Most of those in my generation and in the earlier generation including my teachers in the college and the university where I studied are postmodernists. And most of those teaching in the humanities departments in the universities in our part of the world are also postmodernists grooming their students to become next generation of postmodernists. When I was in the university learning English Literature, I was also a postmodernist of some sort , thinking about names I was beginning to know, such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and many other respectable French souls. In those heady days of poststructuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, most of us students in the English Department spent most of the time struggling to read materials we didn't understand and we blamed ourselves for our failure to understand what they were saying.
Hard as I tried to think like a postmodernist, my mind refused to be anchored in the trendy school of people who thought that modernity is passe, that it was just an ideology colonising your mind, that the so-called achievements of modernity were myths constructed to keep you mentally colonised, that the Western Enlightenment had caused irreparable damages to cultures colonised by the West. Listening to the advocates of postmodernism was like participating in an October Revolution taking place in the Text with a capital T. Lot of textual subversions, deconstruction, hermeneutics. Meta narratives were being carpet-bombed by the New Radicals of Postmodernism without shedding any real blood. Texts after bloody texts lay deconstructed, decolonised and dethroned.
Despite the excitement this textual (also virtual) battlefield offered, I refused to be converted to the radical postmodernist faith that insisted as its cardinal dogma that there was no right and wrong, no objective truth and that everything was relative. Years after those intoxicating university days, I was able to see why I refused to be proselytised by those who claimed that there was no objective reality that you can objectively know. Here is why.
I hail from a backward family in a very backward community in the coastal area. I was lucky to have a father, who had not reached anywhere near matriculation but still wanted to send his children to 'English medium convent schools'. As my father's endeavours to get me admitted in an English-medium school failed, I found myself studying in a local Malayalam-medium school where teachers always complained that we, their students, gave off unpleasant scent of fish. It was true because we ate lot of cheap fish and did not wash our hands with soap. I was poor in science subjects and the only science word that I was familiar with in those days was 'Density' because that was the nickname of our science teacher who taught us chemistry.
My dislike for science also comes from a personal reason. In those school days, science appeared in my life as painful vaccines against all kinds of diseases. Despite the fact that our parents were mostly either barely literate or utterly illiterate, they ensured that we would be subjected to those painful vaccinations, mostly in schools. The parents were in collusion with those cruel health workers to make sure that we did not skip the 'torture'. The only consolation was that there would be screening of old Malayalam movies after every vaccination drive in the school. Why should I love science that caused me pain?
That pain was real. It was by no means subjective. But that pain ensured that I survived without those debilitating diseases that either killed or crippled many in the generation before mine. We did not know then that health care workers were on the frontlines of a battle to ward off tetanus, diphtheria, poliomyelitis, smallpox and also that common disease in my neighourhood called filariasis. Hospitals were the last places I wanted to visit as they were places of dreaded doctors, nurses and attendants. When I was a child, periodical visits to the local government hospital were part of my life, either to get treatment or to accompany others in the family who needed treatment.
Yes, the pain caused by those vaccinations and treatments was as real as the fact that they worked. Even in my childhood days, I knew people who used to go to local religious healers to get their ailments cured. That did not work then. If it did work then we would now be having lot of superspeciality centres run by the healers who could cure the dreaded diseases.
What I am hammering home is that I, just like all other postmodernists of my generation and the generation before mine, am a beneficiary of science and awareness that secular education has brought me. My children, just as the children of the postmodernists of my generation and the generation before mine, are also beneficiaries of scientific health care and education that I got and they are getting today. I feel that it is a betrayal to say, after being privileged to be the beneficiary of science and still enjoying the fruits of science such as my car, mobile phone, iPad and many other things that we take for granted (electricity, for example), to say that science is just a social construct, that it is epistemologically equivalent to the practice of healers who healed nothing.
If a generation is educated in disciplines that teach them that there is no right and wrong, no objective reality or facts to be known, that science also serves ideology of the colonisers and such other meaningless rhetorically effective ideas, that bodes ill for that generation as well as the generation that follows. That is why I am not a postmodernist. Period.
