Month: December 2006

I’ve been wondering what ‘postmodernism’ is exactly. I don’t mean what its claims are, I mean what it is itself. What kind of thing is it? What box does it go in? It’s not a discipline. It’s not a kind of philosophy, like pragmatism or utilitarianism. It’s not a kind of inquiry. What is it? I realize I don’t even know, and I’m not sure other people do either, including postmodernists themselves. Their descriptions of postmodernism tend to be notably vague around the edges. Evasive, a hostile witness might say. Like this one from the hilarious article on the reception of ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism’ by Holmes et al. last summer, the one that quotes comments on a blog as its main examples of that reception.

The postmodernist thinking that has characterised a number of academic disciplines in the last two or so decades of the 20th century – and is still alive and well in some quarters – has played an important role in creating new ways of developing ideas in the arts, science and culture. The relativism on which it is founded, and the ‘liberation’ from sacred cows it seeks, have a place in healthcare and health science…[P]ostmodernism is a response to modernity – the period where science was trusted and represented progress – and essentially focuses on questioning the centrality of both science and established canons, disciplines and institutions to achieving progress. The nature of ‘truth’ is a recurring concern to postmodernists, who generally purport that there are no truths but multiple realities and that understandings of the human condition are dynamic and diverse. The notion that no, one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced) is a tenet of postmodernist critique and analysis.

The words used kind of give away the fact that there is nothing very rigorous going on here. Postmodernist thinking, creating new ways of developing ideas, the ‘liberation’ it seeks, a response, essentially focuses, questioning the centrality, a recurring concern, generally purport, notion. Tenet, critique and analysis sound a little sterner, but after all those mushy terms they don’t convince. It all seems to speak of…just some people saying some things. So, what is that? What is postmodernism?

Well, whatever it is, let’s have a fantasy. Let’s imagine someone who seriously does question ‘the centrality of both science and established canons, disciplines and institutions to achieving progress.’ Okay? Got the someone? Let’s call it X. Let’s imagine depositing X stark naked in the middle of a trackless northern forest in the dead of winter (now, in fact), and then let us see how long X will want to sustain this questioning. Remember – it’s science that is being questioned. So that means no tool use: that means no making a fire, no building a shelter, no making clothes, no trapping animals, no fishing except with bare hands, no throwing sticks, no snow shoes, no rafts. It also means no existing knowledge – X can’t discriminate between poisonous berries and the other kind, can’t identify venomous snakes, doesn’t know how animals behave, can’t tell what the weather is doing, can’t navigate by the north star or the sun, doesn’t know that water can be full of bacteria. X would be dead in a matter of hours.

Now, X will say, indignantly, ‘But I’m not going to be trapped naked in the middle of a trackless forest in the dead of winter!’ Well no, X, you’re not, unless you’re very careless, but that is my point. You are dependent on science for your very existence at every turn, and you don’t even know it. If you suddenly found yourself in the trackless forest scenario, it would probably become clear to you very, very quickly how ‘central’ science is. In short, you’re a fool.

Say what you will, but having the top underrated book of the year according to Prospect is pretty good fun. Also a little surprising. We’ve tended to think of it more from the other direction. Not that it was overrated! No no – don’t run away with that idea. But that we were (modest to a fault as we are) rather surprised that it got such good reviews. So good that it wasn’t like trying to find an eyelash on a football pitch to pick out extracts for quoting in advertisements. We had spares. We had more than enough. And that was a surprise. (Why? I don’t know, exactly. Maybe partly just because it’s hard to tell how a book one has written oneself comes off.) So we think of it, or at least I do, as kind of heaped with praise, rather than underrated. And as doing pretty well – it’s in its third printing. But if people want to say No, it’s even better than that, it should get even more good reviews and be read by even more people and go into even further printing – well far be it from me to disagree. Far, far, far, far, far. Miles be it. A day’s walk. A long way off.

William Skidelsky’s little dig is funny (he’s one of those men who are more funny than women, probably).

We thought we could detect one or two schools of thought at work – Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s anti-postmodernism polemic Why Truth Matters struck a chord with liberal neocons such as Johann Hari and Oliver Kamm.

Liberal neocons; cool. You got your Blitcons and your liberal neocons. Liberal neocons go with bipedal quadrupeds and red bluebirds and vanilla chocolate and sour sugar. But whatever. I didn’t even know Oliver Kamm had read the dang book, much less that he thought it should be more widely known.

The Carnival of Citizens is December 17th. Deadline for submissions is December 15th. It’s hosted at Siris. It’s the brainchild of Richard at Philosophy Etcetera.

All righty. I was told to read Hitchens’s ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ more carefully, so I did, and was unsurprised to find more silly stuff, which I feel like poking a stick at. (You may say that he’s being ironic throughout. He’s not though. I recognize some of the thoughts from other work and from interviews; the stuff about childbirth and war for instance; he means it.)

While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

Oh, is it? I must be a man then. (Mind you, I often think that, when I read journalism about what women are and what men are. When I read that women are caring and co-operative and warm and fascinated by Relationships, I conclude that I’m a man; when I read that men are indifferent and argumentative and cold and bored rigid by Relationships, I conclude that I’m a man. So it goes.) Angst and self-deprecation are male? Come on. I’m in a permanent state of angst, usually about a minimum of seventeen different things, and my dial is also stuck on self-deprecation. Yes yes, I know I’m conceited, I don’t deny that, but I’m also self-deprecating, dammit! Furthermore – I don’t know if Hitchens is aware of this (I would suspect not) but men are often more pseudo-self-deprecating than really self-deprecating. They pretend to self-deprecate but do it in a subtly self-flattering way. They tell stories about their own rudeness or social ineptitude or jokes that everyone misunderstood, so that it seems as if they’re deprecating the old self but in fact they’re reporting on how unconventional and zany and clever they are. So there, Hitch – you do that yourself; you know you do.

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough…Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

Well, there we are again – I must be a man then. But besides that, preference is one thing and understanding is another. Preferring life to be unfair is not incompatible with understanding that it’s not. Aren’t men supposed to be good at logic? Come on, Hitch, pull your socks up.

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.

Okay, he got that bit right. Well done. (Except he could have pointed out that we believe we become threatening to men if we appear too bright as a result of experience. It’s not just some superstition.)

For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.

Bullshit.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous…I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor.

Oh look, it’s the bottom of the barrel! It is males who are the non-rank-and-file mainstay of religion, after all, so why pin the humor-enmity of religion on women?

Okay, I read it more carefully, and found that it’s a lot more riddled with bad arguments than I had realized.