Postmodernism is one of those -isms that has been in vogue over the last half century. Its influence on Western culture has been pervasive. Here in the States, humanities departments of colleges and universities seem saturated with postmodern thought. When I did my post-graduate training in internal medicine at the University of Illinois (Chicago) in the mid 1990s, I recall listening to humanities students on campus talk about "deconstructionism", "subjectivity", "meta-narrative" - big words that sounded foreign to me at that time. My background is in the biological sciences. I might as well have been an alien from outer space, for I was ignorant of the lingo that these humanities types were throwing at me.

I've since done some reading on the subject. I now have some working knowledge to form an opinion about it....though I admit I am still not an expert. For definitions, Wikipedia comes in handy: "postmodernism is a continual skepticism towards the ideas and ideals of Modernism, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty & personal identity, and grand narrative in general; the belief that all communication is shaped by cultural bias, myth, metaphor, and political content; the assertion that meaning and experience can only be created by the individual, and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator."

These definitions are intriguing. The basic issue here is postmodernism's (or pomo's) view of objective reality. Pomo challenges the assumption that objective reality exists. Postmodernists contend that the human brain can never truly know objective reality since its perception of the world is mediated by sensory organs which can be fallible. Our senses can play tricks on us. Postmodernism is therefore a direct challenge to science, an endeavor which is based on the assumption of the discoverability (through sensory exploration) of objective reality.

Postmodernism is said to be a reaction to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the period in history (17th to 18th century AD) when rationality and modernism took root in Europe. The Enlightenment's intellectual fathers were Baruch Spinoza, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, Galileo, Isaac Newton. The ideas that these great minds introduced to civilization triggered the development of science and technology. They ushered in the Industrial Revolution and subsequent upheavals that lead up to today's Information Age. We owe the technological advances we enjoy today to the seeds that were planted by these intellectual pioneers.

Meanwhile, postmodernists trace their intellectual lineage back to Immanuel Kant, who believed that it is futile to try to know the world as it is (the "thing in itself") independent of our sensory experience. Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are perceptual experiences; they don't exist independenly of the perceiver. Humans need sensory organs to be able to perceive space and time. Without these sensory organs, space and time are unknowable.

The implication of Kant's ideas (which he laid out in the aptly titled Critique of Pure Reason) is that rationalism and science are futile activities. Science entails a lot of observing and measuring in the course of data-gathering. If Kant is right, then all these activities scientists engage in can never really measure the thing-in-itself. We will never really know whether the "data" we measure actually exist. They may just be figments of our imagination. With this critique, Kant threatened to destroy the foundations on which science and modern civilization are built.

I'm no philosopher, so I will not dwell on proving that "objective reality" exists using philosophical arguments. The objectivists have already done a stellar job of refuting Immanuel Kant. Ayn Rand said "existence exists"; it is axiomatic. My own rebuttal to Kant is rather crude. Here it goes: if objective reality does not exist, or is at least unknowable, how then do we explain the presence of sensory organs whose purpose is precisely to detect external objects? Kant acknowledged that sensory organs exist; even he didn't deny that. We have eyes that see. Eyes are organs that evolved to detect light by means of photochemical reactions that occur in specialized cells in the retina. We have ears that hear. Ears are organs that contain specialized cells that are deformed by sound waves, thereby enabling the brain to perceive sound. And so on and so forth.

The existence of these sensory organs begs an explanation from Kant. To me, they presuppose the existence of "objective reality". Evolution has surely favored the survival of organisms that have a way of interacting with the environment. Even plants have mechanisms to detect changes in environmental conditions. Plants tend to grow where light is most abundant, or where soil is most fertile. Organisms that are unable to detect changes in the environment simply do not exist.

The postmodernists pooh pooh all of this. Michel Foucault, for instance, says that there is no objective reality beyond language. Language is all there is. Jacques Derrida goes the next step by "deconstructing" language, stripping it bare. Language - instead of being a medium used to transmit a message - has become the message itself. Words no longer have referents in the external world; they have become the "thing-in-itself".

Postmodernists tend to be Marxist, anti-Western, and especially anti-American in political orientation. They view science with deep suspicion; they believe that since it was invented by white European males, science is therefore a tool of cultural imperialism - invented to oppress colored peoples and to subjugate women. Some postmodern feminists have even gone to the extent of calling Isaac Newton's Principia a "rape manual". Many postmodernists are also leery about criticizing indigenous cultures, since they believe that all cultures are equivalent to each other. They believe that there are no objective standards by which to judge the merits of a society. This kind of thinking results in moral equivalency; that's why postmodernists equate terrorists with freedom fighters, or folk remedies with rigorously lab-tested drugs. When you attend an anti-globalization, anti-American demonstration, you'll see postmodernism and its follies in luxuriant display.