One more thing to add in connection with my last post about Telling The Truth:

A critique of postmodernism applies to the subject matter of this weblog as postmodern thinking seeks to break down the integrity of rational thought and reasoned argument. Capitalism, in its purest form, is an embodiment of reason as king of determination. As such, a culture infected by postmodern thinking will inevitably cause Capitalism in the society where that culture thrives to deteriorate.

Lynne Cheney’s 1995 work, Telling The Truth, is a remarkably balanced and well supported critique of the impact of postmodern thought on American institutions. Wife of current Vice President, Richard Cheney, she was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986-1992, and she holds a PhD in English.

The book, divided into seven chapters, is written very much like an academic text– every statement supported by evidence and cited. (There are, in fact, more than 35 pages of citation in the End Notes section.) Each chapter examines a different facet of postmodern infiltration of American institutions, including colleges, primary and secondary education, media, law, and, of course, politics. I will quote just one passage from Cheney’s book and let it stand for all the book contains:

That there are no true stories, but only useful ones, no overarching principles, but only the interests of the moment, are ideas now deeply embedded in our culture. We are not the first society in which this has happened; and damaging as the consequences are for us, they have been far more destructive in other places, in the Soviet Union and in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, for example. Nonetheless, there are things that we can learn from the experience of others; and first and foremost among them is the relationship between truth and freedom.

… When we find ourselves faced with situations that violate good sense– whether it is how our children are being taught or how our legal system is abandoning the principles that have long undergirded it– we should, each of us, speak out about what we see. We should not let ourselves be intimidated by seemingly sophisticated statements about how there is no reality and thus no truth… Complete objectivity may be beyond our reach, but we can achieve a significant degree of it, certainly enough to understand that social arrangements are mutable and to make reasoned judgments about how the ones our society has chosen measure up. Faced with demands that those arrangements change, citizens of a democracy should demand reasoned argument and make clear that invective and name-calling do not fall into that category.

If there is one criticism I have of Telling The Truth, it is that Cheney tends to credit too heavily Michel Foucault with advancing the idea of reality as a social construct. He did, of course. But by the time Foucault was writing I, Pierre Riviere, Peter Berger had already written The Social Construction Of Reality, which is an important text in the field of sociology and is completely apolitical.

Despite that small criticism, Cheney examines her subject with very little political bias, citing incidents of postmodern damage at both ends of the political spectrum. More, she does so thoroughly and supports every claim and example with citation. The book is widely criticized by socialists and postmodern champions, as is expected, but of the critiques I’ve read, they have all been rife with the “invective and name-calling” Cheney rightly places outside the arena of rational discourse.

I’m currently reading an old book by Lynne Cheney, wife of US Vice President Dick Cheney and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, called Telling the Truth: Why our culture and our country have stopped making sense– and what we can do about it. So far, it’s a pretty strong critique of the (then) emerging trend of relativism in academia brought on by post modernism.

Cheney’s book is divided into seven chapters, each addressing a different aspect of the damage done by post modern theory. To make her point, she uses documented examples and presents them in a way that is itself neutral, yet makes obvious the lunacy of the application of relativism to the situation:

Thus, One Nation, Many Peoples recommends that we not burden students with too many names and dates and places: “The information-dominant approach to the social studies curriculum fails as a vehicle for multicultural education.” Instead, we should emphasize that history is “socially constructed,” that it reflects the circumstances in which it is written rather than the reality of the past. We should teach students to appreciate different interpretations and work to open their minds to “multiple perspectives.” We should give credit to to “noncanonical knowledge and techniques"– including, presumably, the kind offered by Leonard Jeffries.

I’m no friend of post modernism, and I’m a strong proponent of schools teaching people how to think and pursue knowledge and truth, as opposed to teaching students what to think and to believe that truth is relative. And this blog would be a great place to expand on that, but I want to finish this book first. I’ll let you know how it turns out.