Reasonable and Unreasonable Postmodernisms

The Oxford Dictionaries declares "post-truth" to be their "word of the year" for 2016.  That decision confirmed, as if it needed confirming, that we are suffering through a crisis in public discourse.  The "post-truth" crisis is not entirely partisan.  Think of the celebrities who peddle a nonexistent link between vaccines and autism or the activists who refuse to accept that genetically-modified foods are probably quite safe.  But the rise of Donald Trump has emphasized how much "post-truth" has become a distinctively right-wing phenomenon in America.  Politicians who are smart enough to know better deny climate science and reject simple economics. Trump, now sitting in the Oval Office, continues to declare that his Inauguration crowds were the hugest ever and that several million illegal ballots were the only reason he didn't win the popular vote.  Kellyanne Conway champions "alternative facts."  

I am not the only one who wonders sometimes whether our descent into post-truthism is simply the revenge of postmodernism.  What were once abstract literary and philosophical theories often identified (not entirely accurately) with left-wing academics seem to have burst the dam and spilled over to the public sphere, and to at least the wildest corners of populist rhetoric and right-wing politics.

This all came home to me a while ago in an exchange with a distant acquaintance who also happened to be a Facebook friend.  My Facebook friend, a diehard but not very intellectual Christian conservative, had posted one of those crazy memes quoting a foreign leader as allegedly saying that the American people must be a "confederacy of fools" to have elected Obama.  I responded as I am wont to do, by pointing my friend to the Snopes site that debunked the crazy claim.  My friend did not take that well, accusing me of trying to be the "Facebook police."  No, I replied, I was just pointing out a factual falsehood.  Then, in a series of further exchanges, my friend made essentially three arguments:  

First, though there was no evidence that the former foreign leader had said those words about Obama and America, I couldn't prove that he hadn't said those words.  (I've heard similar responses from other people in other contexts, as if factual burdens of proof don't exist or don't matter.)

Second, my friend said that I had my truth, and she had hers.  (Relativism run amok.)

Third, with respect to our separate truths, my friend reminded me that she believed that Jesus died for our sins and was raised from his tomb, and that I (as a Jew) did not.  I told my friend that I would never challenge her belief in Jesus, but that there was a real difference between fundamental religious commitments and the simple question of what a certain Czech politician did or did utter certain words.

Of course, I got nowhere.  My friend had her truth, and I had mine, and that was that.

My friend never went to any fancy schools, but the echo of a certain sort of academic jargon is clear.  

The irony here is rich, of course.  An academic jargon designed in part to unsettle our fixed beliefs and prejudices has percolated into habits of mind that only reinforce clearly false beliefs and buttress dangerous prejudices.

But it's also important to separate the wheat from the chaff.  For what it's worth, I consider myself something of a postmodernist fellow traveler.  See, for example, here and here.  Postmodernism has, I think, illuminated by legal scholarship.  And, as a religious believer, I am convinced that some form of postmodernism is necessary to maintaining and defending religious belief under conditions of modernity.  But there's always been a difference, even in the academy, between deconstructive and constructive postmodernism, or, more bluntly, between a reasonable and unreasonable postmodernism -- between productive complexification and simple bedlam.

So here's a manifesto of sorts for a reasonable and constructive postmodernism, a postmodernism that tries to overcome the flaws in modernist foundationalism and scientism while also rejecting the crudest, most Trumpian, forms of post-truthism.  (This is a manifesto on a blog, not an attempt at philosophy.  The point is just to set down a marker.)

1. There are truths.
   
   
2. Many truths are discernible by human beings with varying, but often high, degrees of confidence.
   
   
3. But Truth is also often complex.  Truth is often fractured.  
   
   
4. Truths are sometimes multi-layered, and bound up in our perspectives and forms of talk.
   
   
5. Not all truths are binary.  Sometimes, apparent opposites can coexist.
   
   
6. There is no single, universal, acidic, standard or method for discerning truths.
   
   
7. We discern truths through a variety of forms of discourse -- common sense, science, religion, morality, art, literature, among others.  
   
   
8. Each of these discourses has its own rules and standards.  Science, for example, has its rules, and religion has its rules, but they are both rules.  
   
   
9. We must take the rules and standards of various discourses seriously.  That is not to say that those rules and standards are always clear, or are final and nonnegotiable.  But to ignore them or cavalierly override them is to plunge into the abyss.
   
   
10. Often, these various discourses do not overlap or compete.  Even when they do, it is often possible, in good intellectual conscience, to hold to the truths of each simultaneously.  Other times, though, choices must be made.  Sometimes, boundaries must be enforced.  But sometimes, they can or should be renegotiated.
    
    
11. Some beliefs are legitimately warranted by observation and others by deduction.  Yet others are legitimately warranted by deep conviction or by a holistic assessment of our entire cache of other beliefs.
    
    
12. But everything is not up for grabs.  
    
    
13. In the light of what has been said so far, we should approach the question of Truth with some humility.  
    
    
14. But we should also try, as carefully as possible, to understand when truth is particularly complex or fractured and when it is (as best as we can tell) not, and to map out as best we can the claims, separate and overlapping domains, and methods of the various discourses that help us know aspects of the truth.  
    
    
15. To believe that Truth can be complex, or fractured, or non-binary, or any of the rest discussed here is to invite rigor, not to disdain it.  It also demands good faith.  
    
    
16. The task is not impossible; in fact, we engage in it all the time without necessarily knowing it.  That is life.
    
    
17. So back to the beginning:  There are truths.  And many truths are discernible by human beings with varying, but often high, degrees of confidence.

Something like this manifesto allows me to criticize my Facebook friend, and criticize Donald Trump, as well as climate science deniers, anti-vaccine fanatics, Birthers, and the like.  But it also convinces me that Christians are entitled to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and Mormons are entitled to believe that the angel Moroni showed Joseph Smith a set of golden tablets, even though I do not share those beliefs.  More on that, I hope, in a future post.

Perry Dane