ABSTRACT
If Western civilization has a fundamental governing ethos, the idea of progress—whether couched in terms of material advance, improved health and wellbeing, religious redemption, or the catchall, “the pursuit of happiness”—claims primacy. To achieve these lofty, virtually metaphysical ideals has many footings, but key among them for the past 400 years are the instruments of rational thought. While science has enjoyed the greatest success of the rational ideal, political systems and social programs have sought to mimic the scientific standard. Radical postmodernists held a far more circumspect view, not only about extrapolating laboratory rationality to the social, but, more critically, human reason itself. For them, Reason, in its modernist incarnation, no longer holds its position as the arbiter of Western mentality, where knowledge, objectivity, truth, and rationality are housed in some standard version.
