Caroline Chisholm, Dame Jean McNamara, Miles Franklin and Dame Mary Gilmore.
Nevertheless, Linden is obviously right in saying that non-WEAMs have been hard done by in the past (although one is entitled to wonder just how much his- tory she knows). But what’s so ‘post-modernist’ about holding this view? It was the ‘modernists’ who fought long and hard for the rights of non-WEAMs. In fact, when Linden complains about such things as reference books that devote more space to Indiana than India, she sounds much more like a classic Enlightenment thinker than a postmodernist (the latter is just as likely to complain that modern reference books ignore the genuine interests of the local people who read them.)
Post-modernists, in fact, are the last people who fight for human rights. Most of them are either authoritar- ian Marxists, or ‘anything goes, nothing-is-wrong’ ni- hilists, who explictly reject ‘humanism’. This is not sur- prising, when you consider that their two main heroes are Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s writings on the ‘superman’ directly influenced the Nazis, and Heidegger was a gung-ho Nazi in the early 1930’s, and was a Nazi party member right throughout the war (and who never renounced his Nazi past). 4 (And then there was Paul de Man, the greatest champion of post- modernism in America, who, it turned out, was a very shady character who wrote Nazi-supporting journal- ism in Belgium during the war. 5)
Linden might object that many of the women and black people I refer to are not modernists. But why not?
They all subscribed to the sort of humanist values that characterize modernism. The thing is, Linden has no clear idea of what she means by ‘modernism’, and in her article the term is completely useless. She even clas- sifies James Joyce as an anti-modernist. This will be news to those poor traditionalists who teach ‘modern- ist’ literature courses. She also says that:
French and other European philosophers [were] always a little out of mainstream modernism, which is mostly conducted in the English language.
This is a surprisingly Anglocentric view for a postmodernist to take, and reveals an ignorance of in- tellectual and cultural history that is inexcusable for one who is basing her arguments on this history. The Enlightenment, for example, was as much a Continen- tal movement as an English one, if not more so, and it was especially influential in France. And a large pro- portion of the Enlightenment heroes are from the Con- tinent, for example, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Bayle, Wolff, Lessing and Mendelssohn.
She also says things that suggest that anyone who casts doubt on the scientific method, or who warns against the dangers of technology, counts as an anti- modernist. But this would undermine her whole posi- tion, for one of the most pervasive features of intellec- tual life since the Enlightenment has been the reaction against science and technology. There have been vast numbers of novels and non-fiction books written in the past century about the horrors of modern life, the evils of factories and industrial capitalism, and so on. A large proportion of the leading novels of the past century that are taught by the Eng Lit ‘traditionalists’ concern such issues (take D H Lawrence for starters).
It simply isn’t clear what Linden takes to count as modernism, or as post-modernism. And it is just not clear at all what her point is. She makes a number of vague and jumbled claims about recent developments
in physics, sociology and linguistics, as well as refer- ring to globalisation, but not only are these claims highly misleading, they present no coherent picture of why postmodernism should be considered to be a sig- nificant new movement that is worth hitching your wagon to.
In order to help us understand postmodernism, she shows us an upside-down map of Australia, and says there is no reason why maps shouldn’t have the South at the top, for neither way is really correct. Similarly, she says:
Postmodernism says that there’s no such thing as The Answer. All answers are at best tentative, or condi- tional upon the question and the questioner.
But the discovery that there is no absolute up or down in the Universe - and thus no reason why Tas- mania should not be shown at the top of Australia - is a discovery made by modern science. Besides, it is mis- leading to simply say that there is no ‘Answer’ to the question of which is the right way up. There is an an- swer of sorts, and this answer is that there is no right way up.
Anyway, Linden’s claim that ‘all answers are at best tentative’ does not fit in with her analogy. The analogy was supposed to show that some questions have no answer, but this is not the same as the view that all answers are tentative. The latter view is compatible with the view that some answers are better than others.
(Skeptics agree that, in some scientific areas, answers may be tentative, but they do not agree that all answers are therefore equally good.)
As far as answers being ‘conditional upon the ques- tion’, well, of course! Whether ‘82’ is the right answer depends on whether the question was ‘What is the atomic number of lead’ or ‘How many vodkas did Scott have last night?’ Answers, however, are not conditional upon the questioner. The correct answer to the two questions just given, for instance, are the same regard- less of who asks them.
A postmodernist should at least be on firmer ground when it comes to aesthetics, because relativism about values is more plausible. But Linden’s comments on aesthetics completely miss the point. She says ‘Shake- speare is better at a lot more things than the bus ticket - but not at getting you on the bus’, but she fails to ex- plain just what business it is of English Lit teachers to teach students how to get on buses. (One thing is for sure, though: in a postmodern University, the Eng Lit lecturers won’t be teaching the classics.)
She then descends into a confused sort of under- graduate relativism. She says she doesn’t doubt scien- tific discoveries such as Darwinism, or that the heart pumps blood. But she then says that:
The Truth is not out there. Nor are The Meaning, The Answer, Reality... They are all inside us. We human be- ings make meaning, and truth, and answers. We can also change them.
This is pure Shirley Maclaine. You can’t hold that Darwinism is true, and also that truth and reality are made by human beings, which we can change to suit ourselves. 6 If the truth is just a matter of what you choose to believe, then if Linden had chosen to believe in Creationism, then that would have been true, accord- ing to this relativist view. And if there is no reality be- yond your mind, then there does not exist anything which Darwinism can be true of anyway. In fact, this
position is not so much relativism, as idealism. Ideal- ism (in philosophy) is the view that nothing exists ex- cept minds. (This sense of ‘idealism’ should not be con- fused with the more common sense which means ‘filled with noble ideas’). I doubt that Linden really wants to be an idealist, or even a relativist. But in that case, the Truth is, in fact, ‘Out There’.
Earlier Linden had said, in pontificating on the limi- tations of science, that:
If you want to find a way of looking after land in Aus- tralia, CSIRO may give you a good answer. So may the Aboriginal people who did perfectly well here for more than fifty thousand years.
I’ll ignore some of the crucial facts and distinctions that Linden skates over here, and concentrate on the most important point. Let us accept that Aborigines know a fair bit about the land, which is no doubt true.
How did they acquire this knowledge? Was it through waffling on about how they make their own reality and truth? Did they just think of something that appealed to them, and then decide that it was true? Did it thereby become true for them (but not for Europeans?) Or did they gain their knowledge by close, careful observa- tion of the way the world is, a way that exists inde- pendently of whatever people think about it? Call me crazy, but I’d say the latter.
Linden also makes another classic mistake by con- fusing facts and values, when she complains that Dar- winism has been used to justify bad things, and she concludes that Darwinism is therefore not neutral about values. Here she has failed to distinguish between Dar- winism as a scientific position, which is value-free, and whatever moral positions that have attempted to use it as a basis. The latter (some of which are indeed dubi- ous) have nothing to do with the scientific theory, and do not follow from it.
The ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is the name philosophers give to the mistake of thinking that moral positions fol- low from facts about the natural world. Consider, for example, the fact that certain areas of science are con- cerned with how some organisms help each other. Some social reformers say that we should use this as a model of how to live, but these moral claims, whether they are right or wrong as moral claims, do not follow from the scientific facts, and they have no bearing on these scientific facts. The same is true of Darwinism, and any moral claims made in its name.
Linden also seems to argue that ‘modern science’ is not value-free, because, for example, it spent much time and energy on developing Viagra, but it does not stop millions of African babies dying each year of malaria.
Here she makes the elementary error of failing to dis- tinguish between science and its applications (and I’m disappointed that a reader of the Skeptic should make such a mistake.) Science itself makes no claims about the relative importance of moral issues. In doing sci- ence, you use certain methods to discover the truth about how something works. But the issue of what peo- ple should spend their money on is not itself a matter for science. It is a moral issue. (It is true that science can sometimes help us decide how best we can achieve the goals - moral or otherwise - that we have decided upon, but that is a different matter.) If you want to criti- cize anyone here, you can perhaps criticize the popu- lace, societal institutions, the politicians, and maybe even individual scientists. But criticizing science itself is simply to miss the point.
She also seems to think it is a significant blow against the objectivity of science that:
...even the best scientific theories are created by falli- ble human beings who share the beliefs of the societies in which they live.
But the fact that scientists can be fallible and biased - as readers are well aware - does not mean that sci- ence cannot be objective. The whole point of the scien- tific method is to iron out the biases of individual sci- entists. That’s why science insists on controls, double- blind tests, full and explicit documentation, replication, etc. And that all works pretty well (which is why we have computers, and why smallpox is gone). Anyway, where you get your ideas from is irrelevant to scien- tific method. Science assesses your ideas as scientific hypotheses, and accepts or rejects them according to scientific evidence, not according to where they came from.
The sort of claims that Linden makes are in many ways the same sort of claims that new-agers make, and Linden makes the same sort of crude mistakes that they do. 7 The fact that there are now large numbers of ac- claimed academics and ‘public intellectuals’ who also make these kinds of mistakes is incredible. What’s more, these academics are often enormously more obscure and pretentious than Linden.
It’s also worrying, when you consider that instead of teaching students how to think carefully and criti- cally, and how to assess and weigh evidence, these peo- ple are teaching them the sort of sloppy, confused think- ing that keeps people from understanding the world around them. And if we are concerned with politics and morality, as postmodernists are, then we should remember that, while science is itself value-free, the sort of critical thinking skills characteristic of ‘modernist’
science and reason are the best tools we have ever de- veloped for fighting tyranny.
These academics, then, are doing exactly the oppo- site of what they should be doing. Instead of providing their students with bullshit-detectors, they fill their heads with twaddle, all officially sanctioned by the in- stitution in question. The students might as well be learning Church-taught medieval theology. Any inbuilt critical faculties that the students may have are blunted.
And this is the main reason why I, at least, have ‘taken against postmodernism’, and why I intend to devote a lot of time in the next few years to showing just how ridiculous it is, as well as to showing how closely it resembles new age thought.
It may sound like I’m overreacting. But much of the postmodern work that is acclaimed as brilliant and revolutionary in the humanities and social sciences just has to be seen to be believed. It is staggeringly, unbe- lievably bad. Much of it just word-salad, and it makes about as much sense as a randomly-constructed Dadaist poem. Consider this typical passage from one of the darlings of postmodern thought, Luce Irigaray:
But where does that place - of discourse - find its
‘greater-than-all’ in order to be able to form(alize) it- self in this way? To systematize itself? And won’t that greater than ‘all’ come back from its denegation - from its forclusion? - in modes that are still theo-logical?
Whose relation to the feminine ‘not-all’ remains to be articulated: God or feminine pleasure. 8
Or consider this now notorious passage from the
famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, another celebrated hero of postmodernists:
Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the [square root of] -1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the func- tion of lack of signifier (-1). 9
And finally, a hot-off-the-press home-grown prod- uct, from the University of New South Wales’ own Cathryn Vasseleu:
A significant feature of speed as a critical transition is that, in severing the tangible instantiation of the body from the body as a discrete transmissible telepresence, its translatability or capacity for transformation from one state into another is reduced to a dimensionless, atomized motility. 10
There are some science lessons here for Skeptics. You may not have known that speed is a ‘critical transition’, or that your body is a ‘discrete transmissible telepresence’.
There are some postmodernists who use the
‘deconstruction’ methods of Derrida to supposedly show that logic and reason undermine themselves. One of the most prominent expositors of Derrida’s meth- ods is Jonathan Culler. One of his paradigm examples of how deconstruction works is intended to show that the concept of ‘causation’ is problematic in the follow- ing way. Suppose you feel a pain, which causes you to look for the cause of the pain, and you discover a pin sticking in you. Thus, ‘the experience of pain... causes us to discover the pin, and thus causes the production of a cause’.11 And ‘If the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin’.12 In other words, the concept of causation can be turned upon its head so that the effect can become the cause; thus, the whole concept of causation is, in a way, dubious.
I kid you not. That is Culler’s argument, apparently derived originally from Nietzsche.13 It is embarrassing to even have to point out what a simple and absurd error Culler has made.14 The cause of the pain (ie the pin sticking into you), is not itself caused by the effect (ie the pain). Nor is the cause of the pain caused by your looking for the cause of the pain. The effect (the pain) causes only your discovery of the cause, but the discovery of the cause is not the cause itself. After all, if I discover what killed, say, Rembrandt, it hardly fol- lows that I caused his death.
Much postmodern thought is, unfortunately, built upon such simple and ridiculous errors. (It is a sad in- dictment on many supposedly-academic publishing houses that they promote such work these days.) And that is why most analytic philosophers (and, I think, most scientists) regard postmodern thought as intel- lectually scandalous, and consider its practitioners to be charlatans. Unfortunately, most analytic philoso- phers have not made much of an effort to combat post- modernism, partly because postmodernists tend to fu- riously denounce their critics with vicious personal at- tacks, and also because little academic kudos is attached to taking time off your own work to attack postmod- ernism (or new age or creationist thinking, as some Australian academic Skeptics have discovered).
Another reason philosophers have left postmodern- ism alone is because they presumed that such hope-
lessly bad stuff would inevitably fade with the other transient fashions of the times. That hasn’t happened, though, and postmodernism is spreading, especially through the less intellectually-capable university de- partments. One of the reasons why postmodernism is spreading is because of the unfalsifiable, win-win way in which postmodern thought is set up. Anyone who uses reason to show that it is wrong (or that it is too vague to be helpful) can be automatically dismissed as having missed the point. In this regard, direct parallels can be drawn between postmodernism and religion, new age thought, astrology and certain aspects of Freudianism, parallels which I intend to explore in fu- ture work (in much more detail and sophistication, of course, than in this crude piece).
It is high time, I think, for more of us academics to stand up and expose postmodernism. There have at least been a few books in recent years that have done a superb job of demolishing postmodern pretensions.
Two such books, which I highly recommend, and which are extremely readable, are Higher Superstition by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt,15 and Intellectual Impos- tures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.16 Sokal is the physicist now famous for his hoaxing of a leading ‘cultural studies’
journal, Social Text, by having had an article accepted and published by it, an article which was in large part meaningless, and full of scientific howlers. I also rec- ommend an excellent book by an Australian historian, Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Disci- pline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theo- rists.17
Finally, if you think that postmodernism is a racket you figure you could do well in, you don’t even need to write your own articles any more. A wag at Monash University has written a program that automatically generates a brand-new postmodernist article every time you visit his web site, complete with footnotes and ref- erences and all the buzz-words and shibboleths (eg dis- course, hegemony, gender, logocentric, binary opposition, phallocentric, narrative, hermeneutics, the ‘other’, paradigm, sexed, textual, hierarchical, patriarchal, genealogy, praxis, contextualize, entrenched). Each article is pretty much in- distinguishable from the real thing. The address is
<www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern>.
Footnotes:
1. Foucault is notorious for this. Amazingly, after some of his ‘his- torical’ research was discredited by real historians, he took to say- ing that his books should be understood as novels, despite the fact that his arguments depended on his claims being historical, rather than a bunch of crap that he made up.
2. Which hardly ties the origins of ‘modernism’ down: the Enlight- enment is generally considered to have started in the seventeenth century in England, and in the eighteenth century on the Continent.
3. And the use of science to gain knowledge should not be equated with the Enlightenment anyway, because the latter is primarily a political and ethical movement, and is logically distinct from sci- ence. There are a fair number of claims made by Enlightenment think- ers which many modern scientists would not agree with.
4. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, translated Allan Blunden, London: Fontana, 1988.
5. David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, New York: Poseiden Press, 1991.
6. Meaning, on the other hand, is created by us in a certain kind of way, in that words get their meaning from our actions. But it doesn’t follow that truth is ‘up to us’.
continued p 48...