Yeah Right

From the NYT:

Aides to Mr. Giuliani dismiss questions about his use of statistics as nitpicking, arguing that no one can dispute the big points he makes by using the statistics: that crime dropped significantly during his tenure, say, or that he worked to restrain spending in New York.

"The mayor likes detail, and uses it frequently on the campaign trail in ways the other candidates don’t," said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani. "And at the end of the day, he is making points that are true."

So Giuliani has no need to be accurate, but even if he isn't, he's still right. The hole in that logic should be blazingly apparent to anyone who isn't under some sort of magic spell or hasn't recently been hit on the head with a hammer.

I don't want to get all recursive here, but a few months back I wrote a bit about atheism and how the spirit of religious debate has bled into other areas of thought, and has even (incorrectly) been called "postmodernist" (start at the paragraph that begins "Now, my professors at NYU..."). But it's not just religious debate that is irrational nowadays. There's a feeling that you can say whatever you want and escape comment, because whatever it was that you said, it actually meant this. It's not often directly called postmodernism, but this thinking is associated with postmodernism, often negatively.

When this fake postmodernism is used to defend a point, it's usually under the assumption that postmodernism has unequivocally concluded that facts are meaningless and anything can be proven. As such, it's used to defend things that couldn't be defended in any other way: ideas that are fascist, dogmatic, or just plain stupid.

I think the classic example is the Bush aide sneering at a reporter for being a member of the "reality-based community": while the reporter sniffed at the ground, confined to what was (snicker) real (guffaw), Bush and his hero squad would be creating that reality simply by willing it to happen. Another good case is Stephen Colbert's "truthiness", but if I went any more into that, I might as well go work for the New York Times, rather than just quote from them. The common thread is the desire to legitimize something abstract and ideological, even after it is clear that such a thing cannot be done.

Now, postmodernism does generally conclude that one viewpoint is just as legitimate as another, but that's from a theoretical standpoint, not a practical one, at least in the less wacky interpretations. All viewpoints are legitimate in that they come from the same source, namely ourselves, and though they can be influenced by things like facts and statistics, your conscious consideration of facts when making a judgment doesn't in itself give your conclusion any special status, it just makes it more realistic, more practical. Facts can't tell you what to do; they can only describe something. The conclusions are yours to make.

When people invoke this anything-goes sentiment to deride postmodernism, they tend to deliberately misrepresent it as anarchic and dangerous (in that it does things like excuse Nazism) as well, and usually with a really bitchy attitude. These are usually older professors or self-affected champions of the common man. The old professors are just angry that the stuff they were taught when they were in school isn't being taught anymore. The champions of the common man are too intellectually lazy to examine the basic tenants of their own thought. The result for both, however, is the same: because postmodernism doesn't sanction a specific list of ideas, it cannot justify their own (or anyone else's), and they think that makes it useless in practical terms.

After all, if you really lived your life questioning the nature of your identity at every moment, you would be paralyzed with fear, and you'd eventually starve to death from distraction. But that's not putting the ideas to successful use. The important part of postmodernism, as with any stable of thinking, is to realize its implications - to recognize why the world is as it is.

Both of these failures, the intentional misinterpretation and the fatuous dismissal of postmodernism, hinge on a deliberate error in thinking that all postmodernist thinking is alike, or that it may only be applied in one way. It's unfair to attack postmodernism as nonsense because people abuse its name; it's even less fair if you're the one abusing it. These two groups are people that should know better: postmodernism is less of a single theory and more of a critical method that, in one of its many aspects, challenges assumptions about objectivity. That makes its definition elusive, but that's the whole point.

But because that's not obvious enough, not sexy enough to justify claiming that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that first camp cuts out the practical end of the argument, or they just don't grasp it. They think indeterminacy means they can say whatever the hell they want and then back it up with "Well, that's what my thinking has brought me to", or "My facts differ from yours". All of a sudden, we no longer feel the need to debate using the same facts, the same independently verifiable figures. So debate is meaningless. It doesn't mean that everyone is right; it means everyone is wrong.

It's not theoretically justifiable to just throw around any old facts or figures and claim that even if they're wrong, they're somehow not. Someone like Giuliani likes to say things that he just makes up because they make him sound smart and because it thus appears that it's the facts talking, not some guy puffing himself up. People turn to postmodernism to legitimize their zany, half-baked ideas because every other school of thought has turned them away. No theory, however, can support saying things that are just wrong. "At the end of the day", they're still wrong.