The End of Positivism?

Looking at Positivism from a post-modern perspective presents a number of issues. When potential causes of the 19th/early 20th century phenomenon are labeled, arguments against such claims virtually build themselves. Further, positivism's influences waxed and waned in different fields at different times. This causes a number of issues if one attempts to establish causation for different philosophical phenomenon that are linked to positivism.

Positivism and Modernism are linked, thus working definitions should be established for both. Positivism is the belief that knowledge-seeking endeavors ("sciences", including social sciences and the humanities in some incarnations) should be done by collecting empirical sense data and then theories and laws extrapolated from that data. It holds that this is true in all forms of study, whether this be a "pure" science such as mathematics or a social science such as psychology. Modernism takes the Positivist ideal and postulates that since the current (modern) era has more data available to it than previous eras, it must therefore be empirically better than previous eras. It might further argue (especially in its 19th/early 20th century contexts) that societies which have adopted the newest technologies and scientific theorems are empirically better than other societies.

One of the primary influences on these theories was the so-called Industrial Revolution. The benefits to industrialization for a society were seen as inherently better than the best pre-industrial societies could offer. This pushed a view that the Western powers which had been the first to industrialized were "better" than the rest of the known world. Since many of the problems of industrialization were virtually invisible to the upper classes of society of the time due to those problems affecting lower classes disproportionately, there was little negative attention in much of "high society" of the time.

This is clearly a generalization. Many persons were very vocal about the problems of industrialization, both in the upper class and the lower ones. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is an example of attempts to correct these problems. The beginnings of the labor movement is another. However, the insular nature of many of those in the "thinking" class often lead to them being inured from much of this criticism until it becomes too loud to ignore.

For the theological example, one can look at the dominance of Schliermacher in German theology up until the Second World War. Barth's criticisms of Schliermacher's general optimism and positivist attitudes in the 20's and 30's highlight much of the tension that came to focus around positivism/modernism in the period between the World Wars.

It was these wars which forced much of the world to question the value of modernism and positivism. Since the conflict of the First World War essentially boiled down to Europe's attempt to decide the "best" western power (at thus the "best" race-nation in the world), its complete failure to produce this in any empirical sense began the process of destroying the tenants of positivism. The Second World War is now seen as the inevitable continuation of the First, due in large part to the world power's failure manage any real sort of change in attitude. At the conclusion of the First World War, Europe effectively attempted to continue much of the same policies and thought processes which led to the war itself with only a few minor rule changes.

While the two World Wars are the clearest voices to grow out of the problems of Modernist and Positivism, they are not the sole causes of their downfall. Industrialization itself made many of its problems known to those who were looking for them well before industrial war brought them screaming into the headlines. Yet these two wars are perhaps the clearest voices of the dangers of this sort of thinking.

Despite the deep scars the wars left, there are still academic areas which have not engaged this challenge to modernist thinking. Many biblicists still approach texts as if there is a single "correct" meaning which can be drawn from the data (the text), provided one is objective enough. Arguments on objectivity aside, searching something as vague as language for a concrete, singular meaning ignores work from current linguistic scholars on the vagaries of language (see Relevance Theory). There are clearly "more correct" interpretations than others, but there cannot be a single "correct" interpretation of a text, especially ones which are now so removed from their original context and intent as religiously canonical writings.