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Postmodern Trumpism (continued)

          The postmodern view that truth is subjective has important epistemological consequences. We no longer have to listen to each other: we don’t have to try to reconcile competing claims and information. If you maintain that thousands were massacred at Wounded Knee on that day in 1890 while I contend that no one was killed, if we believe that there is an objective truth, we would engage each other. We would investigate what support there is for the competing positions, and perhaps do more research. As a result, we might abandon or modify our original assertions. If, however, truth is subjective, if truth is what is true for each individual, we will not undertake this shared enterprise seeking a better understanding of the truth. Thousands dead is true for you. Nobody died is true for me. End of story. It’s all relative.

          The notion that truth was relative wedged its way into a wider world and crept into many areas of thought outside of academia. For example, Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote: “What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn’t true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.” (Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief.)

          It also entered an Ivy League seminar room. I don’t remember the topic discussion for the class I was recently leading, but when I called on one student, she said, “Don’t you want to know what my opinion is?” I snapped “No!” The bright young woman had a shocked look. Surely her opinion was valuable. Others around the table were concerned. Many looked as if this was the first time a student opinion was rejected. I went on to say, “I want your facts; your information. What relevant experiences have you had? Then you can tell me how your opinion arises out of those data.” She went silent. But in a world where truth is subjective, all opinions are equally valid, and she probably thought that I should have allowed her to present her truth no matter how it was derived. (I got one bad teaching evaluation from this seminar. I assume that it was she, but that is just my opinion; I don’t have facts to back it up.)

          Postmodern thinking has affected diplomats. Michiko Kakutani’s book The Death of Truth quotes a Russian propagandist. “All narratives are contingent, Surkov suggested, and all politicians are liars; therefore, the alternative facts put out by the Kremlin (and by Donald Trump) are just as valid as everyone else’s.” Surkov “invoked Derrida-inspired arguments about the unreliability of language—to suggest that Western notions of truthfulness and transparency are naïve and unsophisticated.”

          Postmodernist thinking even invaded science. On The Big Bang Theory it is a laugh line when Penny’s not-overly-bright boyfriend says to Leonard and the rest of the Caltech crowd: “Agree to disagree. That’s what I love about science. There’s no right answer.” But supposedly bright people began to maintain that science was merely socially constructed and that science could not claim to be neutral. Science could not seek universal truths because it was fatally affected by a scientist’s identity and cultural values. (Tell that to the scientist spouse and watch her seethe!)

          One of my leftist academic colleagues adopted this anti-science position. The United States Supreme Court had written an opinion about what scientific evidence could be admitted into trials. I appeared with my colleague on a panel at a neighboring law school discussing this decision. My colleague denigrated the decision by glibly saying that science like other knowledge was merely “socially constructed” and subjective. On the other hand, I knew that she had taken an elevator to the conference room, and I wondered if she truly thought that the principles that allowed that lift to ascend and descend were mere subjective social constructions. If we truly believed that there was no objective scientific truth, we could not operate in the world. No one really believes what she was trying to peddle. Instead, a more sophisticated approach might have allowed that science does not produce absolute truths because it is always trying to refine its knowledge or that scientific funding, which influences what gets studied, can be affected by cultural and society forces. But we all know that there is a universal truth behind the physics of gravity and friction.

(continued January 10)

Posted on by rjonakait

Postmodern Trumpism

          The end of year. A new year begins. We mark this time with traditions that seem to have been with us forever—egg nog, Auld Lang Syne, the ball drop at Times Square, fireworks everywhere, pine needles in unlikely spots from an aging Christmas tree, resolutions and promises–but we also now have a seasonal tradition that is only three years old. Various news organizations tell us how many falsehoods Trump has told in the last annum. This might not seem as festive as other traditions, but it is becoming as entrenched.

          It is mystifying that a president can produce so much that is false and still have the support of so many. Probably no simple explanation can satisfy, but I suggest that we consider the effect of a literary theory. While the juxtaposition of “literary theory” and “Trump” may seem bizarre, bear with me.

          At one time, literary scholars uniformly saw a text as the creation of the author. The writer “owned” it and determined its meaning. Readers searched for what Hawthorne or Stendhal or Locke or Pound meant.

          However, a competing view emerged. It noted that an author cannot determine how a reader reacts to a given text. These new literary theorists led by Jacques Derrida maintained that it is critical readers who determine what a piece of writing means, which may not necessarily be what the author intended it to mean.

          This “postmodern” or “deconstructionist” approach transformed the meaning of “truth” in a text. If the author’s intention is the meaning, then there is just one “truth,” and those exploring a writing were all after the same thing. But if the crucial question is not what the writer means, but how the text is interpreted by its readers, there can be as many “truths” as there are readers. Something may be true for one reader and not another. Truth no longer was a single, objective concept but was subjective and variable. A text could have many meanings depending on who’s reading it.

          As long as postmodernism was confined to literary theory, it had limited significance, but it broke out into other disciplines. Anti-authoritarians and the New Left promoted the notion that many “facts” were the product of entrenched, Western, white, and male-dominated thinking. Instead, the new critics maintained that in reality there were no universal truths but only personal ones shaped by cultural and social forces. Postmodernism denied an objective reality existing apart from human perception. Knowledge, they said, was filtered through class, race, gender, and other factors.

          This approach had merit and gave valuable perspectives on history and society. So, for example, there is not one truth about capitalism. The economic system is different from the perspective of the corporate officer or the migrant worker picking lettuce. Class, race, and gender, the postmodernists maintained, shape thinking about the value of the police. The positive effects of Christopher Columbus are viewed differently from various perspectives.

          Postmodernism points out that received wisdom is often the product of a limited or biased view and should not be uncritically accepted. That point has great value and should be a call to work harder to comprehend a given phenomenon. More information, more views should be sought to improve understanding. I should not accept that a mountain is forested just because the south face is covered in trees. The north face may be barren. I must go around the mountain to get a better understanding of it.

          This can be difficult work that might not completely satisfy. So, for example, if I want to understand what happened on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, postmodernistic thinking could tell me that I cannot just accept the official army reports. I should seek the views of Lakota members, army regulars, bystanders, and others. I might have to learn about the Ghost Dance movement and how a ghost dance appeared from the Lakota perspective versus the perspective of the soldiers on that day. I could expect to find contradictions and gaps in information and perhaps not a completely satisfying understanding of the massacre, but my understanding would be deeper because I sought out different perspectives rather than just relying on official reports.

          However, those undertaking this endeavor still believe there are objective facts. Hundreds of men, women, and children were killed that day. I am seeking to get a better understanding of those facts, and I expect that you would reach a similar understanding if you, too, undertook this endeavor. We may not agree completely, but we are after the same thing–an objective truth.

          But this “postmodernism” is not the postmodernism of the literary theory. The textual analysts rejected that there was a single truth that all critical readers were after. Instead, they concluded that the meaning of the text varied from reader to reader and that “truth” was subjective. If an understanding was true for a reader, it was true even if was not true for a different reader. In one way, then, postmodernism deepened our understanding of the world when the assault on traditional knowledge required seeking different perspectives on a phenomenon. However, it was another matter when this literary theory crossed over into other fields bringing the message that truth is “relative” or “contingent”; that there is no objective truth; and that truth is subjective.

(continued January 8)

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Courtship and Conscription

Five years earlier than our trip, our Moroccan guide was thirty-four years old and single when his brother suggested that it was time for the guide to get married. The brother had someone in mind. The guide was told that he could glimpse the woman at a particular time and location, and he went there several times, but she, in spite of the prediction, did not pass by. Finally, the brother brought him to the woman’s house. The guide and the woman, according to the guide, each asked a “few” questions of the other. Only after this meeting, did the guide tell his parents about the woman. The parents were surprised that he had met her without them knowing—apparently a breach of protocol. A short while later, the guide, his parents, and his sisters went to meet the woman and her family. After this meeting, the two got engaged and were married six months later.

This courtship seems strange from a western viewpoint, but the way the guide recounted it, it must not be unusual in Morocco. And as far as I could tell, the marriage has been successful. My only doubt about that is that the guide seemed a bit intimidated by his wife.

After four years of marriage, the couple had a son. The guide is very proud of the boy and said that he would like one more child.

The guide more than once told us that women have advanced much in Moroccan society. When he did so, I always thought it would be informative to get a Moroccan woman’s perspective on their situation.

Women are allowed the opportunity for an education; our guide’s wife has a college degree, having studied physics and architecture. The guide said that she would like to work, but it is hard to find an appropriate job. He said that the Moroccan unemployment rate is ten percent overall, and jobs for educated people using their training are often scarce.

Moroccan public education is free through college. Universities have a hierarchy with some harder to get into than others. University admission is determined by a graduation test from the equivalent of our high school. Our guide readily admitted that he had not done as well on that examination as others and did not get into the most selective school. Instead of studying medicine, he studied English.

Morocco has compulsory education from the ages of six through fifteen for both boys and girls, but it has not been completely successful. There is much absenteeism from the schools, especially in the countryside, and the country still has an illiteracy problem.

Morocco has recently reinstituted mandatory military service, and this produces some equality between men and women since both are conscripted. The guide did not say why the draft had been abandoned a generation ago, but it did not exist when he was of military age, and, as a result, he did not serve in the military. Conscription does not seem to have been reinstituted because Morocco feels an imminent foreign threat. Instead, the guide said that the major goal of the draft is to instill nationalism, but he did not elaborate on why that had become necessary.

Hearing this bit about Moroccan conscription, I thought about the United States draft. It ended nearly fifty years ago, and I wondered if American patriotism had waned or waxed since then; whether the country was more or less warlike; whether our nation was more or less safe; whether young people were better or worse trained for jobs. I wondered what the chances are that conscription would ever be reinstituted here. If so, how would our country be affected if both men and women were subject to a draft? I wondered if we might have mandatory, universal national service of which the military would be one option. There must be some good literature of such topics, but I don’t know about it. If you do, let me know, for these are subjects worth exploring.