A Darwinian Approach to Postmodern Critical Theory: Or, How Did Bad Ideas Colonise the Academy?
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SOCIAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY
A Darwinian Approach to Postmodern Critical Theory: Or, How Did Bad Ideas Colonise the Academy? Alan Davison 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This article proposes a Darwinian approach to examine the persistence and resilience of a peculiar set of misbeliefs that have flourished in intellectual circles over the last several decades. These misbeliefs, such as the prevailing antirational explanatory models within postmodern critical theory (PMCT), might be expected to perish under the weight of critical scrutiny; that is, selection pressures would tend to weed them out in a highly competitive and rigorous “marketplace of ideas” such as the academy. Given the flourishing of PMCT and its attendant communities of practice, political economies, tribalism and social signalling, it is suggested here that it should be approached in a new way: as a significant socio-cultural cluster of misbeliefs worthy of explanation with tools honed via evolutionary science. For example, the prominence of religious-like performativity and self-validating arguments associated with PMCT makes it suitable for study from perspectives such as memetics, evolutionary psychology (EP) and signalling theory, and Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). With these approaches, a hypothesis-driven research agenda could be developed to examine the deeply-rooted cognitive basis and adaptive socio-cultural drivers behind the spread of PMCT. It is proposed that formal and systematic programmes be established to research the phenomenon, and that – just as with the study of religion – we move beyond the now long-established emphasis on intellectual critique and instead establish a broad programme in the Evolutionary Studies of Postmodernism (ESPM). Keywords Adaptive . Evolutionary . Meme . Misbelief . Postmodernism . Signalling . Theory
Many otherwise canny humanists and social scientists would now think it boorish and intolerant to care about whether the ideas they invoke have received any corroboration, since only a soulless positivist would want to pass judgement on a theory before seeing what illuminating effects its application can provoke. A trial of sensibility is the only precaution needed: the theory will have demonstrated its cogency if it brings out meaning and coherence in a given text or problem. Of course, such bogus experiments succeed every time. All they prove is that any thematic stencil will make its own pattern stand out.1 Frederick Crews 1
Frederick Crews 1986: 173.
* Alan Davison [email protected] 1
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia
Cultural transmission enables humans to produce ever more adaptive fits to local circumstances. But much in culture is biologically maladaptive. That which makes culture useful – high fidelity transmission – also makes it dangerous. The special biases and capacities that enable us to inhabit our cognitive niche, also allow for the transmissi
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