Jaime Roberts
1 min readJun 3, 2021

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This article has a flawed understanding of Postmodernism. The culture wars going on right now are not left vs. right, but rather Modernism vs. Postmodernism. Modernism is Objective Idealism: creating concepts from objective data. This can be seen in science and the scientific method. Postmodernism is Social Idealism: creating concepts around social constructs. This can be seen in linguistics and analysis that uses social data. The Postmodern critique of Modernism is that it reduced the world down into objective and materialistic data, and ignored social knowledge like morality. Postmodernism reduces the world down into social constructs in the same way Modernism reduced the world down into objective (scientific) constructs. Jordan Peterson is a Modernist (trained in science) who is critiquing Postmodernists. Many Postmodernists are trained in the ‘social sciences’ or liberal arts and have no understanding of objective sciences, and have no way to even think of Modernity. Both sides have a valid critique of the other, but neither offer a way forward. The only way forward for our culture wars is a meta narrative that includes both sides, objective and social knowledge, into an inclusive whole.

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Jaime Roberts
Jaime Roberts

Written by Jaime Roberts

Architect writing about environmental design in an age of climate change.

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