The Death of Truth. Michiko Kakutani
view. Multiculturalism underscored the incompleteness of much history writing, as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob argued in their incisive and common-sense-filled book, Telling the Truth About History, and offered the possibility of a more inclusive, more choral perspective. But they also warned that extreme views could lead to the dangerously reductive belief that “knowledge about the past is simply an ideological construction intended to serve particular interests, making history a series of myths establishing or reinforcing group identities.”
Science, too, came under attack by radical postmodernists, who argued that scientific theories are socially constructed: they are informed by the identity of the person positing the theory and the values of the culture in which they are formed; therefore, science cannot possibly make claims to neutrality or universal truths.
“The postmodern view fit well with the ambivalence toward science that developed after the bomb and during the Cold War,” Shawn Otto wrote in The War on Science. Among left-leaning academics in the humanities departments of universities, he went on, “science came to be seen as the province of a hawkish, pro-business, right-wing power structure—polluting, uncaring, greedy, mechanistic, sexist, racist, imperialist, homophobic, oppressive, intolerant. A heartless ideology that cared little for the spiritual or holistic wellness of our souls, our bodies, or our Mother Earth.”
It was ridiculous, of course, to argue that a researcher’s cultural background could affect verifiable scientific facts; as Otto succinctly put it, “Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man.” But such postmodernist arguments would clear the way for today’s anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers, who refuse to accept the consensus opinion of the overwhelming majority of scientists.
As on so many other subjects, Orwell saw the perils of this sort of thinking decades ago. In a 1943 essay, he wrote, “What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.”
“It is just this common basis of agreement,” he went on, “with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science.’ There is only ‘German Science,’ ‘Jewish Science,’ etc.” When truth is so fragmented, so relative, Orwell noted, a path is opened for some “Leader, or some ruling clique” to dictate what is to be believed: “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened.”
People trying to win respectability for clearly discredited theories—or, in the case of Holocaust revisionists, trying to whitewash entire chapters of history—exploited the postmodernist argument that all truths are partial. Deconstructionist history, the scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt observed in Denying the Holocaust, has “the potential to alter dramatically the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation.” And it can foster an intellectual climate in which “no fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.”
POSTMODERNISM NOT ONLY rejected all meta-narratives but also emphasized the instability of language. One of postmodernism’s founding fathers, Jacques Derrida—who would achieve celebrity status on American campuses in the 1970s and 1980s thanks in large part to such disciples as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller—used the word “deconstruction” to describe the sort of textual analysis he pioneered that would be applied not just to literature but to history, architecture, and the social sciences as well.
Deconstruction posited that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers. In focusing on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of a text (and articulating such arguments in deliberately tangled and pretentious prose), it promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications: anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or commonsense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.
As David Lehman recounted in his astute book Signs of the Times, the worst suspicions of critics of deconstruction were confirmed when the Paul de Man scandal exploded in 1987 and deconstructionist rationales were advanced to defend the indefensible.
De Man, a professor at Yale and one of deconstruction’s brightest stars, had achieved an almost cultlike following in academic circles. Students and colleagues described him as a brilliant, charismatic, and charming scholar who had fled Nazi Europe, where, he implied, he had been a member of the Belgian Resistance. A very different portrait
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