Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation ” and serves on the Business Council at Business for America. This is the 13th entry in what was intended to be a 10-part series on the American schism in 2024.
The election has ended, yet the anxiety on the street still feels palpable. Having been bombarded from all sides with obnoxious political ads and frantic fundraising pitches, digital and analog alike, so many of us are pleased it will finally stop. But a phone call I received five days before election night heightened my sense of urgency.
The call was from an extraterrestrial from Andromeda who claimed to have been trying to reach me all week. We had a stimulating but sobering talk. The bottom line: The prognosis for the human race is not good, she warned, explaining that the experts in her galaxy forecast human species extinction within a few decades. With wars raging and a planet burning and flooding, and liberal democratic society at risk on a global level, her colleagues believe that only via our own species’ extinction can the remainder of the millions of the planet’s species survive.
She seemed perplexed and queried: “What happened? You folks were on a good trajectory, doing so well over the last 300 years.”
Of course, her hindsight analysis is accurate based on most objective measures. Over this time span, the data make a compelling case for an unparalleled surge in human prosperity — in fact, we have made more headway during the 300-year time frame she cited than during the prior 2,000 years. Among many other statistics, 300 years ago the life expectancy of humans was about 30, and four-fifths of the world lived in horrendous poverty; today, the average lifespan is over 70 in almost every part of the globe, and about one-fifth of the planet’s inhabitants live at the dreadful level of poverty.
Thus (if objective data still matters), over this time period a focus on the pursuit of empirically based science has resulted in an unleashing of human capacity. While significant advances have arisen over many recent centuries, the 18th century period we now refer to as the Enlightenment has provided the bedrock for what we think of as a modern society. While the Enlightenment was an all-encompassing movement marking a plethora of disciplines, one overriding theme of the era was celebrating the astonishing potential of human capacity.
For the millennium prior, the determinants of an individual’s prosperity were demarcated by two simple factors: the birth lottery and one’s brutal strength. As Benjamin Franklin and Denis Diderot showed us, all humans are capable of reason and problem-solving and thus able to build their own unique brand of prosperity. They postulated that one’s destiny on earth is not solely in the hands of faith, but also on the ability to observe the universe and employ deductive logic.
Yet despite this impressive track record, for the last 60 years we have been experiencing a head-on assault from the postmodern movement, which maintains that truth is elusive and all is subjective. The original intent of many postmodern thought leaders was to incorporate diverse voices into a discussion previously dominated in the West by white European males. While this provided a much needed societal evolution, unfortunately the result has often been to turn the traditional merits of empiricism and reason on its head.
Today, you don’t have to be a philosopher or an academic to be a postmodernist. The objective of incorporating diverse voices has been construed by many politicians, academics and citizens to warrant everyone being entitled to one’s own facts — how convenient for us. This “lay postmodernism” is so pervasive that cherry-picking “one’s own facts” is now claimed as an inalienable right.
Many who get lost in a sea of digital information have simply abandoned the pursuit of truth altogether. Moreover, this new lay postmodernism doesn’t discriminate based on partisan orientation. Whether in the form of conspiracy theories or alternative facts on the right, or a blinding focus on identity politics on the left, amygdala-driven conversations have crowded out reason and data across the political spectrum.
Most alarming perhaps is that lay postmodernism has increasingly invaded the realm of science in areas such as climate change or public health care where advocates on both sides choose to use the facts that already confirm their rigid opinions. This is a far cry from what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, “difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to the truth.” When we surrender to the lay postmodern inclination, we not only do a disservice to the valuable aspects of the postmodern evaluation but, more importantly, we do so with great peril to our Enlightenment inheritance.
Indeed, objective scientific truth is a required element of both problem-solving and democracy, and embracing it is the only hope for reaching consensus on policy. The intent of most postmodern thinking was to bring alternative views into the conversation, not to discard our constitution of knowledge. The former can be accomplished without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Before we hung up (as she was shooting off to another galaxy), my Andromeda friend wished me luck and asked me to keep our discussion in mind and share it with fellow citizens as we reflect on the future of our democratic republic.
