This class has helped me sum up a lot of frustrations and questions I'd had for a while now. In middle school, I argued a lot (Surprise, surprise!) on a wide variety of topics with a pretty limited variety of people, namely other little petulant nerds. We would go back on forth on points of moral arbitration and logical fallacies. But a constant point of irritation for any party in our countless arguments was when we tried to cite a statistical trend or a research study. Both parties often ended up finding something to support their argument, which left everyone at an impasse. Or, on the occasion that only one party found supporting evidence, the opposing party would immediately toss it away as bad research. In either case, the arguments reached a point where the whole pretense of anything along the lines of a debate was lost. We just began talking past each other, making points that were just not processed to the rest of us.
The nature of this argument might sound familiar to anyone who's kept up with the news ever. For the past few years, it seems like we've been seeing more and more of this type of argument and on a much larger scale than a couple of middle schoolers arguing with each other. There are very few avenues in which both sides of the political aisle come together to have genuine discussions with each other. The "talking past each other" nature of their argument originates from a similar source as the middle school arguments, which is that neither party has an agreed upon standard of evidence. Every week we have a new Benghazi, Obama's birth certificate, Newtown conspiracy, topics of discussion in which prominent figures from either side of the aisle simply fail to agree on what qualifies as valid evidence.
The massive stream of information presented by the Internet Age ends up becoming counterproductive. With so many potential information sources all equalized by the platform, it becomes even harder to decipher the true "factual" nature of events.
When we read that reading in the red packet just prior to starting Libra, it said something about the Kennedy assassination being the first time that we saw an event become so disputed. To me, and I feel like to a lot of us, that idea seems unimaginable. Like I said earlier, we have a Benghazi every other week. It seems like, despite the troves of information possessed by Nicholas Branch, we still have no idea what happened that day. Or, perhaps, because of the troves of information we possess, we have no idea what happened.
(Now, as you probably know if you've ever heard me open my mouth, I don't personally see this as a "both sides of the argument" type deal. At the end of the day, one must choose a standard of evidence and I think the standard of evidence used by the left is pretty reliable (i.e. climate scientists, health care economists, nonpartisan government agencies.) That won't be relevant to the points I'm making here, because in this post I'm going to genuinely consider the idea of postmodernism from the right as well since it makes for a compelling argument, but I just want to make it clear where I'm coming from.)
This aspect of postmodernism was fleshed out succinctly for me, oddly enough, by the below scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Mac presents interesting take on postmodernism we haven't really considered yet. Though Doctorow, Butler, Vonnegut, and Reed are all subversive, they all appear to be somewhat left-leaning. (Doctorow, Butler, and Reed explicitly so, but Vonnegut can easily be made to fit left-leaning narratives.) Liberals and progressives can use the idea of postmodernism to rightfully debunk the nature of "facts" that have been largely chosen and constructed by a Western imperialist agenda. But the same logic can be similarly applied to debunk the mainstream liberal media (science included) and support religion.
And although I don't agree with the type of people Mac's character is caricaturizing, taking a postmodern view helps me better understand where they're coming from. How do we truly know what's fact and what's fiction?
