PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Pointing to the ultimate contingency of all research settings, postmodernists emphasize
heterogeneity, difference, and the multiplicity of viewpoints. 9
In addition to this, there are a variety of scholars and practitioners adhering to a
critical perspective which I would argue is more appropriately described as anti-modern
than post-modern. Many of these writings are strongly environmentalist. Antimodernists
would agree with postmodernists that the various “pro-modern” or
“modernist” frameworks should be rejected, albeit for very different reasons. Where
postmodernism emphasizes multiplicity for the sake of multiplicity, anti-modernism
instead celebrates multiplicity only in the context of the ultimate one-ness of the universe.
I see the crucial distinction between postmodern and anti-modern views in the perceived
relationship between society and nature. This is a critical, but unfortunately often
overlooked difference which goes a long way towards explaining recurring dissonances
in environmentalist debates over sustainability. Post-modernists believe that the very
concept of Nature is itself socially constructed, and as such they are mostly unable to
develop normative concepts of sustainability. Anti-modernists, by contrast, typically
have a rather fundamentalist view of Nature. From an anti-modernist perspective, the
crucial failing of Modernism is the attempted “domination” of Nature, or, put more
plainly, modern societies’ ecological insensitivity and lack of environmental
consciousness. To anti-modernists, Nature is the tangible dimension of a larger world
that has both material and spiritual aspects to it, and as such Nature is intrinsically worthy
of protection. Sustainability and environmental protection thus become normatively
definable and justifiable concepts.
9 However, many social scientists thusly accused by postmodernists as being “modern”, “modernist,” or –
even worse – as “positivist” would themselves reject these labels, or at least their negative connotations.