Karmakin wrote:
I agree with that, to the point where I feel like the Po-Mo left spent more time attacking the anti-Po-Mo left than they did the right, well at least until Trump got elected (oops!) It wasn't a sort of normal attack...it was more along the lines of DON'T LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN THEY REALLY DON'T EXIST PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON'T LOOK ANY DEEPER INTO IT. That's why presenting a non-SJW left alternative, is a good thing to work towards (and that's what I personally try to do)
But here's the thing. I'm actually not sure how much it's actually post-modernism, to be honest. I have to argue against that. Because so often it feels like something entirely the opposite. It's not the idea that there isn't any solid knowledge or answers..that culture often comes from a perspective where they have ALL the answers, and anybody who questions them in any way is basically being a flat earther or an anti-vaxxer. I don't believe that's very post-modern at all actually.
The issue, at least to me is people who want sociology and anthropology to be sciences, rather than applied sciences. They want there to be proven models and right and wrong answers that all line up with their ideological beliefs, rather than a set of fluid best practices for observing complicated social phenomenon. So that's how we get things like Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomies, and strong identitarian worldviews. They want to be able to talk about identity groups as distinct classes. Women are X, Men are Y, Whites are Z, Blacks are A and so on. And that allows them to actually have common right and wrong answers.
That's the problem, at least to me.
This is a very interesting post. I think that the core problem with postmodernism isn't the dismissal of solid knowledge, but rather the dismissal of a common reality behind what one knows and one doesn't, and which is the source of evidence and allows for testing of our knowledge, even if our knowledge is just an approximation, not an absolute.
It's good to be skeptical, to have cautionary limits to models even in the "harder" sciences. Margins of errors, criticism of assumptions and of foundations, testing "what ifs?" and alternative models, if only theoretically, proposing conjectures, etc. are part of what makes science an active field.
In physics for example string theory, many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, speculations about the Alcubierre drive, about closed timeline curves, about exotic matter, about dark matter keep scientists on their toes. The Einstenian revolution to Newtonian mechanics is a classic example of when a pretty counter-intuitive speculation about the nature of reality turned out to lead to the advancement of science.
The best property of science isn't that "it works" but that it's self-correcting, that it allows for a mechanism to put conjectures to the test. In this specific sense science is the opposite of belief. In science there's nothing sacred, even long-held assumptions and models which are highly predictive can be revised if there's a better model to explain what the evidence tells us.
The trouble with post-modernism is that it makes assumptions which are impossible to put to the test in a meaningful way. In order to test for something you first have to make precise predictions which can be tested.
There's no way to effectively test standpoint theory, for example, because it's a categorical assumption about all of reality. It makes no precise predictions. One of the problems with standpoint theory as science is that there's no objective way to evaluate standpoints, so the assumption the "oppressed" are less biased than the "privileged" is based on, well, nothing objective. How do you evaluate the bias of the "privileged" is not known, so people slip in their "common sense" assumptions without wondering about whether those are accurate or not
because there's no way of telling.
This is a common problem to post-modernism. If there is no way to test assumptions against new evidence in order to correct your assumptions then people are simply going to "explain away" all contradictions and issues according to their dogmas. People simply CAN'T be relativists in all matters: it's a self-contradictory position ("Everything is relative" is a categorical assertion) and it just doesn't map the way people think.
In absence of a common reality which people can test their beliefs against, and adjust them if necessary, people don't become relativists or nihilists, they instead create dogmas that allow them to understand the world according to their preferred ideology. This is why Feyerabend's "open society", where there's no privileged viewpoint and "everything goes" is purely a dream (or part of Feyerabend's attempt to troll people, which I find more likely).
In absence of objectivity there's no tolerance or open-mindedness, there are wars of subjective dogmas and feelings, there's double-thought, double-speak, "alternative facts", reshaping reality, etc. Post-modernism leads to tyranny
because of its lack of objective foundations.
As George Orwell said "freedom is saying that 2+2=4. If that is granted, all else follows".
