A note from the Links Editor      

Why I am Not a Postmodernist

There was a time when people were openly grateful to scientists and physicians who dedicated their lives to making us healthier and happier. There was a time when it was fashionable to express appreciation for the system of government and the practice of dispassionate inquiry which have brought us the unparalleled health, freedom, and prosperity which we enjoy today.

There was a time when people thought that a proposition was "valid" or "true" if, and only if, it ultimately squared with the observable world around us.

There was a time when people thought it was right to judge each person by what he or she had done as an individual, rather than for their race, skin color, ancestry, religion, gender, sexual preference, or anything else.

There was a time when people enjoyed discovering how much we all have in common, and how most of us wanted the same things despite the superficial differences. There was even a time when we thought the best way to overcome misunderstanding, prejudice, and hate was by means of reason, common sense, clear-thinking, and good-will.

We called this being scientific. We called this being rational. We called this being enlightened. We called this being mliberal.

We called this being modern.

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I am concerned here only with the use of the word "postmodernism" as it usually gets used in rhetoric, not with its use in real epistemology.

Real postmodernism is a thoughtful study of the limits of scientific inquiry, the origins and perpetuation of unreasonable prejudices, and the ambiguities of language. Even though I am not a professional philosopher, I appreciate real postmodernism as far as I'm able to understand it.

By contrast...

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• Postmodern Culture The principal site, and a good place to start. There is even a search engine. [See also Note 1, below.]

• Postmodernism FAQs

• Postmodernism by Michael Fegan. "Postmodernism calls into question enlightenment values such as rationality, truth, and progress, arguing that these merely serve to secure the monolithic structure of modern capitalistic society by concealing or excluding any forces that might challenge its cultural dominance."

• Brent Wilson rejects science because he thinks it caused the Holocaust.

• Postmodernism for Beginners. This site, for a college course, keeps changing. Click on David-With-Sunglasses and you'll find you're back here.

• Technoculture Joseph Dumit's review of another writer's essay. "The Actors are Cyborgs, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere." This is the first site I found which mentioned Sandra Harding, whose book "The Science Question in Feminism" accused Einstein's relativity of being gender-biased, and called Newton's "Principia" a "rape manual."

• Postmodernism and Health : "The body of the patient is inscribed by discourses of professional 'care' as well as by pain and suffering." The author takes psychiatry at its most unscientific as the prototype for scientific medicine.

• Black-and-White The first (and for a while, the only) undeleted reference I could find on the 'net to the Portland Baseline Essays. [See also Note 2, below.]

• Chantal Mouffe and why she is against democracy. This postmodernist envisions a future dominated by minority group identities and minority group grievances. "The book represents not just a discussion of the concept of democratic citizenship, but the epitaph for it."

• National Center for History in the Schools. [See also Note 3, below.]

• The Panic Encyclopedia -- The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene A collection of postmodernist essays. [See also Note 4, below.]

• Stanford Humanities Review 4(1): Nobel laureate Herbert Simon thinks that great literature is about the common experiences and concerns of all human beings. Professor Simon also cites scientific work that he thinks shows that humans do, indeed, all have certain understandings in common. Here are the postmodernists' outraged responses, accusing Professor Simon of massive ignorance, bigotry and heartlessness. [See also Note 5, below.]

• Postmodernist Philosophy Good site, real philosophy rather than the usual "postmodernist" stuff; the author appears likable and reasonable.

• Johns Hopkins "Cultural Studies and Postmodernism" Links to cultural studies, without anything incomprehensible or loony.

• "Anything Goes". Paul Fayerabend and his friends complain about scientific theories being counter-intuitive, people who ask for "clarity, precision, objectivity, and truth" are "impoverishing [history] in order to please their lower instincts", "scientific theories are only justified by their own standards and not by some objective criteria", the impossibility of predicting weather accurately (ever heard of "chaos theory", Paul?), "let's talk about Galileo's politics again", etc., etc.

• Michel Foucault For me, the best of the postmodernists. A likable man who writes primarily about sub-science (lots of GOOD examples from old-fashioned psychiatry) being misrepresented as knowledge by cliques seeking political advantage. Unfortunately, Foucault and his followers have generalized this to genuine (empirical, experimental) science. His prescription is radical skepticism. Mine is free and honest inquiry.

• Michel Foucault

• Michel Foucault Trading card. Nice.

• Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Thought, and Postmodern Thought. Philosophy links from U. of Colorado.

• Postmodern Nausea. "In time's absence what is new renews nothing; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, but represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return. It isn't, but comes back again." -- Derrida. The background of this site is a sketch of the large intestine, perhaps for the obvious reason.

• Postmodernity, History, and the Assassination of JFK cites the supposed impossibility of determining what really happened as a way of understanding why postmodernism is true. As a scientific pathologist, I was amused by the familiar statement: "This projectile [CE 399] allegedly caused seven wounds to JFK and Texas Governor John Connally and changed direction four times, yet was in virtually intact condition when found, making it one of the most extraordinary objects in the history of gunfire." The last portion of the statement is simply untrue.

• Religious-Right Postmodernism Two Evangelicals adopt postmodern terminology to claim "universal reason" led logically to Hitler's atrocities. [See also Note 6, below.]

• Radical Afrocentrism: "Socrates and Cleopatra were black". "The ancient Egyptians were black like Malcolm X, flew in gliders and had psychic powers". "Melanin is a superconductor", etc., etc.). You'll find this stuff persuasive if and only if "truth is whatever your grievance-group says it is." This is typical of "postmodernist" changing the ground-rules of rational inquiry.

• David Muhammad's speech at Harvard.

• "A Brief History of Afrocentric Scholarship": "As can be discerned from this brief paper, Afrocentrism is not a new movement promoted by egomaniacal pseudoscientists." Lavishes praise on Yosef ben-Jochannan, whose made the famous claim that Aristotle stole his works from the black people's library at Alexandria, which was not even built until after Aristotle's death. Asked by Mary Lefkowitz about this, "Dr. ben-Jochannan was unable to answer the question, and said that he resented the tone of the inquiry." ("Out of Egypt", cited below). Professor Lefkowitz's subsequent scholarly examination of the claim that Greek philosophy came from Egypt has been "deconstructed" to make her a "racist". "Beethoven was black": Bill Clearlake. The Marxist Review of Books.

• Postmodernism: The Drinking Game: "Rule one: If anyone, at any time, for any reason, believes in, supports, or likes a person, place, or idea, it's only because they haven't uncovered the fundamental contradictions underlying it and you are allowed to laugh at them because they are Less Jaded than you."

• Postmodernism: The Drinking Game (Ed. Note: A different one, though perhaps postmodernists would not recognize it as such!)

• Danny Yee, a real scientist, on postmodernism: "In general, when 'postmodernism' is restricted to literary criticism and cultural studies, it is a lot more reasonable."

• Mr. Taylor at U. of Arizona

• "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" by Chip Morningstar. His joyful hoax, in which he delivered meaningless gibberish to a "cultural studies" audience and met with approval and agreement.

• "How to Speak and Write Postmodern". "At some point someone may actually ask you what you're talking about. This risk faces all those who would speak postmodern and must be carefully avoided."

• L'Isle de Gilligan -- Parody

• Random Post-Modernist Essay Generator Writes postmodernist double-talk using a computer-algorithm. Compare its productions to the stuff at "Postmodern Culture".

It's a fact. People want to believe lies that make them feel intellectually and spiritually superior to others.

At its best, contemporary postmodernism is a reaction against all the stupid people who pretend to have answers to everything ("meta-narratives"). Science, rightly used, does the same thing.

In its more typical forms, contemporary postmodernism is a sustained attack on the three hopes of the "modern" era:

• the "modernist" hope that we could use rigorous and disciplined study to understand nature, and use the new knowledge for our common benefit;

• the "modernist" hope that people from different backgrounds and cultures could live together in a democractic society, enjoying economic and personal freedom;

• the "modernist" hope that people around the world could discover our common ground, and overcome hatred, prejudice, or misunderstanding; and that sharing our literature and other works of art would help us do this.

Postmodernism grew out of literary criticism and the focus on the ambiguities of language. I understand how this applies to the language of literature, advertising, and propaganda. I understand all too well how this applies to the "knowledge" of sub-sciences like sociology, psychology (outside some narrow lab applications), and education, where real experiments are (regrettably) almost impossible, successful theories are (regrettably) few or nonexistent, and where ideology and politics dominate in the public arena and do tremendous harm. (I'll stand by this controversial statement, and believe that most readers who bring their own real-life experience will agree. In fact, I've received appreciative notes from academic psychologists and students of culture who deplore the misapplication of their subjects by ideologues. Here, I'm with Michel Foucault completely, and my own godawful experiences with "expert" after "expert" underlies much of my appreciation for this great thinker.) And works of literature are not produced or read in a social or cultural vacuum. The latter is the focus of today's literary criticism at its most intriguing.

But I am at a loss to understand how the language of science ("centimeter", "oxygen", "hemoglobin", "six") and fundamental human experience ("This is blue", "I itch", "I feel cold") shares this indeterminacy.

Postmodernists complain that science is a cultural prejudice, and/or a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power, and/or only one "way of knowing" among many, with no special privilege. For postmodernists, science is "discourse", one system among many, maintained by a closed community as a means of holding onto power, and ultimately referential only to itself.

No reasonable person would deny that politics and the profit-motive do influence what science studies, and who gets to use the laboratories. But it seems to me that the feature of real-world science which distinguishes it from other forms of description is rigorous measurement and the experimental method, which we can apply to atoms, to the galactic radiation, to our bodies, and to the medical techniques of indigenous peoples. All scientific knowledge is tentative, and scientific statements are judged by their predictive value. (Postmodernists themselves sometimes say, "What's true is what works.") As scientists look at nature, science corrects itself over time, and all scientists thrive on finding flaws in one another's works. Like it or not, science works. Superstition doesn't.

More seriously, postmodernists blame science for Hitler's atrocities and the other evils perpetrated against humankind. This is noxious falsehood. Every tyrant uses the language of science (who doesn't, nowadays?) But oppression happens and continues because people choose to believe (or pretend to believe) ugly lies. If anything will free us from this, it's knowledge of the world as it really is. And if my own experience has taught me anything, it's that reason, not make-believe, is the best way of dealing with the real evils of our world. After all, it was superior science and understanding, translated into superior military power, that gave the free world the victory over Hitler.

We still hear a great deal today about "multiculturalism" and "relative values". But everybody that I know, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or religion, seems to want the same basic things. This begins with health, reasonable personal liberty and security, and a reasonable chance to have one's initiative rewarded. Postmodernists talk about being "dehumanized" by science and technology. If they really believed this, they would trade their academic positions for the lives of subsistence farmers in the world's poor nations, or (if they could) the short, sickly, miserable lives of chattel-serfs in the ages "before technocracy". There they will discover that what people want isn't "cultural integrity" or "multicultural sensitivity", but health, food, safety, and a reasonable opportunity to choose one's own course through life. Those who would deny them these basic human needs aren't the scientists. It is the tyrants and ideologues of the right and the left.

Of course, it's silly to believe that science gives ultimate answers about our place in the cosmos, or what things mean, or what's right and wrong. But as far as I can tell, the best way to make a good decision is to understand a situation as it really is, and the best way to do mischief is to choose make-believe instead.

I believe the material to which I've linked this page speaks for itself, even though it is written in a peculiar doublespeak that is hard for the uninitiated to understand. Postmodernist writings consist largely of effusive praise for each other's works, and obvious appeals to the prejudices of their liberal audience. Since the constituency is liberals, there is a preoccupation with how wealth and opportunities are to be redistributed by the government, and the question of how wealth and opportunities are produced and defended gets ignored. A satirical website about the postmodernist work ethic is a blank page.

The more recent writings are less hostile to science itself. There are even writers at the "Postmodern Culture" site who look to popular science writers to buttress postmodernism's attack on the supposed monolithic ideology of classical science. Harvard's paleontologist, Dr. Gould, is a favorite; unlike the creationists of the 1980's, the postmodernists who take Dr. Gould as an authority seem to really want to understand him. Alongside this are the totally-discredited Duesberg claims about the cause of AIDS. In between are various environmentalist and social-science polemics papers. You'll need to decide on their merit; it's interesting to see postmodernists using the evidence of empirical science after all, when it suits them.

As a visitor to "Postmodern Culture" who worked hard at literary criticism as a college undergraduate, I'm struck by the lack of internal self-criticism at the site. In college, I examined empirical evidence to decide whether Milton really drew on particular neoplatonists in creating his "Chaos" scene, whether John the Baptist was a conscious forerunner of Jesus, whether the Wellhausen hypothesis of the origin of Deuteronomy was true, and what Shakespeare was trying to tell us in "Antony and Cleopatra". I examined the ideas of others, compared them with the facts of the real world, and had the same done to me. As a scientist-physician, I have thrived on finding the errors in others' work. By contrast, the world of postmodernism shows the same lack of internal criticism that I've come to expect from pseudoscientists and charlatans of all stripes.

Somebody has to say "No!" to all this. So far as I can tell, I'm the first person on the "Net" to do so in an accessible way.

If you are a postmodernist, I'm fully in support of your appreciation for your neighbor's culture, your concern about the future of our planet, and your care for people who are genuinely oppressed. I enjoy the great diversity of humankind, in our food, our dress, our music, our literature, our sexuality, and our forms of spiritual expression.

I am only asking you to reconsider (1) whether empirical science should have a privileged place in your thinking about how the world of nature really is, and (2) whether western-style democracy isn't the best way of getting what you and your neighbors really want. And if you love books as I do, ask yourself (3) whether some passage in literature has touched you in a special way, reaching something in you that is universal to humankind, something "beyond the text", beyond all cultural prejudice.

Especially, look at the world around you. Most scientists, most white people, most men, and most European-Americans, are good, sensible people who care about the world in which we live. Science isn't a conspiracy of power-hungry monsters against the human race. The real enemy is superstition, ignorance, and silly lies. And if you live in America, Canada, Australia/New Zealand, or Western Europe, most people in the world would gladly trade places with you.

Learn about the world as it really is. Health and friendship!

The word gratitude appears only a few times at the Postmodern Culture site, and never with respect to science, medicine, or democracy. First, a reviewer of "Schindler's List" talks about how appropriate the gratitude shown to Oscar Schindler was. Nearby, you can find "The Fairy Tale of The Just War" ("The hero receives acclaim, along with the gratitude of the victim and the community.") So how do you think the free world finally overcame Hitler? Apparently, gratitude is a virtue or a fairy-tale, depending on whether the postmodernists like (Schindler) or dislike (the free world) the recipient.

NOTE 2. It is obvious to me that people who are wilfully deceiving the public stay off the Internet. Pseudoscience targeted to exploit blacks ("melanin science", "the Portland Baseline Essays") has almost completely disappeared from the 'net. (See Gross & Levitt "Higher Superstition", Johns Hopkins 1994 for a review of the "Baseline Essays" author's falsified credentials; despite his claim to be a distinguished research scientist, he reportedly has no education past high school, and no record of scientific publication.) More on the "Baseline Essays", all negative: Center for Equal Opportunity. American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker says "It uses pseudoscience to promote a political agenda. At the same time, it cheats students of a chance to find out what real science is like, and it deprives them of a founcation on which to build future learning. This would be bad news for any of our youngsters; it is criminal for poor, minority students." Revisionist Discoveries by Anti-Racist Historians quotes the Baseline Essays: "Afrika was the epitome of civilizations in times when western Europe lived in a state of savagery and barbarity featuring filth, sexual disease, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, and anarchy."

NOTE 3. These are the folks who spent a million dollars of tax money to generate learning objectives for American History. The resulting document did not mention George Washington as our first president, mentioned Abraham Lincoln only as a speechmaker, and was utterly silent on America's contribution to science (no mention of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, or what they did). Yet there were nineteen separate references to McCarthyism, and reverse racial, class, and gender prejudices permeate the work. Check out the main site and its links yourself. The influence of postmodernist pseudo-epistemology is obvious. Click here to see how a participant cites thermodynamics against "individualism", and quantum theory "indeterminacy" to explain why it's not worthwhile mentioning the individual heroes and achievements for which most of us are proud and grateful.

NOTE 4. There is one essay here on the relationship between the Chilean astronomers and Pinochet's brutal repression of the people who almost succeeded in setting up a Castro-style communist state in Chile. The author considers Chile's observatories to be collaborators in Pinochet's human-rights violations merely for remaining open ("the ideological indifference of scientific value-neutrality"), and frames an analogy between astronomy and torture: "Astrophysics, which itself is a will to pure factuity, compels the universe to confess its secrets."

NOTE 5. Typical is the incident reviewed by Mark Turner. When cognitive scientists discover, based on their experiments, that human beings everywhere agree on the meaning of "This is blue", the postmodernist reply is that "human beings are a recent invention, a wrinkle in our knowledge that will inevitably be displaced as new wrinkles arise." (Mark Turner's written me, 1/1/97 to point out that he's describing the postmodernists, and is himself a cognitive scientist. Shoulda been obvious... Sorry, Mark! Thanks for speaking out for understanding and reason.) Also typical is Suvir Kaul, apparently thinks that the purpose of literary criticism is to promote partisan positions in the struggle for world ideological domination, and thereby solve "the problems of racism, sexism, economic inequality, and lack of equal opportunity."

NOTE 6: "Whether you're talking about the manifestations of universal reason in the final solution of the Holocaust or you're talking about the manifestation of universal reason in nuclear arms, there seems to be something inherently violent here." The authors are not the first members of the religious right to: (1) assert that Hitler's atrocities are the logical outcome of the Enlightenment and the triumph of science; (2) claim to champion the poor and oppressed against evil, secular science and technology; (3) claim that science etc. pretends to have answers to everything ("...the assumption by means of universal reason that Western culture has the truth, and that necessarily marginalizes..."). But these two are apparently the first to identify as "Postmodern" their familiar right-wing overstatement of the limits of rational inquiry. And while I appreciate your Christian zeal, gentlemen, your statements are on a level with the creationist ("neck of the giraffe") material elsewhere on your server. The root of tyranny, lawlessness, over-population, racial hatreds, world hunger, avoidable disease, and rank stupidity isn't "universal reason" or "meta-narratives" or "modernism". It's something inherent in human nature. Mainstream Christians like myself still talk about sin.

Click here for my reply to the first postmodernist posting I found on the "Net".

The most interesting anecdote so far came from a doctoral student in the humanities, who asked to remain anonymous: "I have just gone through a huge battle in my 'supposed' doctoral seminar [at a major university], where I pointed out some of the fallacious logic in Postmodernist rhetoric. The professor, ___ ___, a PM author, could only respond with 'F--- you.' A very literate thing to say... ". Joshua Hersh, one of the students, described his own course at Ohio State University. "This one is called 'Values, Science and Technology in a Global Perspective.' We learn about things like the particle physicist's subculture in which their particle beams represent a phallic symbol. We also learn about how all science is socially influenced and knowledge does not really exist (epistemological relativism). Finally, we learn that the people in the class that have bad vision are cyborgs because they augment their vision with eyeglasses."

I also ran (Jan. 15, 1996) a MEDLINE literature search for "feminist theory". I found 52 references. Of these, 50 were postmodern-style rhetoric, ranging from common-sense-common decency stuff to the familiar we-hate-men stuff. There was a large representation from the nursing literature, including an exhortation to "include feminist theory as a major component of the nursing curriculum." Only two were empirical studies, both of sexual violence. In each case, the predictions of "feminist theory" turned out to be totally wrong. Try it yourself; there's MEDLINE links nearby. In science, any "theory" which has, even once, failed to show predictive value must be modified or discarded. That's the key difference between science and politics.

The conservative anti-science, anti-empirical, anti-common-sense movement is every bit as vigorous and nasty as its liberal counterpart. These people have not (yet?) discovered postmodernism as a rhetorical device. I'd welcome your suggested titles for a essay to stand as a counterpart this one.

Vaclev Havel, president of the Czech republic and hero of the liberation from Soviet domination, on "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World". Urges people to set aside both cultural differences and the reliance on "modern" institutions. "The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it."

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This site is a mirror of the original work.

Friedlander operates the world's largest free personalized medical information service. It's an outgrowth of his modernist vision of a world made healthier by science, communication, mutual understanding, and common kindness.

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Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments.
Vol. 3 No. 1. Spring 1998

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