Post-Modernism vs. Democracy

Posted on May 5, 2004 in Anthropology Reading Social Justice Thinking

As a student of anthropology, I admittedly did not take “hard science” courses, but I did get an understanding of where the 20th century’s objections to racism, for example, got their scientific grounding. Franz Boas, who might rightly be termed the father of cultural anthropology, studied differences in intelligence between blacks and whites. He found that maybe 10% of whites might be more intelligent than all blacks and 10% of blacks might not be as smart as whites. He observed that this occurred before one calculated out differences which were the result of environment. He furthermore demonstrated that better nutrition and education could easily erase these gaps. Finally, he reasoned that even if we showed that 1% of whites were smarter than all blacks and 1% of blacks were dumber than all whites, there was a 99% percent overlap in intelligence. This miniscule difference and substantial overlap could hardly be used to justify segregation.

Based on these and other scientific findings, activists against racism were able to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn segregation in schools and, later, to convince the U.S. Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All went well until the post-modernists came along with their “critique” of “elitism” among scientists. It suddenly became fashionable to smash the very foundation upon which the civil rights advances of the 20th century had been founded.

Post-modernism has been the door through which Creationists, racists, and other critics of Science have slipped back into the marketplace of ideas. As Phil Mole observes in the May/June 2004 issue of Skeptical Enquirer, it wasn’t intended that way. Post-modernists sought to undermine a very real elitism and purblindness within the scientific community. Rooting out those biases is a noble cause, but the way the ill-educated critics of Science went about it has tragic potentials for our society. Mole writes:

….we are simply seeing a modern variation of a long democratic tradition: mistrust of authority. Postmodernism with its fancy jargon about social constructivism and observer-mediated realities, has simply reinvigorated the anti-elitism and ideological relativism always present in democratic societies. In a deep sense, postmodern relativism is simply a new language for reclaiming the emotional attachment to egalitarianism fostered by grammar and high-school history classes. Students taught a sanitized vision of modern society in which the tenet that “all men are created equal” later bumps against the hard realities of inequality and the role scientists have played in strengthening those inequalities. The radical relativism of postmodernists touches just the right cord with these jaded students. In a world where the heroes have clay feet and justice is elusive, postmodernism provides the solace of believing that egalitarianism still thrives in the intellectual plane. If all men are not created equal, they can at least take comfort in the equality of ideas.

Thus, most critics of science are acting from admirable ideas. When they complain of the marginalizing effects of traditional science, they believe they are acting in the spirit of equality. They believe that science isolates and trivializes other groups to solidify its own status, and they want to rescue these isolated voices from perceived oblivion. But they fail to realize a fatal flaw in their approach. By emphasizing only the flaws and biases of science, they present a skewed image that not only contradicts responsible scholarship but also erodes both public understanding and support of science. In a society largely dependent upon scientific knowledge, these are dangerous ideas. Indeed, the greatest irony hidden from modern critics of science is that they are actively undermining the very foundation of the democratic society they claim to cherish. Democracy can flourish only in a climate of rationalization that sees some ideas as true and others as false. Science, with all its limitations, is still the best methodology for discovering this truth. [emphases mine]

Through the portal Moles describes, enter the Creationists, the racists, and those who believe that there are still weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq — in short everyone who has a reason to hide from an objective analysis of their prejudices. I agree that the motives of post-modernists are admirable, that they do rightly perceive biases that white male scientists often bring to the study of human behavior (in particular), and that there are other ways to knowledge; however, I do not like the way that they have opened the door to sloppy thinking and some very wrong takes on the nature of human life and the Universe that threaten to undermine and destroy all that our parents and grandparents struggled to establish for the good of all the children of this country of ours. In this world of the senses, some things just cannot be established as true. The vehicle which brought us to our understandings of the nature of human existence was Science. Before we scrap that Greater Vehicle, shouldn’t we take the time to understand how it really should work and what, when it has been practiced rightly and well, it has done for us?