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"Postmodernism", "open mindedness" and "moral relativism"
I'm probably just gonna end up ranting and digressing, but that's why I'm not putting this in the debate forum.
There's a lot of emphasis on postmodernist thought here at columbia. Especially in our lit. humanities class, which, this semester, has been very good.
We read Don Quixote a couple weeks ago, which I really enjoyed, and the whole idea of constructed narrative obviously led to a lot of discussion of postmodernism (of course, Cervantes predated postmodernism by centures, but that's besides the point). What was especially interesting was Quixote's (or, at that point, Quejada's) death scene. Quejada was rejecting all the narratives he constructed for his life, saying he was simply Quejada, not the knight errant he wanted to be and, in fact, for much of the novel, forced himself to be. Which, in turn, led Sancho Panza, the ever-faithful squire, to be post-postmodern and basically say that it doesn't matter that he constructed these narratives, what matters was that those narratives were providing him with some level of happiness. An interesting point brought up in my class was that Quixote's death pretty much went hand in hand with his realization of the constructed narratives.
But yeah, all that talk about narrative got me into thinking and reading up on postmodernism, and it's hard to see how postmodernism isn't a narrativist construction in and of itself. Postmodernism has a lot of definitions, but what I've been able to gather is that it is marked by subjectivity, a decentralization of thought (that is to say that it is not self-centered like modernist thought), and, to quote Lyotard, "an incredulity toward metanarratives." Now I understand that what is important is that it's toward "metanarratives" and not "narratives" in general, but postmodernism really does seem like a metanarrative in and of itself.
In many ways, to me the ideas of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" are themselves narratives. People tell themselves that things are different based on how you view them, but in reality there are a lot of things that imply the nonuniqueness of observation. If you look at the sky and see stars all around you, a subjective interpretation could be to claim that the Earth is the center of the universe, and all the stars are around us. But modern science has pretty much surmised that the universe is fairly universal; that is to say that it's more objective than it is subjective.
Obviously there are many, many things that are specific to specific people, but postmodernism is definitely a step toward looking at things in a completely subjective manner, which just does not make sense. Some things really are objective truths, the scientific Principle of a Nonunique Observer being one of them. So postmodernism just seems like another kind of narrative being "imposed".
Should truly postmodern thought reject postmodernism then? But that just gets into all kinds of logical infinite loops.
But really thinking through postmodernism, obviously you can't stop at just the ideas of objectivity/subjectivity and metanarratives. The ultra-subjective viewpoint immediately leads to the ideas of "open mindedness" and "moral relativisim", which can similarly be pointed out as kinds of narratives themselves. The idea of "open mindedness" can really appear as a construction that needs to be broken down. And it's just a really annoying construction, too; people can claim to be "open minded" and "tolerant" of other ideas yet, at the same time, be quite close minded in their assessment of those whom they consider to be "close minded".
And then with moral relativism you get into all kinds of practical problems. In a morally relative society, what becomes of law and governance? Obviously this points toward anarchism, which I can say I would wholeheartedly agree with. Government as an idea is about the biggest construction humans have ever made and that is where I can say I definitely agree with the postmodernists. But while I definitely agree that morals can be relative, and even in individual people, they can see things in different ways at different parts of their lives, something about this idea of moral relativism doesn't really sit well with me. Just seems like people get out of hand with it. I mean, you can never justify rape. So obviously there has to be a line where some morals are just objective. I've had this conception in my mind of a few "universal morals" for a little while now (maybe a year or two), which obviously postmodernist thought would consider dangerously close to being a metanarrative, but I still like this idea of considering that there are some things that just can't be touched. Rape, murder (in most cases...when I'm feeling really evil I can justify killing, even killing innocents, if it could lead to a greater good), pretty much most violent acts I can consider to be universally wrong. And everything else can be subjective according to different situations and ideas about the merits of the act in question. I really don't know where I was going with this one...but yeah, moral relativism is cool with me to some degree.
I think I was a little harsh on postmodernism at the beginning of this post. I wanna make it clear that I definitely like postmodernism as an idea. It helps to really explain politics and political rhetoric, for example (see Joan Didion's essay "Insider Baseball", about the Dukakis/Bush 88 election; she doesn't really mention postmodernism directly but references it a lot through the discussion of the constructed narratives). I mean, the biggest constructions I can think of right now are the ideas of "national security", "war on terror", "Western values", and "democracy", all very political terms (and those aren't just Bush terms...Clinton was huge on talking about national security and Western values; and the first Bush and Clinton both had a "war on drugs", and this kinda goes back to LBJ's "war on poverty" - all can be seen as big time constructions).
Eh I'm tired now and I don't really have a point to this. So yeah, yay postmodernism. But uh...boo postmodernism, sometimes.
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04-09-2005 08:07 AM
