Top Ten Tips and a Few Antidodes for Contesting Post Modernism

It is with some trepidation I turn our attention to Post Modernism. However, it seems to be a potential road block on the route to good conflict discipline that needs addressing. On the one hand its influence seems to be on the wane and its usefulness to conflict work always somewhat limited. On the other hand, its pernicious influence can be seen in a lot of places that should have got over it by now. Christopher Butler says Post Modernism is a

‘..loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party. It is a not particularly unified approach who once thought its time had come, but has now gone.’

There is still a need to combat some of its intense skepticism, because all such extremes have an innate tendency to tip over into their opposite: extreme gullibility. As a result Post Modernism, while raising some interesting oppositional perspectives, has damaged the cause of argument and limited the creation of workable alternatives to the dominant ways of looking at the world and changing it. I sometimes think of the world of Dick Cheney and George W Bush as quintessentially post modernist: no grand narratives and indeed no real powers to argue things through at all; just jump to solutions.

So here goes my contesting:

1. Blind to Science: Post Modernism is characterized by strong self consciousness. But it has not really taken any advantage of emerging neuro-science to build a truly reflective theory of mental processes. Neither has it tapped into the discussions of the philosophy of science or indeed other useful modern philosophical trends to answer some of its more interesting questions. It seems systematically and fundamentally to misunderstand much modern science and willfully misuse it for strange tortuous purposes. It is heavy with jargon and pseudo-profundity.
2. Reading George Orwell is the best preparation for Post Modernism and we should be accordingly suspicious of its post-Marxist attempt to make all texts subject to arbitrary interpretation. Orwell already had the Ministry of Truth doing that in ‘1984’.
3. The End of Grand Narratives, yet it is one. The skepticism at the heart of Post Modernism was based on the idea that over-arching master narratives like Marxism and religion were on the decline. Clearly it was empirically wrong about the latter, as the new ‘Wars of Religion’ suggest.
4. All Paradigms are Equal. It is certainly appropriate to draw attention to such narratives or paradigms and encourage questioning of them. That is what our conflict work envisages. It is quite different to come to the conclusion that no big picture narrative is possible or useful or that there are no more or less truthful or useful ways of looking at the world. To assert such a thing is itself an attempt at a meta-narrative of the sort that it denounces and so is self-contradicting.
5. Deconstruction Rules. Post Modernism relies heavily on Derrida’s method of deconstruction, which views truth as always relative to the differing standpoints and pre-disposing intellectual frameworks of the person doing the judging. This is consistent with the mental models posited by neuroscience, but there is nothing in neuro-science to suggest that all models of the world are equally valid. If this were true, there would be no way of empirically or pragmatically measuring their relative usefulness. Our whole perceptual and logical systems are about constructing those mental models and then testing their utility over and over again. We as a species have had a long period of evolutionary testing and many of our mental models are extraordinarily accurate, most of the time. Different observers are able to reach very close agreement on what they see or our roads would be undrivable.
6. Solipsism Sucks. Emerging research on mirror neurons enables us to share subjective space in a way that casts considerable doubt on Post Modernism hyper-solipsist approach to reality. We are able to experience matches between the world, our emotional internal reaction to it and the similar reactions of others.
7. Arbitrary Nature of Language: Not. When we come to the Post Modernist take on language, while some mapping from reality to words is arbitrary, as are some of the ways we divide up the world, for the most part we can find pragmatic translations that largely work. The occasions when they do not are sufficiently rare to be commented on and to form the focus of efforts at remedial understanding. When we use certain language to (as Post Modernism calls it) ‘privilege’ certain discourses, we are right to. We can be all means deconstruct, but only as a prelude to sturdy reconstruction and Post Modernism has not shown much appetite for that. The Post Modernist claim is that once we see our conceptual systems as arbitrary, then we come to see the ways we see the world, its social systems and even human identity are not guaranteed by language to be accurate representations of the world. Our conceptual and sensory systems are not as it happens arbitrary. Though they may sometimes be wrong, the errors are systematic and, as we understand the neural underpinnings of mind, increasingly comprehensible and capable of being adjusted for. We live inside our mental models not the direct experience of reality, but the mental models are subject to endless testing against their predictive power over reality and are constantly consciously and unconsciously modified until they are a reasonable fit. That is how we drive a car.
8. The Text is the Thing. Contrary to the Post Modernist perspective, the prime purpose of a text is to communicate the author’s intent. The author can tell how well she/he has communicated by the reaction of the audience. The audience can tell how accurately they have read the author’s intention by her/his reaction to their reaction etc. This is not to say that we cannot read things into a text that were not put there, or that some great literature does not generate an almost infinite variety of interpretations. This just means that such texts are highly generative and may well have been built that way. Even multiple interpretations are no guarantee of lack of contact with authorial intent. There is nothing wrong with pointing out the contradictions within texts or the contradictions between the world and the text, but there are limits.
9. History is Bunk: Not. The Post Modernist take on history as just one hegemonial narrative is similarly misplaced. Certainly there are many interpretations of history and some narratives of factual sequences of events differ as a result of different evidential availability and interpretation. But there are better and worse interpretations of history. The consistency of the interpretations varies in its accuracy in observable ways. Post Modernism by its skepticism stifles debate because it suggests that debate cannot make real progress. By opening the questioning of established interpretations, it is doing just what the Conflict Model is suggesting. But in assuming that we cannot make any progress in getting closer to some more objective version of the truth or history, it is pernicious. An exact correspondence between history and the past is not possible: the map is not the territory, but we can get ever greater utility from our maps of historical reality and the process of debate is generative.
10. Misreading Thomas Kuhn. Post Modernist skepticism about science is similarly unfounded and perhaps based on a mis-reading or extreme interpretation of Thomas Kuhn and his incommensurability thesis for differing paradigms. Like Kuhn, it is kind of Post Modernism to point out the problems of differing paradigms, but this does not mean another way in which we can retreat into scientific solipsism. Philip Kitchen is very good on the process of ‘modest realism’ that science uses. He separates this from the more value laden perspectives on what we should study and what we should do with the results of research. Post Modernists often grossly distort the empirical claims of science and create mystification and obfuscation. Many of the Post Modernist attacks on science are themselves under severe attack. They did focus attention on this issue and have perhaps set off a useful dialogue around scientific objectivity, but they are now in retreat.

Post Modernist Antidotes: So how can we address the problems Post Modernism raises in way that helps us with conflict?

1. Pragmatic Deconstruction: We can use the deconstruction technique to see where our paradigms or statements about our interests contradict each other or reality, using the techniques of Socratic self questioning. We can put them up to be tested and improve them as a result, never confident we have reached perfect truth, but coming to know roughly in which direction it lies. We are not seeking the Platonic ideal, just greater reality in the pragmatic sense of what works. We should use rival paradigms to test our own and the other paradigms to see what they share and where they differ or conflict. The interaction between paradigms would be dialectical and aim, not at relativist despair, but a better paradigm or synthesis emerging out of the interaction. Deconstruction in the Post Modernist sense uses contradictions in a text as evidence of text’s arbitrary wobbliness. We should see it as a generative opportunity to interrogate the contradictions, understand their origins and leverage them to get better understanding: we use contradictions dialectically.
2. Use Neuroscience. Post Modernism throws considerable doubt on the idea of the self and thereby challenges individual rationalism and personal autonomy. We will examine far more useful questioning of this in our review of neuro-science and the role of unconscious processes in our actions and thinking. But because this neuro-science is founded in empirical research, it is bounded and has the possibility of being transcended through reflective understanding. We may have an exaggerated sense of our individual autonomy, but neuro-science careful prescribes the limitations and the ways to jump over the fence.
3. Use Recent Bias and Heuristics Research. The Post Modernist take on language reinforces this loss of autonomy and suffers a similar fate: it is really not evidentially based and so overstates its case. Recent developments in decision theory and economics have had a far more useful impact in modifying ideas of individual autonomy that form the bedrock of the free market economy. We don’t really need Post Modernism to do any heavy lifting in this area either. The issues of false consciousness are better handled by Marxism, or Social Dominance Theory that suggest ways of transcending such delusions and are less likely to leave minority groups divided and isolated in their own identities, powerless to take on the wider systems.
4. Do Not Despair of Argument. Post Modernism ultimately despairs of effective argument. This book is centered on both the idea of rational dialogue, and the limitations of rationality. But it also focuses on the ways to overcome the limitations. The rules and systems that support such dialogue are more useful than those of Post Modernist.
5. Don’t Count on Post Modernism When Faced With Tyrants. Much of the world’s population has to deal with really oppressive, murderous power relations and Post Modernism is hardly the philosophy to survive a concentration camp. The social construction of reality and of our identities does not mean we don’t have any or that we can write our own scripts. We can act to change the world and we do have rights that can be trampled on and the trampling should be resisted.
6. Don’t Take Post Modernism in the Boxing Ring. There are still bitter conflicts out there and Post Modernism is not much use in them. Let us take Post Modernism skepticism and use neuro-science to better understand the limitations of our modest realism. Let us transcend them both and continuously improve our grip on reality and our ability to change the world for the better, untrammeled by its pessimistic powerlessness and removal of our sense of agency. This is the way to move forward on conflict.
7. Why Care About Post Modernism Anyway? If you wonder the relevance of all this to critical issues of modern politics, doesn’t the lack of common agreed standards for political debate in some ways reflect the corrosive influence of Post Modernism? Don’t both Left and Right suffer from the inability to engage in real dialogue with each other or even within their own ranks? Isn’t this a negative legacy of Post Modernist relativism that needs to be overcome?

Footnote: If you have never really heard of Post Modernism or think it is confined to University English departments then take a look at Post-Modernism A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Butler for a short balanced description, and take my word for it, it is more damagingly pervasive than you think.

Now here is a more incisive take on the deeply conservative role Post Modernism often plays in ‘the real world out there‘: