Talking about post-modernism seems so twentieth century, a barren exercise in unpicking fussy little knots of no continuing relevance, intellectual archeology best left to mediocre academics in small universities who have nothing useful to say but must publish or perish, something like obsessing about 19th century political writings.

This review Nature as Dogma of Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy -- Bruno Latour, by Yaron Ezrahi in ASO fits the description except that Bruno Latour is not a dead continental pseudo-philosophy wanker, he's alive and still writing books.

As a thought experiment on the connections between nature, science and politics in contemporary democracy, Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature is exceptionally brilliant and thought-provoking. As a critique of modern conceptions of and practices pertaining to those relations, it is nearly always compelling. But as a recommendation to the public to adopt a radically alternative model of thinking about, and relating to, nature, science and politics, I found it neither persuasive nor feasible.

Latour, one of the most original contemporary thinkers in this field, invites us to abandon what he regards as the metaphysical universe of modernity and to deliberately adopt a new metaphysics to guide our lives and to relate the world to our concerns. In the new world he conceives, Latour banishes both the concept of nature as an objective entity that obeys its own laws and scientists who claim a privileged authority to represent the facts of this external realm and to interpret their implications for our lives. He advises us instead to imagine ourselves as living in a world in which facts and values, reality and morality, science and politics, and causal necessity and freedom are seen not as dichotomous but as inseparable aspects of the same things, processes, choices and actions.

Latour believes that his new metaphysics will liberate us from the fiction that nature is nonnegotiable. He maintains that both as a category of thought and as an idea that regulates practice, nature has been functioning in the universe of secular modernity as a dogma. By presenting external reality as an objective limit on human freedom, he insists, nature and its representatives, the scientists, have actually limited rather than expanded human options. If the right to represent nature is expanded to include not just scientists but also ethicists, poets, farmers, architects and laypeople, then things that have in the modern system been regarded as inanimate external objects imposed on us as incontestable givens will become "humanized" as more integral, elastic and "articulate" components of our world.

In Aesthetics, Ethics and Ecology a similar issue was wrestled.

In Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age Paul Wapner runs a few laps around the various modern, post-modern and post-post-modern views of environmentalism. It's not simply an exercise, he actually goes somewhere and by taking the scenic route and pausing to observe and evaluate selected monuments and trail markers he illuminates a murky subject.

His purpose is to rescue environmentalism from the post-modern critique which is so influential for leftists. His method is to build a well reasoned account of the observations and ideas that make the PM critique valid and then offer a way past that critique that doesn't simply dismiss it as sophistry...

But there is some importance to developing a response to the leftist critique since anti-environmentalists make good use of it...

Wapner sees a flaw in this ungrounded view since "dispensing with the category of "nature" means that there are no reigning guidelines for valuing one set of arrangements, or one artistic creation, over another" and proposes a way out...

Wapner provides a basis for a more grounded view when he says: "... preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good." This is not an ethical issue, it is sound biology. It is life itself that is useful, indeed a requirement, for human existence. Policies that tend to increase life tend to be useful for humans and other life. We can make choices based on aesthetics and ethics but they are constrained by the need to privilege abundance and diversity of life.

Ezrahi continues:

In the postmodernist conception, the notions that nature is an object and that the scientific priesthood has a privileged authority to represent it are banished, and we move to a scheme in which both human and nonhuman agents can be more inclusively, equally and harmoniously woven together. This is a universe in which the scientific, technological, ethical, political, aesthetic and economic aspects of any entity, agent or action that is a candidate for passing through the entrance gates to our common experience are considered simultaneously and continually. This new world is, Latour says, a better one than the one we are used to living in: It is more respectful of the multitude of diverse viewpoints, more egalitarian and more deliberative, and its denizens are ready to resolve conflicts through compromise rather than by appealing to unchallengeable knowledge or final truths.

Since Latour's preferred world is one in which both nature and science are politicized, where Science is replaced by many sciences, Nature by many natures and the Public by many publics, it is no wonder that some scientists, academics and other surviving modernists have regarded Latour's vision as a casus belli.They view his breaking up of the conventional dichotomies (facts and values, science and politics, the discourse on causality and the discourse on responsibility) as an assault on the greatest achievements of progressive modernization. Those achievements include having replaced mythological, magical or religious notions of agency and causality with secular, mechanistic or organic ones; having made knowledge and instrumental rationality the new basis of public affairs; having guaranteed the autonomy of science and academic institutions vis-à-vis church and state; and having checked arbitrary political authority by speaking truth to power.

It is this sort of unsophisticated response to the post-modern critique that keeps the issue vital. Latour has taken great pains doing laboratory anthropology and documenting it in We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action in which he notes the actual practice of science which is nothing like Ezrahi's description, instead being a complex mixture of winnowing failed experiment from useful experiment to glean significant data while ignoring seemingly contradictory findings. It isn't that scientists intentionally fake it (though some do), it's that they are a product of their times and culture and are unconsciously affected by circumstances.

Progressive modernization has not replaced "mythological, magical or religious notions of agency and causality with secular, mechanistic or organic ones", it has an alternative mythology. It has not "made knowledge and instrumental rationality the new basis of public affairs". Things are as politicized and irrational as ever. It has not "guaranteed the autonomy of science and academic institutions vis-à-vis church and state", they are in the thrall of states, their primary patrons, even more than before. Most of all it has not "checked arbitrary political authority by speaking truth to power", more than ever it is the servant of power tailoring truth to political need.

The objectives of progressive modernization have merit but they have not been achieved, giving life to Latour's seemingly inimical agenda. Perhaps Ezrahi agrees:

Instead of attacking Latour, his critics should respond to his challenge and try answering the question of whether his new metaphysics offers a feasible and a desirable alternative to the modern metaphysics whose weaknesses and anachronisms he so effectively exposes.

This is a living conflict that has not been resolved, a clash of differing metaphysical systems that each seem weak when looked at closely.