We must no longer assume any principle of truth.
—Jean Baudrillard, “postmodern guru,” 2000
“Call it relativism, critique or postmodernism. The idea is the same: Truth is not found but made. And making truth means exercising power.” So explained postmodernist Casey Williams in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece. At the time, Trump had him flummoxed. Williams could see Trump exercising power by “making truth” for his base, and he did not like the truth Trump was making.
Under the headline “Has Trump Stolen [postmodern] Philosophy’s Critical Tools?” Williams had to admit, “Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.” (Again, we see Michiko Kakutani was right.) Williams was writing to console himself and to assure us that even though postmodern ideas fit Trump like a glove, it was okay—because postmodern tools are good, and we need them to fight Trump. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either.
The crux of the matter is this: According to postmodernism, truth does not exist, and we cannot even rely on “hard facts.” Williams comes right out and says so.
Some liberals … insist on the existence of truth and the reliability of hard facts.
Yes, some liberals (actually, almost all of us) still do insist on the existence of truth and of hard facts. For example, Trump famously claimed he won the popular vote if you “deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Here’s the truth: There weren’t millions of illegal votes and Trump lost the popular vote. That truth exists. It’s a fact. To be redundant, it’s a true fact, a hard fact. Another fact: Trump was president during 2019. There are actually millions of hard facts. But postmodernists always refuse to look obvious facts in the eye—kind of like Trump.
It’s crucially important that we say what’s true, and that we convince people Trump is a liar. No, that’s not a silver bullet, but the postmodern approach of telling everyone that truth doesn’t exist, and that hard facts are not reliable, is just evil. It’s exactly what Trump, Putin, and long ago, Hitler wanted their publics to believe. That’s what keeps (or kept) them in power.
Truth is Found, Not Made
Williams’ claim that “truth is made, not found” is a strange one. Nonetheless, it’s worth looking into because it’s at the heart of the postmodern befuddlement. Say you want to know a fact—how much a new Tesla would cost you. First, you try the postmodern approach—just make it up. May as well make up a price you like, say $15,000. That would make a great fact.
Then you go down to the Tesla dealer and wham. Truth, existing truth, the hard truth, hits you smack in the face. What happened? You found the truth. What is Williams thinking?!
Well, he sorta tries to explain. “People who produce facts … (maybe they’re white, male and live in America) … They rely on non-neutral methods (microscopes, cameras, eyeballs) and use non-neutral symbols (words, numbers, images).” Whoa! They’re even using non-neutral symbols like words and numbers? Who would have guessed that even White American males would stoop so low? But it was in the New York Times, so it must be true … well, except “true” is not a thing anymore, is it? This is confusing.
His idea is that people (even scientists) try to discover facts using microscopes, numbers and other bad stuff like that. But they blow it every time. Instead, what happens is they end up “making facts,” “producing facts” … that are not true. Usually because they’re White, male Americans. Hold on, what’s that got to do with it?
Williams pretends to be making some deep philosophical argument about how it’s theoretically impossible for anyone ever to discover a true fact. But he can’t help showing us the ax he’s grinding. In fact, the whole argument is just made up to fit a hidden agenda—to trash the Enlightenment and all that dominant White male stuff.
This is ridiculous. Couldn’t we trash White males without throwing out truth, reason, and science? Ironically, postmodernism was entirely cooked up by a bunch of not-so-nice European White guys.
Science, Too?
Yes, of course. Once you trash the idea of finding the truth, science is dead in the water. Williams reports that “Bruno Latour had made a career questioning ‘scientific certainty.’” Latour is the #2 postmodern science wizard, and Williams quotes him as saying:
Entire [postmodern] Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up.
There you have it: Postmodernism says that scientific facts are just made up. As an example of what goes wrong with postmodern science criticism, consider the following quote from Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on postmodernism. (To appreciate this entry, understand that the “mechanics” (motion) of solid objects is relatively simple, but there is a $1 million prize offered for making progress on fluid mechanics because it’s so tricky.)
The French [postmodernist] philosopher and literary theorist Luce Irigaray, for example, has argued that the science of solid mechanics is better developed than the science of fluid mechanics because the male-dominated institution of physics associates solidity and fluidity with the male and female sex organs, respectively.
Irigaray is obviously bonkers, but this is no barrier to being a postmodern guru. Even if we did think physics is mainly guided by an interest in sex organs, what is she thinking? That male scientists are more interested in male than female sex organs? No, they’re not all gay! That was 1985, but don’t worry, you can still get a postmodern Ph.D. for similar “contributions” to postmodern science. Here’s proof.
Feminist Glaciology
M Jackson (M is her first name) has come out with her fourth book on glaciers, The Secret Lives of Glaciers (2019). She holds a doctorate from the University of Oregon in geography and glaciology. Top climate activist Bill McKibben blesses her as a “noted scientist.” I watched her TEDx Talk from 2017 in which she explained:
“Female glaciers, they move quick. They give off more water. They’re usually blue or white. Gender identification is crucial in this part of the Karakoram [mountain range in Pakistan] because here villagers breed their own glaciers. They take the seeds from male glaciers … [and] combine them with seeds from female glaciers and they make a brand new glacier. Some glaciers are farmed for just a couple of years and some are farmed for centuries, all to provide stable water in the dry season.”
Believe it or not, she was completely serious. However, one problem did get Dr. M’s knickers in a twist: “The majority of glaciological knowledge that we have today stems from knowledge created by men, about men within existing masculinist stories.” Umm … are we sure those men (and a lot of women, by the way) aren’t creating knowledge about glaciers using amazingly sophisticated science and not just “masculinist stories.”
Jackson studied under Mark Carey, a dean and postmodernist professor of history at the University of Oregon. The two of them recently published a paper on “Feminist Glaciology” that they wrote under a five-year, $412,930 grant from the National Science Foundation.
Not surprisingly, the right wing, from the Wall Street Journal to DailyCaller.com, had a field day. “FEDS PAID $709,000 TO ACADEMIC WHO STUDIES HOW GLACIERS ARE SEXIST,” shouted the DailyCaller. (That amount is right because Dean Carey has gotten three grants from the National Science Foundation.) What an embarrassment for all the women who are real scientists.
How Trump Uses Postmodern Anti-Science
In his NYT opinion piece, Williams told us: “Latour observed that conservatives had begun using the methods of critical theory to muddy debates around issues, like climate change.” Here’s how that works.
In October 2018, Leslie Stahl, interviewing Trump about climate science, asked, “What about the scientists who say it’s worse than ever?” Trump replied, “You’d have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda, Leslie.”
That’s the postmodernist line exactly. They claim, as Williams does, that you can’t trust scientists because:
People who produce facts—scientists—do so from a particular social position that influences how they perceive, interpret and judge the world.
While it’s true that anyone can be biased, even scientists, it’s also true that your smartphone works, and if the science had just been made up, it would not even glow in the dark.
The essence of science is skepticism, and the central requirement for getting results accepted into the scientific canon is cross-checking by others. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has no ethic of skepticism about its own beliefs, is highly suspicious of logic and is disdainful of any attempt to be objective.
Conclusion
Helping Trump disparage science has no upside. Trump doesn’t read postmodern philosophy, and that’s the scary part. How did it reach him and his base? Postmodernism has been diffusing into popular culture unnoticed for 50 years. It has now reached every political corner, from the notorious crypto-fascist troll, Mike Cernovich (“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college”), who is spreading “alternatives to the dominant narrative” to the National Science Foundation, which is funding fake feminist glaciology.
It gains access to popular culture through colleges and universities by claiming to be radically left. But as the next chapter shows, it was derived from the philosophies that underpinned Hitler’s Third Reich. Postmodernism is not itself fascist, but its anti-truth, anti-reason philosophy serves the right wing in America just as it did in Germany and now does in Russia.
Addendum (optional and wonkish)
Because postmodernism has made such a hash of the language and the concepts of truth and fact, and because I enjoy clarity and logic, I thought I would provide a clear overview of the basic concepts of truth and reason. It’s wonkish but simple, so that’s your warning, served with some encouragement.
Logic concerns statements, implications, and truth. The classic example is: Socrates was a man. All men are mortal. So Socrates was mortal. That’s logical. But for now, just notice that logic deals with clear statements that can be either true or false. OK, here goes:
About true statements:
- A true statement is called a fact.
○ You can say it’s a true fact or a hard fact, but it’s all the same. Facts are facts.
- If you know a fact, that’s knowledge and also (some) truth.
- Some facts do exist. (In other words, true statements exist. Truth exists.)
○ Two Proofs: 2 + 2 = 4. Trump became president.
- You can learn (or find) facts, that you didn’t know.
○ Proof: If you don’t know what state Mount Rushmore is in, ask Google. You’ll find a fact.
- You cannot make up a brand new fact.
○ It’s either already true (not new) or not true; saying it’s true won’t make it a fact if it’s not one already.
About false statements:
- Everyone thinks some things are true that aren’t. We call those mistakes.
- Some people call things truth when they know they are false. We call those lies.
- “There are no facts” is a false statement. If it were true, it would prove this fact: “There are no facts.” So there would be at least one fact. So the statement cannot be true. It is false.
It all boils down to this: Some statements are true, and some are false. The false ones can be mistakes or lies. Other statements are unclear and neither true nor false. Sometimes we can tell which category a statement is in, and other times we can’t. If we use our heads, we can get better at telling which is which. That’s what science does, and that is what Trump and postmodernists most want to prevent.
Ripped Apart
