Just Because You Can Do Something, Doesn’t Mean You Should

Some time ago I started revamping my diet to cut some of the less than beneficial elements of my consumption out. The impetus for doing so was quite banal: my partner came home and said that she had seen a herbalist who had suggested a particular type of cleanse and would I do the cleanse with her?

I agreed to do so and we proceeded to cut dairy, refined carbs, sugar, vinegars, sugary fruits, and all yeasty foods from our wheelhouse, while at the same taking a regimen of herbal supplements. The effects of this dietary shift were surpisingly pronounced. While on the cleanse I felt physically, emotionally, and mentally more clear and more energized.

Once the cleanse ended we tried to be slow in reintroducing banished foods back into our system, but Christmas loomed large and we both indulged more than we should have. After a particularly hearty dinner at my future in-laws I immediately felt the effects of what I had eaten and proceeded to curse myself, downing as much water as I could to flush out my system.

While flushing, I wrote the following post over at the Politics of Scrabble, noting,

It occurs to me that there are a myriad if things we put in our body without ever really thinking about it, much of it due to modern technology. Just like me prior to this cleanse, we have no sense of what the affects on our well-being are because we’ve rarely experienced life without these additives. But the effects can be stunning. I felt 120% better without all the stuff in my system that I cut out and I had no real idea how bad I felt before. I don’t count myself an enemy of modernity, but I think this points to the insight that postmodernity offers us in either its liberal/progressive or conservative flavours: just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Having now gone to see the same herbalist and been put back on the cleanse diet for the past two weeks, I am feeling the same healthy effects and that notion of “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should” is back front and centre in my mind.

Much of the drive of modernity is towards progress. In the eyes of modernity, progress solves all. With progress we move forward, we build bigger and better things, we create more for more people. It is a constant march forward, but often feels like we don’t take the time to either look back or look around to see where it is that we’re going.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for progress and I do see a lot of the benefits that the progress of modernity has provided. I don’t deny that there is, on the whole, less war and more prosperity amongst more people now than there has been in the past. I think those are good things. But I think the ethos of our day is also pointing to the need to ease our constant movement forward and to balance that movement with a careful consideration of what the impacts of that movement are. What do we damage along the way? What do we shunt to the side without even realizing it? As summed up above, just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily means that we should.

That notion of whether or not we should do certain things is a moral question and I think the normative elements of our behaviour are coming increasingly to the fore in an era of postmodernity. We are becoming increasingly sensitized to the unintended consequences of our decisions and forced more and more to grapple with those consequences, both internally and externally.

What I find particularly interesting is that it seems as though that grappling seems to be happening both on the left and on the right. A certain segment of both conservatives and liberals are, for example: questioning the legitimacy of invading Iraq, concerned about the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees, concerned about environmental degradation, desirous of a more natural, local and organic food system, and skeptical about the excesses of corporate capitalism.

If postmodernism has taken the certitude of truth from us, it has replaced it with a surprisingly useful orienting skepticism: just because we can do something, doesn’t mean that we should. This skepticism seems to be in line with an increasing move happening, again, both on the left and on the right. That move is articulated nicely by one of the elusive Postmodern Conservatives, Will Wilson,

[W]e cannot choose to be premodern. What we can choose to do, however, is to be aware of the fact that none of us exists in an existential void; that we live and love within inescapable frameworks; and that the rejection of frameworks does not free us from frameworks. The free verse poets have not liberated themselves from form, they have merely cast away that form of which they are aware, and in the process they have rendered themselves oblivious to the form which continues to surround them. One of the more exciting prospects of postmodernity is the emergence of traditions which are self-reflexive and self-aware.

While it has generally been conservatives who have been associated with the embrace and love for tradition, liberals too now are looking back to see what lessons can be learned from tradition. On both sides, rather than a blind acceptance of the inherent correctness of tradition, both conservatives and liberals are re-inhabiting traditions in, as Wilson suggests, in a self-aware and reflexive manner that seeks the wisdom that endures from such grooves and rejecting the ignorance that pervaded the thinking of the time.

What this really represents, for me, is a move beyond postmodernity to, for lack of a better phrase, post-postmodernity. The tentative steps that I would suggest are being made are not unlike building a bridge as you cross it. Re-inhabiting those traditions in a self-aware fashion that isn’t the impossible retreat back into pre-modernity is, in a way, finding ways of linking those traditions to an evolving and dynamic future and utilizing the partial foundations they provide to reconstruct a foundation that moves forward into the void of certitude that postmodernity has left in its wake.

Such a move is post-postmodern insofar as it seeks to reinsert a directionality to our inquiry, but does not rely on the certitudes of God or tradition or the foundations of belief completely because the means of understanding that underlie reliance on those markers is no longer predominant, or in some cases even applicable. The directionality is self-made, built up from partial truths that exist and remain relevant for our use.

Of course, none of this means that differences will be eradicated, but it does give a common purpose to those differences: an intelligent and careful movement forward.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

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Tags | difference of perspective, modernity, post-postmodernity, postmodernity, progress, self-awareness, tradition, unity of purpose, Will Wilson