world will keep rolling forward as it always has and always will. The cultures of the world will interact and disputes will arise. They always have. And so, different cultures will clash. As they are now.   

But I believe that in reality every society has some values that are smart and that deserve to endure and some that cause needless pain and will cause more if they are not changed. It is true that there should be no top-dog culture, but saying that is not the same as saying that we should just leave the problem of culture alone. 

We can figure out a solution to the problem of differing cultures if we all approach it from a starting point of humility and good will. All of our cultures have made mistakes, some even on the international scale. But we can fix this.     

So I’m saying that I think sociologists and anthropologists owe the rest of society an apology and a renewed effort to solve the problem of culture. What is it? How does it work? The problem is hard, but we have no evidence that tells us that it is insoluble.

I know my view is not popular. I have to speak up, nevertheless. The deep fear that motivates me is based in another view of human beings, namely the view of history. The last two hundred years have brought huge changes for the human race, and not just in technology and medical science. Advances in all the sciences have caused us to question our whole value system. To be specific, I think the dilemma is centered on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, the big blow to Western ways of thinking about values. 

Nietzsche lived in those times. He concluded that there is no meaning to any talk about values. Therefore, the only way to live is to make your own values and impose them on everyone you can. A moral life, according to Nietzsche, is one lived to win. That’s it. All other talk is slave mentality. “Slave mentality” is Nietzsche’s own term. Don’t be a slave, he says. Be a master.

How does this connect to postmodernism? In the history of the world since 1900, it connects very plainly. By 1900, the old values were fading fast. In that vacuum, Nietzsche told the bullies that they were the good guys, and they should let nothing stand in their way.  

His bleak view was the main alternative to the discredited values of old Europe. These two views were the main ones that the thinkers of the developed world had as their guides at the start of the twentieth century. And remember, the old values were starting to sound obsolete.

The logical conclusion was that if disputes between cultures always come and if there is no way to sort them out except by war, then make up your mind. Do you want to be a winner or a loser? If you want to be a winner, then start getting ready now. This is Nietzsche. It is Nazism under Hitler, Fascism under Mussolini, "scientific socialism" under Stalin, and imperialism under Tojo. 

Postmodernism has added nothing to the picture that anyone can use effectively in the world of realpolitik. It is a long-winded way of making it okay to give in to bullies.   

So here’s my bottom line. We must do better than we did in the twentieth century. We can’t afford another all out war in which we use all the weapons we have. It will finish us and maybe finish our planet.

Decency and sense must have the mental gear in place to get out of the defensive role. It will not be good enough for us to shrug off the challenges posed by the bullies of the world or to tell them, “Why can’t you just be nice?” or “Well, then I’m never speaking to you again.” 

And make no mistake. The bullies of the world will always be here. Decent people need to confront them with an affirmative model and a positive agenda of their own. Moral realism. Courage. Wisdom. Freedom. Love.

In the 1920’s and 30’s, a traveller would have had great difficulty finding politer, more cooperative, more accommodating people than those in Germany, Italy, and Japan. They were ordinary, hard-working, decent people. I believe they fell prey to the bullies who gradually took over their countries because their intellectuals let them down. Ideas drive actions. We can only be as wise and good as our ideas equip us to be.

And maybe in fairness, I can forgive the thinkers of Germany, Italy, and Japan in those times. They were doing the best they could. They just weren’t coming up with any solid ideas of what really makes right and wrong. It was still early in the struggle to make sense of the world Darwin showed us.

But in 2016 we must do better. We aren’t looking at 55 million dead in a span of six years. We are looking at a hundred times that many in three days. That is what our weapons now could do. If you love peace, it is not enough to try your best to be diligent and decent and shy away from arguing. We have to get out of the reactive role and instead go over to the active one. Not be willing to die for democracy if a crisis comes. Be willing to live for it every hour of our lives.

Alright. I’ve vented. Maybe the most I ever have in this space. I thank you for this opportunity to vent. Scary as it is to talk in such images, I need to. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, friends, have a good day.