I find Peterson, Saad, Dennis Prager, and other PoMo-bashers stimulating, charismatic, often inspiring. I share a classical liberal political outlook. But in making sense of challenges facing liberalism, the PoMo bashing is misleading. It dumbs down understanding of the challenges. By positing a demon that believes an absurdity (“no interpretation better than another”), PoMo-bashing gives easy hope of correcting the belief and undoing the demon.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Klein cites Deirdre McCloskey, who is a long-time opponent of logical positivism and hence sympathetic to post-modernism.
Let me try to take a position between two extremes. The extremes are:
1. Truth is truth. It can be judged impersonally, using logic and empirical methods. Decoupling, if you will.
2. Truth is relative. It can be judged from the perspective of the individual’s location in social space. “As an African-American woman, my reality is that. . .”
One problem with (1) is that it denies the reality that emotions and social circumstances do affect people’s beliefs. Another problem with (1) is that it does not include a category (other than dogma) for beliefs that cannot be evaluated scientifically. It risks biasing you toward a faith that “social science” can be used to rationally construct human affairs. I think that these concerns, particularly the last one, incline McCloskey and Klein to have some sympathy with post-modernism.
One problem with (2) is that it is overly nihilistic. There are plenty of objective truths. Another problem is that it is too power-conscious. People abuse it to try to exercise power in conversations where truth-seeking, not power-seeking, ought to be the nature of the discussion.
In general, when a label is deployed as a boo-word, it has lost its usefulness. “Neoliberalism” falls into that category. It seems that “post-modernism” does, also.