I've been thinking a bit about what I said yesterday about my own decision not to engage in "debate" on issues where there is no debate. In reading and re-reading all the effluvia in our media over the Libby commutation, and the underlying history of the leak, the investigation, and the trial, I am led to the conclusion that the true Post-modernists in America aren't those wacky left-wing professors telling our kids that Toni Morrison is better than Shakespeare. The true pomos are right-wingers. Except, of course, they miss one crucial fact of post-modern theory, to which I shall come shortly.
Part of post-modern philosophy, and a part with which I strongly agree, is that much of the concern of western philosophy since the pre-Socratics has been aimed at answering a question we now know is the wrong question to ask. It isn't as if all those brilliant men and women were actually quite stupid people. They just asked the wrong question, over and over, expecting, someday, to find an answer. The unspoken premise in most of western philosophy is this - human beings are qualitatively distinct from all other things in the world because we are aware - of ourselves, of the world around us, and most of all, of our own awareness. This special trait, sometimes called consciousness, sometimes called the faculty of reason, is something mysterious, wonderful, ineffable. At its root, it must exist apart from any and all physical relations and causes. Our task, should we choose to accept it, is to figure out what "it" is that makes human beings so different. Metaphysics hinges on this question being the right question.
Since Darwin, one wonders how anyone could see anything substantive in this. It is one thing to maintain that human beings are conscious in a way that, as far as we know, no other creature in the Universe is. It is another thing to say that, therefore, consciousness must itself be something separate from all physical causal relations. The reasoning goes something like this: this thing we call "mind" cannot be the sum total of the synaptic actions of the human cerebral cortex; if it were, why we'd be no different from any other creature. Because we are, "mind" is not a part of the natural history of causal relations. QED. This argument, alas, is wrong because the unspoken major premise is still held despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Post-modernists for the most part see the whole realist-idealist divide in the philosophy of knowledge and metaphysics as two sides of the same East German coin; interesting as a historical artifact, but worthless for exchange. That human beings "know" things is an unremarkable by-product of evolution. How could it be otherwise? Reporting on factual matters is a necessary survival trait; the better we are at such reporting, and comprehending those reports, the more likely we and our offspring will survive. To see in this rather banal notion something deep, mysterious, even spooky - some ephemeral thing called "mind" - is, as I said, continuing to take the unspoken major premise of much of the history of western thought much too seriously.
Post-modernists are not Berekeley-style idealists, who claim in some solipsistic fashion that all reality is the creation of our minds. Post-modernists, rather, reject the idea that questions about "knowledge" and "existence" are either interesting or fruitful. These are questions best left to neurologists, neuropsychologists, and various biologists and bio-chemists. The idea that there is a hidden depth to reality, and that philosophers are uniquely qualified to search it out, define it, and be the final arbiters of such things is silly.
Post-modernists, for the most part, are much more interested in the ways human beings actually live their lives. The conversations they have. The vocabularies they use to describe their lives. The relationship between and among various vocabularies and language-games and how these are negotiated, translated, mis-translated, and the like. One of the more interesting aspects of post-modern thought is the emphasis upon narrative. Recognizing that human beings are natural story-tellers - about themselves, the groups of which they are a part, etc. - many look to the idea of narrative as a way of illuminating how we understand ourselves. This is where our current crop of conservatives come in.
The creation of a narrative that explains who we are and how we came about is always an admixture of facts, myths, wild stories, and anecdotes blown way out of proportion or context. Part of the task of "figuring it all out" is looking at these narratives as a whole, and understanding how all these pieces fit together. As a post-modernist myself (although I hate the term), I am less interested in whether or not George Washington chopped down a cherry tree or Abe Lincoln walked five miles, uphill both ways, through the snow as a child to return two extra pennies he was given at a country store than I am in how these stories function in our understanding of ourselves as Americans. Historians are certainly welcome to debunk them, and should. I am more interested in what the invention of these stories, and their continued propagation after their debunking, says about who we think we are.
I shall reiterate here that facts, reports about events that occur, are not something special per se. They are simply part of the package of tools that human beings possess in order to survive. There is no spooky connection between our ability to perceive the lion crouching in shadow waiting to pounce upon us, and the lion itself. In the same way, there is nothing profound about our ability to make accurate reports on events such as the war in Iraq. Factual matters are, and should be, unspectacular. Of course there is a certain correspondence between some of the things we say, and events that occur in the world. How could it be otherwise? Human beings would never have survived as a species if we couldn't communicate with each other concerning events in the world.
Too many people misunderstand this crucial part of post-modern theory. The use of narrative as a device for understanding the world of necessity includes factual reports. To switch for a moment to scientific terms, for me at least, a factual report is a simple statement that can be plotted on a graph - object O was at co-ordinate x-5,y-7, at z-time 01:00. Simple trigonometry. The misunderstanding by too many, not just in the public at large, but even with some interlocutors who disagree with the kind of approach to philosophy that I have been explaining here, is that they do not understand this crucial part. As such, they complain that post-modernists are solipsists, are Berkeley-idealists, are radical skeptics. All of these charges are wrong, based as they are on a misunderstanding, or a neglect, of the point I am emphasizing here.
Our contemporary conservatives complain about post-modernists, yet they practice it endlessly. They invent countless narratives (sometimes connected by the words Bill Clinton, terrorism, 9/11 - choose your own) that attempt to explain the world. They defend these narratives through the assertion of various claims that they insist as "factual". Indeed, these "facts" are a crucial part of the argument they are attempting to make - Islam is a terrorist religion, Bill Clinton was convicted of perjury, Iraq had WMDs that were secretly shipped to Syria. That they are disproved over and over again is irrelevant; you see, these post-modernists are not concerned with such banal things as whether or not individual claims can be verified as accurate reports of events. They are narrative constructionists, telling a story about the world, and their role in it, and they insist and will continue to insist, that such things as "facts" are irrelevant because the larger narrative is what is important.
Pointing out errors of fact is important. It is also fruitless, because the narratives our pomo conservatives tell are based upon them. Narrative uber alles dictates that they get those points in. In the conflicting narratives of America, as they are currently practiced, facts are irrelevant. At least to our post-modern conservatives.
Virtual Tin Cup
