Truth in Postmodernism

                The past few weeks I’ve found myself diving deeply into a reevaluation of womanhood from Biblical, historical, biological and cultural perspectives.  I want to find out what is part of my DNA and what has made up the fabric of my social conditioning as a woman.  That is not what this post is about.  In the middle of my research, I came across what I thought would be a promising resource: Biblical Womanhood in a Postmodern Culture (Linder, 2016).  My first thought was “whoo hoo!  Maybe this source can give me more useful information on what womanhood looks like my actual current circumstances.”  

I was wrong.  It would have helped if they got the definition of postmodernism right.  They didn’t.

According to postmodern theory, truth is not universal, is not objective or absolute, and cannot be determined by a commonly accepted method….much of the literature about postmodernism is nonsensical and hard to take seriously. When major postmodern figures speak or write, the gibberish which often results sounds more like a vocabulary test than a sustained argument.   (R. Albert Mohler Jr., cited in Linder, p. 42)

Postmodernism: Reevaluation of our Human Capacity for Omniscience

First off, let’s start with what postmodernism is:

“A general movement within the social sciences and humanities that during the 1980s and 1990s sought to question the possibility of impartiality, objectivity, or authoritative knowledge,”  (Erickson & Murphy, 2003, p. 206) (emphasis mine).

Postmodernism:  Not a Denial of Absolute Truth

Next, what postmodernism is not: 

It does not mean there is no truth.  It does not deny the existence of objective reality.  It points out the way that our cultural perspective and historical milieu have shaped our views, biases, and methods of creating knowledge.  (Erickson & Murphy, 2003, p. 163-164) Once again, it does not mean there is no truth, it means our capacity to know truth is constrained by our humanness.  In other words, absolute truth isn’t bashed as much as human omniscience. 

Why Postmodernism? Teenage Rebellion against Modernism 

                After World War II, the West’s previously held paradigms of the world and knowledge and power were badly shaken.  Modernism, humanism, science, and rational thinking were supposed to fix world problems and instead it culminated in a disastrous World War, upheld by these very same philosophies.  Thus, as a reaction against some of the excesses of modernism, postmodernism was born. 

Some Things I’ve Learned from Postmodernism

1.)  Humility:  I am fallible, imperfect, and limited in my capacity to know everything.

                Modernism taught that the knowledge created by the West was universal…but it had to be created in the West by the West for it to be knowledge and for it to be true.  Western methods of creating knowledge were the only ways to find truth and those truths were true for all people (even non-Western ones).

 Postmodernism says, “hey now, just because you used the scientific method doesn’t mean you know everything.  You can be wrong sometimes and other people can have good ideas too.”

2.)  Situatedness:  I am a creature of my context, created by, in and for a particular milieu.

Postmodernism is, in essence, an evaluation of how context influences our capacity to know things (Derrida, 1982).  Truth is inseparable from power and power is inseparable from truth (Foucault, 1968). This doesn’t mean that an absolute truth doesn’t exist, it just means that our capacity to know and understand truth is rooted in our historical context and what is accepted as true in one particular era may not be accepted in another, but that doesn’t make it less true, just unseen or unacknowledged truth (Rabinow, 1986).

For example, germs made people sick long before the microscope.  Gravity existed for Sir Isaac Newton.  Lake Victoria had Africans fishing its waters long before Europeans had it on their maps.  The lack of knowledge of germs, gravity, and Lake Victoria didn’t make them less true…they just were not yet known to a particular group of people at a particular time in history.  European knowledge was constrained by their context.   

My knowledge of the world is influence by the world I have grown up in.  Kevin Vanhoozer explains, “the postmodern condition is perhaps best view in terms of an acute awareness of one’s situatedness (e.g., in gender, culture, history, language, geography, etc.)” (89).  Being an English-speaking Millennial mzungu woman from Los Angeles influences my view of the world, my interactions with people I meet, and my ideas of and capacity to know truth (not the absolute reality of Truth). It also influences my interests.  I tend to have an affinity for female authors more so than male authors.  I’ll take Elizabeth Gaskell over Charles Dickens anyway.  I prefer Jane Austen to J.R.R. Tolkien.  In anthropology, I am fascinated by the role of women in the world and how marriage, kinship, sexuality, and childrearing are influenced by culture.  I love reading about women’s worlds and women’s perspectives because I am a woman.  My experience as a woman colors my interests, my relationships with other people, and my view of myself.  Postmodernism forces me to both acknowledge my bias and frees me to pursue my interests.

                Situatedness also requires an honest evaluation of the power dynamics shaping the definitions of truth in a particular time period.  The majority of Americans can’t find Uganda on a map.  Does that mean Uganda doesn’t exist?  No.  It means that Uganda is irrelevant to America and not seen as important to daily life. Anthropologists or missionaries they are paid salaries by the British Empire are going to have different incentives and priorities for their work than anthropologists or missionaries paid by Wycliffe Bible Translators.  Studies on climate change funded by oil companies may have slightly different results than those conducted by wildlife conservationists.  And the supporting political party of a particular media outlet may influence which facts they report and which they do not.  There is an infrastructure of power that forms our ideas of truth based and it’s just as important to acknowledge that power as the truth. 

                Power means that the winner writes the history book and the loser’s story disappears.  Postmodernism says that if you want to understand Truth, you need to hear both the winner’s side and the loser’s side of the story.  Having only one story doesn’t mean you are closer to Truth, it just means you only acknowledge one truth and refuse to hear any other sides of a story.  An honest look at who controls the story, who benefits from the story, and who isn’t included in the story can give a more accurate picture of the story than the story itself. 

 

3.)  Mystery:  there is knowledge that is beyond my understanding and a world larger than myself. 

                The idea that one people group, one part of the world, or one method of knowledge is the all-encompassing end-all for truth-production severely shrinks Truth to a very small, narrow place.  The scientific method is pretty great and very useful, but it’s not the only way to learn about the world.  There are things that just can’t be known by science alone. 

                The world is complicated and complex and, even with the scientific method in place, scientists have to admit there are things they just don’t know.  Then there are things beyond the natural world which the scientific method can’t even begin to approach.  There is a sense of mystery having things beyond human understanding and knowledge that I can’t even begin to know.  It reminds me I’m a small person in a much larger universe. 

Postmodernism reminds me that God is mysterious and numinous.  He is bigger than knowledge, tools, theories, philosophies, and discoveries.  The God I know is bigger than archaeology, biology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and all other “ologies”.  It is arrogant to think that a discovery can “prove” or “disprove” God.  Why are we so afraid of knowledge, of change, of being wrong?  God is bigger and He can defend Himself.  The God I know is bigger than modernism, postmodernism, premodernism, and post postmodernism.  He is the beginning and the end, He is “before all things and in Him all things hold together.” 

I don’t need to be afraid of opposing viewpoints.  At the end of the day, Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life,” regardless of the philosophies of my current era, whether they be Hellenistic, Platonic, Confucian, or Existentialist.  And God is still God and He works in every era, through every era, and in the worldviews of all peoples in order to bring all people’s to Himself. 

Does all of this sound oversimplified?  It is.  I’m trying to avoid all the “gibberish” and “nonsensicalness” of postmodern writers.  Is postmodernism flawed?  Absolutely.  I’ve yet to find any human creation that is perfect.  But postmodernism is.  It’s the new reality in the Western world.  A world of contesting voices, power struggles, and reevaluations of how we know what we know.  It’s ok to sometimes throw everything in the blender and spend some time looking in the mirror to see who we are and what made us that way.  Good ideas and new insights can come out of that.   It’s better to know what it is than fight against what it isn’t. 

Now that my rant is finished, I can return to my original purpose…reevaluation of womanhood (in light of postmodernism, of course!)  

Works Cited

Derrida, J. (1982). Différance. In Margins of Philosophy (A. Bass, Trans., pp. 3-27). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Erickson, P. A., & Murphy, L. D. (2003). A History of Anthropological Theory. Petersborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.

Foucault, M. (1968). On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Questions for Michel Foucault. Cahiers. Retrieved 10 18, 2018, from http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/pdf/cpa9.1.cercle.translation.pdf

Linder, L. (2016). Biblical Womanhood In a Postmodern Culture: Standing on Truth in our Shaky World. Retrieved 10 17, 2018, from Bethlethem College and Seminary: http://2uxt2berb3uz5oi1iq6uzjv0-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/BW_Teachers-Guide.pdf

Rabinow, P. (1986). Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and post-Modernity in Anthropology. In J. Clifford, & G. E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (pp. 234-261). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vanhoozer, K. J. (2006). "One Rules to Rule Them All?" Theological Method in an Era of World Christianity. In C. Ott, & H. A. Netland (Eds.), Globalizing Theology: Belief and Practice in an Era of World Christianity (pp. 85-126). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.