Earlier this week I was reading and thinking about the problem of trying to practice science with weight of the post-modern critique weighing heavily upon all scientific analysis of human behavior. In archaeology, it’s more or less fair to label the archaeological theories with their corresponding broader social theories thusly: Processual or “New” Archaeology is equivalent to modernism in art and philosophy. Post-Processualists are the post-modern archaeologists. But what do these terms mean?
Modernism is complicated, but in my own, paraphrased and summarized view it can be seen as the idea that the world, or your work, can be made objectively better through quantification and calculation. In broader terms it’s the idea that the advancement of science and technology will solve all the problems of the world and achieve a bright and shining future.
Post-Modernism is the recognition of the limitations of the modern way of thinking, of how the flaws of relying completely on modern technology which is limited and burdened by the baggage of the past. Post-Modernism is the full on embrace of snark culture, and it requires a recognition of limitations and a sense of self deprecation.
There are many other schools of thought, but these are the broad themes at play in most fields of theory.
Lots of students have issues tying theory to the practice of anthropology or archaeology. I suspect the same is true in other fields which have theories to teach. Students ask what sort of impact these types of world views can actually have. I will now give an example of how a cultural zeitgeist can modify the structure of institutions by looking at the dawn of the post-modern era in college football.
The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was the modern era of football. An algorithm took a representative democracy of football elite and combined the results of their voting with a mass of different calculations based on the detailed statistical record kept of every game. The idea behind this is that through technology and science it’s possible to pit what should be, objectively, the very best two teams against each other in a final game.
In the last decade of the internet, a certain trend towards sarcasm and cynicism has been essentially leaking from the internet into the rest of society. The way in which the polling was conducted, and the formulas spat out a result which we followed blindly, whether it made sense or not (for instance, putting teams which lost conference championship games on the pedestal to potentially be National Champions because of statistically outlandish performances earlier in the season) became a sore spot for many fans of college football.
The snark and sarcasm surrounding the “BCS Madness” culminated in the NCAA ending the BCS and instituting an extremely abbreviated (2 rounds, 3 Games, 4 teams) playoff post season. The 4 teams which would form this playoff bracket would be selected be a committee of football experts which have the express goal of applying human nuance and interpretation to football. For example, it’s extremely difficult for a computer to deal with injuries in the formulas which were used in the BCS era. A human can look at a team and notice that an injury is going to hurt the teams prospects very badly despite their previous successes. Simply put, the human brain is, with all it’s biases and issues, much better at certain types of very complicated analysis for a very complicated and very human purpose.
What I mean, I will illustrate by a further example: Henry Ford once said that if he had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses. Likewise, what college football fans say is that they want the best teams to play for the championship. What they actually want is the best game, and the assumption is that the absolute best teams will make for the best game, like the average person in Henry Ford’s era would have assumed that the best way to get from point A to point B faster would be to ride a faster horse, even though this is not always the case.
By transferring the decision making in college football back to a handful of informed individuals, the NCAA is able to more effectively build a post season that will please the most fans. I held off on posting this until final announcement’s were made. Ohio State will be playing Alabama and Oregon will be playing FSU. The games are just about the best you could have asked for after all was said and done with this season, but in the end it doesn’t matter what I think. The NCAA realized that the modern idea that we can calculate our way to better football ignores something fundamentally human about an athletic competition, and that fans and the NCAA are better served by allowing the human touch, rather than by trying to eliminate any perception of it from the final results.
