The postmodernists, baby—they're back. Or at least, according to a recent report in the New York Times, the celebrated French postmodern thinker Bruno Latour is back at age 71. Back from the laurel groves to say what, according to the Times, sounds a lot like "Whoops."
A writer who did as much as anyone to weaken the foundation of science—a thinker who sought to deconstruct the idea that science discovers and expresses fundamental truths about external reality—Latour came to fame as a postmodern philosopher by insisting through the 1970s and 1980s that scientists were all-too-human, in both the Original Sin sense of easily corrupted (Latour's doctorate was in theology) and the sociological sense of creating a joint human construct.
Thus, for example, in 1979 he and Steve Woolgar published Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts—applying one of the greatest, most impudent ideas in the history of the great impudence that was postmodernism. The book presents the activity of a Salk Institute research laboratory as though the scientists were a native tribe in the Amazonian jungle and the authors were cultural anthropologists studying its folkways. And sometimes as though the Salk Institute were an African wildlife preserve and the authors were primatologists studying gorillas.
Instead of being concerned with the result emerging from the lab, Laboratory Life focused on the interactions of the human beings in the lab. And the authors would conclude that science is essentially a social construction—built, like any culture, from oral traditions and ethnic practices, joined by a set of religious-like commitments. Like all other humans, scientists seek to adjust "the balance of force" in any society toward their favored beliefs, Latour would later write in his 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.
Bruno Latour was hardly the first to put science to the test. In a way, the critique was foreordained: The brutal attack that the Modern age had unleashed on Medieval culture—think Voltaire's Candide—was performed with tools that rested uneasy once the Middle Ages seemed destroyed. The postmodernists were only the latest and most flippant in a long line of discontent with the world that Modernity had built on the wreck of the Medieval.
A portion of the intellectual side of that discontent would be directed against the enthronement of science as the model of true knowledge. We needn't reach all the way back to Nietzsche. The foundational sociologist Max Weber, for example, named "disenchantment" as the great characteristic of the Modern age, the effect achieved by what he would call the "elective affinities" of early Modernity: the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, nationalism, capitalism, and all the rest, blending together to create the modern mind. And in 1917, Weber would deliver "Science as a Vocation," his lecture on the human in science, set alongside his doubts about the power of science to provide meaning for society.
So, too, in 1938, Gaston Bachelard would publish The Formation of the Scientific Mind, an account of science as mental patterns, and in 1962, Thomas S. Kuhn would add The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—a profoundly influential text that would describe a scientific theory not as true or false, in itself, but as a historically conditioned mental paradigm.
Bruno Latour's impish genius was to carry the whole thing to something near its logical extreme. In his 1988 The Pasteurization of France, for example, he suggests that the important event of 1856 in the town of Lille was not just Louis Pasteur's discovery of microbes but also microbes' discovery of Louis Pasteur. The French scientist "collaborated" with microscopic entities to influence human history. The fact that it was called science was, at the deepest level, simply a feature of the swirling struggles for cultural power in that particular age.
Over the past few years, however, Latour has changed his mind. The occasion for the New York Times awestruck profile is a lecture-as-performance-art that Latour opened in New York on October 26—a lecture-performance he has already given in Canada and France. In one sense, it's about climate change.
In another sense, however, it's about class distinction. We live a post-truth time, or so the claim goes. But people with conservative, populist, and nationalistic political views appear to have learned the lessons of deconstruction a little too well, adopting that postmodern doubt about authority figures. The postmodern thinkers insisted that much of what passes for objective truths are simply claims to power—but the postmodernists never intended for such skeptical tools to fall into the hands of the great unwashed. Like Epicureanism, postmodernism was a philosophy that understood itself to belong solely to the intellectual elite. Postmodernism was a philosophy that, for its success among the self-congratulatory cognoscenti, required that ordinary people not believe it and go on with their ordinary lives—supporting the postmodernists by keeping the power plants running, the streets paved, and the supermarkets filled with food.
The New York Times makes no secret of its agenda. Despite such things as the anti-vaccine movement, for the Times anti-scientism is a flaw all examples of which are on the right: "The past decade has seen a precipitous rise not just in anti-scientific thinking—last year, only 37 percent of conservative Republicans believed in the occurrence of global warming, down from 50 percent in 2008—but in all manner of reactionary obscurantism, from online conspiracy theories to the much-discussed death of expertise. The election of Donald Trump, a president who invents the facts to suit his mood and goes after the credibility of anyone who contradicts him, would seem to represent the culmination of this epistemic rot. 'Do you believe in reality?' is now the question that half of America wants to ask the president and his legion of supporters."
Ava Kofman, the New York Times writer, faces much the same problem as Bruno Latour himself. On the one hand, they want to maintain the elite-class hipness of the postmodern intellectual turn. On the other hand, they want to take their leftist political views as a class distinction that separates them from the lower and middle classes. And no easy solution appears to be emerging.
Bruno's awkward position comes in part from the odd thing that is neo-Marxism these days: the improbable marriage of postmodern epistemology and Marxist politics, with social distinctions generally substituted for the economic distinctions of Marx's original class analysis. Jean-Paul Sartre, during his most Marxist period, dismissed the deconstructionists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as the "young conservatives," perceiving that their postmodern theories of knowledge would prove unconstrained by the old-fashioned "scientific materialism" of Communism. Postmodernism might prove useful for destroying the bad conservative bits of the Modern age, but what would prevent it from then turning to destroy the good leftist bits?
Nothing, as it turns out. The corrosive effect of postmodern skepticism won't stop on command—not even the command of those who, like Bruno Latour, helped pour the deconstructing acid on Western civilization.