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).
Some major texts include: Gross & Levitt (1994)1997; Koertge 1998; Sokal & Bricmont 1998; Hacking & Hacking 1999; Slingerland 2008; Sokal 2010. There are, of course, many more articles and commentaries that address these same threads. Of the major texts listed two are especially noteworthy: the collections of essays in Koertge (1998), while dated, are exemplary in their nuance and careful case-study examples; while Slingerland (2008) articulates and then links the flaws in postmodernism to its negative impact on science-humanities interdisciplinarity and consilience. A significant forthcoming contribution is Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay’s 2020Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Has Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why this Harms Everybody, Pitchstone.
“A belief is a functional state of an organism that implements or embodies that organism’s endorsement of a particular state of affairs as actual. A misbelief, then, is a belief that to some degree departs from actuality – that is, it is a functional state endorsing a particular state of affairs that happens not to obtain.” McKay & Dennett 2009: 493.
NOMA proposes that religion and science are separate domains, including in the questions they address and the evidence they use. Articulated by Stephen Jay Gould in an essay in Natural History (March 1997: 16–22, and later reprinted in his 1999 book Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Ballantine.
Some other key memetic concepts might apply well to mapping or categorising how PMCT has spread through institutions and social media: vector, replication, transmission and the like.
Some hot topics that might attract analysis from the perspective of a meme’s eye view could include: “blank-slate”-ism & social determinism; biological sex and gender; the link between terrorism and belief systems; and “white fragility”.
Some recent promising scholarship has looked at the importance of signalling within religious contexts, highlighting its adaptive costs and benefits. As described by Shaver and Bulbulia (2016: 104): “The prevalence of religion across cultures and throughout human history suggests that religion is a product of evolutionary dynamics. Signaling theorists hypothesize that religious systems evolve to facilitate within-group cooperation because religious costs enable partners to reliably predict the cooperation of others”.