Butterflies and Wheels is a site that wants to be "fighting fashionable nonsense." That's a noble goal, in the sense that any nonsense should be fought, or at least pointed out to others. (After all, it often is entertaining.) Why fashionable nonsense is more objectionable than traditional nonsense is a mystery to me, but I guess you have to start somewhere.
So there's this article by Thomas R. DeGregori on that site, called "Shiva the Destroyer?" which rails against junkscience (sic), or, more specifically, against Dr Vandana Shiva, a critic of modern agricultural methods.
Junk science is one of those new words which has been coined by detractors to label bits of science with which they disagree. Most environmentalist concerns get called junk science at first, for at least a decade or two. Until George W. Bush finally admitted that it was real, global warming was called junk science. (Which is not to say that these critics are entirely swayed by political winds, since there are still plenty of folks who insist that global warming is junk science. Most of the rest of them are now investing in oceanfront property in Arizona.) Industrial interests like the tobacco lobby have also used the word to obscure the facts.
Anyway, back to the word postmodern. The article in question makes a strong effort in the beginning to concede that postmodernism has its good points. However, these are left-handed compliments at best.
Apparently in the past few decades a number of critics have decided that the word postmodern is useful to apply vigorously to anyone with whom they disagree, be they poets or scientists. It is as if human culture reached its zenith by the start of WW II, and anything that came after that war (postmodern was coined in 1947) is a degeneration, to be abhorred in all its manifestations.
In this sense the word postmodern is now used by detractors to label movements in politics, society, religion, and education.
The trouble with this use is that it is completely inappropriate. It is pejorative, and is done to prejudice. Take, for example, Christina Hoff-Sommers in "Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women," and Jon Entine, in "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It."
(What is it with colons? Can't we write book titles without resorting to subtitles? "The Inflammatory Colon: How timid editors and marketing wonks have conspired to turn us into a nation of headline weenies." But that's a different editorial. The article which I mentioned at the beginning is taken from DeGregori's book entitled "Origins of the Organic Debate: Vitalist Junkscience vs. Scientific Inquiry.")
In the first example Hoff-Sommers makes many good points, but in this instance overstates her case by a mile. She writes about revisions of secondary and post-secondary school curricula which allegedly eliminate the teaching of math and science because it is anti-feministic, and calls those who perpetrated the revisions postmodern. Yes, there are courses you can take which treat math or science as a male cultural adjunct. But they aren't pervasive, and all of the schools which offer such courses also offer the standard curriculum of math and science on which modern technology relies. Hoff-Sommers uses the word postmodern to punch up her argument, but instead does her thesis considerable disservice.
In the second example Entine tries to sensationalize the entirely reasonable observation that there is a genetic basis for physical ability, and that closely related people have similar genetics. This is true, but there are many other reasons for athletic prowess. Instead of giving the scientists who have a quarrel with Entine a fair hearing, he calls them postmodern, and fluffs off their arguments.
Essentially, the word has become a sign post for polemics which try to maintain the appearance of objectivity. So when a site like "Butterflies and Wheels" uses the word with such frequencey (it features the word on at least fourteen pages, according to Google, and cites a number of critics who love to use the word postmodern as a pejorative) I get highly suspicious. Is this indeed a site devoted to fighting nonsense, or is it instead a site with a partisan axe to grind that lacks the honesty to do it without resorting to code words?
We need a closer look at the article which I mentioned at the beginning of this rant.
It starts, as I've already mentioned, with two solid paragraphs devoted to a rhetorical technique known as "poisoning the well" by a liberal (no pun intended) use of the word postmodern (seven times in those two paragraphs). The target of this polemic, Dr Vandana Shiva, is introduced in the third paragraph, together with a bunch of potentially libelous assertions. (They would definitely be libelous in some countries, and they would be libelous even in the USA if they weren't editorial opinions, and thus protected under our First Amendment.)
Whoever Dr Shiva is, she has gained a number of critics, and these critics are cited and quoted in the ensuing article. It seems that she is committing the sin of making self-serving statements, some of which are demonstrably false. Not exactly an earth shaking discovery, especially since I can't think of a single person with any sort of influence who doesn't do exactly the same thing. (Remember all those times that George W. Bush talked about "the American people" as if he had spoken to each of us and we all agreed with him? I'm sure everyone who reads this article can think of politicians both large and small and on either side of the aisle who have done the same thing.)
Once DeGregori is fairly comfortable that he's completely discredited Dr Shiva, he goes on to the actual point of his article, which is that it is impossible to feed the world without relying on artificial fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, genemod crops, and modern cultivars.
He starts out small. He proposes that it is impossible to feed the world without the use of artificial fertilizers. After offering cite after cite of Shiva's detractors, he suggests that this pearl of wisdom is so obvious that it should be beyond question. This after he hasn't actually offered one solitary cite to support his contention.
DeGregori offers a bit more on the issue of water use. Here he deems it sufficient to dazzle us with some cites from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. The cites themselves seem a bit strange. First there's a sentence that says that modern rice varieties are three times as productive as traditional varieties. Next there's a statement that over the past fourty years we've doubled the production of food from a given amount of water. That the one is directly related to the other is left as an exercise for the reader. As far as DeGregori is concerned, there seems to be no possibility that modern methods of irrigation and improved landuse contribute to water efficiency at least as much if not more than the use of modern cultivars.
And then DeGregori returns to flagellating Dr Shiva for her ideology. She makes mistakes in lectures, she can't tell a sick rice bed from a field of weeds, she attempted to keep genemod food aid out of India, and her organization probably couldn't feed India. And besides, she travels too much and has the temerity to suggest that folks without a TV have a richer social life.
Next DeGregori takes on the notion of local knowledge. This seems to be a concept that's pushed by Dr Shiva, among others. The idea, at its simplest, is that folks best know what grows well in their neck of the woods. DeGregori extends it to include local hierarchy and customs. Just how Dr Shiva advocates Muslim misogyny isn't documented, but DeGregori and Meera Nanda, the source for DeGregori's extrapolations, imply that the one requires the other, and that therefore Dr Shiva's (or anyone else's) support for local knowledge is absurd.
So what we have here is an article that's meant to attack Dr Shiva, and to discredit her positions, whatever they may be. It is clearly of a species with political lies and corporate fraud, designed to mislead its readers. Once again the code word postmodern correctly signposted a partisan polemic, well larded with fallacies. (Incidentally, the word junk science serves exactly the same purpose.)
(This is not to suggest that I'm defending ecofeminism - it's a bit silly, if you ask me - or that I'm eating all organic foods - I'm not - but there are concerns in the pro-organic debate that deserve serious consideration instead of being fluffed off with politicized rhetoric.)
If you must call something or someone postmodern, restrict it to art, architecture, or literature. Here, at least, the word isn't always a code word for "stuff that right-thinking people shouldn't like." (Although there probably are lots of folks who hate postmodern art, architecture, or literature.) Issues in politics, society, religion, and education require individual scrutiny. (Yes, there are self-described postmodernists who subscribe to a particular set of beliefs. They're just as bad.) We cannot allow the pundits to take over the debate by stuffing a bunch of unrelated issues into the same pigeon hole labeled "postmodern." And we should be suspicious of anyone who resorts to code words to advance their arguments.