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)