Evo-PoMo: A Hotel Room for Strange Bedfellows.

I've recently been reading (or listening to on CD) several books on the topics of evolutionary psychology and postmodern philosophy: Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works(2009), Richard J. Bernstein's The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity(1992), Seyla Benhabib's Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics(1992), and Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion(2012)

As I learned about the latest evolutionary psych theories, it was like the lights started going on all over. It's an experience I've had a few times before, when a new concept arrives that makes things fit together in startling, unexpected and yet logical ways.

Evo Psych and PoMo, I will admit, are rather strange bedfellows. Since these two intellectual movements began gaining prominence, there has been a great deal of hostility between their advocates. Pinker complains about how "postmodern intellectuals" scorn the evidence of biology, while the postmodern critical theorists, for their part, accuse evolutionary psychologists of "essentialism" and ontological naivete. To me, this looks much like a replay of the "two cultures", the hard-headed scientists and soft, fuzzy aesthetes.

Yet, while perusing these various texts, I found a number of intersections. Indeed, I was startled by how the Evos and PoMos often seemed to be expressing similar motifs within different linguistic and conceptual paradigms.

Notably, for instance, Pinker's theory of "mental modules" dovetails quite well with the postmodern idea of multiple "ways of knowing" -- a term which Pinker himself actually employs. According to his theory, our brains contain genetically-hardwired "modules", functional systems of neurons, for a number of such "ways of knowing", including specific mental processes relating to [I quote from memory]: "objects, animate things, natural kinds, artifacts, formal rules, and minds." The brain, in other words, employs a number of different strategies in accordance with the topic and situation, and does so using a variety of different constructed categories. The basic categories appear to be human universals, stable across cultures, while cultural memes fill out the particular details.

Now, one of PoMo Crit-Theory's contentions is that traditional Western rationality is imperialistic because it privileges one type of reasoning -- formal, logical, left-brained -- over all the other ways of knowing which exist, and which are associated with non-Western people, women, children, minorities, and other oppressed groups. These other ways of knowing include "local knowledge", contextual, situation-based reasoning, intuition, empathy and the like. Pinker's theory would agree that all of these forms of cognition exist, are valid, and indeed stem from evolved adaptations. The human brain is naturally designed to process information in a variety of ways, ranging from the precise and formal to loose, fuzzy, contextual, situational, emotive, relativistic and, well, postmodern.

I anticipate that there will be much productive cross-fertilizing between these two fields in the years to come -- although, of course, not unaccompanied by the usual academic drama and acrimony. Which, I am sure, will make it all the more entertaining, in addition to illuminating.