Postmodernism Has Been A Net Loss
Its insights are not unique and its denial of objectivity has been worse than useless.
Fellow scientists, scholars and intellectuals, your intuition is correct—postmodernism has been a net loss for the world, an exhausting and counterproductive detour in intellectual history.
Whatever insights the masters of postmodern thought seem to have introduced did not require a new discipline or indeed much notice at all. Here at the cusp of the 2024 US Presidential election especially, I think it is past time for many of postmodernism’s core tenets to be abandoned as failures.
To start, postmodernism was never needed. Even at the beginning of the “postmodern critique,” modern science and social science were moving toward inclusivity and away from rigid universals as a matter of methodological rigor. In fields like anthropology and sociology, researchers were challenging assumptions and expanding perspectives while still upholding truth as something to be pursued, even if imperfectly.
What’s left of Postmodernism after you subtract the obvious conclusions that the traditional sciences would have or had already achieved on their own? The only answer is denial of objective truth at all—the attempt, even, to dismantle truth as a concept. The result has been predictable: Rather than liberating knowledge from bias, the rejection of objective truth has left real knowledge vulnerable to discounting and manipulation. The rejection of universals has not only failed to free knowledge from bias but exposed it to new dangers, such as ideological spin and factual relativism.
Alternative facts. Truthiness.
Partisan media—think Fox News—is an easy example of how postmodernist ideas have like minded bad actors in the real world. The network prioritizes narrative over objective reporting, mirroring the postmodern rejection of universals. And don’t forget politicians like Donald Trump, for whom factual accuracy is a chump’s game compared to shaping a version of reality that resonates with a particular audience’s beliefs. Trump is obviously too dumb to use such language, but for him, truth is “contextualized” and rooted in who has the power to define it. (Perhaps it could be said, however, that postmodern language is dumb enough for Trump.) In this sense, the postmodern legacy of truth-skepticism becomes visible not in the content of Fox News, or of Trump’s “weave,” but in the methodology—the implicit promotion of the view that truth is malleable and that perspectives on reality depend on who is doing the perceiving. I don’t think postmodernism caused this phenomenon, but I do think the easy compatibility between Fox News, Trump and postmodernism is scandalous and tempts the academy itself to engage in dangerous and Trumpy excess. I have, for example, been told by a colleague that it was hegemonic of me to point out that another colleague’s pretty strident claim was not true, not despite but because I appealed to evidence.
This environment, where facts are pliable and each side has its own “truth,” has been a real catastrophe for our society and, speaking now as a professor, for our students. The only original postmodernist idea—that truth is subjective and situated within power dynamics—has invited us all to blur the lines between empirical fact and opinion, and to consider empirical evidence only in reference to the apparent political power of whoever gathered and reported that evidence. Ironically, and setting aside for a moment its own obvious philosophical blunder (that it too cannot be true if there is no truth), postmodernism offers intellectual succor to those with the authoritarian intuition to sow bullshit on the path to dominating others.
In this way, postmodernism doesn’t merely destabilize traditional views of knowledge but actively empowers those who would obscure facts to serve their own ends—at the very least making it easier for bullshit to proliferate unchallenged.
And here we are.