Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza

Author:Dinesh D'Souza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

13

Who Are the Postmodernists?

Dear Chris,

I am not sure that it was the wisest idea to share my letter on feminism with the chairwoman of the Women’s Studies department. Isn’t this the woman who looks like Janet Reno, wears ridiculous hats, and comes to class with a big dog? She sounds quite terrifying. Now if I am found in a back alley mauled by a bloodhound or stabbed in the back with a hatpin, you will know where to direct the authorities.

You note that much of the humanities program—including the Women’s Studies department—is made up of “postmodernists.” Who, you ask, are the postmodernists? The postmodernists are the Truly Profound Ones. By way of illustration, let me offer this passage by literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman. “Because of the equivocal nature of language, even identities or homophones sound on: the sound of Sa is knotted with that of ca, as if the text were signaling its intention to bring Hegel, Saussure, and Freud together. Ca corresponds to the Freudian Id (‘Es’); and it may be that our only ‘savior absolu’ is that of a ca structured like the Sa-significant: a bacchic or Lacanian ‘primal process’ where only signifier-signifying signifiers exist.”

This has all the hallmarks of postmodern thought. It is pompous, verbose, and incoherent. To a certain type of intellectually insecure person, postmodernism and its intellectual cousin, deconstructionism, can appear profound: “Gee, that sounds very complicated. These people must be incredibly brilliant.” Tens of thousands of graduate students have been fooled in this way by people such as Hartman and the master of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida. Serious thinkers see through Derrida in an instant. Michel Foucault reportedly said of Derrida, “He’s the kind of philosopher who gives bull-shit a bad name.”

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss all postmodern thought in this way. Philosopher Richard Rorty and literary critic Stanley Fish are both lucid writers, and they put forward substantial claims. Their fundamental claim is that there is no such thing as objective truth. Even science, Rorty and Fish assert, does not describe “the world out there”; rather, it is a Western cultural construction that has no more claim to reality than anyone else’s cultural construction. In an article in the New York Times, Fish even suggested that the rules of science are just as arbitrary as the rules of baseball.

Postmodern theory suffers from the weakness that the postmodernists themselves don’t believe it, as their actions show. When Richard Rorty needs a medical checkup, he doesn’t go to a witch doctor; he checks into the medical center at the University of Virginia. When Stanley Fish and I debate on campus, we do not travel there in an oxcart; we go by plane. “Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet,” Richard Dawkins writes, “and I’ll show you a hypocrite.” Airplanes fly, Dawkins points out, because a lot of Western mathematicians and engineers “have got their sums right.”

In other words, science works because the universe operates according to certain regularities or laws, and science is devoted to discovering those laws.

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