Primrose Road

I'm fairly sure that at this point I've already run the idea that the most recent wave of atheists is unfairly critical of postmodernism and uncritically supportive of Enlightenment-style empiricism into the ground. During my 15-hour train ride to Toronto last week, however, I found a passage in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion that quite eloquently (and ironically, considering that Dawkins takes several swings at Foucault in the book) sums up one of the reasons why we need postmodernist thought:

"There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of 'diversity' and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture."

Dawkins astutely points out that the trope of 'preserving diversity' can easily become racist, classist, and can all-too-easily privilege the group that is supposed to be doing the 'preserving' over the 'preserved.' Perhaps surprisingly to those who would critique Foucault & friends, this is what postmodernist thought is often about: rethinking not only Enlightenment / colonialist / liberal humanist forms of thought but also noticing the ways in which attempts to 'preserve diversity' can easily fall into the traps of colonialist thought.

Again, what many of the "new atheists" seem to be critiquing is not postmodernism, but feel-good, New Agey, 'everyone should have a voice' misreadings of postmodernist thought.

Some of the ScienceBloggers have picked up on a story about a teacher who threatened, via email, to sue her (freshman comp!) students for harassment. It's quite obvious that the woman was simply litigious -- she also tried to sue her superiors because they "ignored" the harassment -- and couldn't handle her students' challenging her. (I wish more students would disagree with and challenge me in class.) Unfortunately, this one case of a teacher's thin-skinned childishness is being used in the science blogosphere to attack postmodernism in general, which I think is unfortunate and reflects a continued misunderstanding of the term and philosophies it encompasses.

Sure, some postmodernists will argue that science is just one "way of knowing," but their aim is to question beliefs that we accept as "natural" because of religious and social norms, not to present a drippy New Age form of relativism. The scientific method is in my view the most effective and safest "way of knowing" in the medical field; people who sell magic water make me angry too. But the ways in which many scientists and proponents of the "new" atheism on the blogosphere praise Enlightenment seems to me philosophically problematic: while the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" aspect of it makes sense, the (implied) "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" aspect can be somewhat unsettling. Historically, there's a little bit of colonialism buried in Enlightenment, a factor that should be acknowledged.

Basically, just because there are perhaps more than a handful of New-Agey relativists out there who call themselves postmodernists doesn't mean that postmodernism runs counter to science.