Postmodern Science? By William Lama, Ph.D.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Steven Pinker’s paean to the Enlightenment has aroused impassioned commentary from all sides of the intellectual world. Enlightenment Now is Pinker’s full- throated defense of Western modernity, the beneficiary of the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism and progress.

Reason is the fundamental Enlightenment ideal. “It is non-negotiable.” Enlightenment philosophers believed in objective reality, whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings. Scientists held that explanations of natural phenomena are objectively true or false. And the Enlightenment promoted the optimistic view that reason, logic, science and technology could change societies for the better.

As Pinker succinctly put it: “The Enlightenment worked!” Until “it didn’t.” Pinker is concerned that “postmodernism,” with its “defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness” is a threat to science, technology and progress. Pinker believes that the chief menace of postmodernism is its “intellectual war on science, wreaking havoc in universities and jeopardizing the progress of research.” Postmodernism is the anti-Enlightenment, a return to the Dark Ages.

Postmodern Theory

Postmodernists believe that reality is “constructed” and dominated by Western assumptions and power. They hold that reason and logic are “constructs” - valid only within established cultural traditions. Postmodernists believe that there is no such thing as objective truth. To the extreme postmodernist, science and technology are destructive and oppressive because they have been used to destroy and oppress others.

So, where did such a nonsensical theory come from? The term “postmodern” was coined in 1979 by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard advocated an epistemic “relativism” and privileging “lived experience” over empirical evidence. For postmodernist Michel Foucault, human nature is the direct product of power. “The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires and forces.” For Jacques Derrida, the author is not the authority on the text, the intention of the speaker is irrelevant. What matters is the impact of speech – hence PM “microaggressions.”

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstitions summed it up thusly:

“Postmodernism has become a Lyotardian metanarrative, a Foucauldian system of discursive power, and a Derridean oppressive hierarchy.”

Amazon.com: Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

As science has given us the gifts of knowledge, life, health and wealth, it seems strange that intellectuals would wage war on science. Postmodern “Critical Theory” impugns science for the historic sins of racism, slavery, and genocide, including the Holocaust. Few believe those absurdities. Yet, somehow, the postmodern denial of objective truth appeals to practitioners of the humanities and social sciences. Surely that perspective is fortuitous, since the cultural critics of science then don’t have to know any actual science. Indeed, know-nothing postmodernists have built university programs, even departments, of women’s studies, gender studies, multicultural (race) studies, Latinx studies, and science studies. Pinker blames academic intellectuals with this damning indictment:

“Intellectuals hate progress, intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress, universities full of progressive intellectuals constitute a suffocating leftwing monoculture.”

The Sokal Hoax

Progressive intellectuals have their own “learned journals.” In 1996 the journal “Social Text” published a theoretical paper by physicist Alan Sokal entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: The Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” After referring skeptically to the "so-called scientific method," Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being was dogma imposed by the post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook." What’s more, “The π of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity.”

Transgressing the Boundaries (nyu.edu)

Seriously! Including the pretentious vocabulary (hermeneutics: literary interpretation) and the “so-called” science, the Sokal paper was a hilarious hoax, but the editors of Social Text fell for it hook, line and sinker. Sokal and Jean Bricmont (another physicist) address the postmodern war on science in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. “There is something very odd indeed in the belief that in looking for causal laws or a unified theory, or asking whether atoms really do obey the laws of quantum mechanics, these activities are somehow inherently bourgeois or Eurocentric or masculinist, or even militarist.” Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

The anti-Enlightenment gobbledygook permeates university humanities and education departments, and the new teachers go forth to indoctrinate K-12 students. The CA Education Department created the “Equitable Math” curriculum including “critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms.”

Rescuing Math and Science from Critical Race Theory’s Racial Discrimination

Furthering evidence of the postmodern nonsense is the Postmodernism Generator, free online software that generates postmodern essays. Every time you visit the site up pops a brand-new essay, ready for submission to Social Text or any postmodern journal of your choosing. Communications From Elsewhere “What a time saver! If you have kids in college, let them know.”

Two Cultures

The tension between the humanities and the sciences in academia is longstanding, and contributed to the postmodern mess. In his 1959 lecture at Cambridge University - The Two Cultures - C.P. Snow caustically noted: “The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

Snow argued that both cultures should build bridges to promote the progress of human knowledge and to benefit society. Instead, muddle-headedness gave rise to postmodern nihilism and relativism that exacerbated the divide and the “stupidification” of society.

My View

On a personal level, my physics training in college began with The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by the renowned Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. In the epilogue to his lectures Feynman wrote:

“The main purpose of my teaching has not been to prepare you for some examination—it was not even to prepare you to serve industry or the military. I wanted most to give you some appreciation of the wonderful world and the physicist’s way of looking at it, which, I believe, is a major part of the true culture of modern times. Perhaps you will not only have some appreciation of this culture; it is even possible that you may want to join in the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun”.

“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character

Feynman was a great teacher and a funny guy, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He admits to studying Spanish to prepare for a trip to South America, before learning that his destination was Brazil. Feynman was a great practical joker. Regarding the verification of scientific theories, he warned: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

In closing, I’ll return to Pinker’s assessment in Enlightenment Now:

“Postmodernism has been a disaster. Many of its luminaries: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida are morose cultural pessimists, who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art and science are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.”

Pinker and I say: BS. Modern science is still “the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.”

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Dr. William Lama has a PhD in physics from the University of Rochester. Taught physics in college and worked at Xerox as a principle scientist and engineering manager. Upon retiring, joined the PVIC docents; served on the board of the RPV Council of Home Owners Associations; served as a PV Library trustee for eight years; served on the PV school district Measure M oversight committee; was president of the Malaga Cove Homeowner's Association. Writes about science, technology and politics, mostly for his friends.

email: wlama2605@gmail.com

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