From: "julian samuel" <jjsamuel-AT-vif.com>
Subject: And then there was postmodernism... 
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 09:39:40 -0800


source not known -- Julian Samuel

Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 04:23:01 -0500
Article28 March 2002Printer-friendly version
And then there was postmodernism...
by Patrick West
If creationism is on the rise in the UK, blame
the academic left as
much as the religious right.
For a generation now, the academic left has been
engaged in a war
against science as we know it: propagating the
notion that science
is an inherently Western concept, that it is
culturally perspectival,
but most of all, after Werner Heisenberg, that it
is an imperfect and
thoroughly flawed 'discourse'.
The general public's distrust of science and
scientists in general,
whether it be over genetically modified (GM)
crops or cloning, is
not merely a fad, whipped up by the media. The
public's flight into
homeopathy, healing crystals and alternative
medicine represents a
deeper distrust of science, a flight that has
been fuelled from the top
down by thousands of undergraduate professors who
claim that
'science' (inverted commas are mandatory) is but
another Western,
logocentric discourse that tells us more about
who is doing the
observing than what is observed.
Creationism may now be given the legitimacy it
needs not because
fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise, but
because
postmodernism reigns.
Although some today are prone to dismiss
postmodernism as a
craze of the early-1990s, there is little
evidence that we do not still
live in a relativist age, despite Blair and
Bush's attempt to force the
language of 'good' and 'evil' into the
international sphere. From the
heights of academia, where textuality, relativism
and cultural
perspectivism rule, to the lowly language of
social policy, where
difference and diversity have become modern-day
mantras, we do
indeed appear to live in times of inverted
commas.
'Feminist scientists' concluded that science
was an intrinsically
masculine enterprise
Add a dose of demotic populism to this relativist
posturing, and
there can be no defence of science in the face of
creationism. To
attempt such a defence is to risk accusations of
'intolerance' and
'elitism': it is an affront to pluralism and a
proverbial kick in the face
of diversity. 'But science is just another form
of religion', I
remember two undergraduates chiding me at
university. In the
words of the headmaster of Emmanuel City
Technology College in
Gateshead, the school at the centre of the recent
creationism-teaching row in the UK: 'both
creation and evolution
are faith positions.'
The postmodern movement of the past quarter
century has
promoted the idea that there is no such thing as
truth; there is only
interpretation. And curiously enough, to begin
with, many
postmodernists actually took inspiration from
scientific
developments. Initially influential was
Heisenberg's principle, which
stated that the more precisely one located the
position of a particle,
the less you could ascertain about its momentum
(and vice versa).
In addition was Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity, which - it
seemed - suggested that how one saw the cosmos
depended upon
the point from which one was looking.
While Einstein seemed to give a nod to what
anthropologists had
long been arguing - that what is observed is
fatally influenced by
who is doing the observing - Heisenberg's
principal was taken to
mean that science itself was an imperfect
discipline. Relativity suited
the agenda of the relativists. Chaos theory
(butterflies flapping their
wings in Kansas, etc) and Benoit Mandelbrot's
fractals became
totems of a movement that sought to question the
notion of a
knowable universe. As Mandelbrot shows, the
closer you go in on
a map of Britain, the longer and more intricate
becomes the
coastline, until, at sub-atomic level, it becomes
impossible. Ergo,
the more science looks, the less it will find.
Postmodernists take
innocent scientific metaphors such as chaos,
uncertainty and
relativity at face value, as if to suggest that
science is literally
chaotic, uncertain, and subjective.
Instrumental was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific
Revolutions (1962), which forwarded the notion
that science
changes or advances not merely because of new
discoveries, but
when society itself changes. 'Feminist
scientists' reached the
conclusion that not only was science controlled
by men - it was an
intrinsically masculine enterprise. Quoting
Francis Bacon's call to
'place Nature on the rack in order to force her
to yield her secrets',
they suggested that 'science' reflected a
patriarchal need to
dominate, categorise and penetrate. After Michel
Foucault, it was
declared that science was but a phallogocentric
power game -
'phallogocentric' being postmodernism's way of
saying that logic
itself is a masculinist conspiracy.
Of course, it was not proper scientists
advocating as much, but
academics and educationalists. A 1992 draft of
the new National
Science Standards in the USA announced that these
standards
would be 'based on the postmodernist view [that]
questions the
objectivity of observation and the truth of
scientific knowledge'.
Although these actual words were eventually
dropped from the
final 1996 draft, its ethos has been maintained
in the form of
'standpoint epistemologies'.
Multicultural scientists are championing
creationism in the
name of 'diversity'
'What makes a belief true', says a leading
standpoint
epistemologist, Trevor Pinch of Cornell
University, 'is not its
correspondence with an element of reality, but
its adoption and
authentications by the relevant community' (1).
After all, 'many
pictures can be painted, and...the sociologist of
science cannot say
that any picture is a better representation of
Nature than any other'.
In short, it does not matter what a scientist
says, it matters what
colour he is, or if he is a she.
In the words of one 1999 journal article
published in the USA for
mathematics teachers, the reason why some Navajo
schoolchildren
were failing at the subject was that 'the Western
world developed
the notion of fractions and decimals out of need
to divide or
segment a whole. The Navajo world view
consistently appears not
to segment the whole of an entity'. Teachers of
Navajo children
were encouraged to deal with concepts more
'naturally compatible
with Navajo spatial knowledge', such as
'non-Euclidean geometry,
motion theories, and/or fundamentals of calculus'
(2). Poor kids:
calculus before fractions.
In 1996, the 'International Study Group on
Ethnomathematics'
released a paper calling for the teaching of
'multicultural
mathematics' in schools. It was nonsense, the
paper suggested, to
talk of some being 'good at maths' or some not.
It ridiculed the
'so-called Pythagorean theorem' and called for a
'culturally
responsive pedagogy'. By 1997, more than three
quarters of
teachers in the USA had implemented
'Ethnomathematic'
guidelines.
According to Meera Nanda, writing in Noretta
Koertge's book A
House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodern Myths
About
Science, Hindu nationalists in India have been
appropriating
multicultural science to proclaim 'local ways of
knowing' - which
means downgrading algebra (which is too Islamic
or Western) and
putting in its place 'Vedic mathematics':
rule-of-thumb
computational formulas derived from Sanskrit
verses.
Koertge had documented particularly how the quest
for
'female-friendly science' has brought us down
some peculiar
avenues. In a 1996 conference of the American
Association for the
Advancement of Science, she noted how one
feminist explained
why research into the mechanics of solids was
undertaken at a far
earlier stage than that of fluid dynamics. Men
were more
comfortable working with rigid environments which
reflected their
'sex organs that protrude and become rigid', and
were uneasy with
fluidity itself, which reminded them too much of
menstrual blood
and vaginal secretions. 'In the same way that
women are erased
within masculinist theories and language,
existing only as not-men,
so fluids had been erased from science, existing
only as not-solids',
she explained.
The academic left and the religious right are
suspicious of
reason
Yet in America, home of both the 'multicultural
scientists' and
creationists, it is the latter which solicit the
greatest outrage.
Presumably, being Christian and mainly white,
creationists
represent in the multicultural mind two power
groups that have held
hegemony over the world. This view, however,
fails to recognise
that many Muslims are similarly creationists.
During the recent
Emmanuel College debate, A Majid Katme of Islamic
Concern
added his voice, to the effect that: 'There are
clearly huge holes in
the fossil records, and missing links in the
theory. Only true
sciences do fit with the divine teachings, no
false ones or theories
like Darwin theory.'
The disturbing corollary of the antipathy
directed only at white
Christians is that the Left - both rational and
multicultural - only
seems to make noises when white children are
being taught
damaging falsehoods. When black or Asian children
are taught
palpable nonsense, are we meant to raise our
hands and say, 'It's
their culture'?
Yet according to Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in
Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels
With Science
(1994), multicultural scientists are going so far
as actually to
champion creationism, all in the name of
'diversity'. One prominent
advocate of multicultural science teaching in the
USA has endorsed
teaching creation myths in American classrooms,
not merely Jewish
and Christian versions, but 'many traditional
Native American,
African, and Eastern religions'.
Perhaps this unholy alliance is not so
surprising. The academic left
and the religious right share many facets. They
are suspicious of
reason, hold to the notion that truth is
dependent on the individual
or group, and that culture-specific answers are
equally if not more
valid than universal ones based on evidence. They
are both
anti-modernists, distinguished only by their
prefixes: one being
'pre-', the other 'post-'. Both groups deride
those who 'believe' in
evolution as intolerant, expressing a kind of
liberal rationalist
fundamentalism - that zoologist Richard Dawkins
is a kind of
modern-day Torquemada. Rationalism, they say, is
not the
anti-ideology it professes to be, but a doctrine
of its own.
This is unsupportable rhetoric. You show me an
anti-logocentric
philosopher or a bible-belt anti-scientist who
has travelled by plane
or been treated in hospital and I will show you a
hypocrite. I can
show you Christians who believe in evolution. Can
creationists
show me an atheist who believes in creationism?
There is a tiny minority of non-religious
creationists
Well, in truth, there is a tiny minority of
non-religious creationists. A
group of ultra-sceptics call themselves adherents
to 'Intelligent
Design', while even a section of the
neoconservative, libertarian
right in America have questioned evolution, such
as was seen in
Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern
Liberalism and American Design, or Michael Behe's
Darwin's
Black Box.
Neoconservatives, the multicultural left and the
religious right all
want to downgrade evolution because they have
their own political
agendas to pursue - respectively, because it is
the cause of moral
decline; it is Western and hegemonic; and it
disagrees with a
Protestant literal-minded interpretation of the
Bible. They will say
evolution, being a non-empirical branch of
science, is mere 'theory'.
Such sophistry would have great implications for
geology, biology,
archaeology, astrophysics and physics. We have
never witnessed
the shifting of continents, the birth of stars or
the movements of
subatomic particles. Does this mean these things
have not
happened? Anti-modernists don't so much say 'if a
tree falls down
in a forest and there's nobody there to hear it,
does it make a
noise?'. They pronounce: 'if a tree falls down in
a forest and
nobody sees it, then it has not fallen down.'
Ultimately, postmodern scientists rest their
ideas upon metaphors,
not upon what actually happens in science. They
assume that just
because there is chaos theory, uncertainty and
irrational numbers,
that science is incomplete, chaotic, relativistic
and irrational. As any
practising scientist will tell you, this is
simply not true.
In one respect, after Kuhn, they do have a point.
If science reflects
the society from which it emanates, then
'postmodern science'
reflects a wider cultural malaise: our desperate
disenchantment with
the values of the Enlightenment and the West's
worrying descent
into irrationalism and superstition.
Anyhow, happy Easter. Here's to one man who is on
record saying
he believes in evolution: the Pope. How strange
that many of those
in charge of so many children's education do not.
Patrick West is a freelance writer.


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