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I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.
No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.
I want to talk about books.
Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz
Is postmodern literature
To throw up some examples of what I mean;
I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.
I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."
Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.
In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.
But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.
And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".
This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.
And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.
The one thing I have to give post-modernists a point for is their observation that there is no such thing as objective truth, value or morality, in the strict sense. That, and that it is impossible to remove the filters that exist between us and "reality", the mind is a lens: in the absence of the lens, there is no mind.
The map is not the territory. This is true, it cannot be otherwise. I then immediately part ways with them: yet, you cannot remove the map and still have navigation.
There is no observation without an observer, and there is no such thing as truly objective, privileged observer.
This is, once again, true. But I disagree with every fiber of my being on the implications.
I think that is a poor excuse to entirely dispense with the idea of consensus reality, of shared standards, or even making moral arguments. It would be akin to claiming that since the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle rules out a perfect ruler or clock, your broken timepiece is just as good as the atomic clock in NIST's basement. Or that your eye balled estimate of your dick as actually 12 inches long is of any value, though accuracy would probably be preferable given the tendency/desire that some postmodernists display: they enjoy sucking themselves off. At least it would get in the way of the unproductive navel gazing.
We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.
The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works. The fact that we cannot deduce a universal system of ethics from scratch does not mean we cannot seek to find a theory of morality that most of us will happily subscribe to, or at least consider a directional improvement. You are telling me that we all wear glasses, but I will object to the sleight of hand you then employ, which is snatching them away and declaring that the myopia is honesty.
(I once had a lengthy relationship with a scholar who subscribed to post-modernism, if not as awfully as what I have described. It was... painful, even if think she's not a bad person, even if we parted amicably.)
Your comment reminds me of the famous Asimov line from an essay, which I agree with: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.
E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?" The choice of the question is subjective, but this question certainly has an objective answer, which we can figure out or at least approximate, and then we can decide whether or not the answer has some use.
And anyone motivated to actually learn about beauty standards or anything else so fundamentally subjective would certainly be motivated to come up with objective measures like that. But the fact that so many stop before that step and just say, "Welp, I guess that means I can just declare that any arbitrary beauty standard that places me at the top is exactly as reasonable and proper as the mainstream ones that place me at the bottom, and enforce it through righteous violence."
I recall first encountering something like this back in 2014 during the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, when the exact same people who had decried the Jack Thompsons of the world in the 90s-00s for falsely (or at least empirically unjustifiably) attributing violent acts by gamers to influence from playing violent video games were championing the Anita Sarkeesians of the world for alleging that "misogynistic" tropes in video games would cause gamers to adopt misogynistic attitudes. When I pointed out the obvious contradiction, I was rebuffed with the notion that misogynistic attitudes aren't like violent actions because they're internal and subjective and whatever, and so we can just declare it to be the case through standard literary analysis.
When, of course, the simple, completely obvious next step would be to do some sort of study or analysis of comparing like-for-like gamers exposed to identical video games but-for the presence of misogynistic tropes, and then measure their behavior afterwards (or rather: measure the delta of their behavior afterwards versus beforehand) with respect to enacting acts or saying things determined to be misogynistic. And equally obvious is that without at least 2 different independent, ideally competing, parties doing the hard work of this kind of research and all having to inevitably, helplessly, conclude the same thing, we really can't make any confident statements of truth regarding that matter, and that anyone who does claim to know the truth is at best ignorant and most likely a charlatan like Jack Thompson was.
Pointing this out basically never got any response from such people.
My answer is that you aren't talking about "true objectivity" but something that is about as close as we can get in practice.
When you that kind of study on aesthetic standards, what does emerge is not some kind of agent-independent, viewpoint neutral fact. What you have you established is a fact about the very subjective people and cultures you've studied.
(Assuming the statistics was done correctly, which does not happen as often as anyone would like in sociology or anthropology.)
It is an "objective" fact that X beauty standard is the most popular for Y (most humans, assuming your sampling was representative). That does not make it truly universal. Language is imprecise, so I will say that have found out an empirical truth about the specific subset of entities you have surveyed. In the same manner as we normally talk about truth, of course.
In other words:
Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color. You have a frame of reference, just a reasonably well specified one. An alien would possibly disagree, or the people who are colorblind and simply can't see blue. What you have won is a popularity contest (done scientifically), and not one about ontology.
You can't dodge this metaphysical headache, but most of the time, it can be ignored from a pragmatic point of view. If the NIST clock has the endorsement of the best physicists, if it predicts temporal events with better accuracy, if it matches the consensus of other clocks better? Then I will say it's the best clock, without worrying too hard about the fact that I can't help smuggling in my own preferences about what it means to be a better clock or even the importance of telling time.
Right, and my point is, if we were to answer that question I asked previously, it wouldn't establish the "objectively correct beauty standards" or whatever, just "beauty standards that are shared among cultures in the world, as measured by [the people involved]." This will forever be intrinsically subjective, and we will never have any access to some sort of "objective" beauty standard unless God comes down and proves His existence and then declares it So. But the point of an "objective" beauty standard, like any standard, isn't to be some sort of invariant Truth about our world that we can write down onto some tablets to shoot out into space or whatever, it's a tool against which to measure other things when trying to decide how to categorize those things for use in our real life. And we can certainly discuss how useful the objective standard I came up with is for those - the judgment on how useful that is compared to other objective metrics one could come up with is also inescapably subjective and context-dependent. But we can still argue about which ones are the best and then come to a conclusion that we decide is useful enough for accomplishing our goals.
I would argue with God if he tried this, or at least I'd ask for reasons to believe in objectivity beyond the fact that he's God and thus could be expected to know better. So would I if he claimed that 1 = 2 (without definitional trickery). Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.
I've already been writing a detailed essay about the topic, and this is something I will address in more depth. Otherwise I agree with the rest of your arguments and their implications.
I think the same, but I assume that omnipotence includes the ability to convince people like you or me that we are wrong about this, without resorting to hypnosis or mind control or whatever.
Perhaps and (probably yes), but just because an argument is compelling or the person making it rhetorically sophisticated beyond my ability to parse does not make it actually true. I'd say it's cheating, but I doubt an actually omnipotent being would care what I think if it was trying to make me believe false things on purpose.
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Or that special relativity implies moral relativity.
That observation is one of those things that is a reasonable point, and then once you've given that inch, the worst people in the world steal a child-sex-trafficking mile. Everything worthwhile about the point is better organized as the map/territory distinction, and anyone who seems to be trying to disparage the territory in general is probably pseudointellectual trash.
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