Words&Dirt

“‘They’s stuff goin’ on and they’s folks doin’ things. Them people layin’ one foot down in front of the other, like you says, they ain’t thinkin’ where they’re goin’, like you says––but they’re all layin’ ’em down the same direction, jus’ the same. An’ if ya listen, you’ll hear a movin’, an’ a sneakin’, an’ a rustlin’, an’––an’ a res’lessness. They’s stuff goin’ on that the folks doin’ it don’t know nothin’ about––yet. They’s gonna come somepin outa all these folks goin’ wes’––outa all their farms lef’ lonely. They’s comin’ a thing that’s gonna change the whole country.'”

––The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, pg. 173-4

“Of the late Michel Foucault, the great interpreter of political power in the history of ideas, poised ‘at the summit of Western intellectual life,’ George Scialabba has perceptively written,

Foucault was grappling with the deepest, most intractable dilemmas of modern identity….For those who believe that neither God nor natural law nor transcendent Reason exists, and who recognize the varied and subtle ways in which material interest––power––has corrupted, even constituted, every previous morality, how is one to live, to what values can one hold fast?

How and what indeed? To solve these disturbing problems, let us begin by simply walking away from Foucault, and existentialist despair. Consider this rule of thumb: To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

To Foucault I would say, if I could (and without meaning to sound patronizing), it’s not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand each other very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains.

And to others concerned about the growing dissolution and irrelevance of the intelligentsia, which is indeed alarming, I suggest there have always been two kinds of original thinkers, those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward. It lifts us upward through a zigzagging trajectory of progress. And in the Darwinian contest of ideas, order always wins, because––simply––that is the way the real world works.

Nevertheless, here is a salute to the postmodernists. As today’s celebrants of corybantic Romanticism, they enrich culture. They say to the rest of us: Maybe, just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism, even as it menaces rational thought. Another is the relief it affords those who have chosen not to encumber themselves with a scientific education. Another is the small industry it has created within philosophy and literary studies. Still another, the one that counts the most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need postmodernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? John Stuart Mill correctly noted that teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the postmodernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment, we will start over again. Because, as the great mathematician David Hilbert once said, capturing so well that part of the human spirit expressed through the Enlightenment, Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know, we will know.”

––Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, pg. 46-8