![\"Postmodernism](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/131\/2018\/11\/Denver.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI\u2019m freshly back from Denver, where the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)<\/a> took place this year. The AAR is the world\u2019s largest academic body focused on the study of religion. It includes everything<\/i> under its big tent \u2013 experts in ancient Daoist texts, Biblical historians, Sanskrit scholars, sociologists of religion, transhumanists, and even \u2013 yes \u2013 cognitive scientists of religion. Attending the AAR is a little bit like finding yourself in one of those edge-of-the-galaxy bazaars Star Wars<\/i> characters are always getting lost in<\/a>: it\u2019s massively diverse, baffling, crowded, and filled with incompatible languages. Of course, one of the biggest language barriers in academia is between the humanities and the sciences \u2013 and the AAR is no exception.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve recently written here<\/a>, the secular, academic study of religion is mostly dominated by humanities scholars \u2013 that is, experts in texts, foreign and classical languages, areas studies, and social theory. Only a small minority of religious studies scholars use scientific or quantitative methods, and their choice to do so is often controversial. Generally, religious studies sees itself as a discipline whose objective to skillfully and sensitively interpret<\/i> religious phenomena. This is what the sociologist Max Weber called verstehen<\/i><\/a>, or \u201cunderstanding.\u201d To pursue verstehen<\/i> is to try to get inside a religious tradition or practice, to understand it from the practitioner\u2019s point of view, without necessarily coming to believe its actual religious claims. Verstehen<\/i> is usually associated with the soft social sciences, but it also captures much of the humanities\u2019 aims. Humanists try to sensitively understand their subject material \u2013 to focus deeply on the rich context of a particular period in history, or a unique region of the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By contrast, scientists generally try to explain<\/i> things (in German, erkl\u00e4ren<\/i>). They aim to come up with general laws that give rise to particular phenomena. As such, particular cases or examples are only interesting if they help shed light on the impersonal and universal laws behind them. So a scientist who studies religion isn\u2019t very likely to focus on the rhetorical techniques of Classical Sanskrit for the sheer fun of it. Instead, she\u2019ll dive into such a subfield only if it can help illuminate, say, how religious ideas spread in general <\/i>\u2013 that is, if it can generate new general principles that she can apply to other periods of history. Scientific ideas are supposed to be transposable, not limited to particular cases. That\u2019s what makes them scientific.<\/p>\n So there\u2019s a real cultural gap between the humanities and the sciences. To humanities scholars, scientists who study religion often seem equal parts arrogant and na\u00efve \u2013 blusteringly confident that their generalizing methods will apply to any given individual religious datum, yet shockingly ignorant of actual religious texts or traditions. To scientists, humanities scholars who refuse to accept scientific methods can seem old-fashioned, backwards, or stubborn.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But there\u2019s another kink to the story. The humanities are also heavily influenced by postmodern<\/a>, postcolonial<\/a>, and critical theories<\/a>. These theories are diverse and difficult (impossibly, actually) to define clearly without writing a dissertation (and they\u2019re not all the same thing). But they share in common several core assumptions that bear on the relationship between the sciences and the humanities:<\/p>\n To translate, postmodern theories claim that knowledge isn\u2019t really objective. Rather, it\u2019s produced by social discourses<\/i>, which are inherently normative, or value-laden. As such, there\u2019s no such thing as a neutral statement of pure fact. Even the most seemingly humdrum truth claims are actually tools that help to advance some particular social agenda or other. For example, if I claim that ritual helps to create common bonds between participants, a critic influenced by postmodern theories might accuse me of using essentialized generalizations to uphold a status quo that in fact uses social rituals (such as national holidays and televised football games) to legitimize oppression (such as structural injustice in American society). They might suggest that my views about the usefulness of ritual are actually a function of my position within the omnipresent power structures of late-capitalist society. By trying to get students and readers to think that ritual is objectively<\/i> a socially useful thing, I\u2019m actually shoring up the consensus for the social system I benefit from.<\/p>\n This is only a very, very rough description of postmodern epistemology. In reality, postmodernism is very complex, with lots of different, often conflicting streams included within it. For instance, some forms of postmodern thought claim to owe a debt to Marx and his followers, while most others are actually anti-Marxian<\/a>. But all strains of postmodern thought insist that knowledge is really a function of social identity and location; that it\u2019s impossible to separate a speaker\u2019s point of view from her beliefs; and that power relations are at the heart of any discourse.<\/p>\n All of these axioms are, of course, seriously<\/i> at odds with the values of science. Scientists believe that they\u2019re pursuing objective, verifiable truth; that personal identity and perspective should be irrelevant in deciding what\u2019s real; and that social biases can and should be decisively filtered out of scientific inquiry. The \u201cpostmodern\u201d worldview and the scientific worldview are, in many ways, saying completely incompatible things about how knowledge works.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s not surprising, then, that many of the most vocal and outspoken critics of postmodernism have been scientists. The physicist Alan Sokal became famous in the 1990s for publishing a hoax paper in a postmodern cultural studies journal<\/a> in which he claimed to argue that modern science is actually a prop for an \u201cideology of domination.\u201d Despite the fact that the arguments in his paper didn\u2019t really support his conclusions, the paper was published in the journal Social Text <\/i><\/a>\u2013 and Sokal promptly went public with the hoax, citing the journal\u2019s willingness to publish a nonsense paper as evidence that ideology was more important to its editors than evidence or sound reasoning.*<\/p>\n More recently, the psychologist, linguist, and rationalist Steven Pinker has been outspoken in his criticism of postmodern theory, savagely intoning that<\/a><\/p>\n The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries \u2013 Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists \u2013 are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Leaving aside inaccuracies in Pinker\u2019s diatribe (Nietzsche died half a century before postmodernism came into its own as an intellectual movement), it\u2019s clear that people who value the Enlightenment, scientific reasoning, and objectivity are often left cold by postmodern theories. And the reverse is often true, too \u2013 postmodern theorists aren\u2019t too keen on thinkers like Steven Pinker, who believe that Science\u2122 really can explain and conquer everything, that there\u2019s a universal, objective point of view, and that \u2013 conveniently \u2013 they (the scientists) happen to occupy it.<\/p>\n So there\u2019s a lot more to the divide between the humanities and the sciences than just erkl\u00e4ren<\/i> versus verstehen<\/i> (or nomothetic versus idiographic analysis<\/a>, if you want to get technical). There\u2019s a real conflict in how scholars in these different camps understand knowledge itself. Scientists believe we can get outside of cultural and social context, to discover how the world is in itself. Most humanities scholars are skeptical about this. They think that social context follows us wherever we go, that we can never get outside of social discourse, and that pretensions of objectivity are often cover-ups for particular social agendas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As usual, both sides have some good points. Scientists often are pretty na\u00efve about the ways that social context and cultural bias inflect their own reasoning, and the prestige of science really has been used as a tool for legitimizing oppressive institutions time and time again (remember drapetomania<\/a>, the mental health \u201cdiagnosis\u201d that applied to American slaves who wanted to run away?). But hardcore postmodernists or social constructionists also have a tough time explaining why science works<\/i> so much of the time \u2013 why we can identify the mass of an electron, or how it is that we can use Newtonian physics to successfully land a rocket on the moon. At its extremes, postmodernism can also be self-refuting, as Pinker accuses. If every<\/i> truth claim is just a function of power arrangements and social discourse rather than objective fact, then so are the claims of postmodernism itself<\/i>. And if those claims are merely relative, then they can\u2019t apply universally \u2013 and we\u2019re left with a paradox. Are truth claims always socially relative, or aren\u2019t they? It\u2019s a kind of version of the liar paradox<\/a>: if the sentence \u201cthis sentence is a lie\u201d is true, then it\u2019s false, which means it\u2019s true\u2026and so on ad infinitum.<\/p>\n None of the panels I attended at the American Academy of Religion conference this year addressed these questions directly. But as a researcher who straddles the worlds of the humanities and the sciences, it\u2019s impossible not to feel the tension when the paper I\u2019m presenting is a reductive, explanatory model of religious cognition, while the papers being presented elsewhere in the conference at the same time are diving deeply into the social and cultural contexts of particular traditions. It\u2019s not necessarily a bad<\/i> tension, though. Tension is often the necessary precondition for creativity. And a humble but self-confident science that takes the critiques of postmodernism seriously, but firmly refuses to turn aside from the quest to learn real things about the objective world, would be a creative thing indeed.<\/p>\n \u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013<\/p>\n\n