Young Australian Skeptics

(cross post from Demonic Talking Skull)

In my final year at Melbourne University I was accepted into a one-​​year Honours course in History. I didn’t end up doing the course because the prospect of a sixth year of being utterly broke didn’t really appeal. But, as a prerequisite all prospective Honours students were required to do a subject on the various methods by which one could study history – from a feminist or post-​​colonialist angle, for example.

It was actually very interesting as it introduced me to modes of thinking which I’d not been exposed to up to that point. The discipline of forcing yourself to look at a subject from a completely different angle is a valuable one. Even if you don’t agree with that point of view, it at least forces you to re-​​evaluate your own position.

And then we covered postmodernism. Oh postmodernism, how can I describe thee? I shall let thee speak for thyself:

Neomaterialist narrative and capitalist libertarianism

“Society is part of the fatal flaw of consciousness,” says Sartre; however, according to von Junz[1] , it is not so much society that is part of the fatal flaw of consciousness, but rather the absurdity, and subsequent failure, of society. However, the ground/​figure distinction intrinsic to Joyce’s Dubliners emerges again in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Debord’s model of semantic Marxism suggests that narrative comes from communication.

Thus, the subject is interpolated into a capitalist libertarianism that includes narrativity as a reality. Precultural desemanticism holds that the task of the artist is social comment, but only if the premise of capitalist libertarianism is invalid; if that is not the case, the Constitution is capable of significance.

Therefore, Baudrillard uses the term ‘cultural pretextual theory’ to denote not theory, as Sontag would have it, but neotheory. The subject is contextualised into a dialectic paradigm of consensus that includes sexuality as a totality.

Make sense? Of course not. That text was a random piece of jargon spat out by The Postmodernism Generator – check it out for a good laugh. But I assure you that it’s indistinguishable from “serious” postmodern writing. I’m not going to attempt an analysis of postmodernism here (as it would require access to neurons with which I’m currently not on speaking terms), but I think that the best demolition of the style was offered by Richard Dawkins in his essay “Postmodernism Disrobed“:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

I’ll say one good thing about postmodernism – it acts as a gold standard of chaos, misinformation and intellectual bankruptcy, and makes it quite easy for the rest of us to know precisely what it is that we need to avoid.

The one BIG problem with postmodernism is its unholy and insidious spawn – relativism. Relativism suggests that it is impossible for anyone to divorce themselves from the contexts of upbringing, culture, education and even gender, and therefore such things like absolute truths are by definition impossible. What’s true for you might not be true for me. This is fair enough on the surface – most of us realise that there’s more than one side to every argument and that events can be interpreted differently. I’m a white male who has been brought up in a Western middle-​​class society, and I can see perfectly how that would impact my worldview. But it doesn’t change the fact that 2 + 2 =4.

This is where relativism falls over. It’s fine as a safeguard against intellectual complacency – before you state “This is so”, it’s always important to check why you think it is so. And relativism is also fine in cases of pure subjectivity – “This woman is beautiful” is a subjective truth with which nobody else is required to agree. But in cases where truth gives way to fact, relativism seems to have forgotten its place. We’re seeing more and more examples where empirical fact is being undermined by relativistic thought: “Science might say that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, but my culture teaches me differently”.  OK fine, you’re culture teaches you differently and you’re entitled to your own opinion, but to borrow a phrase from Sam Harris, that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to your own facts.

Like postmodernism, relativism is an intellectual curio which makes for interesting late-​​night Pinot Noir-​​fuelled conversations. But it’s important to remember that its entire premise is based on obfuscation and anti-​​empiricism. In matters where clarity of communication and objective and sceptical thinking are required, relativism does not have a place at the table. So the next time someone tells you “Well science doesn’t have all the answers”, explain in the words of Dara O’Briain that this is correct, and if it were true scientists would simply stop bothering.

Or slap them to the ground. Objectively.

Tags: James Bannan, Philosophy, Science

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.