(FORTUNE Magazine) – POSTMODERNISM, IN 75 LINES OR LESS

The headline refers to the daunting task here being undertaken by your hard-working servant, who felt obliged to tackle the assignment after repeatedly (well, twice) being asked what in h-ll he was talking about last fortnight when alluding to the parody of "postmodernism" that got past the editors of an academic journal called Social Text. And we've already blown nine lines.

Okay, what is postmodernism? The answer is in one sense quite easy, since all a normal person needs to know about the doctrine is that it's a lot of involved nonsense. The answer is also maddeningly complex, since postmodernism sprouts in many different academic departments, refers to a cluster of ideas whose core is somewhat elusive, and has adherents who get their kicks by writing in a language comprehensible only to the initiated. Postmodernist Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley: "The epistemological paradigm that presumes the priority of the doer to the deed establishes a global and globalizing subject who disavows its own locality as well as the conditions for local intervention." Uh-huh.

Actually, one reads disputes about whether there is a core idea to postmodernism. What everybody, including its practitioners, does agree on is that postmodernism is adversarial in its approach to the dominant culture. It is a weapon, designed to smite certain ideas prevalent since the Enlightenment--including the belief in an objective reality approachable through reason and science--but now endlessly assailed on campus as prejudiced expressions of the dominant race, class, and sex. Wary of Western logic and the scientific method, postmodernists are driven to cultural relativism. The issue of Social Text that got stuck with the parody also had an article calling for "a borderlands epistemology that values the distinctive understandings of nature that different cultures have resources to generate." Bring on the shamans.

Feminism and postmodernism seem to be tightly linked, although, here again, the nature of the connection is a bit elusive. In the feminist variant, postmodernism often denies the simple-minded construct in which there are two sexes. The aforementioned Ms. Butler concludes her book, Gender Trouble, by ridiculing the "binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness." Feminist postmodernists also tend to be real hard-liners on logic and reason. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy credits them with taking postmodernism on a path wherein "the conception of reason itself...is often redescribed as...(en)gendered, patriarchal, homophobic, and deeply optional." This is definitely the view of Jane Flax of Howard University, whose contribution to a 1992 anthology called Feminists Theorize the Political includes a passage stating: "Feminists...need some defense against and alternatives to traditional discourses about women and means of obtaining truth, since both of these may be biased." One senses she won't like the 71 lines.

TOO MUCH RECYCLING?

"Even dumber than anticipated, which is saying plenty." This was one's summary judgment on the latest Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) video, a half-hour production featuring ecofanatical actress Joanne Woodward but also offering a curious cameo appearance by socially unconcerned San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds (concern rating based on author's intuition) and recently showing on all too many public television stations.

Titled Complete the Circle, the presentation opens to the strains of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." We zoom in on Barry at the plate, his earring aquiver as he waits for the pitch, with Joanne's voice-over stating it is a tie ball game in the last half of the ninth inning--obviously a lie, since the visiting team bats first and any child can see the videotape has the Giants playing the Mets at Shea Stadium. Anyhow, Bonds takes Dave Mlicki deep, the ball sails over the right-field fence, and the Giants win.

Or do they? Instead of trotting around the bases, Barry unexpectedly stops at second. Why is he doing that? To give the Mets a break? No, he stops because it gives Joanne her cue to smilingly posit that "when you recycle, it's like hitting a home run"--but "if you just recycle, it's like stopping at second base." What a metaphor. What she means, it gradually turns out, is that to really hit a home run, it's not enough to segregate your papers and beer bottles and lug them to the curbside for the nice recycling truck to pick up. You also gotta be sure the products you buy in the first place have been recycled because when you buy recycled stuff, "you complete the circle, just like a baseball player running all the way around the bases."

Viewers making it through all these production values end up with a familiar message: that we must all recycle more and more because that way we need less landfill for garbage, also because we save energy and scarce natural resources. The riposte you have been waiting for says some of the recycling we're already doing makes no sense. It also says that the recycling movement seems increasingly driven by religious impulses, not economics. And that the federal government, including best-selling author Al Gore--Earth in the Balance has sold about 510,000 copies--ought to stop promoting the movement. Who needs Al to proclaim on page 159 that manufacturers not using recycled materials know less about their business than he does?

The movement rests on some wobbly assumptions. One is that there is some God-awful need to recycle because the country and planet are running out of raw materials. If this were really so, somebody would surely have blown away economist Julian Simon of the University of Maryland Business School, who at last sighting was still standing there reminding folks that just about all raw materials keep getting cheaper in real terms as the decades roll on.

Also wobbly is the notion that we must recycle to reduce the garbage output, allegedly threatening to overwhelm the landfills of America. In fact, and here we recycle one of the favorite stats dropped on readers in recent years--it was gleaned from a Cato Institute paper by economist Clark Wiseman--the entire garbage output of the U.S. during the next 1,000 years could be put in a 30-square-mile landfill 1,000 feet deep. The country has plenty of space, and modern landfills bear no resemblance to the loathsome municipal dumps you are possibly confusing them with.

How do you tell when recycling makes economic sense? No problem: It makes sense when it happens naturally, without any federal subsidies or interaction with Gaia the earth goddess. The automobile industry has been recycling without Gaia for over 40 years, as evidenced by those compacted cars one sometimes sees by the highway. Aluminum cans are also an easy case because recyclers can make a profit reselling them to beer and soft-drink producers and are therefore delighted to pay your township for the privilege of carting them away. But other products are more problematical, and many recyclers are now finding they are in a lousier business than Al Gore led them to expect.

Their problem--centered on newsprint and some plastics--is that the products they recycle have become embarrassingly uncompetitive with ordinary raw materials. The news from Pittsburgh in mid-June was that no recycler was willing to bid on a city contract under which it would have picked up the curbside assortments for free. A report from Boston was more hilarious: Recyclers already committed to pick up were losing so much money on operations that they dumped the stuff in a local landfill (and confessed). In New York the problem for recyclers a year ago was that the highly profitable newsprint left by the curb was being systematically stolen by "paper rustlers," as they were colorfully labeled in the tabloids. Prices having collapsed, the problem today is that recycled newsprint is not in demand by anybody, not even the staunchly cyclist Times.

People in the business have to be rethinking whether recycling isn't already overdone. But the fanatics selling recycling as a secular religion--or maybe not so secular--appear to be pounding away harder than ever. A Nexis search the other day turned up 164 articles in the database mentioning the ominous term "precycling." The word refers to something deemed even more wonderful than buying recycled products: It's getting by without products. Planet-sparing suggestion broached by a Montana journalist: Instead of buying your olive oil in disposable bottles, get your own reusable bottle and buy the stuff in bulk. Will the salad fans of America go for this deal? Will EDF make a video out of it? Will it feature Albert Belle? One wonders.

THE EEOC IN RETREAT

A funny thing has happened to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in recent months. The EEOC, which has spent years expanding the definition of "discrimination," is now contracting it.

In its expansionary mode, the agency went far beyond what Congress thought it was enacting in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. EEOC decided that the law forbade not merely discriminatory intent but discriminatory results--the "disparate impact" standard. It played a major role in expanding the act's ban on sex discrimination so as to encompass sexual harassment and, further, to specify that harassment has occurred when workers, male or female, encounter a sex-related "hostile environment." (Around 10% of harassment complaints are now brought by men.) Finally, the agency gained responsibility for coping with the multifarious mysterious contentions about bias built into the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It had to happen, so it happened. The EEOC got overwhelmed. Just during the Nineties, its case backlog has increased by about 130%, to around 100,000 today. Drowning in paperwork, the agency had to regroup.

EEOC chairman Gilbert Casellas was naturally too cagey to say that he now proposed to operate with a narrower definition of discrimination.What he said was much more politically correct and socially acceptable: that he would make the agency more efficient. It would now mass-produce results. It would emphasize broad-gauged "pattern and practice" cases, involving large numbers of employees. It would summarily dismiss cases that looked tough to win. Its investigators would handle more cases; they are now averaging 123 cases a year, up from 51 in 1990. Under the new regime, the caseload is barely growing, and Casellas is in fact getting good reviews for EEOC's new efficiency.

But ask yourself this question: Is it logically possible to throw out far more complaints and act only on cases that look easy to win--and not implicitly narrow the definition of discrimination? The answer is obvious. Whether the process will bring the law of discrimination all the way back to the original 1964 act is, to be sure, another question.