Welcome to Post-modernism: Object < Process

The world is full of extremely difficult question about causes and correlations, volition and conditioning, attributions of responsibility, now more than ever before.

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The challenging discussions around race and policing provides an excellent case study to illustrate my point.  Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown - how do we distribute responsibility for that event?  Michael may have acted aggressively toward Darren, and he certainly attempted to flee - those actions suggest some culpability on his part, if not the entirety of the blame.  On the other hand, Michael was unarmed, and fleeing/surrendering at the time of his fatal shooting.  This clearly points to the officer's being responsible for Michael's death, doesn't it?

These were the talking points that followed the shooting - determining what literally occurred that day, as if a total understanding of the facts would allow us to decide everything that needed to be decided about what happened that day.  The news media was focused on resolving the objects involved in the discussion, and for many people, that is a logical stopping point.

But for our larger culture, understanding the facts on the ground is no longer sufficient.  In the months since then, the discussion grew to consider both the accumulation of experiences over the course of his short life that might make it totally reasonable for Michael to either be aggressive toward Darren or to run away - institutional racism, aggressive police tactics, and so on.  These questions have also begun to be explored from the officer's side - a lifetime of policing, accumulating anecdotal evidence about how he expects African Americans to behave.  Simply put, we transcended a discussion of the facts of that day and instead engaged the processes that brought us to a time and place that made it possible for those facts to exist.  We don't just want to know that Michael Brown ran away - we want to know WHY he ran away.

I would argue that this phenomenon, this shift to understand not just the objects of our everyday experiences, but more importantly the larger processes that work behind those objects, is playing out in a number of national conversations.  I would also argue that this is a VERY GOOD THING.  This shift is the hallmark of postmodern philosophy - a family of thought that seeks to understand people as a confluence of socio-politico-cultural forces, rather than as tabulas rasa.

For many, this is extremely uncomfortable territory because it takes away our ability to place blame and moral responsibility for acts squarely on the shoulders of perpetrators; it seems to excuse bad behavior because "society" makes people do bad things.  I think, however, if our ultimate goal is to build a better, happier, more just, more sustainable society, we must let go of the need for blame and punishment.  Postmodern analysis allows us to move beyond the little details to understanding the big picture, and to address underlying causes.  That's the only way to really make a dent in the big, important stuff.