The Great Beacon of Academia: Postmodernism

As you can perhaps tell by the title, I have once again had the great pleasure of running into one of the great fallacies of modern liberalism: the philosophy of postmodernism. This idea flourishes on college campuses due mainly to the fact that a college campus is one of the few places were a group of people can be far enough removed from reality, for an extended period of time, to not see the absurdity inherent with it.

Many people buy into this idea believing that it represents honest questioning and research; i.e that we are trying to truly evaluate and understand both sides and be as reasonable as possible. Unfortunately, the true problem with this philosophy lies in the fact that, in an attempt to refrain from 'bias' or 'prejudice,' it omits judging and opinion-forming altogether. Furthermore, it also comes with the inevitable invoking of multiculturalism, and the standard lines that 'we don't really know right and wrong,' or that there are 'several' truths.

Today, I encountered it in history class where the discussion concerned various philosophies of and teaching methods of history. The postmodern idea of history contends that we can never 'know' historical truth because our viewpoint from the present is so diluted. Many in the class, indeed, gave responses that sounded like they were taken directly from Michael Moore or someone of the like. I even heard the contention that there probably were multiple historical truths.

So apparently, when I say that "on July 4th, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed" I'm not stating a historical truth. What? Was it signed again on the 8th? I mean come on, of course there's only one historical truth, a day or a moment only happens once, so two different things aren't happening at once. The founders didn't sign and not sign the Declaration on July 4th. They couldn't. Not unless they had a secret, evil time machine to go back and live through the day twice.

Look, I'm not saying it's not a good thing to look at evidence, and study an issue from all sides, walk a mile in someone else's shoes, if you will, but that doesn’t mean when you've walked that mile that you can't say their road just sucks. Making judgments is a good and necessary thing to do. That is where postmodernism falls apart in the real world. You can't just walk around saying I think that's wrong but that's just my opinion. What if, for instance, in my culture it's 'right' to pull out a shotgun and shoot postmodernists? Under those circumstances a postmodernist has no moral argument to prevent me from killing them. In fact, if they allowed themselves to live, based on their rules, they would be demonstrating 'intolerance' of my culture. The bottom line, however, is that if my culture pulls shotguns on postmodernists for no reason; my culture is just plain wrong.

Of course, as far as a history class is concerned, postmodernism is directly aimed at the old 'Eurocentric' model of teaching history. You know, the one where we teach kids American History and focus on the Western World. Postmodernists dislike this because it makes a judgment, a judgment that western culture is, by and large, better and superior to everyone else's. And that is, by and large, a true assessment. It was the Greeks, Romans and then Americans who first adopted this idea of a 'Republic'. It was out of the Enlightenment that we got this concept of 'unalienable' human rights. Heck, it was America that really began the total elimination of slavery. These, and many more, are the reasons why we teach from this perspective; because in the real world, it makes more sense for Americans to know a bit more about the history of Republicanism (in case they ever decide to vote) than of African tribal cultures.

Certainly, we should include lessons about the rest of the world, perhaps a mandatory 'World History' class would be a good idea, but let's not forget to emphasize Eurocentricity. We should not be afraid to draw the conclusion that Eurocentric values, traditions, etc are not just better, but right. After all, that's why we've stuck with them for so long and, interestingly enough, why the postmodernists, or the postmodernist's ancestors, came here in the first place.