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)