January 8, 2004
Dear Concerned Citizen,

Postmodernism, we hear, has become a dominant force in American colleges and universities. Periodically we read reports of postmodernists equating President Bush with Adolph Hitler, or insisting that the words “terrorism” and “evil” have no real meaning. In Europe, too, postmodernism has a powerful influence. Recently a French postmodernist offered the observation that terrorists didn’t really destroy the World Trade Center; rather, the World Trade Center committed “suicide.”

When we read this we are tempted to tear out our hair. Who, we wonder, are these postmodernists? They are a group of intellectuals who regard themselves as deeply profound. By way of illustration, let me offer this passage by literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman. “Because of the equivocal nature of language, even identities or homophobes sound on: the sound of Sa is knotted with that of ca, as if the text were signaling its intention to bring Hegel, Saussure, and Freud together. Ca corresponds to the Freudian Id (‘Es’); and it maybe that our only ‘savior absolu’ is that of a ca structured like the Sa-significant: a bacchic or Lacanian ‘primal process’ where only signifier-signifying signifiers exist.”

This has all the hallmarks of postmodern thought. It is pompous, verbose, and incoherent. To a certain type of intellectually insecure person, postmodernism and its intellectual cousin, deconstructionism, can appear profound. “Gee, that sounds very complicated. These people must be incredibly brilliant.” Tens of thousands of graduate students have been fooled in this way by people like Hartman and the master of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida. Serious thinkers see through Derrida in an instant. Michel Foucault reportedly said of Derrida, “He’s the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name.”

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss all postmodern thought in this way. Philosopher Richard Rorty and literary critic Stanley Fish are very clear writers, and they are putting forward substantial claims. Their fundamental claim is that there is no such thing as objective truth. Even science, Rorty and Fish assert, does not describe “the world out there.” Rather, it is a Western cultural construction that has no more claim to reality than anyone else’s cultural construction. In an article in the New York Times, Fish even suggested that the rules of science are just as arbitrary as the rules of baseball.

This postmodern theory suffers from the weakness that the postmodernists themselves don’t believe it, as their actions show. When Richard Rorty needs a medical checkup he doesn’t go to a witch doctor; he checks into the medical center at the University of Virginia. When Stanley Fish and I debate on campus, we do not travel there in an oxcart; we go by plane. “Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet,” Richard Dawkins writes, “and I’ll show you a hypocrite.” The reason that airplanes fly, Dawkins points out, is because a lot of Western mathematicians and engineers “have got their sums right.”

In other words, science works because the universe operates according to certain regularities or laws, and science is devoted to discovering those laws. Of course scientists do not claim to have final or objective truths, but they do insist that the Newtonian account of the universe is superior to the Ptolemaic account, and that the Newtonian account has itself been surpassed by that of Einstein. Even though scientific hypotheses may be culturally conditioned, it is only when these hypotheses have survived criticism and testing that they are accepted as true.

Embarrassed to challenge the authority of science, some liberal scholars concede that facts are known but they insist that values are relative. These scholars are, strictly speaking, logical positivists rather than postmodernists, and their view appears much more reasonable. After all, we can verify facts but values would seem to be the product of individual and cultural preferences.

The Greeks, however, disagreed with this. The ancient Greeks held that there was a moral order in the universe that was no less real or true than the laws governing the motions of the planets. Moreover, the Greeks believed that this moral order was accessible to human reason, much like the laws of nature. On what basis do liberal scholars reject the Greek view? They point to the existence of widespread moral diversity. People within America disagree about morality, and different cultures have different views of morality. Thus the prevalence of moral disagreement is offered as evidence that there is no moral truth.

But this postmodern view is not convincing. So what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. If the Gallup organization conducted a survey of the world’s people, and the world’s various cultures, it is quite possible that most people and most groups would emphatically reject Einstein’s proposition that E=mc2. This disagreement would hardly refute Einstein; it would only prove that the majority of the world’s people are wrong. So, too, the presence of moral disagreement proves nothing about whether moral truths exist. Socrates argued that, if anything, disagreements invite investigation so that we can determine which moral opinions are true and which are false.

It is a great intellectual challenge to make the case for morality and truth at a time when many in the West are no longer sure that such things exist, or that they can be demonstrated. The decline of belief in an external moral order is one of the most important political facts of the past two centuries. Indeed, this decline has created the “crisis of the West.” This crisis is not simply one of the “death of God.” Rather, as Nietzsche predicted, if religion withers away, so does morality. The reason is that religion is the source of morality, and therefore morality cannot long survive the decay of religion. How do postmodernists response to this decline of morality? To welcome it, in the name of freedom. That was Nietzsche’s response as well. They speak about creating “new values.” Some even dream about creating a “new man” free from the traditional impediments of human nature.

The liberal commune, based on shared possessions and free love, is one such social experiment. The Nazis and the Communists also tried to create new men and new values, with disastrous results.

Efforts to change human nature and invent new values are both foolish and dangerous. Instead, we should accept human nature for what it is, and be cautious about schemes to alter it. Moreover, we should embrace old values while recognizing that they need to be adapted to new circumstances. Our challenge is to articulate reasons for those values to a society that has lost its moral consensus.