Is Objectivity Merely a Cultural Invention?

How does one reason with someone who does not believe in reason?

Rationality is facing some hard times these days.  Postmodern thought has relegated truth to subjective cultural bias and not surprisingly, we now are told objectivity itself is a racist construct of the white European culture.   

One sophomore level course will have students “explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race.”

At Redstate, an essay titled "Towards a truer multicultural science education: how whiteness impacts science education" is quoted in reference to the destruction of objectivity.

While “the [science] culture attempts to be unbiased through peer reviewing and consistent methods and methodologies,” this interpretation “falsely makes us believe that science is an objective enterprise and transcends culture. 

“For many scientists, we are convinced that objectivity prevents an oppressive culture because discoveries are independent of identity... Consequently, we unknowingly spread whiteness ideology.

It should have been obvious to anyone who cared to pay attention that postmodern thought would eventually erode belief in all rationality.  It was less obvious how that would manifest itself.  Thanks to the symbiotic relationship of postmodernism and Marxist ideologies on college and university campuses, we are seeing the answer. These kinds of assertions make it possible to dismiss any claim of logic, evidence and rational thought as bias, or worse, slander anyone who uses evidence to say something a particular group doesn't like.   

One of many recent victims of such slander is Heather MacDonald.  She has written on issues of race, crime and law enforcement, calling attention to things like the huge disconnect between the outrage over a police shootings of blacks vs the far, far greater problem of black on black murder, which she believes certain policies have made worse.  Her reliance on reason, evidence and statistics are not items to be evaluated and debated.  Rather, her conclusions are dismissed as malicious bias.

At Pomona College, students protested her scheduled appearance on April 6, 2017, shutting down the event, forcing its relocation, and not without some physical altercation.   That particular incident of physical force is not the point of this post.  

MacDonald's critics opposed her on the basis that free speech was being used as a white supremacist tactic - in other words, free speech, in her case, was itself racist.  In an open letter subsequent to the even, a group of students from the Claremont Colleges insisted granting free speech to someone like MacDonald was unconscionable.  

“Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry...

“Thus, if ‘our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,...how does free speech uphold that value?”

The word "truth" in the above quote does not mean what most human beings in the last few centuries (or millennia) think it means.   For in postmodern thought, words are just symbols of other culturally constructed symbols and in the end a mere mask to power.  The letter continues:

“The idea that there is a single truth–‘the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”

So having dispensed with the idea of and the need to engage with ideas, all that was necessary was to label MacDonald as racist.  And one label won't do...

“Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.”  

What makes the concept of free speech possible is the ability to independently evaluate whether someone's ideas make sense, whether the ideas are logical, based on evidence, whether the ideas provide answers to the questions being addressed.  If objectivity is not possible, then "free speech" is merely manipulation.  So certain ideas simply must not be allowed to be heard.  To the Claremont protesters, anything that MacDonald might have offered was merely "hate speech" and as such could and must be censored. Free Speech, like objectivity, is dead. 

The essential question I raise here is whether "truth" exists and can be objectively discovered.  If not, then the next question is, how can there be any such thing as "discovery of truth" at all?  Is truth itself is a construct and rationality merely a tool of oppression?   More to the point, how does one reason with someone who does not believe in reason?

Unfortunately, I think that is the intended effect at least a few academic elites have in mind - to undermine the concepts of objectivity and reason so that emotion and agitation become more effective tools of protest.  The power of persuasion can then be replaced with the persuasion of power.  The masses can be moved by stirring the emotions without regard for rational thought.

I suspect most who are caught up in this stream of thought are being duped.  They haven't had the chance to step away and ask themselves "does this even make sense?" 

I guess I would propose reasonable people respond by asking this question:  Is life even possible without the possibility of objective truth?

It is a rhetorical question, but one that doesn't take much effort to consider.  I offer some everyday examples:

Every day most of us get behind the wheel of a car.  To operate that vehicle, we need to rely on the consistent reality that the gas pedal accelerates, the brake pedal slows and the steering wheel directs.  We rely on the ability to see and properly interpret traffic signs and lights.  We also have to trust that the other people on the road see and understand those signs and signals the same way, that we all understand the same rules of the road.  If the understanding of every road sign was merely a matter of "perception", our roads would be utter chaos.  If there was no objective truth, no relationship between external realities and our perceptions of them, we would be insane to drive.  

Or we could think of cooking.  We routinely go to the store and buy ingredients for recipes.   To make sense of any recipe, we must rely on the objective truths that sugar is sugar, and that ingredients can be measured - one cup equals one cup, that a tablespoon is a tablespoon.  We must rely on objective truths that certain ingredients have food value and are not poison.  We have to take for granted that we can set an oven to 400 degrees and a timer for 25 minutes.   We could not do something as simple as baking a cake if there is no such thing as objectivity.   

In short, if objective truth were nothing but a cultural "construct", ordinary living would be impossible.  Yet apparently hundreds, thousands, probably millions of otherwise reasonable human beings have been convinced that truth, objectivity, rationality are just words.

This is the insanity born of postmodern relativism (now interlaced with Marxist mythology).  It is rapidly leading the west to a totalitarian conclusion.  Dissent to the new understanding of all of life as a battle between oppressor and oppressed is met with ridicule, censorship, character assassination, efforts to use authority structures to ban unwelcome ideas and at its worst, physical blockades and varying degrees of violence. 

But there is more, as I feared and suggested here , here , here, here years ago, postmodern relativism and denial of objective truth has made its way from philosophy and ethics into law and now into the previously objective scientific fields.  We are now told, as the most glaring anti-scientific example, that gender is a construct impervious to facts of physiology and genetics.  We are not allowed any longer to trust physical reality and must accept someone else's subjective inner feelings or risk swift and uncompromising condemnation.  Our culture is thus becoming increasingly chaotic.  Who is really anti-science here?

If reason does not exist, no field of study is immune.  Will every area of science, research, industry see the day when reality itself is redefined according to subjective standards?  What will the effect of that be?  Will it be long before the search for cures to diseases are undercut with redefined words and subjective assertions?   This is not exaggeration.  Read the quote again at the top of this post:  “For many scientists, we are convinced that objectivity prevents an oppressive culture because discoveries are independent of identity...

If even scientific discoveries are subject to identity politics, what will science become?  
There is,  it seems, no "truth" that cannot be redefined, politicized and weaponized.  And the effect of that is increasingly clear.  All that remains is class warfare and chaos.  

One can only hope that reality itself will become obvious enough that this madness will collapse under its own weight.  Because you really can't reason with those who no longer believe in reason.