As an undergraduate studying English at the University of Utah, I was required to take Introduction to the Theory of Literature. The course was a disaster. I was an awful student of critical theory. Like most burgeoning English majors I knew at the time (the early 1990s), I wanted to read and write literature, not to study what people had decided it meant to read and write literature. And then there was the professor who headed the class. He had a pretentious fondness for the French deconstructionist Derrida that I did not understand, partly because I did not understand Derrida himself, and partly because as a teacher this fellow was so single-minded that he could not reach any but the most earnest students. After class, I would often see him in the cafeteria, where he would practice his French with a colleague who also taught theory for the department. I guessed they were talking about Derrida, but who could say? Together, these elements would constitute my introduction to the baffling world of postmodern theory.

I wore the “D” I earned in that class like a badge of shame, but we shun what shames us, and so even though postmodernism of one form or another dominated the department, I managed to earn my degree while still avoiding this man, his ilk, and their “floating head” theories, the relevance of which would cease the instant I closed the book or left the classroom. Perhaps I was lucky. My orientation to literature was, if anything, romantic, and I would continue to entertain this view of language, literature, and life, ultimately, as an MFA student in poetry at Arizona State University. The creative writing program there did not proffer any alternatives. In fact, the only challenge came when I, along with several other teachers-in-training, attended a weekly seminar taught by seasoned rhetoricians. Not surprisingly, the poets resisted the rhetorical approach to language. Indeed, they were suspicious of—if not hostile to—any approach that sought to demystify the medium with which they rendered their personal afflatus. And I am sure that the rhetoric students in the classroom experienced their own unique dismay at what they must have seen as our beautiful but ineffectual and anachronistic conception of language. At the time, both approaches had their own appeal. But that was before I had perceived the world from outer space. Now I see that no subjective view of life is sufficient for addressing the nature and crisis of living in the Anthropocene.

When I started teaching in 1995, writing texts that emphasized multiculturalism were in vogue. More recently, social justice has emerged as the preferred context within which to teach writing, which may help to explain the continued interest in the work of social constructionists like Derrida and Michael Foucault, including the latter’s concept of the “discursive formation,” which is defined as the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems. Foucault was likely trying to evoke ecology and thereby imbue his ideas with objective rigor with the phrase “total set of relations,” but I am not convinced that he succeeded.

Foucault was concerned with how different groups of people construct knowledge and, eventually, truth. In his view, what is true for one is not true for all: “Truth is always dependent on a particular discursive formation; that is, there is no underlying meaning or truth within or imposed on the things of our world, and the truth or knowledge of something rests entirely within the relations of statements inside a discursive formation.” To the extent that individuals and groups of people generate particular perspectives of the truth, Foucault was right. But the postmodern idea that there is “no underlying meaning” in the world apart from what people may produce is nonsense. That a certain perspective is exclusive and hinders access to other ideas is a comment on the limitations of the perspective, not on the degree to which truth can be known and shared. And yet Foucault’s oversight persists, as evidenced by the popularity of writing texts that privilege subjectivity over objectivity; lived experience over scientific fact; difference over similarity; orthodoxy over exploration.

Although, in principle, challenges to the mainstream tradition are much needed, they reveal a bias toward culture as a vehicle for determining truth: Competing narratives attempt to revise the dominant narrative according to their own particular ideological, racial, ethnic, or cultural experience. The voicing of these perspectives is, of course, long overdue, and because of it we have begun to appreciate the uniqueness and complexity of human experience. But as the work of Foucault and other social constructionists shows, if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail. And where certain subjective truths do not prevail, violence of one form or another will likely ensue. According to this culturally relative view of the world, then, truth is arbitrary and exclusive, rather than evidentiary and shared. The consequence is divisiveness. Thus, the importance of hearing for the first time the distinct voices of silenced, marginalized, oppressed, and “invisible” peoples is coupled with an equally important need for uniting in order to address natural and social ills, a task that exclusive views of the self and world are not equipped to handle.

In his book Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution, Loyal Rue, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Luther College, explains the challenge of multiculturalism: “A particular story may be mine, and it may be worthwhile, and I may be diminished without it, but it is not a story that speaks for everyone’s experience. And as I discover the limitations of my own story there is born within me a longing to hear the larger story of which my own is a part—the universal story, everybody’s story.” Rue’s remarks speak to the core of the problem: despite having the goal of understanding and appreciating diversity, the various stories of a pluralistic society do not add up to anything we can all share. Similarly, postmodern theories may be useful insofar as they help us understand group dynamics, but as subjective accounts themselves they fail to honor the biological world of which all stories are part, on which all stories depend, and from which all stories ultimately arise.

Thus, Rue asks “Where do we go for a universal narrative account of how things are and which things matter?” His answer: The paradigm of Darwinian evolution. In contrast to the majority of cultural and religious narratives, which are anthropocentric, the paradigm of evolution is ecocentric and based on the fact that we originate from, live in, and depend on a physical world of interrelated systems, and that as the place where all stories happen, indeed, that makes all stories possible, we must care for the natural world above all else. This means that we must begin the difficult work of talking about things as they really are, and not just what we think they should be.

E.O. Wilson explains why this will not be easy: “Culture conforms to an important principle of evolutionary biology: most change occurs to maintain the organism in its steady state.” Understanding this underlying biological uniformity is the key to valuing our individual stories while still acknowledging and repairing their limitations. The world and what we know about it has changed and deepened, but many of our stories do not reflect this awareness. These accounts are therefore largely irrelevant to all except the individuals and groups who support them, which raises the question of what constitutes useful information. If I believe what social constructionists tell me, useful information is relative to the group that generates and shares it. Fine. But information that ignores biological fact, while meaningful, isn’t useful beyond the parameters of one’s subjective worldview. Only when this subjective information is examined in the context of the evolutionary paradigm does its objective relevance become clear: However unique our stories may seem, they are all expressions of a shared human nature.

Equally important is that this new definition of usefulness extends to nonhuman nature as well. Thus, when seen from an ecocentric or planetary perspective, the limitations of subjective accounts of existence are clarified but dissolved. What remains is a sense of biotic responsibility and relatedness. Rue writes: “As we discipline ourselves to take a wider view we begin to appreciate that the overlaps among species are much more profound and important than the differences. From the outer space of a Darwinian perspective life is a unity, a community of shared interest in the conditions of viability, apart from which there is no enduring promise. The driving theme of everybody’s story is to understand these ultimate conditions and to value them ultimately.” As Rue suggests, by emphasizing how organisms overlap, and by valuing what all organisms share—i.e., conditions of viability—the evolutionary perspective provides and encourages a foundation for biotic equanimity.

The ‘liberal arts’ were so named for their orientation towards free thought, and the foundational claim that they existed to enrich the lives of free people. They are, in other words, dependent on the open-mindedness of individuals wishing to develop their knowledge and understanding by exploring thousands of years of history and literature produced by human civilisation. Despite this, universities in recent years have seen a rapid decline in the reputation and value of liberal arts degrees. Whereas once an education in literature and philosophy was highly revered in academia, setting the world at its students’ feet, today a liberal arts education is widely regarded as a useless endeavour for aimless students, which offers no clear path for the future. This development can, in large part, be laid at the feet of the ever-increasing influence of postmodernism, a superficially attractive philosophy often used to promulgate political and cultural ideas. Courses that have embraced a postmodern viewpoint tend to harshly ostracise any conflicting perspective, thereby eroding the intellectual freedom upon which the liberal arts had hitherto relied.

Part of postmodernism’s allure is that it evades clear definition. Does it exist only in the realm of art and literary theory or is it also a social phenomenon? Like any cultural movement seeking to expand its territory, it seems to have designs on both. Postmodernism, in both the artistic world and the real worlds, is concerned with interpretation and subjectivity, and the deconstruction of overarching ‘meta-narratives.’ Its opposition to these meta-narratives, according to philosopher Stephen Hicks, can lead to a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment’s salient ideas of reason, logic, knowledge, and truth. One of postmodernism’s most famous thinkers, Stanley Fish, has said of deconstruction (a postmodern technique) that “it relieves me of the obligation to be right…and demands only that I be interesting.”1 This is the essence of postmodern theory—you don’t have to be right, because right and wrong don’t exist.

Since universities are the home of contemporary philosophy, it should not be surprising that they are currently the main hub of contemporary postmodern thought. This manifests predominantly in liberal arts subjects, where postmodern subjectivity is often taught under the guise of ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity.’ This is particularly evident whenever students are asked to analyse a work of art. Rarely are they encouraged to research the context in which the art was produced or to draw upon previous knowledge to uncover resonance and meaning. Instead, they are encouraged to fabricate interpretations based on their personal experience and feelings. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that contemplating and critically analysing art is an entirely objective enterprise. Artworks can yield multiple interpretations, and sometimes more than one of these interpretations will be equally valid. However, postmodern analysis takes this a step further; its rejection of grand narratives means it has no grounds on which to say that any interpretation is superior to any other. To say that one interpretation is better than another is not only to imply an objective standard, but also to ‘exclude’ or express ‘intolerance’ towards any interpretations that have been deemed inferior or less plausible.

This becomes especially hazardous when the postmodern approach to art is extrapolated into broader society: if an artwork can have an infinite number of viable interpretations, why can’t life itself? In describing the philosophy of a prominent postmodern thinker in his book, Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen Hicks asserts that reason “does not come to know a pre-existing reality; it brings all of reality into existence.”2 This drives a wedge between empirical knowledge and objective reality, providing the basis for an emphasis on the subjective. It also opens the door to blatant absurdity, because (a) in a world where objective truth doesn’t exist, absurdity is indistinguishable from fact, and (b) if interpretation is entirely subjective, then who is to say that an absurd interpretation is inferior to any other? Consequently, many liberal arts courses are infused with absurdities dressed as ‘tolerance’ that nobody is permitted to question. When university professors say, for example, that “race is not real” or “sexual dimorphism is a myth” nobody questions it. Such statements may have no empirical basis by any objective, scientific measure, but they are taught to students and accepted as mainstream wisdom in higher education just the same.