by Don Hall

Not so long ago, credible journalists and high profile editors made the case against objectivity in reporting the news. This sounds like a niche academic choice, it doesn’t seem like anything but wonks be wonking.

Postmodernist theory is associated with relativism and a focus on the role of ideology in the maintenance of economic and political power. Postmodernists are "skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person". It considers "reality" to be a mental construct. Postmodernism rejects the possibility of unmediated reality or objectively-rational knowledge, asserting that all interpretations are contingent on the perspective from which they are made; claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism.

Again, wonks be wonking.

More simply put, postmodernist theory states that there is no such thing as an objective truth and that everything is relative to the identity of the person (race, sex, socio-economic status) making a claim of truth.

I remember dabbling in the concept of moral relativism back in college and, at the time, it was very appealing to my view of the world—for about a month. The idea is that everyone’s personal belief structure is a monolith for themselves. For example, most people in the world believe that murder on religious grounds is objectively the wrong thing to do but the tribes who still engage in human sacrifice or cannibalism are morally righteous because that is in tandem with their relative moral worldview.

Like I said, a month before I started to comprehend how completely nihilistic and unstable this perspective is when considering a planet full of individuals requiring some sort of boundaries in order to live among one another. Once, when my mother was working with Vietnamese refugees in Kansas—doing ESL work and generally acclimating them to middle America—she brought a woman to her church. Being a Lutheran church, the service included communion. After, the woman was mortified that mom practiced the drinking of blood and eating of flesh. Her understanding was from a culturally subjective point of view and she was shocked. Even after mom explained that it was a metaphor of sorts, she never came back to the church.

Moral relativism aside, Western society is engaging in an attempt to reframe reality in postmodernist terms. Call it reality relativism where our common understanding of reality is being challenged by those seeking power and control where these groups have previously been on the margins of the body politic. Common definitions of biological gender, racial identity, violence, trauma, colonization, assault, racism, among others are being radically challenged and the attempts at redefinitions is at the heart of much of our current inability to focus on genuinely objective truths such as the rapidly deteriorating climate, the increase in income inequality, and corporatism of our democracies.

In order to function as a society, common language is essential. We can all agree that the light spectrum that results in the color ‘red’ is completely subjective in naming it but unless we can all agree that what is labeled ‘red’ is, indeed, red traffic is going to be even more dangerous than it is now.

Perhaps the postmodernists have a point in that almost all defining characteristics of society are subjective but without an agreement on an understood objective reality, we’re fucked. Those definitions don’t change because a very vocal, very online, very social media savvy minority of people decide to scream about them. At best, it’s annoying, at worst it’s alienating for the very majority required for true change to occur.

That said, if what you define as harm and violence are strongly offensive words, I’ll take you on before Hamas.