Why Postmodernism Suddenly Looks So Obsolete

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — Postmodernism, perhaps the most influential ideology of the past 50 years, denies and questions our ability to understand events and better the world through reasoning. It undermines truth, objectivity and universality in that sense, and praises instead all that is subjective, local, passing or emotive.

It has proved itself sufficiently influential to convert even the political left, with its universalist pretensions, to its particularizing reasoning! Postmodernism did not become left-wing, mind. No, it was strictly the other way around as the left ceased to believe in the power of economic conditions and social classes, and came instead to reduce everything to subjectivity and issues of identity.

It has made reality a cultural construct and thus, subjective and emanating from human nature, which has in turn been declared inexistent. In the social sciences, quantitative research methods were replaced with qualitative research, as academics became far less interested in understanding what is “really” happening in favor of what was happening in the minds of social actors.

Destructive criticism

I myself felt attracted to postmodern ideas and the charm of what the thinker Jacques Derrida terms “deconstruction.” I never reached the point of denying the reality of an objective reality but did insist too much on reality’s constructed and subjective aspects.

To say that nothing is true is so dashing…

Yet what I found particularly attractive was postmodernism’s rebellious quality rather than its, well, veracity. Destructive criticism is always more captivating than the dogged work of construction.

To say that nothing is true, everything is illusory, and social life makes no sense, and that the only worthwhile things are tragedy and art (as that great precursor of postmodernism, Nietzsche, said), is so dashing, unlike trying to understand, find solutions to problems, and seek out a consensus.

Walking in the dark, with no direction

But postmodernism, as Jean-François Lyotard, another thinker, said, is more an attitude than a theory, a pose rather than a hypothesis. Ideas seem to be similar to the things we buy and sell: their commercial value hides their value in terms of utility. In other words: two watches will tell you the time with equal precision (so their utility is the same) but one can cost a thousand times more, for its brand. With postmodernism, ideas became a trend too — desirable, facile and politically correct — but with limited “utility” in explanatory terms.

It is now fundamental to defend our identity as human beings.

I am not saying disbelief and doubt are not important. No, just that we have gone too far in doubting the sense, and essence, of things. Science and philosophy need a balance between doubt and certainty. Without doubt, certainty becomes dogma and without certainty, doubt turns to nihilism.

So before the atomization and aimlessness of our times, I think now that we must join efforts to unite cultures and countries, and highlight what conditions us, starting with our biology (human nature). It is now fundamental to defend our identity as human beings — homo sapiens — even as we are threatening life on the planet.

The value of an ideology is not just dependent on its outward attraction or inner coherence, but on its ability to better human life and somehow contribute to peaceful cohabitation. We need theories that enlighten us instead of intellectual poses that prevent us seeing what is happening. Postmodernism is just that: it wants us to walk through a pitch-dark night, to nowhere in particular.

*Mauricio García wrote this in response to El Espectador’s call on its columnists to engage in the “healthy exercise” of changing your mind.