Postmodernism: what it got right and what it got wrong
We don’t actually do that much with most of our ideas. So their truth value doesn’t matter all that much.
For example, I have all kinds of opinions about climate change, nuclear energy and my neighbor’s haircut. But I hardly use those as an input for decisions. Like I would when I accelerate from an intersection because I think the traffic light is green. If that view turns out to be wrong, my accelerating was a bad call and potentially dangerous. So truth matters there. But most of our opinions are not like that. They are like our thoughts on climate change. There are no actions we can take whose payoffs (for us as individuals) depend on whether our beliefs are true or false. The rare exception would be someone living near the Florida coast, say, who moves inland to avoid predicted floods. Or maybe the owner of a hedge fund or insurance company who places bets on the future evolution of the climate. But for the rest of us, and for most of our beliefs, they don’t have to be grounded in truth, because the truth value doesn’t have any effect on our life.
This is different at the collective level. Most of what we know as a society is aimed at (ultimately) leading to better options or more informed decisions. Hence the emphasis on valorization in science.
Truth is critical to political decision-making, because well-considered political decisions can only be made when the facts are on the table. If you want to go somewhere, you have to know where you are and how to get there. What problems and challenges does society face and how did they come about? What kinds of measures are possible? How well do they work? What do they cost? And so on.
This raises a question. Why are some statements considered appropriate to base those decisions on—they are ‘the facts’—and other statements are not? Who determines what claims we take as the basis for making policy, and by what criteria do they do so?
Who makes the facts
Who is considered legitimate to provide facts—that is, whose opinion those in power should refer to in order to justify their decisions—is a matter of social structure. And, in our society, politicians must cite science to justify basing their decisions on certain ideas and not others. If the government rolls out policies that assume vaccines are safe and effective, it should cite scientific research demonstrating their benign functionality. They should not cite their mother-in-law’s analysis or their preferred religious book take on the subject. That’s not an acceptable justification.
That position of science seems obvious to us now, but it’s heavily contested historically. In ancient Greece, for example, leaders had to justify war-related decisions by referring to the utterance of an oracle. (I know this because I watched the movie 300, which is historically accurate according to my mother-in-law). More recent example: In the fall of 1987, at the First International Conference on Scientific Miracles of the Koran and Sunnah (held in Pakistan), one speaker said, “If there is a contradiction between a definitive [Koranic] text and conjectural science, then the scientific theory is refuted.” For a long time indeed, it has been the religious consensus, not scientific one, that determined what was and what was not recognized as fact. Just ask Galileo and all the helio centrists who died at the stake.
The fact that, today, science is considered legitimate to provide facts, and other sources like the Bible don’t have that status, has more consequences than you’d think. It explains why parents who unsuccessfully treat their children with prayer are charged with manslaughter, while parents who unsuccessfully try surgery are not. It also explains why evolutionary theory features in textbooks and creationism are not taught to our children as knowledge. “Because science thinks this is probably true,” is a good reason to teach a claim as such. “Because my ideology deems this likely,” is not.
Why do they make the facts
Anyone can believe and say whatever they want, but science is the only legitimate party that can turn claims into a fact—to something we base policy, curricula, and prosecutions on. It creates mutual knowledge that is normatively accepted. It produces “received” or “official” or “accepted” statements about some situation. If you wish whatever you believe to have that status, you need to make sure it becomes part of the scientific consensus.
This arrangement does not sit well with many people who feel ignored or oppressed by this monopoly: creationists, homeopaths, astrologers, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, Q’Anon followers, and followers of several other faiths. A common criticism on their part is that this structure excludes minorities—like them—from influencing policy and thus from power. But is that fair? After all, the scientific method is no less subject to uncertainty than other methods. And the opinion of experts is still just that—an opinion. An opinion of people with similar outlooks and biases. Old white men. A cultural elite, intimately connected to other powerful networks in our society. Isn’t that suspicious?
That their interpretation can justify policy decisions, that your idea must convince scientific experts to be recognized as fact, is mainly so because they have won a power struggle. Or so goes the standard postmodern critique. How facts are chosen, expressed, valued and used, according to that philosophy, is always a matter of power relations and not of the truth, because there is no one objective, correct way to interpret those facts in the first place.
The French philosopher Foucault, in particular, did not tire of proclaiming that “truth” is merely the product of a war of interpretations in which the victor imposes his dominant discourse on the loser. Likewise, Rob Wijnberg, editor-in-chief of The Correspondent, infers that “There is no such thing as truth, because—where there is one reality—every person experiences, interprets and describes it differently.”
And if there is no such thing as truth in the first place, then why are they, from the establishment, allowed to decide what is true and thus what we base policy, curricula and prosecutions on?
“Lazy postmodernism”
Whether it’s true or not, this idea of ’everyone experiences the world differently therefore there is no objective truth’ is often used by postmodern thinkers as an argument for their claim that all claims of knowledge (such as those made by the Bible and those made by science) are equally valid. “The current attack on truth and factuality,” notes the Dutch writer Bas Heijne, is “the unfortunate result of lazy postmodernism that declares every truth to be relative and sees in science a conspiracy of a white, patriarchal culture to secure its own power and dominance.”
The mysterious popularity of such analyses leads, first, to a changed attitude towards truth. The relativism of ‘you have your truth and I have mine’ seems more and more popular these days.
Even worse: if the truth has many sides and interpreting reality is mainly a matter of interpretation, and a fact is nothing more than what prevails in the power struggle of interpretations, then my interpretation, my truth, is just as justified as the scientific one. I am not less right, just less powerful.
Accordingly, I am justified in clinging to my truth with its accompanying “alternative facts”, and to demand recognition for that truth. Because I am just as sincerely convinced of my the correctness of my interpretation as the next person.
My opinion should be given just as much respect, the same status, as any other.
And so right-wing creationists insist that their ideas be taught alongside “science-based” theories. And left-wing populists demand the same status for their unscientific critical race theory.
Whether it comes from woke activists bemoaning the dominance of white patriarchy, or from the alt-right opposing the dominance of liberalism, such rhetoric carries a promise. Those ‘hegemonic’ power structures should be questioned, everyone should be entitled to their perspective.
But as soon as truth becomes a mere matter of perspective, everyone can make their own. Hence, while “the ideology of postmodernism [is] miles from Trump’s, the intellectual vandalism on concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ [is] similar,” according to philosopher of science, Maarten Boudry.
Clearly, something went wrong with postmodernism.
Too much relativism
Let’s admit: facts are sometimes difficult to uncover, and can leave room for different interpretations. Reality does not just present itself on a tray, but is always approached from a certain perspective. Postmodernism has helped us to reconsider some simplistic views of objectivity and knowledge.
Postmodernism is also right that the established powers that be have more influence on the distribution of money, time and energy necessary to uncover facts and build a shared picture of reality. Yet, there are many truths that are not the product of pure power alone. For example, it was eventually accepted that sugar is worse for health than certain types of fat, despite a lobby by the powerful sugar industry. Ditto for the statement that smoking is bad for you—now recognized as true despite the opposition of power.
Postmodernism is correct that truth, for its association with power, is never fully divorced from politics and social conflict. So the question of holding command over truth leads to a battle for epistemic authority. However, the fact that truth and power are intertwined does not mean that truth claims are all about power.
Postmodernism’s deflation of truth has gone too far in another way.
Once again, let’s admit: neutral data doesn’t exist. Data can only make themselves known through an infrastructure that is set up for that purpose. So scientific facts are not a simple reflection of the world as it is, but the product of a wide network of research practices, validation structures, professional networks and political dynamics that create and sustain these truths. So we cannot speak of The Truth. But why should that lead to a relativism in which every view is equally true?
From the shocking observation that facts do not come to us out of the blue, but are the outcome of a human-scientific process, you cannot conclude that therefore they are just another subjective interpretation. In fact, contrary to the postmodernist step from 1) criticism of the belief in The Truth to 2) the conclusion that all forms of knowledge are equally valid, you can gauge some claim’s likely truth value precisely from analyzing this very process. By examining how an idea came about, you can already make a first estimate of how likely it is to be correct. Does the statement come from some dated book, of which we know that many of its other claims—such as about the age of our planet—are incorrect? Or from modern experiments that have proven to work?
Postmodernism amplifies the power problem instead of solving it
But suppose that we abolish all criteria for factuality. This is what postmodernism seems to prescribe. Because we don’t want to privilege certain statements over others. That’s unfair and makes it all a power struggle. Have we then taken a step forward?
Well, if objectivity and truth don’t exist, and if everyone is entitled to their perspective, why not white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, too? If you no longer believe in truth and facts, how can you fight lies?
Without belief in a shared truth and in the ability to transcend our ideological differences and divergent perspectives, the law of the strongest is the only thing left.
Precisely to prevent that, you need a shared understanding of what a statement ‘must do’ to get the (privileged) status of fact. To be included in policy decisions, prosecutions and curricula. Now that criterion is: the statement must convince scientific experts. Yes, this creates a position of power for scientists, whose analysis can’t not provide absolute certainty. But it is a fallacy to think that abolishing gatekeepers of truth also solves the (alleged) problem of power relations.
Once you’ve abolished those, the hold of the ruler only becomes stronger. Now political decisions still have to be justified with a reference to science—so the ruler has no free rein. But if we see all criteria for factuality as equally valid (for even scientific truth does not escape power relations, so it is no better than other products of power relations), then any ruler can justify every decision in every possible way. Politicians can then, for example, shamelessly ignore scientific evidence, based on the opinion of the energy lobby.
After all, the lobbies present their truth, which is just as true as the scientific one.
Precisely without a shared standard against which to weigh justifications, when everything is equally true and equally permissible, the powerful ruler has free rein as in days of yore.
