Introductory rant Relativism states that there are no fixed axioms - everything is relative and talking about an objective reality is thus unjustified because "reality is relative". The contradiction in here is that the assumption "reality is relative" in itself is an absolute, a statement of an exisisting objectivity. If everything is relative then making the statement of everything being so is relative too and thus it would be impossible to state that everything is relative in a world where everything is relative. The thought falls on its own logic! Anyways, part of this tradition is the school of post modernism. According to the post modernist, reality is socially constructed and all experiences of it are entirely subjective. This idea has had a big impact especially on the humanities. And here comes another huge paradox; the student who wants to research, say, the division of labour on the 'Santa Maria' has to include aspects of gender and minorities into his research even if there were no minorities or women on board of Columbus' journey to America. Not including such perspective is seen as "problematic" because it "excludes and ignores 'under-privileged social groups'" (or something like that). But, in a reality where gender, class, race and ethnicity are merely a social construct, one would think that raising these kind of questions would be unnecessary since social groups do not really exist. But, nooooo - it just has to be talked about all the time because not doing so is ignorant. Potential questions for discussions Is a thought with such inherent contradiction worth any credibility whatsoever? Why is that post modernism problematises everything except itself? What are the good sides of these ideas and what are the potential dangers of it? Can a thought that denies the exisistence of knowledge contribute any knowledge to the world?
I think it is fair to say these ideas have become the discoursive hegemony. Not only are they ideas only circulating in certain faculities of academy, but also are they dominating both politics and media. Therefore, I regard post miodernism as highly toxic - it is an idea of extreme collectivism that completely denies the individual and leaves no room for personal agency. It turns groups against each other and thinks everyone is only to be defined by their physical attributes. In many ways, post modernism - when pusghed in absurdum - is about destroying everything that defines civilisation; freedom of speech, personal autonomy, free market and moral values. It is authoritarian totalitarianism without ethics and morals. I am not saying that there is some Post modernist conspiracy or some sort of planned tactic of malevolent Cultural Marxism. Most likely, they themselves do not even realise the dangerous of their own ideas. But, to me, there still are some very nasty dangers of this school of thought that are nothing but appallingly anti-intellectual. I cannot see it providing society anything good at all.
It promotes and enables cognitive dissonance. Turns those people into beings who are disconnected from reality. Then they go about creating their own, constructed by post modern beliefs, and dogma. If they don't like objective facts, they call them relative and go about creating their own set. We used to call it stupidity, now it is called post modern thinking. But a rose by any other name smells as sweet.
You seem to confuse the idea that things are social constructs with the idea that they don't exist. It would seem to me that post-modernism is acutely aware of the differences, but concludes that the differences don't have to be there, or that if they do, they don't have to manifest in the same way as they currently do. While it's a bit of an oversimplification, I don't think of ideas as good or bad, ideas will crop up when they are caused (in lack of a better word). Critical theory didn't turn up because someone who could have made a different decision made a brain fart and happened to give rise to post-modernism, post-modernism is the response that the social, technical, political (and so on and so forth) conditions gave rise to. Figuring out good and bad sides of post-modernism would consist of comparing the world with the hypothetical scenario in which post-modernism didn't exist. However, a world in which nobody drew the obvious conclusions based on their human experience (and in particular, the unabridged access to others' minds that the internet supplies) seems so farfetched to me that I struggle to even make a meaningful comparison. It seems to me that those who truly argue that there is no objective reality are few and far between, much more common are those who believe that there may be an objective reality, but that chasing such a reality more often blinds you to other legitimate (and objectively real, but maybe hard-to-measure) concerns. For instance, there are some who are faster runners than others. A person who runs faster is better at running. A modernist might construct a competition to find the fastest runner. A post-modernist might question the idea why we need to have a competition, why we care who runs faster. That's not to say that we can't think about humans as fast and slow runners, just that we don't need to think in those terms.
