Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself. That may sound like a bold or even hyperbolic claim, but the reality is that the cluster of ideas and values at the root of postmodernism have broken the bounds of academia and gained great cultural power in western society. The irrational and identitarian “symptoms” of postmodernism are easily recognizable and much criticized, but the ethos underlying them is not well understood. This is partly because postmodernists rarely explain themselves clearly and partly because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of a way of thought which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist. However, there are consistent ideas at the root of postmodernism and understanding them is essential if we intend to counter them. They underlie the problems we see today in Social Justice Activism, undermine the credibility of the Left and threaten to return us to an irrational and tribal “pre-modern” culture.
Postmodernism, most simply, is an artistic and philosophical movement which began in France in the 1960s and produced bewildering art and even more bewildering “theory.” It drew on avant-garde and surrealist art and earlier philosophical ideas, particularly those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, for its anti-realism and rejection of the concept of the unified and coherent individual. It reacted against the liberal humanism of the modernist artistic and intellectual movements, which its proponents saw as naïvely universalizing a western, middle-class and male experience.
It rejected philosophy which valued ethics, reason and clarity with the same accusation. Structuralism, a movement which (often over-confidently) attempted to analyze human culture and psychology according to consistent structures of relationships, came under attack. Marxism, with its understanding of society through class and economic structures was regarded as equally rigid and simplistic. Above all, postmodernists attacked science and its goal of attaining objective knowledge about a reality which exists independently of human perceptions which they saw as merely another form of constructed ideology dominated by bourgeois, western assumptions. Decidedly left-wing, postmodernism had both a nihilistic and a revolutionary ethos which resonated with a post-war, post-empire zeitgeist in the West. As postmodernism continued to develop and diversify, its initially stronger nihilistic deconstructive phase became secondary (but still fundamental) to its revolutionary “identity politics” phase.
It has been a matter of contention whether postmodernism is a reaction against modernity. The modern era is the period of history which saw Renaissance Humanism, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the development of liberal values and human rights; the period when Western societies gradually came to value reason and science over faith and superstition as routes to knowledge, and developed a concept of the person as an individual member of the human race deserving of rights and freedoms rather than as part of various collectives subject to rigid hierarchical roles in society.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says postmodernism “is largely a reaction against the philosophical assumptions and values of the modern period of Western (specifically European) history” whilst the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy denies this and says “Rather, its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in another mode.” I’d suggest the difference lies in whether we see modernity in terms of what was produced or what was destroyed. If we see the essence of modernity as the development of science and reason as well as humanism and universal liberalism, postmodernists are opposed to it. If we see modernity as the tearing down of structures of power including feudalism, the Church, patriarchy, and Empire, postmodernists are attempting to continue it, but their targets are now science, reason, humanism and liberalism. Consequently, the roots of postmodernism are inherently political and revolutionary, albeit in a destructive or, as they would term it, deconstructive way.
The term “postmodern” was coined by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition. He defined the postmodern condition as “an incredulity towards metanarratives.” A metanarrative is a wide-ranging and cohesive explanation for large phenomena. Religions and other totalizing ideologies are metanarratives in their attempts to explain the meaning of life or all of society’s ills. Lyotard advocated replacing these with “mininarratives” to get at smaller and more personal “truths.” He addressed Christianity and Marxism in this way but also science.
In his view, “there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics” (p8). By tying science and the knowledge it produces to government and power he rejects its claim to objectivity. Lyotard describes this incredulous postmodern condition as a general one, and argues that from the end of the 19th century, “an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge” began to cause a change in the status of knowledge (p39). By the 1960s, the resulting “doubt” and “demoralization” of scientists had made “an impact on the central problem of legitimization” (p8). No number of scientists telling him they are not demoralized nor any more doubtful than befits the practitioners of a method whose results are always provisional and whose hypotheses are never “proven” could sway him from this.
We see in Lyotard an explicit epistemic relativism (belief in personal or culturally specific truths or facts) and the advocacy of privileging “lived experience” over empirical evidence. We see too the promotion of a version of pluralism which privileges the views of minority groups over the general consensus of scientists or liberal democratic ethics which are presented as authoritarian and dogmatic. This is consistent in postmodern thought.
Michel Foucault’s work is also centered on language and relativism although he applied this to history and culture. He called this approach “archeology” because he saw himself as “uncovering” aspects of historical culture through recorded discourses (speech which promotes or assumes a particular view). For Foucault, discourses control what can be “known” and in different periods and places, different systems of institutional power control discourses. Therefore, knowledge is a direct product of power. “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one ‘episteme’ that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.”[1]
Furthermore, people themselves were culturally constructed. “The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.”[2] He leaves almost no room for individual agency or autonomy. As Christopher Butler says, Foucault “relies on beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual’s class position, or professional position, seen as ‘discourse’, regardless of the morality of his or her individual conduct.”[3] He presents medieval feudalism and modern liberal democracy as equally oppressive, and advocates criticizing and attacking institutions to unmask the “political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them.” [4]
We see in Foucault the most extreme expression of cultural relativism read through structures of power in which shared humanity and individuality are almost entirely absent. Instead, people are constructed by their position in relation to dominant cultural ideas either as oppressors or oppressed. Judith Butler drew on Foucault for her foundational role in queer theory focusing on the culturally constructed nature of gender, as did Edward Said in his similar role in post-colonialism and “Orientalism” and Kimberlé Crenshaw in her development of “intersectionality” and advocacy of identity politics. We see too the equation of language with violence and coercion and the equation of reason and universal liberalism with oppression.
It was Jacques Derrida who introduced the concept of “deconstruction,” and he too argued for cultural constructivism and cultural and personal relativism. He focused even more explicitly on language. Derrida’s best-known pronouncement “There is no outside-text” relates to his rejection of the idea that words refer to anything straightforwardly. Rather, “there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.” [5]
Therefore the author of a text is not the authority on its meaning. The reader or listener makes their own equally valid meaning and every text “engenders infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.” Derrida coined the term différance which he derived from the verb “differer” which means both “to defer” and “to differ.” This was to indicate that not only is meaning never final but it is constructed by differences, specifically by oppositions. The word “young” only makes sense in its relationship with the word “old” and he argued, following Saussure, that meaning is constructed by the conflict of these elemental oppositions which, to him, always form a positive and negative. “Man” is positive and “woman” negative. “Occident” is positive and “Orient” negative. He insisted that “We are not dealing with the peaceful co-existence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.”[6] Deconstruction, therefore, involves inverting these perceived hierarchies, making “woman” and “Orient” positive and “man” and “Occident” negative. This is to be done ironically to reveal the culturally constructed and arbitrary nature of these perceived oppositions in unequal conflict.
We see in Derrida further relativism, both cultural and epistemic, and further justification for identity politics. There is an explicit denial that differences can be other than oppositional and therefore a rejection of Enlightenment liberalism’s values of overcoming differences and focusing on universal human rights and individual freedom and empowerment. We see here the basis of “ironic misandry” and the mantra “reverse racism isn’t real” and the idea that identity dictates what can be understood. We see too a rejection of the need for clarity in speech and argument and to understand the other’s point of view and avoid misnterpretation. The intention of the speaker is irrelevant. What matters is the impact of speech. This, along with Foucauldian ideas, underlies the current belief in the deeply damaging nature of “microaggressions” and misuse of terminology related to gender, race or sexuality.
Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida are just three of the “founding fathers” of postmodernism but their ideas share common themes with other influential “theorists” and were taken up by later postmodernists who applied them to an increasingly diverse range of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. We’ve seen that this includes an intense sensitivity to language on the level of the word and a feeling that what the speaker means is less important than how it is received, no matter how radical the interpretation. Shared humanity and individuality are essentially illusions and people are propagators or victims of discourses depending on their social position; a position which is dependent on identity far more than their individual engagement with society. Morality is culturally relative, as is reality itself. Empirical evidence is suspect and so are any culturally dominant ideas including science, reason, and universal liberalism. These are Enlightenment values which are naïve, totalizing and oppressive, and there is a moral necessity to smash them. Far more important is the lived experience, narratives and beliefs of “marginalized” groups all of which are equally “true” but must now be privileged over Enlightenment values to reverse an oppressive, unjust and entirely arbitrary social construction of reality, morality and knowledge.
The desire to “smash” the status quo, challenge widely held values and institutions and champion the marginalized is absolutely liberal in ethos. Opposing it is resolutely conservative. This is the historical reality, but we are at a unique point in history where the status quo is fairly consistently liberal, with a liberalism that upholds the values of freedom, equal rights and opportunities for everyone regardless of gender, race and sexuality. The result is confusion in which life-long liberals wishing to conserve this kind of liberal status quo find themselves considered conservative and those wishing to avoid conservatism at all costs find themselves defending irrationalism and illiberalism. Whilst the first postmodernists mostly challenged discourse with discourse, the activists motivated by their ideas are becoming more authoritarian and following those ideas to their logical conclusion. Freedom of speech is under threat because speech is now dangerous. So dangerous that people considering themselves liberal can now justify responding to it with violence. The need to argue a case persuasively using reasoned argument is now often replaced with references to identity and pure rage.
Despite all the evidence that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia are at an all-time low in Western societies, Leftist academics and SocJus activists display a fatalistic pessimism, enabled by postmodern interpretative “reading” practices which valorize confirmation bias. The authoritarian power of the postmodern academics and activists seems to be invisible to them whilst being apparent to everyone else. As Andrew Sullivan says of intersectionality:
“It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. … Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse.” [7]
Postmodernism has become a Lyotardian metanarrative, a Foucauldian system of discursive power, and a Derridean oppressive hierarchy.
The logical problem of self-referentiality has been pointed out to postmodernists by philosophers fairly constantly but it is one they have yet to address convincingly. As Christopher Butler points out, “the plausibility of Lyotard’s claim for the decline of metanarratives in the late 20th century ultimately depends upon an appeal to the cultural condition of an intellectual minority.” In other words, Lyotard’s claim comes directly from the discourses surrounding him in his bourgeois academic bubble and is, in fact, a metanarrative towards which he is not remotely incredulous. Equally, Foucault’s argument that knowledge is historically contingent must itself be historically contingent, and one wonders why Derrida bothered to explain the infinite malleability of texts at such length if I could read his entire body of work and claim it to be a story about bunny rabbits with the same degree of authority.
This is, of course, not the only criticism commonly made of postmodernism. The most glaring problem of epistemic cultural relativism has been addressed by philosophers and scientists. The philosopher, David Detmer, in Challenging Postmodernism, says
“Consider this example, provided by Erazim Kohak, ‘When I try, unsuccessfully, to squeeze a tennis ball into a wine bottle, I need not try several wine bottles and several tennis balls before, using Mill’s canons of induction, I arrive inductively at the hypothesis that tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles’… We are now in a position to turn the tables on [postmodernist claims of cultural relativism] and ask, ‘If I judge that tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles, can you show precisely how it is that my gender, historical and spatial location, class, ethnicity, etc., undermine the objectivity of this judgement?” [8]
However, he has not found postmodernists committed to explaining their reasoning and describes a bewildering conversation with postmodern philosopher, Laurie Calhoun,
“When I had occasion to ask her whether or not it was a fact that giraffes are taller than ants, she replied that it was not a fact, but rather an article of religious faith in our culture.”
Physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont address the same problem from the perspective of science in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science:
“Who could now seriously deny the ‘grand narrative’ of evolution, except someone in the grip of a far less plausible master narrative such as Creationism? And who would wish to deny the truth of basic physics? The answer was, ‘some postmodernists.’”
and
“There is something very odd indeed in the belief that in looking, say, for causal laws or a unified theory, or in asking whether atoms really do obey the laws of quantum mechanics, the activities of scientists are somehow inherently ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘masculinist’, or even ‘militarist.’”
How much of a threat is postmodernism to science? There are certainly some external attacks. In the recent protests against a talk given by Charles Murray at Middlebury, the protesters chanted, as one,
“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.’”[9]
When the organizers of the March for Science tweeted:
“colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues,”[10] many scientists immediately criticized this politicization of science and derailment of the focus on preservation of science to intersectional ideology. In South Africa, the #ScienceMustFall and #DecolonizeScience progressive student movement announced that science was only one way of knowing that people had been taught to accept. They suggested witchcraft as one alternative. [11]
Despite this, science as a methodology is not going anywhere. It cannot be “adapted” to include epistemic relativism and “alternative ways of knowing.” It can, however, lose public confidence and thereby, state funding, and this is a threat not to be underestimated. Also, at a time in which world rulers doubt climate change, parents believe false claims that vaccines cause autism and people turn to homeopaths and naturopaths for solutions to serious medical conditions, it is dangerous to the degree of an existential threat to further damage people’s confidence in the empirical sciences.
The social sciences and humanities, however, are in danger of changing out of all recognition. Some disciplines within the social sciences already have. Cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies, for example, have succumbed almost entirely not only to moral relativism but epistemic relativism. English (literature) too, in my experience, is teaching a thoroughly postmodern orthodoxy. Philosophy, as we have seen, is divided. So is history.
Empirical historians are often criticized by the postmodernists among us for claiming to know what really happened in the past. Christopher Butler recalls Diane Purkiss’ accusation that Keith Thomas was enabling a myth that grounded men’s historical identity in “the powerlessness and speechlessness of women” when he provided evidence that accused witches were usually powerless beggar women. Presumably, he should have claimed, against the evidence, that they were wealthy women or better still, men. As Butler says,
“It seems as though Thomas’s empirical claims here have simply run foul of Purkiss’s rival organizing principle for historical narrative – that it should be used to support contemporary notions of female empowerment” (p36)
I encountered the same problem when trying to write about race and gender at the turn of the seventeenth century. I’d argued that Shakespeare’s audience’s would not have found Desdemona’s attraction to Black Othello, who was Christian and a soldier for Venice, so difficult to understand because prejudice against skin color did not become prevalent until a little later in the seventeenth century when the Atlantic Slave Trade gained steam, and that religious and national differences were far more profound before that. I was told this was problematic by an eminent professor and asked how Black communities in contemporary America would feel about my claim. If today’s African Americans felt badly about it, it was implied, it either could not have been true in the seventeenth century or it is morally wrong to mention it. As Christopher Butler says,
“Postmodernist thought sees the culture as containing a number of perpetually competing stories, whose effectiveness depends not so much on an appeal to an independent standard of judgement, as upon their appeal to the communities in which they circulate.”
I fear for the future of the humanities.
The dangers of postmodernism are not limited to pockets of society which center around academia and Social Justice, however. Relativist ideas, sensitivity to language and focus on identity over humanity or individuality have gained dominance in wider society. It is much easier to say what you feel than rigorously examine the evidence. The freedom to “interpret” reality according to one’s own values feeds into the very human tendency towards confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
It has become commonplace to note that the far-Right is now using identity politics and epistemic relativism in a very similar way to the postmodern-Left. Of course, elements of the far-Right have always been divisive on the grounds of race, gender and sexuality and prone to irrational and anti-science views but postmodernism has produced a culture more widely receptive to this. Kenan Malik describes this shift,
“When I suggested earlier that the idea of ‘alternative facts’ draws upon ‘a set of concepts that in recent decades have been used by radicals’, I was not suggesting that Kellyanne Conway, or Steve Bannon, still less Donald Trump, have been reading up on Foucault or Baudrillard… It is rather that sections of academia and of the left have in recent decades helped create a culture in which relativized views of facts and knowledge seem untroubling, and hence made it easier for the reactionary right not just to re-appropriate but also to promote reactionary ideas.”[12]
This “set of concepts” threaten to take us back to a time before the Enlightenment, when “reason” was regarded as not only inferior to faith but as a sin. James K. A. Smith, Reformed theologian and professor of philosophy, has been quick to see the advantages for Christianity and regards postmodernism as “a fresh wind of the Spirit sent to revitalize the dry bones of the church” (p18). In Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, he says,
“A thoughtful engagement with postmodernism will encourage us to look backward. We will see that much that goes under the banner of postmodern philosophy has one eye on ancient and medieval sources and constitutes a significant recovery of premodern ways of knowing, being, and doing.” (p25)
and
“Postmodernism can be a catalyst for the church to reclaim its faith not as a system of truth dictated by a neutral reason but rather as a story that requires ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.” (p125)
We on the Left should be very afraid of what “our side” has produced. Of course, not every problem in society today is the fault of postmodern thinking, and it is not helpful to suggest that it is. The rise of populism and nationalism in the US and across Europe are also due to a strong existing far-Right and the fear of Islamism produced by the refugee crisis. Taking a rigidly “anti-SJW” stance and blaming everything on this element of the Left is itself rife with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. The Left is not responsible for the far-Right or the religious-Right or secular nationalism, but it is responsible for not engaging with reasonable concerns reasonably and thereby making itself harder for reasonable people to support. It is responsible for its own fragmentation, purity demands and divisiveness which make even the far-Right appear comparatively coherent and cohesive.
In order to regain credibility, the Left needs to recover a strong, coherent and reasonable liberalism. To do this, we need to out-discourse the postmodern-Left. We need to meet their oppositions, divisions and hierarchies with universal principles of freedom, equality and justice. There must be a consistency of liberal principles in opposition to all attempts to evaluate or limit people by race, gender or sexuality. We must address concerns about immigration, globalism and authoritarian identity politics currently empowering the far- Right rather than calling people who express them “racist,” “sexist” or “homophobic” and accusing them of wanting to commit verbal violence. We can do this whilst continuing to oppose authoritarian factions of the Right who genuinely are racist, sexist and homophobic, but can now hide behind a façade of reasonable opposition to the postmodern-Left.
Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right but of consistency, reason, humility and universal liberalism versus inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism. The future of freedom, equality and justice looks equally bleak whether the postmodern Left or the post-truth Right wins this current war. Those of us who value liberal democracy and the fruits of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and modernity itself must provide a better option.
This article was originally published at Areo Magazine.
Notes
[1] The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (2011) Routledge. p183
[2] ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.’ Political Theory, 21, 198-227
[3] Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. (2002) Oxford University Press. p49
[4] The Chomsky – Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (2006) The New Press. P41
[5] http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/sec.html
[6] Positions. (1981) University of Chicago Press p41
[7] http://hotair.com/archives/2017/03/10/is-intersectionality-a-religion/
[8] Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (2003) Prometheus Press. p 26.
[9] In Sullivan http://hotair.com/archives/2017/03/10/is-intersectionality-a-religion/
[10] http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/30/anti-trump-march-for-science-maintains-that-racism-ableism-and-native-rights-are-scientific-issues/#ixzz4bPD4TA1o
[11] http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/science-must-fall-time-decolonise-science/
[12] https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/not-post-truth-as-too-many-truths/
21 comments
“To do this, we need to out-discourse the postmodern-Left.”
That’s too funny. I caught it before but you ended up saying post-modern things a few times.
The point of why pomo took over is because they were correct in a very qualified sense. If you read romantics and enlightenment writers you’ll find things that are just not anywhere adjacent to how we view things (e.g, a romantic wrote we get personality traits from our land which is why the German path is different from the French which makes nationalism a crazy, alien hell) but these were what modernism attacked and postmodernism reapplied the points of modernism to itself. Modernism reduced universal epistemic access to cultural narratives because it’s pretty obvious we do not have access to reality by reason (per the enlightenment) nor by aesthetics or the sublime etc (per the romantics).
I’m going to tackle the narrative issues of the enlightenment to sort of get an idea of how you’re missing the point, however well educated you are on this, which you are, of postmodernism and end up falling into the same issues and can’t overcome it. The replication crisis shows that empiricism relies too much on induction which is either totally or generally very subjective. The scientific method assumes observation is necessary. Human reasoning is not unmediated, in some separate, unadulterated dimension. Human reasoning reduces objects into how it can think about things and then works towards coherency (which in form is supported by epistemic justifications like falsificationism). Human reasoning in this same sense makes the is-ought distinction a necessary burden. This makes any ethical system based in it, like humanism and human values, to be subjective.
That’s just a list of the issues of the enlightenment which were tried to be developed past. Kant tried to save reason from this. The Frankfurt school, or at least Habermas, reapplied kant to kant to get critical theory. So anyways, even though our governments run off this paradigm, culturally we’ve moved very far beyond that and ppl are viewing the inconsistencies of liberalism, along with the negative rights and all that, as a narrative for power. Because you can’t apply the enlightenment as a universal narrative in a sense you get treated like you treat the church and Christianity for “science” and liberalism.
There are many sciences (Cartesian, alchemical (e.g. Newton, Bacon etc), positivist, aristotelian/scholastic, you have Christian denominations with different perceptions like Puritans etc) with differing amounts of explanatory power. This doesn’t mean they can’t be further developed but there are different ways to view the domain of “nature”. In this same sense, there’s a better narrative of narratives which would be how we are enchanted to nature (or God’s creation). You wouldn’t regard your conception of “nature” as wholly false or without meaning or as something epistemically unattainable. Postmoderns would. The distinction is really how we view our relation with the universe and what explanatory power these have. If I could say that besides the epistemic issues, you lose a real meaning of human rights when you take away imago dei because we’re more than just beings who have equivalent ability to reason. Some of us don’t have that and that can lead to dehumanization.
Thank you very much for giving this, its a tremendous effort and compelling read. I only wish i could remark further right now.
Regards
Foucault was an evil boy f____er.
Postmodernism at least evidences that discernment is somewhat independent from academic attainment.
“…rejection of the concept of the unified and coherent individual”
It is important to understand that some aspects of postmodern thought are no more than the much delayed emergence into Western Abrahamic thought of Dharmic ideas long available and explored in the East. Problems arise when attempts are made to understand these concepts through a Western prism, which is is akin to trying to bake bread in an icebox. In the above instance, postmodernists stumbled onto the truth that existence is empty (which the Buddha proved and subsequent thinkers expanded upon), but tried to express it in the inadequate idiom of Western thought.
Is it “truth” that “existence is empty”?
A thoughtful piece. From economic sociology, however, it’s important to show parallels to neoclassical economics and Ludwig Hayek. They are uncanny – no need for evidence just opinions. History is dead, there is only the grand individualism of 19 century conditions which pretended there was no authoritarianism in its cruel methods. Nor were there huge corporations. Neoclassical economics still suffers from ‘physics envy’ but it despises evidence of any scientific kind, and treats all living beings as caricature atoms. Hayek promoted a bastardised form of biology and “spontaneous” evolution including conflating ‘natural selection’ with ‘maximisation’. A survival of the fittest from Spencer now justifies socially useless, inflationary speculation. But this lot had to capture the state, just as postmodernists captured the academy. In my view, Hayek is a Stalinist in his callous disregard of the fate of populations: a position from another dead white male that continues. Although people deny it, a careful reading of Foucault’s neo-liberal position shows he admired it. Identity politics has always been defined by the Hitlers, Mussolinis, the KKK and Stalinists. In the 1940s, American artists never espoused identity politics – see a great book FACING THE ABYSS. But the postmodern academy says these artists ‘hid’ their gay, black, female or jewish identities, when these artists aimed to rise above all that.
Review of Helen Pluckrose 2020 “How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism & Its Impact”
A very good summary but I have some disagreements which I think need to be included in an article like this.
Without going too far into details, postmodernism as a cultural criticism can be traced back to Marx and Nietzsche, to the disputes over slavery which included the Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion and the freeing of the serfs in the 1860’s! Today, the issue of slavery still looms large in novels and social sciences around captivity in cultural enclaves, national ideologies, and economic policies, e.g. wage slavery.
Literature still abounds with novels and reports about slavery, colonialism and basically extreme inequality. Pluckrose finishes her article with a standpoint for enlightenment values, which is idealistic, which must get into the niddy griddy of cases, contexts and situations. She skipped over the tumultuous global ideological turn to fascism -the continuation of Empire building – and its counter by cultural critics, the strongest are perhaps the Frankfurt School, but Arendt and Levinas, among many others have powerful arguments against western cultural dynamics – a hierarchy of violence, indeed.
Arendt shot the first major blow against social science which had failed to examine and interpret the genocides of the 20th. Her disputes with Abel and Adorno, later with Zionists, indicate that social science has become catastrophic in its denial of serious social problems promulgated by state leaders and right wing parties, especially the socialist and neoliberal and welfare policy orientations – all basically top down command economies concealed as democracy – but hardly representative democracies!
Postmodernism does not simply begin with Lyotard or Baudrillard. The rise of nihilism, relativism and authoritarianism was also addressed by Heidegger’s ‘destruction of metaphysics’ which influenced Derrida.
Foucault possibly has the most valid understanding of history and governance policies with his understanding of discursive regimes.
One thing that is at issue between a classical liberal, or moral-ethical-legal standpoint and the sort of manipulations and exploitation by the ruling classes and political classes, not to mention locally and in private households, is that power structures tend to turn politics, and hence economics, against the majority which becomes a captive entity under the party ideologies which include religion and sexual norms, eg compulsions. Explain overpopulation, porn and viagra, heterosexual compulsion?
Education however fails to inform the students unless they read assiduously for many many years: A = -A is rejected as contradiction, however in temporal context, change, contradictions may hold up rationally even through a Weberian analytical barrage of rationality positions. Contradiction, pushed as illegitimate thinking, was addressed by Hegel who shows how contradiction works, although he had run aground in his Philosophy of Right over what to do about the “rabble” – that ever increasing class of gig and part time and wage workers! Led to Marx who realized that economics required a thorough explanation – with a moral eye!
An important insight in this area of education is the effect of ‘impossibility’ on changing conceptual orientations, stages and phases of development, and discursive regimes! Often the effort is for opening up possibilities!
Pluckrose was wrong to assert that crimes and social problems were decreasing, like Pinker’s deduction! Explain incarceration and poverty around the globe? Aggravated assault is a common crime everywhere – violence is insidious. How doesn’t she know this?
I suggest that notions like misrecognition in identity politics (Lacan); the contrast in every culture between witchcraft/ESP/folk beliefs – influence – and legal-moral orientations; the subjectivity of religion, faith, beliefs and doctrines as “objective” largely account for the culture industry, authoritarian conformity (Guattari’s ‘everyone wants to be a fascist’) and violent outrage – known problems for a few millennia!
Just before footnote #7, it looks like her argument turned idealist and did not recognize that from the Reformation-Counter Reformation to the Enlightenment-Counter Enlightenment to the Authoritarian – Anti-Authoritarian, the fascist novelty, all reflect on the Modernist – Post Modernist contrasts.
Yes, liberal values are important but they are not powerful enough to contain the evil, the violent, the powerful and all of the malcontents! Therefore, the critical positions found in Post-Modern discourse must be identified and recognized to counter the weaknesses of liberal doctrines and metaphysical positions.
The best liberalism can offer is that its vision of legitimate government is the least bad alternative. I’d rather have such a system – even if it’s founded on some shaky philosophical ideas such as the ‘individual’ – than a government by Philosopher-Kings. The latter is always the endpoint for the alternatives you cite.
Great article.
“Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right.”
However this is without a doubt a crisis whose source is the Left. These ideas emanate naturally from leftist ideology. You may find some of these being entertained in the Far Right but these are anomalies.
These 3 French philosophers may be the founding fathers of postmodern but Rousseau is its proto founder if you will. His view of human nature underlies postmodernists which is a liberal left one.
Replying to JR. The left right spectrum including the middle consists of utopians who already know what needs to be done to reach ‘Heaven on Earth’. The cruel deception is that once you remove selling pitches, jargon and insignia they are the same insisting on conformity, obedience using command and control social and economic control structures, and here’s the most cruel thing of all: they claim to remove class whilst planning a strict class system of the leaders, their implementers and the rest who will be forbidden to think anything but what they deem acceptable.
Democracy respects disagreement and, while authoritarians from the spectrum loath compromise and cooperation knowing everything, democracy finds out what to do and respects disagreement, compromise and cooperation. Democracy is not left or right. It exists to give everyone a voice and recognizes no kind or good political system exists without respecting disagreement and, consequently, humanity.
To sum up: My Truth – obviously stark raving bonkers- is greater than your truth, because I say so, and You! better believe me.
There is a lesson here though, that the writings of the Insane can be just as profound, in their own demented way, if not even more so, than those of recognised geniuses.
“Also, at a time in which world rulers doubt climate change, parents believe false claims that vaccines cause autism and people turn to homeopaths and naturopaths for solutions to serious medical conditions, it is dangerous to the degree of an existential threat to further damage people’s confidence in the empirical sciences.”
The writer assumes too much. There is plenty of empirical science disputing man’s impact on climate change, and whether that’s even a bad thing, never mind the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Yes, thank you Anthony. While I found this piece very helpful, that one paragraph did not resonate. Having dug deep into the science of vaccines, I would say that “safe and effective” is more a marketing slogan than a well-supported scientific conclusion, a statement based in power rather than evidence. And this bow to the allopathic model as the only or best choice?Any time we are met with the claim that “the science is settled,” we can be sure we are not in the presence of true science. I was sorry to see an otherwise helpful piece marred by this one paragraph. Pax. T
I agree. There is a smidgen of self-referentiality involved in the passage referencing climate deniers. How can the writer not see that the act of discounting any dissension to the popular academic dogma and unsettled “science” of climate change is rife with the very postmodern ideas she bemoans? How can she not see the attempt to use this new dogma to shame and silence dissenters as immoral and lift “believers” up as morally superior saviors of the world? I see the political landscape of climate science as part of the whole attack on objective reality. Science observes. Science does not offer absolutes, decrees, and moral judgements.
To follow that sentiment, with my now-heightened awareness of fallacious postmodern thinking patterns, I will try to share another point of contention without sounding as if I’m opining my unpopular location on the intersectional grid or whining that my delicate Christian sensibilities have been offended by this text:
I saw something peeking out from between the words in that passage that references climate deniers. It appears to be a thin thread of contempt for people of faith which weaves itself through most of this otherwise-brilliant article. While the Age of Enlightenment did lead to the glory of modern scientific achievement, the advances are not a direct result of atheism. There wasn’t a sudden denial of faith that freed enslaved minds to lead the way into modernity. Many important scientists were people of faith, as many are today.
Furthermore, Western ethics and common law undeniably come directly from Judeo-Christian values. Evidence of this is easy to find, but it is neglected and withheld from students by educators today, to everyone’s detriment. Isn’t this omission of vital history in line with postmodernist treatment of inconvenient historical facts?
I would argue that appreciation of Judeo-Christian values–not the destruction of them–are what brought us to an unprecedented place of individual rights and freedom in Western society.
I would also argue that a lack of appreciation for said values is likewise what brought us to this dark cultural impasse.
The article, along this thin thread of contempt, seems to dismiss the idea that coherent thought, science, and faith can co-exist. With much respect for the writer and her view of postmodernism, I am consistently amazed at the willful ignorance of academics in their treatment of faith and its contribution to modern society. Unfortunately for all of us, whether through (1) neglect of study, (2) pride of intellect, (3) negative personal experiences with organized religion or a combination of any of the three, generations have been educated by people who accentuate bad actions attributed to Christianity and do not even touch upon the good.
In an honest study just from the birth of Protestantism to this very moment, one finds that good actions attributed to Judeo-Christian faith far outweigh the bad. Whether you want to believe that God exists or not, to neglect the value of Judeo-Christian ethics in our society–let alone to hold those who still adhere to them as buffoons–is at best dipping your own toe into the scummy, malignant pool of postmodern insanity.
Still, knowing that there is common ground between classical liberals and conservatives gives me hope. We must all remain free to discuss our differing views, even in heated debate. If we lose our freedom of speech and our tolerance for one another, I don’t think we will survive. We can co-exist together as we have for generations. Our way of life cannot co-exist with growing postmodern radicalism.
Thank you, Lora. Well said.
It appears the roots of this extend further back. Wittgenstein in his Investigations was father of the notion that language is based on arbitrary or culturally based naming. Astonishingly, he ignored shared human physiology of perception determining fundamentals of language which are independent of culture. There is an absolute basis to language based in the nature of perception which Wittgenstein, and it appears the post modernists are either unaware of, deny or choose to ignore.
In effect, Wittgenstein hypothesized humans as they are not to provide foundations of a theory denying non-culturally based foundations of language. This astonishing trope has held sway since at least 1954 without any academic pointing out what appears to be utterly obvious. An extreme view might be that he subjected humans to inhumanity, by ignoring the way we are.
Once the denial of how we perceive was accepted as respectable- all the rest followed. To an outsider this appears to be an incomprehensible situation. No wonder Philosophy lost virtually all respect in a world desperate for new ideas and positive contribution to addressing astonishing events and developments that are crashing around us today.
Dear Charles!
Sorry, but I think it makes sense to dig a little deeper, because traces go into Plato’s cave, where his Ideal State was born – state, based on the total justice! By chance, at the other end of the world, this ideal state was created, in which people were so successfully turned into ants. It was the Inca Empire, as some have already guessed. A magnificent powerful empire with a population of 10 million people!
Unfortunately, Pizarro with 168 vagabonds and 27 horses, who (horses included) knew nothing about Plato, had destroyed this beautiful house of cards by negligence.
I guess, this sad event was happened due to the shortage of leftist philosophers, postmodernists or Marxists, in the education system in Spain at that time.
It’s a pity!
But we have no right to lose hope, we have no shortage of philosophers now. With Plato, Marx and Derrida in our hearts, with regiments of SJWs and our own stupidity in vanguard we will build our brave new world!
Yes, we can!
Indeed.
They tried and may well have failed because events have have a habit of exposing Utopian dreams- hopeless claims from those who appear to think the World must genuflect to human delusion.
That is not an accurate account of W.’s thinking. To mention but one error, W.’s main contention in the Investigations is that a pervasive mistake amongst thinkers is to conceive of language as based on naming. That is the opposite of what you have said.
Please do not attach W. to the Postmoderns and sully the name of perhaps the greatest thinker in history.
Excellent article, it seems that this is partly an exercise in PhD’s arguing in rather obscure and academic language. I had to look up a few words myself, yet it is having so much influence, negative influence, in our world that it somehow has to get out there to normal people in a way that is easily understood.
To me it seems like this is all about hating and rage. Somehow these academics invented a philosophy that allows them to rage at the world and hurt people and the ideas themselves are empty and unreal other than that. It’s like Hitler’s concept of an Aryan race, racial purity, all used to justify hatred and destruction.
If you see the world as violent, the violence is in your eyes. These philosophers have to be discredited like Hitler was. They are misanthropes.