Institute for Postmodern develop

Characteristics of Constructive Postmodernism

Dr. John B Cobb

To many people, philosophy seems impractical. It doesn't fill your stomach or move you from place to place. It appears to be an intellectual game, of interest only to those who have time to quibble over words. Few people imagine that it is useful for solving practical problems.

That image applies to analytic philosophy, which is widely taught in American universities. Systematic philosophy, however, can be very practical. It derives generalizations from all fields of knowledge and develops coherent principles that can be applied across a variety of intellectual disciplines. Constructive postmodernism, described in more detail below, is such a systematic philosophy.

Practical people are seldom conscious of the implicit philosophy that guides their actions. Yet, by taking fundamental principles for granted, rather than thoroughly testing them, practical people are being impractical. They are limiting their freedom of action unnecessarily. Their thought is constrained by what seem to be "natural" limits, even though those limits derive entirely from their philosophical categories rather than from experience.

For example, since economists are philosophically committed to the "natural" principle of tradeoffs—having to give up one good thing to have another—most believe that reducing unemployment must mean higher inflation. As a result, the policies of most nations block tens of millions of people from jobs they might otherwise have. Similarly, a person who believes in the mechanistic principles of Western medicine might be reluctant to accept a life-saving treatment from a Chinese healer using yin-yang principles. These are just two of many ways in which fixed limits imposed by modern thought can be harmful.

"Modernism" or "modern thought" is the name we apply to the implicit philosophy that guides the actions of Western-educated elites around the world. It can be traced to classical physics (Newton) and Descartes' separation of the world into knowing subjects and inert objects. The idea of causality in modern thought has enabled scientists and technicians to accomplish amazing feats. But modern principles of analysis fail to comprehend some of the characteristics of complex systems, and the results are disastrous. Effective policies and procedures can be developed based on postmodern premises. Philosophy can thus serve practical ends by offering new grounds for action and new concepts of a desirable social order.

To show how this is the case, we first compare modern and postmodern thought in very general, definitional terms. Then, we offer some concrete examples that give some sense of how a postmodern philosophy changes the way problems are understood. Our view of postmodernism is pragmatic. If it succeeds in offering solutions to enduring problems that arise from modernism, it earns our respect. If it fails in that practical task, then we believe we will need to continue searching for a better framework.

One note: Postmodern does not mean something that followed temporally after what is modern. Thus, one can find postmodern elements in ancient thought. However, postmodern does follow modern thought logically, since it incorporates much of the understanding that comes from modern thought. It re-orders the modern in new ways.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES DEFINING MODERN AND POSTMODERN

Modern thought analyzes (breaks apart). Postmodern thought seeks synthesis or increasing complexity of relations.

Modern thought defines people, things, and events as self-contained or separate—either as subjects or objects. Postmodern thought defines people, things, and events mostly by their context. In modern thought, things exist in themselves. In postmodern thought things are constituted by their relations. Everything is simultaneously subject and object. This means that a) no event can be understood in isolation, b) causality is seldom simple or direct, and c) meaning is always ambiguous, partial, and contestable.

Modern thought sees the world as being comprised of matter in motion—atoms as physical building blocks, physical (mechanistic) explanation, and human thought as being similar to computer processing. The dominant metaphor of modern thought is "the machine." By contrast, the postmodern outlook is captured in a phrase from Muriel Rukeyser's poem, The Speed of Darkness, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." In this view, atoms and molecules are not lumps of matter, but parts of a relational matrix, each with its own perspective and contribution to a multiplicity of stories. The universe is alive, not dead, and pulsating with intertwining purposes that are not simply imposed by human consciousness.

Modern ethics focuses on individual actions and asks if they are right or wrong; it emphasizes individual choice, as if it took place almost in a vacuum. Even utilitarianism, which is concerned about complex consequences of a given action, largely ignores the context of the decision itself and exaggerates the degrees of freedom possessed by each of us. Postmodern ethics is equally concerned with the context of an action as with the action itself. It is more interested in the system of relations that generates action than in particular actions themselves.

Modern thought is generally dismissive of religion as superstition. Postmodernism considers religious concepts central to its way of addressing practical problems. Whereas modern thought has tended to see religion in terms of subjectivity and sentimentality (personal emotions), postmodernism sees religion as a method of focusing attention on esthetic patterns that are present both subjectively and objectively in all of life: death and rebirth, failure and renewal, suffering and joy. Above all, postmodernism celebrates the holistic character of experience, which is a core element of religion.

Modern thought is unable to comprehend the nature of its own greatest achievement: the scientific method. Modernists observe the fruits of science—the patterns that lie beneath the visible surface of things. They confuse that accumulated textbook knowledge, as it has been incorporated into a seemingly fixed set of models, with science, which is the process of challenging existing models with new intellectual frameworks. Previously discovered patterns can easily seem lifeless, like the parts of a cell viewed through an electronic microscope, which must stop the interactions within the cell in order to see it. The inherited ("ex post") discoveries of science can be ordered within a textbook to fit into a mechanistic and reductionist pattern. But the imagination is what makes possible scientific breakthroughs, the ex ante discovery of new patterns. True science is quite the opposite of what goes into the textbooks. From the vantage point of the creative scientist, the origins of a scientific breakthrough have more in common with mystical reverence and awe than with the orderly accounts that fill textbooks. The discovery of a new pattern of order in nature comes to the scientist as a gift, not as some logical deduction. Postmodern thought is better equipped than modern thought to account for the process of playful imagination behind scientific discovery. Original scientific work has always been postmodern.

PRACTICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM

Development Policies

Modern. The analytic principles of modern thought encourage people to believe that the solutions to problems are obvious and direct. The solution to world hunger once seemed obvious. Provide farmers in developing countries with the technical means of growing more food. Use broad-spectrum pesticides to kill the increased insect populations feeding on the miracle grains. Build dams to store the water needed for irrigation. Those were the ingredients of the Green Revolution. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was great optimism that this direct application of technical knowledge could solve all social problems. The miracle grains benefited only the richest farmers, and income disparities grew worse in rural areas. Insects developed resistance to pesticides. Large dams displaced thousands of people and spread tropical diseases. By 1990, even the strongest supporters of this social revolution admitted it had failed.

System failure defeated good intentions elsewhere as well. By 1970, most economists believed that macro-economic management could virtually eliminate unemployment. By 1980, the capacity for "fine-tuning" the economy was almost universally repudiated. During the same period, a variety of social programs blossomed and died. Only a few (such as preschool education) worked as hoped. Most failed. The demolition of poor neighborhoods ("urban renewal") destroyed old communities without rebuilding new ones. Jobs programs did not significantly reduce unemployment among the poor. All of these programs were based on the modern belief in direct causation and relatively simple intervention to improve society. Their failure produced a level of cynicism that still persists among economists, planners, and social engineers. In place of hopeful programs that attempt to build on human potential, we now see only the dark side of modernism: the application of punitive Structural Adjustment Programs that force poor people to reduce their consumption of necessities.

Postmodern. The postmodern approach to social problems of development is quite different. It starts with the assumption that people and their problems cannot be isolated from the larger system in which they live. Because people are constituted by their social and environmental relations, postmodern thought advocates indirect change by altering the context of action rather than intervening directly in people's individual lives.

Thus, one method of slowing population growth in China would be to concentrate on providing employment opportunities for young women and encouraging more rapid urbanization. Both of those factors have historically played a role in reducing fertility and would be more effective than a direct "one child" policy, which is almost unenforceable now in rural areas of China. A postmodern, indirect, probabilistic policy does not determine which women will choose to have fewer children, so it has no repressive quality. It merely changes the aggregate behavior of the population by changing the context in which individual decisions are made. It guides, but it does not direct.

The same is true of policies to provide employment. Job training programs define the problem of unemployment as a defect in those who are unemployed—a defect that might be changed by a training program. That reflects a modern view that the problems in a system can be traced to the component parts (in this case, individual people). A postmodern approach regards unemployment as a system problem. If the unemployment rate is set by a central bank at 5%, it is grossly unfair to blame the individuals who comprise that 5% for being out of work. The solution lies therefore in macroeconomic policies (monetary and fiscal policies) that can bring the jobless rate down.

Personal Pathologies

A large number of pathologies that seem to lie within individuals are also partially functions of social relations. These include crime, drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse within families, mental illness, and physical health. The modern view traces all of these problems either to individual choice or to chemical factors in the body. In other words, modern thought is reductionist in orientation.

By contrast, postmodern thought regards these problems partially from the modern outlook (in terms of mechanistic causation), but also partly from the perspective of the failure of larger systems. For example, a postmodern theorist might hypothesize that a certain form of mental illness will vary in a population with the unemployment rate, the degree of income inequality in a society, the density of housing population, or some similar factor. After testing the hypothesis, it may then be possible to reduce the statistical incidence of that form of mental illness in a population without ever knowing which individuals would otherwise have been afflicted with it. More generally, with that sort of methodology, it may be possible to make significant improvements in the personal lives of millions of people without any personal therapy—merely by changing the parameters or context within which people live.

Postmodern social policy has a lot in common with what economist Kenneth Boulding once called the "Law of Political Irony:" if you try to help people (directly), you will probably hurt them. In this respect, postmodern social policy has something in common with the conservative idea of the "law of unintended consequences." For conservatives, that means one should not tamper with tradition. For postmodern thinkers, it simply means that genuine improvement can take place only by reframing issues and seeing them in a new way. It does not accept the pessimism of conservatism.

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