Ruins of open marketplace (from ancient Carthage) 

          (many cultures, races, etc. once met and traded here and mingled and 

                   interacted in responsible ways and learned from each other)

                                (credit: Franzfoto, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                            Postmodernism, Eight, Nine, Ten, You're Out!

I’ve been deconstructing postmodernism for a few posts now and have pointed out that its logic is fatally flawed and that, furthermore, it is not our only worldview alternative. But, if we extrapolate from its basic claims, there are even more serious problems with postmodernism that we can go into today.

One major implication of postmodernism tells us that because of the profound cultural limitations attached to all that we think, we will never rise above the wrangling and quarreling that have characterized relations between human tribes for as far back in history as we can make inferences about those relations. For example, anthropologists have found mass graves of early humans – one can easily surmise whole hominid tribes – who were killed with axes and clubs. Likely, they were victims of some kind of conflict between tribes.  

Arguably, the most salient constant in all societies in all areas and eras is their propensity for war. Human bands, tribes, and nations have many features in common, but the one the evidence says has become more and more frequent for the last ten thousand years is their inclination to practice violence on each other.

We have sometimes been cooperative with those from other cultures. We have traded, visited, even intermarried with folk from other cultures for millennia. But we have also made war on each other for millennia. Orangutangs and gorillas do not make war on each other, but chimps do. Chimps are our closest primate cousins.  

If we accept the postmodernist view of humans, we are driven to conclude that we think almost entirely in the ways that our cultures have programmed us to. When we combine this model with the archeological evidence, we are driven to conclude that we humans are programmed for, not just eternal quarreling, but also eternal violence. Rebellions, revolutions, and wars.

Into this picture, postmodernism shoves the proposition that there can never be a way to remedy this flaw. All values are culturally relative. Therefore, the horror will go on and on.

I am well aware that millions in today’s world accept the proposition that our human cultural programming steers us toward fighting far more easily than toward welcoming, forgiving, and understanding. And yes, it is clear that much of the evidence of our past interactions supports this view. We’ve done a lot of fighting and only a modest amount of cooperating in the past.

However, my immediate answer to such talk is this: I am not an ape, and I am not my ancestors. Furthermore, my grandson will not be me. Over generations, we can learn, change, and evolve. Humans are programmable; programs can be re-written, over one lifetime in one individual, but especially over generations. In fact, the truth is we’ve been reprogramming ourselves constantly all along.  

We have learned how to escape from the nightmares imposed on us by our own cultural programming before. Humans once flocked to see gladiatorial games where men killed each other for the amusement of the rich. Slavery, was once a commonplace fact of everyday life. It is all but gone. We have gotten better over the last few millennia. A bit wiser. Kinder. We can – we must – learn to do better still.

Why do I argue so vehemently against postmodernist cynicism? For at least three very large, profoundly interconnected reasons.

In the first place, there are more of us now. Eight billion humans on this planet and the number is rising as I write. We're being pushed into more and more interactions between cultures. We can’t avoid the Other as we often have in the past. We more and more keep bumping into each other. We must learn to get along because we have no other choice. Not if we want to just live daily life.  

Which brings us to a second reason for finding a way past the cynical defeatism of postmodernism: only a very much improved level of cooperation between cultures is going to make it possible for us to keep our planet viable for us. We have polluted it to the brink of environmental collapse. Only a global effort by a big majority of our species has any chance of saving our planet’s biosphere.

And thirdly, most urgent of all, is the fact that if we fight another all-out, global, war, human communications, food production, supply chains, etc. – in short, human civilization – would likely not be seriously disrupted; no, human life would come to an end. The odds are intolerably high that our species could get wiped out by its own hand. We have the weapons now – chemical, biological, and nuclear – to set this scenario inexorably moving in an afternoon. Half of our species could be dead in six hours. The rest would die of disease and famine in under a year.

Postmodernists shrug all of this off. There’s nothing anyone can do, they say.

I disagree diametrically. Bayesianism, the worldview of science, as I showed in my last post, offers an alternative to postmodernism. A good one. 

So, yes, postmodernists, there is something you can do:

Get out of the way.

                                        Modern farmers' market (San Francisco) 

                                       (credit: Tobias Kleinlercher, via Wikipedia) 

 

                                 

  

                                                                    Coronavirus 

                                                   (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Answering Postmodernism 

In my last post, I broached the worldview called postmodernism. I disagree with postmodernism for several reasons. Let’s consider a couple of them today.

In the first obvious place, it is a philosophical position that is inconsistent with itself. It leads to contradiction so blatant that one can safely assume its premises must be flawed. If every view of the world or of truth is partial and flawed, then why should I trust the views of any of the postmodernists? Thus, postmodernism can be written off in a single breath. 

But in the second, more important place, there is an alternative to postmodern thinking, an alternative that makes better sense. It is called science.

It is true, as the pomos say, that every person’s nurture/culture inclines him/her toward ways of thinking and of expressing thought that are limited by that person's sets of basic concepts and terms, ones that are familiar in their culture. I tend to think most readily using ideas that I learned from my culture. So does everyone.

But the discussion does not stop there. Admitting that we are channeled in our thinking - we are limited, by the ways of thinking we acquire from our cultures - does not change the world. Reality is what it is. There may be many cultures out there, many ways of life, but we all must live in what is.

The easiest way to access the ways of thinking that are familiar in a culture is to look at the language of the people of that culture. For example, Spanish has two words – “ser” and “estar” – for the English verb “to be”. English has only “to be” for expressing the same idea. Similarly, French contains two verbs for the English verb “to know” – “savoir” and “connaitre”.

How do such differences affect thinking? On the surface, we can surmise that they must affect thinking profoundly. Being and knowing are vital concepts. And these are very simple examples. The ways in which people from different cultures think differently and, as a result, can misunderstand each other, are often very complex.

But reality is still reality. If any tribe’s culture leads that tribe’s members to live in ways too radically separated from physical reality, that way of thinking, that culture, will die out because the people who adhere to it will die out. No matter the thinking limits instilled in me by my culture, reality is not defined by culture.

A forest fire is real. I have evacuated as ordered. But yes, I worry my house is going to burn down. It is rational for me to fear fire. No sequence of thoughts in my brain is going to make that fire go out. People are going to have to fight it physically, or alternatively, get out of its way and wait until it burns itself out.

My people’s culture may contain some useful ideas about how to fight forest fires. These may improve the odds of my people’s putting this fire out more quickly than would be the case if we didn’t understand how to fight forest fires. But my culture, and my thinking with its concepts will have no direct effect on the wall of flame bearing down on me. Not even if I think till I sweat. The fire is what it is. We must fight it physically or get out of its way or get burned up.    

Whether or not, during our hike, you have stepped on a nail and driven it into your foot is not a matter of whether your culture has a word for “nail”. And yes, actually, in that situation, I would urge you to get medical help quickly, even if we had trouble communicating. If you would let me, I’d take you to a hospital. Whether you will get tetanus is not a matter that depends on whether there is a word for “nail” in my culture, your culture, or any other culture. You need a tetanus shot now, or you run a large risk of dying in a horrible way.   

In fact, it may be very useful and informative later for you and I to discuss what the disease called “tetanus” is, what it is caused by, and what its effects are. We may learn medical knowledge from each other. Your culture may know a herb that grows in the bush nearby which can be used to ease pain. That herb may really work. I may learn from you. The herb might even ease your pain if you begin to suffer with tetanus. But we should not leave that rusty nail wound untreated. If we are close to a hospital, you need not endure the symptoms of tetanus. In reality, we should take action right now to save you from pain and, likely, death.

A culture is just a set of ideas, customs, and concepts, that a tribe use to understand the physical world and to direct their actions in that world. Over generations, it can become enormously complex. A human tribe can develop whole sets of ideas and behaviors that ease the tribe's interfacing with physical reality and with each other.

But the nail and the fire are real whether anyone sees them or not.

Covid was, and is, not a matter of one’s culture or the judgements one forms as one thinks with terms that are familiar in one’s culture. It’s a virus. If I get it, it will not delay its action to suit whether or not my culture has a word for it.

The same is true of thousands of other matters. Global warming is not going to halt its effects on my homeland because my culture does not have a word for it.

My perceptions in any of the situations above are not guaranteed true. Nor are the measures recommended by the sciences of my Western culture one hundred percent guaranteed effective. Science does not say that. But I do know that in every one of those situations, I can envision several different ways in which I might respond, and I can estimate the odds of effectiveness for each of the alternative courses of action I could take. Then, I can do my best to act rationally. Pick and follow the response most likely to bring me success. Bet on the plans which I believe offer the best odds of guarding the lives of myself and my loved ones.

One possible plan is that I could refuse to do anything about whatever is happening. Postmodernism may have convinced me that it is all an illusion anyway.   

I could choose to hide in my house, against the evacuation order from the local police. I have a garden hose, that I hope will still be getting water pressure, with which to fight the fire on my own if it does come my way. A garden hose against flames varying from 60 to 200 feet high, hot enough to melt tires on deserted cars. But fighting it myself is a possible course of action.

I could choose not to get vaccinated for Covid, in spite of the experts’ warnings.

But I am a man who tends to listen to science. I’m not a fire fighter. I’m not a virologist or an epidemiologist. I’ve read experts’ views on websites online and in newspapers and magazines. They seem more sensible to me than the alternative explanations offered by some of their critics. I estimate the odds of which expert is most likely to be accurately describing reality. I bet on what I believe are my best horses. Mostly, I follow experts’ advice. I read up on several analyses for every decision I have to make. But then, I go with the ones that make sense.

In short, for every matter, we have alternatives. We aren’t stuck with a single option that may be flawed or purposely distorted by people looking to exploit us. Most of all, we have choices, not all of which are equally rational.

At worst, I can always opt out of any mess by killing myself. Camus says staying alive takes more character than dying, once you see that suicide is an option.

Any of my beliefs could be misperceptions or misconceptions acquired from my culture. But that never means I have no alternatives. I always have alternatives, each with its own odds, as calculated by me, of leading to good results. What the nihilists, existentialists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists don’t seem to get is that the alternative worldview, which is a real alternative to their doubting is the profound worldview called science.  

Science does not claim to see ultimate truths about any subject. It only claims to offer us a method by which we can see more and more alternate explanations and options for action for every situation we may face in the physical world. It shows us how to keep fine tuning our policies and actions to get better and better results, for more people, more of the time.

Science answers the cynical, impotent view recommended by Postmodernism and its adherents simply by saying: “Your policy is not rational.” Total cynicism isn’t necessarily, logically wrong. For science, it’s just irrational.

We have choices. They are never all of equal likelihood of success. To not exert ourselves to choose rationally among them contradicts the very roots of life. Yes, life is often confusing, dangerous, and painful. No, that does not mean I should give up. I have choices.  

Science uses a whole set of criteria to judge the likelihood of any model/theory.

Can it be tested in the real, objectively observable world that all rational people accept is around us all the time? If it can’t, it isn’t science.

Are there people studying this phenomenon systematically? What theories or models have they proposed? What research has been done on each of these theories? Have the studies been published in reputable journals with records of being accurate in the past? Have the articles been peer-reviewed? What does the latest research indicate is the most probable theory? What course of action is the most rational one for me to take once I have answered these questions? 

In every situation, I estimate odds. Decide whether I should act. If so, in what way.

I can choose to be one of the ones who proposes and researches any way of viewing and understanding any phenomenon whatsoever. Postmodernism may be able to prove that no humanly constructed idea about anything is logically unassailable and therefore, perfectly reliably true. But I don’t need perfect truth in order to act. Only alternatives among which to choose.  

There is nothing new here. We have been considering alternative views of reality and trying to design our actions to give ourselves and our kids the best chances of survival and health and flourishing for at least a million years. Science just makes the process by which we make choices more systematic.  

With it, we don’t have certainties, but we are not left with a skepticism that ends in mental and physical paralysis. We have options, each of which has odds. We strive to keep learning more about them because we want to act with better and better probabilities of surviving. This is enough. We don’t need any more justification for dumping postmodernism.  

Postmodernism steers and commends us to confusion, error, and futility. To choose any of those is irrational.  

It’s true that we can learn from studying all of the world’s cultures, especially the ones different from our own. Recent experience has shown us that there are sometimes good scientific reasons for other nations’ beliefs and customs. For their eating the foods that they do, their not killing certain animals, etc. Kimchi contains probiotics that are very good for digestion in all humans. Impetigo can be cured by careful cleaning of lesions, then exposing them to direct sunshine. Over the long haul of generations, cows are more valuable as draft animals and sources of milk and dung than as sources of beef. These morés from non-Western cultures have all been studied by Western science and have all been given scientific explanations.

Study of practices common in other cultures is done by scientists not because the postmodernists recommend, decry, or forbid it. It’s done because such study has proved useful.  

I estimate odds. Every day. My ancestors have done so for thousands of years.

I can learn, grow, and benefit from carefully examining the traditional morés, customs, and worldviews of other cultures. But always, I ask: what does the evidence say? What looks to be the action plan with the best survival odds?

This way of handling life by estimating the success odds of various explanations for events and then acting on my estimates is called Bayesianism. It is the way of science. All science does is make our estimating more systematic and efficient.   

So let’s close by mentioning the alternative right and their dizzy theories. For most theories offered by the alt right to explain events in today’s world, the odds are not impossible. Just very unlikely. The odds that Hilary Clinton is running a child porn ring out of a pizza parlor in New Jersey can’t be proven absolutely to be zero, but in my best estimation, they are one out of a bigger number than I can write.

That kind of thinking is closely associated, in my view, with the kind of thinking that “knows” a worldwide conspiracy of colored people is aiming to wipe out all Caucasians. Or that the 5000 wildfires that have occurred in Canada this year were set by government agents. Or that there is a secret New World Order manipulating most of the governments of the nations of the world. What are the odds that any conspiracy of the size that would be needed to perpetrate such plots could be kept secret? Thousands of people would be required and no one has spilled the beans?!!  

Have a decent day, in spite of - or maybe, because of - what the meteorologists are saying in your neck of the woods today. And keep reminding yourself: science is a way of sizing up the odds of the truth of propositions. It has won a lot of respect in our world because as an idea about how to view other ideas, it has so often worked. Gotten good results. Even when it has come to weak conclusions and made bad recommendations, it has corrected itself ...with better science.

                  Signed,

a guy who didn’t die of smallpox, polio, or any of at least a dozen other diseases

                         

                                             Thomas Bayes (creator of Bayesianism) 

                                                   (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                                    Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) 

                         (generally accepted as the first modernist philosopher) 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                          

                                             Puncturing Pomo Pomp 

In essence, postmodernism is the belief that no one can ever find a way to any universal truths – ways of accurately describing the world as it is – because each of us is far too limited by his or her sensory abilities, intelligence, and especially culture (upbringing, in other words) to ever see the truth about anything. We sense the world through fairly weak eyes and ears. The sense data then enter our minds through mental filters programmed by our cultures to notice only some parts of the world. Thus, we totally miss most of what is going on around us. Because our view of the world is so limited, of course our conclusions are going to be flawed.

I grew up in a Euro-type of culture with European kinds of concepts, so when I go hiking in Canada, I tend to search the forest around me for sights and sounds of other humans and of animals that inhabit the area. Occasionally, I notice trees or wildflowers. On the same hike, my friend who was raised in traditional Salish ways sees those same sights, but also bent grasses, droppings, and tracks of animals. We haven’t seen deer, but he knows there are deer in this area. But no bears. All is well.

He is at home here. His native tongue doesn’t have a word for “wilderness”. I am cautious and apprehensive. I keep scanning and listening for grizzly bears. He knows we were in far more danger driving into this hiking area than we are now that we are here. The odds that we’ll meet a grizzly here are near zero.  

The man who grew up with guns respects them, but he is not so fearful that he panics when he sees one. The girl whose mother was a teacher likes to recite poems to herself all day long. The farm boy picks up a handful of soil, squeezes it, and inhales the aromas. Yes. This would be good farmland.

The woman raised in an Indo-Canadian home can tell when someone is cooking dal in her building. She can even name every spice being used. Her Euro-based Canadian friend is mainly noticing flooring, wallpaper, and light fixtures.

The man from the city is looking at the cars on the nearby road. He knows every car make, model, and year. In the city, his watching and listening for cars is so much second nature to him that he is unaware of his own glancing left and right as he approaches a street. The peregrine that has adapted to city life he never has seen and never will see though her nest is on top of his apartment building.

The Amazon hunter knows the trail of a cayman in the jungle and can estimate this one’s weight and be accurate within ten percent.

Is the place where I am now safe or hazardous? Beautiful or ugly? That’s a very individual perception, and it will depend on what I have been trained to notice.

And so humans misunderstand one another before they even begin to interact. Even people raised in the same culture often talk right past each other.  

How wide are the gaps between different cultures? The postmodernists say that, in principle, the gaps are so wide that they are very hard to bridge between individuals of the same tribe, and impossible to bridge between tribes. Disputes and irreconcilable differences between us are as inevitable and unsolvable as the rising and setting of the sun. There are no unequivocally “true” statements to be made by anyone, in any language, about anything. There are only their truths, my truths, your truths, her truths, etc. We are all partial by definition.

Even Physics seems to bear this worldview out. Quantum Theory tells us that the tiniest particles don’t have positions, speeds, or directions until we try to measure their positions, speeds, and directions. Then, they pop into existence in the place toward which we pointed our instruments when we went looking for them. They meet our expectations because our attempts to measure what those particles are doing largely determine what we find when we do the measuring.  

Thus, we can repeat that people – especially people from different cultures – tend to misunderstand and misinterpret one another so profoundly that there’s no way to translate one culture into another. Disputes are inevitable, unsolvable.

What should you and I do about this reality? The pomo’s first answer is: who knows? Who am I to tell you what to do about anything? You decide. Just know that sooner or later, you are going to have to live with the consequences of your actions and that your best laid plans are going to go awry. Much of the time, what happens will bear little resemblance to what you were aiming to achieve.

This view is called postmodernism because it came into vogue after modernism. In the history of Western Philosophy, the “moderns” were philosophers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe (roughly mid-1400s to late 1700s). The moderns claimed to have put the philosophy of the Middle Ages, with its blind faith in scripture, behind them. They gradually figured out how humans can get to the deepest truths about this life. The best way lay mainly in the way of thinking called “science”: Reason applied to the material problems of human existence.

They believed they’d found a way of thinking that could solve every problem. It didn’t work out that way. The “modern” way – in many cases – failed. Reason did not bring harmony to humanity. Many times, it produced the opposite. The Seven Years War. The French Revolution. Bigger guns. Then, in more recent times, hard drugs, the Gulag, Auschwitz, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Reason and science did not deliver on the promises that the earlier moderns had thought they were seeing in our future.

Postmodernism grows out of the postmodern philosophers’ disillusionment with modernism. We now live in a postmodern era of confusion, cynicism, and despair.  

Postmodernists convinced millions of followers that there are many thousands of ways of seeing this world, any one of them as legitimate as any of the others. In the branch of science called Social Science, each human group’s way of seeing the world is called a culture. A culture is actually a set of ways of seeing, and responding to, the world, a belief set that is shared by a group of people called a tribe. To confuse the matter further, even within a tribe, each individual has ways of seeing reality that contain varied versions of the tribe’s culture. The big gaps between ways of seeing, however, are between tribes/cultures. So say the postmoderns. 

These gaps between cultures are so wide that when tribes are pushed by events into interacting or competing, they inevitably get into disputes, then wars. We can’t even agree about what makes an act a crime or what makes sanity or madness. What makes an intimate act normal or perverse. These concepts are radically different from society to society and even from era to era in a given society, all shaped by individual limitations and, even more, by cultures.

Is there no solution?

The postmoderns offer no general worldview that could lead us to solutions to this problem. They say there aren’t, and can’t be, general worldviews that enable us to solve such disputes. Tribal worldviews are incommensurable. The main thing that some of the pomos do suggest is that we should learn to recognize and block any who are maneuvering to gain power for themselves and their friends. Any group who claim that their culture is the only true one. In the postmodern view, such people are invariably fascists. Their ultimate goal, the pomos say, is to control and exploit the rest of us. This postmodernist view, most of the time, arrives at some form of Marxism, each form recommending its own levels of action, and sometimes, militance and violence.   

Thus, postmodernism. Incoherent, but believed wholeheartedly by millions. Is it any surprise that our society contains so many factions, all shouting at once?

                                                  Michel Foucault (1926- 1984) 

                         (widely seen as the foremost postmodernist philosopher) 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons)