Tomkinsian Post-Postmodernism

• A Few Short Questions? by Laurel Downey ljd@melbpc.org.au, 4/4/98
  
  

Laurel, one of the best written and logically forceful critiques you may be looking for (critiques of what I understand to be the postmodern point of view) that I have come across recently can be found in "Free Inquiry," in an article by Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh. The article appears in the Spring 1998 issue of "Free Inquiry," volume 18, number 2, pages 23 to 25. The article is titled "Sizing Up 'Secular Creationism'." Ehrenreich is a biologist and McIntosch is a graduate student in ethnology at the University of Michigan.

These authors critique the current widespread intellectual fashion of dismissing the possibility of biologically-based human commonalities cutting across different cultures. It is now widely supposed, often as an informal, but nontheless influential, ethos among many postmodern intellectuals, that biologizing of human beings is entirely the wrong way to understand human beings.

Ehrenreich and McIntosh, however, expose the fallacies of this fashionable point of view. But inasmuch as reason itself is under attack in the postmodern climate, the arguments of Ehrenreich and McIntosh are likely, in my opionion, to be unconvincing to postmodernists themselves. Thus I worry that persons like Ehrenreich and McIntosh (and I) usually end up preaching to the choir (or, more hopefully, to the undecided).

The problem with an assertion that human beings have no shared, biologically-based nature is itself a theory of human nature. As Ehrenreich and McIntosh cogently observe, nobody questions that chimpanzees have a chimpanzee nature. To then set human beings apart as a species exempt from biology's influence (e.g., exempt from evolved genetically-determined tendencies and potential responses) is precisely to claim that we human beings do indeed have something that is our essence. For many postmodernists, our essence is an exemption from biology. (Not likely, I must say.)

Thus, contrary to the fond postmodern illusions of the everything-is-socially-constructed and narrative-is-all-there-is critics, who mistakenly believe that they deny the possibility of a human essense, it turns out that these critics do indeed believe in a human essence--a miraculous freedom from biology.

A belief in this type of miraculous human essence constitutes an idiology that Ehrenreich and McIntosh fetchingly refer to as "secular creationism," eerily similar to religious creationism.

Among secular creationists, the objection to making essentialist claims does not end with complaints against a possible biological essence for human beings. Neither do they accept the reality of a human rationality. The very notion of rational thought, apart from its cultural determinants, is a typically unwelcomed guest in the intellectual home of a secular creationist.

Accordingly, secular creationism presents us with an ideology wherein careful reasoning is excluded as a sound basis for advancing toward a better understanding of human beings. Correct reasoning, that is, must forever remain elusive because of the influence of its inexorable social construction, according to the radically skeptical view of a secular creationist.

What alternative is there to this radical skepticism? Well, it is of course true that culture is a potent determinant of human behavior. Past intellectual trends that overlooked many important implications of this fact of cultural determinism are precisely what very understandably gave rise to the postmodern interest in correcting abuses of ascribing too much influence to biological (and kindred essentialist) causes. But it remains self-evident that biological determinants of what human beings are and can be also exist.

There simply is no easy solution to understanding the causal influences of both biology and culture. Giving biology it's just due while taking culture into account requires complex and inclusive thinking. Ehrenreich and McIntosh aptly quote Phoebe Ellsworth: "You need a high tolerance of ambiguity to believe both that culture shapes things and that we have a lot in common."

Welcome, Laurel, to the complex world constructed by Tomkinsian theorists wherein BOTH our biologically-based affective and cognitive essence as well as our narrative histories and cultural-ideological scripts constitute the endlessly fascinating subject matter of what Tomkins called human being theory.

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