Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

POCKET GUIDE

to POSTMODERNISM

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism Andrew Colgan, Ph.D.

A summary and interpretation of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau and Foucault by Stephen R.C. Hicks, Ph.D.

The Atlas Society Press

Published by The Atlas Society Press www.atlassociety.org

Copyright © 2020 ISBN 978-1-7349605-0-1 All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this booklet or portions thereof in any form.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Cover design by Matthew Holdridge Book layout by Andrei Volkov

Our Mission The Atlas Society’s mission is to inspire people to embrace reason, achievement, benevolence and ethical self- interest as the moral foundation for political liberty, personal happiness and a flourishing society.

We build on Ayn Rand’s works and ideas, and use artistic and other creative means to reach and inspire new audiences.

We promote an open and empowering brand of Objectivism; we welcome engagement with all who honestly seek to understand the philosophy, and we use reason, facts and open debate in the search for truth above all else; we do not appeal to authority or conflate personalities with ideas. We resist moral judgment without adequate facts, and believe disagreement does not necessarily imply evasion.

“Thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary.”

— Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

Introduction A generation ago, postmodernism was merely an intellectual opposition to grand Enlightenment claims of knowledge, human rights, and progress—that is, to the achievements of the modern world. In our generation, postmodernism has become a sprawling set of cultural activist movements re-shaping journalism, political and legal debate, the art world, sexuality, and education at all levels.

“Hey! Ho! Western Civ has got to go!” chanted protesters at many universities in the 1980s and 1990s. As the 2000s and 2010s developed, the university-educated assumed positions of influence and leadership. Foucault’s metaphorical children have learned their lessons, grown up, and set out to overturn what they think of as a deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, imperialist, and generally destructive and self-destructive society.

By contrast, we inheritors of the Enlightenment civilization think we have inherited and are contributing to a magnificent culture of science, technology, wealth, and benevolence—albeit one with self-doubts, internal inconsistencies, and much room for improvement.

At the same time, we also hear voices condemning both the optimistic modernism and discontented postmodernism and urging us to return to the pre-modern era of tradition, stability, hierarchy, and everyone knowing their place.

So how do we sort out the bewildering array of currents and counter-currents of contemporary culture?

ii

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

I thank Dr. Andrew Colgan for his careful and intelligent summarizing of my Explaining Postmodernism. The book was written in 1999-2000, and I am happy that years later this new guide will help make it useful to a new generation of intellectual seekers.

Stephen R. C. Hicks May 2020

Contents Chapter 1. What Is Postmodernism? ..................................... 1 An Introduction to the Philosophical Origins of Postmodernism ........................................................................... 6 What Came Before Modernism? ............................................... 7 Chapter 2. The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason ...15 Immanuel Kant........................................................................... 17 Critiquing Kant ........................................................................... 20 Chapter 3. The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason ....... 25 Reason’s Collapse from Continental Philosophy ................ 25 Reason’s Collapse from American Philosophy .................... 27 Chapter 4. The Climate of Collectivism ............................... 35 Marx’s Counter-Enlightenment ............................................... 36 Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment ...................................... 40 Themes of Collectivism ............................................................ 43 Left versus Right in the 20th Century....................................... 46 Chapter 5. The Crisis of Socialism ....................................... 49 Socialism’s Response to Failure—A Change in Ethical Standard ...................................................................................... 54 Chapter 6. Postmodern Strategy ........................................ 59

Liberal capitalism The Enlightenment: 20st century sciences, business, technical fields

Feudalism

Medieval period (approx. 400 to 1300 AD)

When and Where

Late 20th century humanities and related professions

Socialism

Collectivism: egalitarianism

Individualism

Politics and Economics

Ethics

Human Nature

Social subjectivism Social constructionism

Original Sin, subject to God’s will Collectivism: altruism

Epistemology

Anti-realism

Postmodernism

Tabula rasa and autonomy

Mysticism and/or faith

Metaphysics

Modernism Realism: Naturalism Objectivism: Experience and reason

Pre-modernism Realism: Supernaturalism

Table 1: Summary of the basic philosophical positions of the last three intellectual eras

Chapter 1. What Is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism can be described as a relatively new intellectual movement that has sprung from the idea that modernism is finished and has not survived the onslaught of critique. This movement has branched into many schools of thought: deconstruction, post-structuralism, some forms of feminism, and critical theory, to name a few.

Each has attempted to fill the void in a variety of intellectual spaces, especially in academia and particularly in the humanities and social sciences, but also in popular culture. Its proponents self-identify as “critics” of one field or another.

Normally, criticism is thought more useful if the criticizer has a superior idea to replace what they have attempted to prove inferior, but this is not the manner in which postmodernism functions. Offering criticism alone without proposing solutions might be likened to the practice of the Sophists from Ancient Greece, who revelled in the skills of rhetoric and sought to find strong arguments against any stance whatsoever for the purposes of politics and persuasion. In more recent times, these rhetorical tactics have been adopted by many postmodernists in various intellectual circles. A few of its representatives are given in Table 2 below:

2

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism Table 2: Sample authors who have applied postmodern lenses to fields of study Example Authors

Field

Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty

Philosophy

Stanley Fish, Frank Lentricchia Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin Jacques Lacan Robert Venturi, Andreas Huyssen Luce Irigaray

Literary criticism Feminist legal criticism Psychology Architectural criticism Science criticism

We can find a common theme if we sample quotations from a few of these examples. From philosopher Richard Rorty, “this talk of correspondence brings back just the idea my sort of philosopher wants to get rid of, the idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature.” Or French intellectual Michel Foucault, who declared, “it is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.” In a similar vein, Stanley Fish remarked that his method of criticism “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting,” having dismissed “illusory objectivity.”

These quotations, about which we will have more to say later, display a pattern of postmodern thought—strict criticism without affirmations. Postmodern writers seek to unravel a singular target: modernism. Generally, they declare that science and reason are ungrounded in their claims toward building a single “Truth,” and as a result, they are

What is Postmodernism?

3

merely claims to what we might call a truth imperialism, or simply power, for “reason and power are one and the same,” as Lyotard declares. The concepts of reason, truth, and therefore reality or what is real must be deconstructed to reveal their “real” purpose: dominance of one group over another, as one group might propose rules for a game that favors their success over their opponents.

If we assume for a moment that postmodern criticism is correct—that there are no grounds to claim statements to be true or objects to have a certain nature—then their conclusion is intuitive. For anyone asserting baseless claims, it is arbitrary to accept some baseless claims instead of other baseless claims. This is the plea of postmodernism: if all claims to truth are baseless, accepting some claims over others can only be for the sake of convenience, and that arbitrary selection of claims will always pit some people over others or will promote one way of life over another—and none of this favoritism can be justified. Instead, postmodern justice would demand that we end these advantages and start to “spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time,” as pointed out by Lentricchia. In other words, disadvantages to some are caused by the “truth package” we have accepted. While problems are found in all societies, postmodernists have been particularly interested in targeting what they see as the dominant societies of the West.

Another major battleground of postmodernism is culture. Differences in wealth, success, and happiness among races and genders prompt many postmodernists to investigate and declare the “winners” to have succeeded unfairly.

Success has been due to this view of the arbitrariness of the conditions of success set up by those with an unfair advantage. Women, for example, have tended to be framed as

4

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

oppressed, as earning less, and as unempowered to achieve. Postmodernists tend to claim that women are primarily viewed socially as home dwellers, mothers, or sex symbols. Andrea Dworkin, for example, claims that pornography is a social construction that unfairly characterizes all women as the playthings of men. It purveys a dominant-slave relationship between men and women and therefore must be part of the perpetuation of differences in the outcome of the sexes. She also argues that even the practice of sexual intercourse, which she purposefully terms “fucking,” is always framed in pornography as one (the male) dominating the other (the female). As can be seen, postmodernism routinely sets up a binary analysis, identifying dominant and oppressed, subjects and objects, or a default and an “Other.”

A precursor to this binary analysis can be found in the ideas on class of Karl Marx, who took a similar approach, such as inventing framing terms like “alienation,” which is comparable to the postmodern term “othering.” Marx and postmodernists claim winners always unfairly compete against the losers. For example, postmodernists argue that capitalistic economic systems betray their citizens by offloading the problems generated onto other (oppressed) groups, including whole nations. Lyotard (infamously) argued along these lines to create sympathy for Saddam Hussein, implying that he and his Iraqi dictatorship are a “product of Western departments of state and big companies.”

As another example, the postmodern equivalent today of the Marxian domineering bourgeoisie is the average white male—their “advantages” are only possible due to the burdens and costs imposed on the “Other:” women, racial minorities, and the poor. While some might argue all

What is Postmodernism?

5

people have benefited from modern democracy, free markets, and equality before the law, postmodernists instead declare such an idea as self-serving rhetoric that attempts to hide the brutality of capitalism by emphasizing “winners” and ignoring the losers. Where capitalists might point to poor decision-making or lack of effort for the cause of the “losers,” postmodernists deny this capitalist myth of equal opportunity, and declare these groups oppressed, differently “abled,” and suffering not due to their own actions, but from a hostile or uncaring society.

As a final example, and another binary, Foucault describes the rawest form of domination within our social institutions: Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked states, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. … [F]or once, power doesn’t hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as a tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; … Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder.

The implications here are that society, culture, or politics are careful constructions that implement power in a masked or hidden form. While some may feel like they are a “free people,” living in modern democracies rather than dictatorships and working in capitalistic economies rather than socialistic economies, all these situations still operate power structures in subtle ways, and each perpetuates difference among the outcomes of various groups. Each power structure creates a winner and a loser, an insider and

6

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

an outsider. Only in the prison does Foucault argue that we can clearly see the fabricated society unmasked, with freedoms and barriers, and the consequences of each on the groups artificially created to oppose one another.

An Introduction to the Philosophical Origins of Postmodernism To shed light on the source of the criticisms of these thinkers, we must look more closely at the philosophical composition of their ideas. Any intellectual movement will make assumptions about human nature and values, metaphysics (i.e. the nature of reality), and epistemology (i.e. the means of perceiving reality). Although briefly stated here, these ideas will be further explored in later chapters.

Metaphysically, to be a postmodernist is to be an antirealist—to claim that reality has no objective basis because its meaning cannot be separable from its perceiver. We can see this in the quotation from Rorty given above about “this talk of correspondence.” Rather than speaking about reality, some postmodernists argue for a socio-linguistic constructivism, where language defines reality as rules define a game. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, similarly presented the idea of “language games,” where a change in the game (language) will change reality.

Epistemologically, since postmodernists insist there is no objective reality, they argue that one cannot use “reason” as there is no firm basis from which to reason. A postmodernist might say that we take for granted what we perceive, and yet the concepts we rely on are not objective but a biased account that perpetuates injustice. Instead, subjectivity is emphasized, where all perceivers inescapably use

What is Postmodernism?

7

“lenses” to gain accounts of things. All objects and persons are unique formulations to an observer. These perspectives come from individual experiences and cannot be pooled with the experience of others to distill universal concepts.

Here is where phrases like “my reality” or “my lived experience” become paramount to postmodernists over socalled “facts”—two accounts of the same event are not considered to be in conflict, according to postmodern epistemology.

On the subject of human nature, postmodernists tend to be collectivistic and treat individuals as inseparably part of groups which are based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. Individuals are a patchwork of group qualities and cannot but perceive reality and interact with others except by way of the attributes of their groups. A scientist can never be considered an objective researcher seeking the truth. The scientist will inescapably be considered a white, male, gay, scientist (for example) and will perceive the world uniquely from these inescapable group affiliations. If the field of science as a whole is filled with white men, postmodernists predict slant or bias which will lead inevitably to conflict with the “othered” or “silenced” groups that the occupations of science have failed to include (female or indigenous “ways of knowing,” for example). As a result, the postmodern ethics and politics tend to focus on a resolution of these tensions by revealing the injustices inherent or systematic in “objective” knowledge systems.

What Came Before Modernism?

Having introduced some of the bases of postmodernism, we might look further into the target of

8

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

postmodernism: modernism and its objective knowledge systems. These ideas can be seen in the philosophical hotbed of Ancient Greece, and closer to our own time, the Enlightenment era in Europe, which was crucial and defining to what we now call modernism. During the Enlightenment, science slowly gained a foothold as a trusted and organized knowledge delivery system through the consecutive generational efforts of many figures, including Francis Bacon (1561-1626), sometimes called the father of empiricism; René Descartes (1596-1650), an important figure in logic but also known as the father of modern philosophy; and John Locke (1632-1704), who had a profound impact on all aspects of philosophy but is especially known as the father of classical liberalism.

We can contrast the ideas of these era-defining figures with the pre-modernist world they combatted. Metaphysically, Enlightenment thinkers promoted what is called “naturalism” during a time of ubiquitous belief in “supernaturalism.” Epistemologically, their use of reason and logic rose slowly as a proper and trusted method of acquiring knowledge over the mysticism of the pre-modernists, who used religion and faith to ground their beliefs and traditions. Pre-modernist concepts of human nature were characterized by frailty, sin, and dependence on devotion to religion, while modernists emphasized human autonomy or freedom, but with the responsibility of character development. The individual is sovereign, whose destiny is yet to be written, which is in contrast to the feudal subordination and sacrifice of people to the “higher” or “divine” goals of the pre-modernist—whether a religious project or a holy war.

What is Postmodernism?

9

As a result, during the pre-modernist times in which the Enlightenment figures worked, they were considered radicals—even by themselves. The worldview they promoted was impossible to merge within the pre-modernist framework that had dominated Europe for a millennium. Over several centuries, thanks to the Renaissance and some inadvertent help from the Reformation figures, religion lost its hold as the exclusive worldview. Gaining ground in its place was the scientific worldview, or modernism, which began transforming intellectual circles, society, and culture.

Disagreements arose between modernists. For instance, Descartes promoted rationalism (knowledge from logic and reason only) whereas Bacon and Locke argued for empiricism (knowledge from the senses perceiving reality).

Together, however, they agreed that objective knowledge could be obtained from this world rather than through an exclusive reliance on supernaturalism, where the divinely inspired few brought knowledge down from the Heavens.

Knowledge creation was now in the hands of any person who could use reason, and with this, the Enlightenment project was in full force.

While the pre-modernists continued to resist this change, it was not until the 20th century that opposition began to mount from another angle. Postmodernism was this other angle, and it essentially sought to de-establish the Enlightenment movement. We will continue the story of this history of the buildup of the Enlightenment project in the next few chapters; however a broad outlook can be found in Chart 1 below.

Chart 1: The Enlightenment Vision

What is Postmodernism?

11

In summary to our introduction into postmodernism, and as a hint to our further analysis of this philosophical movement, a number of themes can be recognized where postmodernism operates in the current culture. In reviewing these points, see if you can make connections to what you observe in modern culture. ● Is the Western canon of literature truly the great books of the West, or are they merely a batch of writings of the dominant and privileged? ● Was Christopher Columbus a hero, bridging two worlds together, or a bringer of European imperialism, religion and culture to, by design, exclude and demarcate the indigenous populations already established in the Americas? ● Is the United States a leading defender of rights, liberty, and opportunity for all, or is it a sexist, racist, class-bound society no better than any other county? ● Should we judge people as individuals, or should we consider group identities as defining, and support policies such as affirmative action, or sensitivity training? ● Is life improving across the world through growing economies and higher standards of living, or are these merely distractions from the real problems of urban poverty, income disparities between rich and poor, and consumerism? ● Have Western codes of law and blind justice systems reduced crime and made the streets safer, or does the Western justice system merely cover up the failures of Western social order, defining those

12

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism failures as deviances to “justify” temporarily and sometimes permanently caging them? ● Is the liberal West promoting peace and prosperity across the globe, supporting democracies and opening new markets to encourage investment, or have the goals of foreign policy in most cases been about imperialism, and has globalism been perverted to binding a cheaper workforce to enrich multinational corporations? ● Have science and technology been generally a force for good, extending knowledge and making the world healthier, safer, cleaner, and more productive—or has science betrayed an elitism that seeks to perpetuate a particular way of life, framing some cultures and peoples as obsolete, backward, or barbaric? ● And in general, have classical liberalism, free markets, and technology been social achievements that can be harnessed by all cultures to improve themselves, or have these “values” imposed capitalism, science, and overall, ideology, onto an already rich cultural landscape and an already struggling polluted environment?

Notice in these various themes that the terms of the debate have shifted. It is no longer about how we promote democracies and peace in other struggling countries, or the types of economic or welfare programs that best assist the poor. We used to discuss ideas like truth, reason, liberty, equality, justice seriously—not ironically. When postmodernists arrived on the intellectual scene, they have asked us to take a step back and evaluate the concepts themselves.

What is Postmodernism?

13

This is why many of these concepts appear in quotation marks in the writings of postmodernists. “Truth” is a myth, they might say. Or “reason” is a white, male, Eurocentric concept. Or “equality” is a mask for oppression. “Peace” is always imposed; the powerful has won and holds down its victims.

Many might read into these perspectives a great deal of cynicism—it would seem to postmodernists that any kind of apparent advancement must only be due to some hidden cost, i.e., a zero-sum game. For example, modernism thinks of and considers peace as the removal of power and violence, but the postmodernist sees this kind of “peace” as a mere temporary ceasefire due to one side dominating the other; if the other can recover, they will fight again. But alongside this cynicism, paradoxically you can also find themes of egalitarianism and relativism in postmodern thought. Postmodernists do tend to favor democracy as an appropriate form of government, for example. But postmodernists go beyond defending traditionally “Left” politics—anti-science, anti-reason, and advocating socialism in economics tend to place them on the far Left as we define it today.

Understanding postmodernism requires a tour of intellectual history. To understand the origins of the postmodern battle with Enlightenment thinkers, we must examine their project. What exactly was discovered in these several centuries that for modernists was a beacon of hope for a better life, and for postmodernists became mere cheats to exploit others at the game of life? Is knowledge a tool for all or a weapon for some?

14

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

In the next chapter, we will examine one particular thinker who would seem to have set much of the stage for postmodernism: the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Chapter 2. The CounterEnlightenment Attack on Reason “Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment.”

— Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault In this chapter we will briefly examine a turbulent period of the Enlightenment era, broadly covering the 17th through to the 19th century. As with all movements, and especially with the Enlightenment, the ideas promoted, even if successful, cannot be likened to smelting a bar of pure iron. Intellectual movements are better likened to a quilt, stitched together by individuals who work often with little communication. It is often only later in history that intellectual historians, having sufficient hindsight, define the era and pick out those they deem to be contributors. Certainly not all contributions strengthen the quilt nor blend with the others. This can be plainly seen in the Enlightenment project, whose main origins come from the quite different perspectives of Germany and Britain.

The British Enlightenment had three main figures: Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Bacon for his empiricism and scientific method; Newton for his science, especially in physics; and Locke for his philosophical work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics. Selected from and absorbed by other intellectual centers in France and Germany, each of these thinkers had international appeal. The greatest crosscultural hurdle at the time was religion, which dominates and defines what is called pre-modernism. Enlightenment

16

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

thinkers were already primed to move past pre-modernism into modernism—many of them were deists and did not hold the more prevalent belief of God as a personal, caring creator that can hear prayers. Instead, God was conceptualized as the great spark that started the universe, or God the great mathematician, or the designer of all living things. Naturally, the first scientists were “religious” in the sense that they were interested in studying the “great works” of God, whether living or non-living.

These early scientists found themselves opposed to traditional theism when they considered God merely a distant architect and believed they could use the human power of reason to discover the workings of God’s creation. This tension with religion and the struggle to make science socially acceptable can be seen in the 17th century in a now famous remark from Galileo: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Are facts and knowledge simply hidden in scripture to be revealed through revelation by priests, or are they waiting to be discovered by observing and reasoning about the world?

This was the big idea developing in the early Enlightenment. Supernaturalistic tradition from the pulpit was being replaced by naturalistic science from the lab. While inroads made by mechanics and chemistry created enough heat on their own, greater cultural shock occurred when scientific methods were applied to astronomy and even human beings. The re-orientation of the cosmos to the geocentric model was hard enough, but what would happen to the human spirit if we were to be analyzed down to the atom, with life itself becoming merely forces, chemistry, and plumbing?

The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason

17

And what of values? Counter-enlightenment thinkers, like 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, were concerned about the erosion of traditional values in selfsacrifice, community spirit, and duty. Science, with its idea of allowing individuals to generate knowledge, naturally led to political individualism, where the happiness of an individual is his moral right to pursue. What would happen to religious concepts such as predestination when education, science, and technology allow any person to set their own goals and create their own destiny? It is a far cry from the idea of “for King and country.” To pre-modernists past and present, the Enlightenment movement and science in general was promoting amoral, godless, arrogant, pitiless, and spiritless human life.

Immanuel Kant With that context in mind, let us look more closely at the most important Counter-Enlightenment thinker: Immanuel Kant. Recall that pro-reason intellectuals are looking to gain ground in the culture by defending realist accounts of perception, concepts, and logic. Kant, more than any other, buttressed pre-modernist ideas against the Enlightenment, laid the groundwork for continued pre-modernist thought in the form of irrationalism and idealist metaphysics in modern times, and provided the epistemological backdoor for postmodernist thought.

Kant is conventionally considered a defender of reason: he favored science, promoted consistency in ethics, and set out a regulative framework for reason and principles to guide thinking. However, Kant also (in)famously disconnected reason from reality, which decidedly places him as against realist epistemology. Kant argued that we can never

18

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

know reality “as it is.” Since our senses or instruments necessarily have a nature, each sense distorts reality into the type of information that sense produces. Human eyes “see” a reality that is different from what a cat sees, for example.

One can understand how this idea leads to the perspectivedominant paradigm paramount in postmodernism, where ultimate truth or “Truth” is impossible due to everything being a perspective, an opinion. One can trace the origins of the postmodern idea of “my truth” to Kant, since promoting one perspective over another is merely a power claim.

Kant set up metaphysics into two separate parts, which is why he is typically categorized as an idealist. He termed true, “real” reality the noumenal world (a world of ideals), and what our senses (and therefore science) are limited to he called the phenomenal world (i.e. that which is perceptible by the senses or through immediate experience). Religion, then, not reason, was the governor of the nature of the noumenal world. Reason was powerless there, severely limiting its scope to the phenomenal perceivable world, which disabled its objectivity. This idea troubled rationalists and empiricists alike, who both agreed on the importance of human reason and its need to be connected to reality to be objective so it may render Truth.

Traditionally, there were two existing arguments made to suggest our senses produce only internal or personal accounts of reality, rather than objective accounts. The first was to argue that what we reason about is only the internal sense data we receive, not the object itself. In other words, sense-perception is like an unavoidable mirage or simulation—it gets in the way of our connection to reality and does not enable us to access reality directly. The second traditional argument against the possibility of an objective

The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason

19

reality was based on the variety of individual accounts of objects due to peculiarities with individuals’ sense-perception. If one person views an object as red and another as pink, what is the “real” color? Perception then is like a subjective “taste,” and we are stuck reasoning about those subjective accounts rather than the object itself.

Kant pooled these traditional critiques into his own analysis, but also absorbed the views of the prevailing rationalist and empiricist realists. Realists argue that knowledge must be objective to be called knowledge and that reality has a nature and exists independent of human consciousness. Kant, in response, proposed a dilemma: there are only two possibilities to connect our concepts to the real objects they mean to represent, either 1) “the object alone must make the representation possible,” or 2) the reverse, where representation alone makes the object.

In the first scenario, the observer of the object has nothing to do with the process’ reality; the object merely imprints itself into our minds. The consequence of this view would mean that the equipment of the senses are receivers only—including the brain. Traditionally, this view is called naïve realism, which assumes observers are “identity-less” or without a nature. Instead, Kant argued the mind has a nature, and it must shape the knower’s awareness. Therefore, Kant embraced the second option, representation alone makes the object, effectively abandoning objectivity for subjectivity.

It also meant that ideas in logic, like necessity and universality, are not features of reality, but features we have imposed on our sense of reality. Logic is a social construct used to make reality communicable to others. This permits science to operate based on objective standards if we accept

20

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

that science will study what we observe—the phenomenal world only. As a result, science cannot find “Truth.” All we can claim to know, according to Kant, “ha[s] no independent existence outside our thoughts” since all we observe are appearances or representations. What is left of our view of the noumenal or “real” world must, then, be left to faith and religion.

Critiquing Kant Now that we have spent some time looking at Kant’s ideas and how we have arrived at some of the prevailing ideas upon which postmodernism depends, we can also present a few objections to these arguments.

One of the strongest claims of Kant and postmodernism outlined above is the idea that each of us generates a subjective reality. Our senses only access a generated, phenomenal world. In other words, awareness must be unmediated in order to be awareness of the real and the true. We might wonder, in response, why our organs of consciousness would be obstacles to the awareness of reality?

The second key argument, which did not originate from Kant, affirmed that universality (the idea of ultimate facts) and necessity (in logic, ideas can only be true or false, such as Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle) are not found in reality. Another name given to this problem was the problem of induction (the inference of a general law from particular instances), which was argued extensively by Scottish philosopher David Hume. The problem was that in creating concepts, such as the nature of a copper atom, we cannot hope to test the behavior of all the copper atoms in the universe in order to be sure we have found the “universal” characteristics of copper. Instead, we find a convergence

The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason

21

by testing a certain number and infer that it will hold for the unobserved copper out there. Thus, universality is only a creation of the human mind. The question is, can we induce certain knowledge? Hume’s essential argument is that the (limited) empirical cannot justify a universal.

These arguments would be unearthed centuries later as a pillar of postmodernism. While we can read in Kant a defense of consistency and principles, and we can certainly point to pre-modernists thinkers who denied all knowledge or had subordinated reason to faith, Kant at least places reason on a certain (phenomenal—of this world)) plane where it may operate on the basis of consistency only. Postmodernists took these arguments to the next step: consistency cannot claim any truth; it is just rules of a game. But what game are we playing? This leaves open a great deal of cultures, politics, and ways of life that must go uncriticized as right or wrong, as long as they are “consistent.”

Kant is different and is considered such an important philosopher due to the far-reaching conclusions of his ideas. A great many “skeptics” in intellectual history have raised important questions about the certainty and dependability of our senses. We might see a mirage—the fact of illusions or distortions might question if what we are seeing is true. But these types of problems do not question the basis of knowledge. Kant’s arguments do. They put reason and reality on separate planes—never to cross. Kant has been the greatest threat to what realists call the “correspondence” theory of truth, where sense data correspond to what is real. Instead, Kant argued for what became known as the “coherence” theory of truth, where truth is internal consistency only. This leaves open what package of

22

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

truths, or what logic, however internally consistent, one adheres to.

Following his death in the early 19th century, Kant’s work led to a century of dominance of German philosophy.

Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel—all major 19th century German philosophers—would be cited by 20th century French philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida, and American philosopher Rorty, but German philosophy would also continue in the influential work of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Two main post-Kantian branches emerged in the 19th century have been summarized below:

Metaphysics

Epistemology

Proponent

Hegel

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and others

Name

Hegelianism (19th century)

Irrationalism (19th century)

Philosophical Branch Focus

● Reality is deeply conflictual and absurd; ● The non-rational or irrational (feeling, instinct, and/or a leap of faith) gives us truth rather than reason

● Reality is an entirely subjective creation; ● Contradictions are built into reason and reality, thus truth is relative to time and place; ● The collective, not the individual, is the operative unit;

Key Themes

Table 3: Two main branches of post-Kantian philosophy in the 19th century

24

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

In the next chapter, we will see how reason continued its post-Kantian collapse, namely from the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was particularly inspired by Hegel.

Chapter 3. The TwentiethCentury Collapse of Reason Reason’s Collapse from Continental Philosophy From Heidegger, who was influenced by Hegel, we can observe the continuation of particularly anti-reason German philosophy. Both are particularly known for the obscurity of their prose, and Heidegger himself had an infamous relationship with the National Socialists of Germany in the 1930s. Nevertheless, Heidegger became the leading philosopher of the 20th century and influenced the later postmodern thought of Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty.

The philosophy of Heidegger is a synthesis and extension of previous German thought. Certainly, we have the influence of Kant’s anti-reason as a fundamental: words and concepts are obstacles to understanding reality or, from the influence of Hegel, what is called “Being.” This is an important concept that, in part, argued that the self and existence are not separable. The historic subject and object division was merged, but this created many peculiarities and contradictions. For example, in a Platonic sense, what is common across the Being of all beings, or what is oneness?

And why is there Being at all and not Nothing? Reason seemed to fail here and so it was discarded. If reason cannot reach an answer to why we have Being, it would seem Being is without reason and thus absurd. If there is a reason for Being, it would be outside Being, but that would mean Nothing. Either way we reach absurdity. Heidegger concluded that reason was an “invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers.”

26

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Instead, something more basic than logic and reason was required to grasp Being. Even language was suspect, developed over centuries and encompassing many qualities of logic and reason. Emotions became the default epistemological tool, adopted from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Particularly strong emotions were preferred, like boredom, but also fear and guilt. Even stronger, Heidegger writes, “In dread we are ‘in suspense’…because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us.”

Here we have the dissolution of all beings, including oneself, into a new kind of metaphysical state that Heidegger thought was fundamental to the nature of existence. In a sense, dread and its disconnectedness give us a taste of the feeling of death—of annihilation. It provides a connection to Nothingness, which was considered the center of Being. Hegel also had this idea, which now Heidegger affirmed: the Judeo-Christian concept of creation, Being out of Nothing, was right. Being and Nothing were one in the same. To reach the former, oneness, we needed to tap into the latter, Nothingness. This was later called metaphysical nihilism.

From Heidegger came the merging of two German traditions: the speculative metaphysics of Hegel and the irrationalist epistemology of Kierkegaard. Continentalists, which were dominated by the Germans, had rejected reasoning about reality and instead trumpeted speculation, will, and emotions as the useful tools henceforth. To summarize from Heidegger, ● Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality;

The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason

27

● Reason is subjective and unreliable in reaching truths about reality; ● Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be unpacked, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked; ● Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all; ● Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason; ● The entire Western tradition of philosophy— whether Platonic, Aristotelean, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.

Postmodernism would draw heavily from Heidegger, but as we will see later in the next chapter, much of the fumbled grasping for the metaphysical that is still found in the German (idealist) tradition due to religious commitments will be rejected by the atheistic postmodernists. The idea of Being and Nothing as something discoverable, as the source of contradiction we are trying to reach, will come to be rejected. Instead, to postmodernists, there is no “source;” contradictions are merely the inevitable result of using an uncritical empirical and thus conforming lens on otherwise independent phenomena.

Reason’s Collapse from American Philosophy We have reviewed the collapse of reason on the mainland of Europe, but how did this occur in Britain and North America? Much of the English-speaking world, even up to the early 20th century, honored the Enlightenment project,

28

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

keeping faithful to the goals of the scientific tradition and the Lockean society. The inroads of metaphysical Continental philosophy were slow, despite the highly religious nature of American society, and yet its Protestant slant, including in England, was enough to keep them on a practical philosophical footing. Ironically, postmodernism—even with its origins in Europe—found a far more receptive host in the 20th century North American academy whose influence now pervades American society. This is due to the collapse of analytical philosophy, or more generally, positivism; we will spend some time unraveling this surprising result.

Analytical philosophy significantly influenced the course of British and American philosophy. Developed in the 19th century, analytical philosophy emerged as a strong proponent of science—it principally argued that all ideas must be capable of scientific or logical proof. It accepted David Hume’s fact and value dichotomy (you cannot get an “ought” from an “is”), as well as Kant’s analytic/synthetic dichotomy, but tended to reject metaphysics as pure speculation. Rather than worry about the source of subjects and objects that generate experience, positivism tended to focus on organizing and explaining the flow of phenomena— things and events in the world. Into the latter parts of the 19th century, mathematics and logic were adopted to further direct the focus on inquiry. One important foothold was established by Bertrand Russell.

Out of the dominance of German philosophy for the last two centuries emerged Russell, a Brit. He became the next important figure in philosophy for the following half century, now into the 20th century. Highly productive, Russell published numerous books, many for a general audience,

The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason

29

seemingly recasting the platform, territory, and consequences of philosophy. In the final chapter of his highly popular introductory book, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Russell frames the history of philosophy as struggling with several basic questions. These, and his overall answers have been summarized below: Table 4: A terse summary of Russell’s basic points from The Problems of Philosophy Question posed by Russell

Answer

Can we prove there is an external world?

No

Can we prove that there is cause and effect?

No

Can we prove the objectivity of induction?

No Definitely Can we find an objective morality? not Conclusion: Philosophy cannot offer truth or wisdom Germany also had a circle of logical positivists, one representative being Ludwig Wittgenstein. They went a step further than Russell, declaring that the questions traditionally grappled with in philosophy to be meaningless and lacking sufficient formulation to merit an answer. In fact, the traditional branches of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, theology, and aesthetics were all improperly constituted, as if philosophy had its own field of study, like science. Instead, philosophy can only be a method, an analytical tool. Philosophy also needed a new aim: no longer could it be truth or knowledge, but it should be precisely the opposite - to make clear the problems that arise in language itself.

30

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

By the mid-20th century, many analytical philosophers— to name a few, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and W. V. O. Quine—while differing in their own positions, broadly agreed that perception was “theory-laden,” meaning that whatever theory chosen to examine something (and we must choose a theory) will inevitably alter our examination. In other words, we are stuck inside a subjective system and have no direct access to reality.

Furthermore, most of the logical positivists agreed that mathematics and logic were conventional, meaning that they had purpose not because of their consistency with reality, but because of their inherent coherence due to their definitions. For example, 2+2=4 is merely true because of the definitions of each of the numbers, not from testing this in reality. Essentially, logic and mathematics are human constructs. These analytical positions are mere symbols, are necessarily true via their definitions, and therefore, being circular, do not express any truth about reality. The Kantian disconnection with reality is evident here. In contrast, any conclusions from reality, such as the synthetic proposition “the car is white,” cannot necessarily be true, for the concepts involved, car and white, are not made equal (by the “is”) due to their definitions alone. Instead, they have been connected due to a perception of reality.

Perception, however, is contingent. Therefore, any synthetic proposition cannot necessarily or by definition be true. This is essentially Kant’s analytic/synthetic dichotomy.

And so, “truth” under logical positivism became either, 1) “cheating” or circular, when we define our terms to give us the conclusions we want, or 2) a claim about a perception, which is always contingent and thus temporary. One

The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason

31

can see how it would not take long for truth to slip into “language games” and symbolic manipulation. Upon this basis, how can science’s dependence on rigorous objectivity be sustained? Like a car out of gear, the engine of perception, when disconnected from the logic of the gears, will not result in any momentum in knowledge production. The products of logical positivism became either circular logic or temporary observations, neither of which is useful to scientists exploring a common subject.

Two alternatives emerged in logical positivism. The neo-Kantian option argued that logic is innate to us; it is therefore a natural framework, subjective but human.

However, what became more dominant is the neo-Humean idea that logic and mathematics are socio-cultural. The concepts we use, which are essentially methods of wrapping up our observations or our understandings, have been decided haphazardly over generations of use. They are nominal, meaning that they are based on whatever names we have decided to package our beliefs with. What follows from this nominalism is conceptual relativism and the resultant controversy about which relative concept was “true” for you.

One example: Mathematics and logic are true and universal merely because we have not given anything else a chance to compete with them. If a society no longer likes the consequences of a particular logical or mathematical conclusion, they might engage in community activism to change it, as would any other social convention be debated and altered.

Science would be the next victim of this relativistic unraveling. Exhibit A: Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. Science itself became an evolving, subjective enterprise. Knowledge or truth

32

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

emerged out of “paradigms,” and these paradigms change, from astrology to astronomy, for example, or from alchemy to chemistry. Truth is relative to a paradigm, an intellectual culture, or a worldview. A paradigm more or less corresponded to the values and beliefs of a culture. And since fact and value are disconnected à la Hume, it was totally arbitrary what paradigm a particular culture was currently adopting. There was no case to be made of science having any kind of advantage or superiority over other “ways of knowing,” which became a ubiquitous term.

In place of the waning pro-reason, pro-science American tradition, anti-realism became more fashionable in intellectual circles. Along these lines, Rorty in 1989 wrote that we should …ceas[e] to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest… ‘The nature of truth’ is an unprofitable topic, resembling in this respect ‘the nature of man’ and ‘the nature of God’…

Likewise, historian John Passmore in 1985 wrote of the Kuhnian era, “the Kantian revival is so widespread as scarcely to lend itself to illustration.” Now that the walls had been sapped, the Anglo-American intellectual sphere was primed to receive the next onslaught in anti-realist philosophy from Nietzsche and Heidegger.

This prologue is neatly summarized in the seminal book on the subject, Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Postmodernism is the first ruthlessly consistent statement of the consequences of rejecting reason, those consequences being

The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason

33

necessary given the history of epistemology since Kant.

Continental philosophy, up to Heidegger, provides the foundation necessary for postmodernism to metastasize.

The surrender of the advocates of reason and reality led to a demoralization of support for objective truth, which allowed the tide of skepticism and relativism to wash away the debris of the Enlightenment project. Postmodernism promised a new synthesis of traditional philosophy that was unmatched by the disorganized opposition. Postmodernism rallied the following positions: metaphysical antirealism, epistemological subjectivity, and values sourced in feelings.

The results for culture and society followed: without any foundation in truth, what basis was there for morality, values, and social order? Conservatives tended toward preservation of their traditions, but postmodernists pushed a more progressive outlook, despite not having a basis to claim this was a superior agenda over conservatism. Feelings, then, became as powerful as Truth traditionally was.

A person’s feelings were now to be unquestioned. Kierkegaard and Heidegger wrote much about dread and guilt; Marx wrote about alienation, victimization, and rage; Nietzsche, about lust for power; and Freud, our aggressive sexual urges.

Postmodernists were often split on the source of emotions, their “metaphysics” between biology and society.

Overall, however, postmodernists tended to agree that no one was in control of their emotions, instead the source was often their group memberships, whether gender, race, class, or sexuality. Even if “reason” was an available tool,

34

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

since groups have no common experience, they had nothing to reason about together. Balkanization was inevitable, power-struggle and conflict expected, and dominance and submission the end, unjust, result. We will continue to unravel the next stage for postmodernism’s incursion into politics in the next chapter.

Chapter 4. The Climate of Collectivism While the debates over metaphysics and epistemology might seem “academic” and neither of concern nor of consequence to the day-to-day lives of most people, it cannot be stressed enough that the conclusions of philosophical ideas operate quite extensively in the lives of people; they just tend to be hidden and subtle. The basic story already revealed in the preceding chapters is that Kantian skepticism about reason led to the growth of subjectivism and relativism in the modern world. In this chapter we will explore how these postmodern ideas drift into politics.

As was pointed out, subjectivity in values, meaning that there is no objective basis to value one thing over another, should open the doors for postmodernists to engage in, or permit, a variety of political programs, from the extreme left through to the extreme right. However, postmodernists in practice have tended to favor some political agendas over others. In fact, there are very few examples of postmodernists that stray from what seems like the monolithic position of far-Left politics.

All major postmodern thinkers, such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, are all on the far Left. This would also include the lesser known figures previously mentioned in Table 2. Academics, when surveyed, are known to have an overall left-wing slant when compared to the general population. However, while not all academics are progressives, it is difficult to find a postmodernist who does not advocate for left-wing politics. This suggests the idea that there is more invested in postmodern politics than the neutrality

36

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

that would seem to follow from a subjectivity of values.

Postmodernist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s remark that “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political” is illuminating: if an epistemology of objectivity and truth lends itself to a politics of domination and submission, certainly an epistemology of subjectivity and irrationality will also lend itself to another kind of human social organization.

Marx’s Counter-Enlightenment Other inconsistencies abound. Left-wing politics, such as socialism and communism, have tended to be defended on traditional modernist grounds of reason and science.

Karl Marx, the famous German economist, founded much of the territory of left-wing economics and called his politics “scientific socialism.”

Another seemingly contradictory stance of postmodernists is the rhetoric and tactics of postmodern politics. In the classrooms and boardrooms engaged by postmodern political activists, we have seen a great deal of hostility to debate, ad hominem arguments, and advocacy of the inherently authoritarian “political correctness.” We can cite several examples: (in)famously, Fish calling the opponents of affirmative action bigots and associating them with the Ku Klux Klan; Dworkin’s male-bashing to the extent of associating all penetrative sex with violence and having a “Dead Men Don’t Rape” slogan above her desk; or Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals advocating violence and deception as political tactics by. How did the far-Left strategy, which often traditionally upheld civility, tolerance, and justice, become so illiberal?

Classical Marxism argued along modernist lines, via reason and evidence, that socialism was the next logical

The Climate of Collectivism

37

political organization after capitalism. It followed two main storylines: 1. The system of capitalism is inherently exploitive.

The “capitalists” or managers of labor create a hierarchy and place themselves at the top, extracting a portion of the productivity of the laborers working under them. They also control who advances to the managerial class and who remains as labor.

Thus, the rich enslave the poor. This wealth gap can only increase, leading to the less productive use of resources and the ultimate collapse of capitalism, either due to the depletion of resources or the resolution of class conflict with the revolt of the working class.

2. Socialism, the supposed remedy of the exploitive capitalistic system, is purportedly humane due to the removal of hierarchy and the sharing of wealth. Production is equal and cooperative. This economic system will bring with it a new era of prosperity, as it lacks the over- and under-consumption of resources of capitalism.

The theory of socialism as an economic system generated and argued for in the 19th century and early 20th century would be tested in various European countries. However, over the 20th century disaster struck as the claims made of capitalism and socialism were refuted in both theory and practice. Note the importance of how these claims were made: since Marxism uses reason and evidence, as is expected in the field of economics, reason and evidence can also be used to test its claims.

38

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

One particularly strong opponent of socialism from an economic science standpoint were the free-market economists, two notable groups of the 20th century being the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek from the former group and Milton Friedman from the latter, these economists wrote extensively on the impossibility of socialism as an economic system, two of them winning Nobel Prizes. Their work led those still in support of socialism to retreat from economic arguments, the domain of science and mathematics, to the less empirical grounds of moral and political arguments.

Not only was socialism disputed if not debunked in theory, it was also found to cause disaster in practice. Looking around the world, countries that exhibit more free market or capitalistic tendencies have more productive and wealthier citizens. The rich get richer, for sure, but the poor get richer as well, making the “poor” in any Western country something of a relative concept when one examines the truly poor in the Third World (and it is no coincidence that the economic and political systems of the Third World are not liberal capitalism). While Marx predicted a collapse of capitalism, we benefit from our standpoint in history where Karl Marx could not—we have witnessed the collapse of several socialist countries over the last century. To name a few, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

We can also point to countries that have slowly moved towards freer markets, such as China and Scandinavia, which has resulted in rising middle classes. Socialistic countries continue to exist, such as some in South America, but one can always examine the immigration versus the emigration rate to see how people vote with their feet;

The Climate of Collectivism

39

people will tend to move to where they can find safety and earning opportunities. Looking across the social and economic systems of the world, it is clear that capitalism tends to correlate with human liberty and wealth, and socialism tends to correlate with a collapse to dictatorship, poverty, and often, human rights abuses. We also have many writers who have documented their plights under socialism, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Nien Cheng.

By the 1950s, Leftist intellectuals had serious doubts about the project of socialism; the slogan from Marx and Engels, “Workers of the world, unite” failed to materialize.

After the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalist countries recovered much faster after World War II. Thankfully for these intellectuals, the Soviet Union also emerged and was seemingly going strong with its commitment to humanity.

However, in 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress student and worker demonstrations, and around the same time, Nikita Khrushchev announced publicly that Joseph Stalin had exterminated tens of millions of people.

If socialism was not already a dirty word, it became one after these series of events, especially in the United States.

At this point, a devotee to socialism had two options: they either agreed with the facts and altered course, or they found a new way to sell socialism. The latter is where postmodernism came in, which is the second thesis of Hicks’s main book Explaining Postmodernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.

40

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Much of this crisis can be compared to the crisis of religion in the late 1700s. They also faced the same choice to either accept science for its facts and reason, or to double down, deny, and protect faith at all costs. Likewise, postmodernism would seem to be a response to the crisis of faith of the academic far Left. If we cannot win on this particular terrain, theoretical or practical, we need to change the terrain. The postmodern epistemology redeploys language as a rhetorical weapon rather than as a seeker of truth.

Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment Before going further, let’s revisit another figure who predated Marx and was pivotal in developing the politics of the Counter-Enlightenment. This would be the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas appear quite anti-individualist and anti-liberal when compared to the ideas of John Locke’s liberalism. Rousseau, active in the 18th century, was a contemporary of Kant and later influenced the Jacobin leaders who would head the French Revolution, which transformed into what later became known as the Reign of Terror.

Rousseau was an admirer of Sparta’s militaristic and feudal communalism, in contrast to the classical Athens that defended commerce, diversity, and the high arts. Rousseau, as can be found in the first line of his popular work Émile, found that civilization and culture corrupts human beings from their nature. And what is the foundation of civilization? Not reason, rationality, rights, justice, or science, all of which are constructs of an artificial rather than natural way of life. They cause moral degradation, he argued in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

The Climate of Collectivism

41

Rousseau believed that living without civilization, with only self-preservation as a goal, was the key to a peaceful and unselfish existence and best suited for the human race.

Unfortunately, like Eve’s apple, Reason was awakened, and all the problems in the world were born. The creation of tools led to the idea of property rights, which led to wealth inequality and poverty. Abundance and luxuries led to gluttony, greed, and waste. Even marriage and monogamous relationships might be said to have ruined the idea of the village-family or tribe where wives and children are not owned by men. Rousseau urged that reason is incompatible with compassion, for the winners in competitive civilization not only have a vested interest in preserving it, they have also acquired the power to keep it that way.

Most famously, and as can be seen as a precursor to postmodernism, Rousseau writes in Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts The sciences, letters, and arts spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.

Certainly, one can see elements here that will be later found in the arguments of postmodernists, such as Foucault as well as those of the Marxists.

Rousseau’s society was to be something between civilization and the primitive tribe. Against Aristotle who defined human being as the “rational animal,” Rousseau insisted that rationality could only be forced onto human

42

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

beings. Instead, we should allow the passions to be the natural, and morally good, guide. Religion was deeply important to wrap up the passions of the society into a “general will,” as he called it. This “will” was to be the public good, from which governments were to direct the people.

Rousseau was so adamant that he wrote in The Social Contract: “[W]hen the Prince says to him: ‘It is expedient for the State that you should die,’ he ought to die.” The basis of this was that reason causes disbelief in faith and religion, leads to disobedience, and finally results in anarchy. As Rousseau wrote, “the individual…is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body, and will.” In this moral society, the individual “coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.” To disobey the general will for an individual purpose should be seen as traitorous, and the punishment was severe. Nothing could be further from Locke’s ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, what later became the core tenets of the American revolution.

Much of Rousseau’s political ideas were put into practice in the 1789 French Revolution, particularly in the final phase, later termed the Reign of Terror. Much of the leadership of the Jacobin party, Jean-Paul Marat, Louis de SaintJust, and Maximilien Robespierre, all praised Rousseau as influential, the latter calling him the “teacher of mankind.”

Not only were the French king and queen executed by guillotine, there were mass executions of nobles, priests, and anyone who questioned the goals of the Revolution. The carnage only ended with the arrest and execution of Robespierre. But the mass slaughter did not end there; instead the void caused by an exhausted France later incited France’s

The Climate of Collectivism

43

emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1803 to engage Europe in a decade of wars.

The reaction of German intellectuals was horror, but their understanding of the crisis was not to blame Rousseau but rather to blame the Enlightenment for its anti-feudal sentiments. Napoleon was partly to blame, for he took advantage of the small countries that made up Europe at the time, ended monarchies, opened government offices staffed by citizens, formalized equality before the law, and extended property rights. The Enlightenment had grown desperate and was now imposing their ideas by the sword.

To the Germans, the Enlightenment could no longer be thought of as a disaster over the Rhine but as an occupation from which an escape was needed. In connection to the occupation of Germanic states, the poet Johann Hölderlin wrote, “Kant is the Moses of our nation.”

Themes of Collectivism From the ideas of Rousseau, collectivist thinking split into Left and Right. The general themes of both are anti-individualism, strong government, control of religion (either to promote it or suppress it), the view that education is primarily for (political) socialization, ambivalence toward science and technology, and tolerance if not deployment of group conflict, violence, and war when it serves the state.

For all their differences in the emphasis and application of these themes, collectivist Left and Right had a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, limited government, separation of church and state, education for intellectual development, and its generally optimistic outlook on peace and trade among all nations. While Left or Right collectivists might try to span a bridge between Marx and

44

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Heidegger, they never dreamed of connecting liberal thinkers like John Locke or John Stuart Mill. Several thinkers, primarily of the collectivist Right, will be summarized here for their particular place in the development of collectivism. The collectivist Left will follow in the next chapter.

Rousseau is often seen as a man of the Left, but he had a great influence on generations of German thinkers, such as Kant, Herder, Fichte, and Hegel, all of whom are generally considered men of the Right. Liberal ideas made few inroads into Germany. Kant encouraged collectivist politics by his assertion of duty and sacrifice as the purpose of life.

As he wrote in his essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, the individual “requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”

Another important figure to highlight is Johann Herder, whom some have called the “German Rousseau.” Herder agreed with Kant’s skeptical epistemology but disagreed with his more liberal views on morality being the same for all people. Herder argued that tribes, peoples, cultures, Volk were incompatible, and that each followed its own path. Essentially, he was a relativist when it came to progress. Herder is important as the roots of later nationalistic movements in central and eastern Europe.

Johann Fichte, another disciple of Kant, emerged around the defeat of Napoleon in Prussia. He presented his Addresses to the German Nation, which was meant to revive the German spirit. One of his solutions was to create a system of what he called “real German national education.” Its purpose he explains this way:

The Climate of Collectivism

45

…the means of salvation which I promise to indicate consists in the fashioning of an entirely new self, which may have existed before perhaps in individuals as an exception, but never as a universal and national self, and in the education of the nation.

This system inspired the Prussian mass public-schooling systems now almost ubiquitously adopted across the world—including the United States in the early 20th century. However, Fichte, like other German thinkers, held the German ethnicity with such an esteem to believe that his form of “true education” was meant only for Germans.

And finally, Hegel held his own views politically, views that were somewhat peculiar to his German colleagues.

Metaphysically, Hegel called what is real the Absolute, which was made up of processes natural to existence. Our lives, then, were a tiny part of this grand movement, and support of this process was our only moral imperative.

Thus, governments were also to be aligned. The Absolute, or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea was inevitable and to attempt to thwart it was not only futile, but destructive to oneself as it went against one’s nature. In realizing the Absolute, Hegel writes, …this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state … One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.

Freedom, for Hegel, was obeying the laws of the state that conform to the path of the Absolute. Most, upon trying to understand Hegel, would find such a definition of freedom lacking in any semblance to what is normally meant

46

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

by the term. Rather than ends in themselves, Hegel argued that “individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end.… [He] must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” What Hegel called “world-history” was this path toward the Absolute, and even morality may be ignored when a “world-historical individual” rises to power and makes progress toward the “One Aim.” Overall, we observe in these four figures not only a distaste for liberalism, but also for the conservative agenda of returning to feudal societies. Instead, the collectivist Right’s plan was progressive rather than conservative, pushing forward toward a kind of society with governments strong enough to subordinate its citizens so that they may be sacrificed to goals of national “progress.”

Left versus Right in the 20th Century Both collectivists on the Left and Right had a favorable stance on socialism: it meant a progressive agenda toward public works and a strong community ready to work, fight, and die for the needs of the state. Much hinged on the success of the collectivist Right in the Great War, what was later called World War I. Moeller van den Bruck, an avid anti-Marxist, wrote, “We have lost the war against the West.

Socialism has lost it against Liberalism.”

Germany suffered a devastating military and spiritual defeat. In The Decline of the West, author Oswald Spengler, a man of the German Right, described the decadence found in the liberal West due to its love of democracy, capitalism, and technological progress. Spengler further rose to intellectual life after writing Prussianism and Socialism in 1920.

His strategy was to steer away from international socialism, the strategy of the Left, and to urge a national socialist

The Climate of Collectivism

47

focus. Other German thinkers, such as Werner Sombart and Moeller, argued similarly that “every people has its own socialism … international socialism does not exist.”

And so, shortly after World War I, Germany formed its National Socialist German Workers party, soon to be headed by Adolf Hitler. Moeller would actually predict this, writing in 1923, Socialism begins where Marxism ends. German socialism is called to play a part in the spiritual and intellectual history of mankind by purging itself of every trace of liberalism. … This New Socialism must be the foundation of Germany’s Third Empire.

Hitler would speak with Moeller as a colleague at an event, calling him the “Rousseau of the New Germany.”

Instructive to the rise of National Socialism in Germany is Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s director of propaganda. Goebbels had a Ph.D. in philology and was strongly influenced by the work of Spengler. He had a strong voice in the party, particularly in constructing its socialist economic platforms.

Goebbels hated money, calling it the “source of all evil.” He regularly wrote letters to the Communists of Germany, urging them to join them against their common enemy, capitalism, to “liberate the whole working class.” The intellectual climate was so strong that German university students and professors at this time, filled with the German intellectual tradition of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spengler, commonly wore the Nazi armbands through the 1920s and 1930s. There was also anger surrounding the Great Depression, many believing it was caused by

48

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

capitalism, and that collectivists on the Left and Right would finally set things right.

Unfortunately for the National Socialists and the collectivist Right, the liberal West not only survived the Great Depression, but it was victorious in World War II. The losers were discredited again, physically, morally, and spiritually, and Germany, again in ruins, was occupied and split by the West and the collectivist Left, the Soviets, for nearly half a century. By the second half of the twentieth century, the intellectual battle was now between liberal capitalism and Left socialism.

Chapter 5. The Crisis of Socialism Recall the two basic claims of classical Marxism, one economic and one moral: 1. Capitalism operates on exploitation of labor and must eventually collapse. Socialism, operating on communal labor and property, is the just system.

2. Morally, capitalism is based on self-interest, which necessitates competition over cooperation, leading to alienation and conflict. Socialism, operating on self-sacrifice, altruism, and thus cooperation, leads only to justice and peace.

While capitalism survives for a time, Marxists thought it would necessarily be unsustainable due to rising class conflict. Diminishing resources and class disparity would render enough pressure to initiate a revolution to socialism.

Marxists waited a long time. Not only were predictions failing, but capitalist countries seemed to be doing quite well. Net immigration to capitalist countries was also a problem; the “land of opportunity” slogan seemed so appealing. Marxist theory suggested that not only would zerosum economics squeeze out the middle-class, plunging most of them back into the working class, it should also slowly eliminate the competitive wealthy until only a handful control the whole of society. Instead, the opposite happened. Middle classes across the world increased in proportion, shrinking the working classes. Wealth for all classes, including the working class, increased. A trend of upward class mobility—“impossible” said the Marxists—was a real thing. It was plain that the proletariat was not going to

50

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

revolt under these conditions. Some thought that since a revolution was not going to happen, perhaps they just needed to promote socialism by slow evolution—at the ballot box. This was adopted by the Fabians in England.

There was less patience on the European mainland; democratic socialism in the early 20th century was not working. This ideal of grassroots, bottom-up rallying of the people to bring on socialism did not work for Germany in the 1920s, as Georg Lukács and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school were reluctant to conclude. Marxism seemed in need of modification; the social revolution required leadership and could not be left to workers to self-organize. Ironically, many of the radical Left came to agree with what the collectivist Right had been advocating all along: the need of an aristocracy, a protected, intellectual class that would engage in the work needed to bring on socialism. In other words, 20th century socialism, while remaining for the people, no longer had the patience to be by the people. The Great Depression gave national socialists an excellent bargaining chip with the already industrialized workforces of Italy and Germany. “Elect us, we will put you back to work, and we will jail the capitalists who caused the Depression…” or so the narrative was to be.

Something quite different happened in Russia as it lacked industrialization at this time. Its revolution in 1917 ultimately created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, initially led by Vladimir Lenin. Prior to the revolution, Russia was an agrarian, feudal society. Capitalism had not come to industrialize the workforce. Classical Marxism suggested that a period of capitalism was necessary before evolving to socialism, but Russian revolutionaries did not want to wait. Instead, since the nation lacked an

The Crisis of Socialism

51

organized workforce, they created an elite to organize and ultimately force the nation from feudalism directly to socialism. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the czarist monarchy was abolished, and the tsar and his family were executed. Lenin would call the new socialist government a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” At the same time and in a similar situation, onlooker Mao Zedong in the 1920s approved of the transition of Russia and sought to model it in his own country. However, with China even more politically disorganized and impoverished, Mao resisted industrialization and sought to build a socialist state while remaining largely agrarian. Mao, like Lenin, would also label his government as “The People’s Republic”; socialists insist they are always working in the people’s interest.

World War II became an important turning point: rather than united, the collectivists, by a historic miscalculation, fought each other to exhaustion and allowed the liberal capitalists another victory. Now with the collectivist Right defeated, the collectivist Left would have their chance to go toe-to-toe with the liberal capitalists. And so became the intellectual and political division that led to what we now call the liberal West—the United States, Japan, England and its satellite nations, and the western half of Europe—versus the collectivist East—the USSR including eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, and parts of Africa.

Unfortunately, over the experiments of the mid-20th century, it seemed Marxism was wrong about which economic system was unsustainable. It was not capitalism that ruptured, but socialism. Despite being guided by a philosophy that emphasized workers, productivity, and sacrifice to meet the needs of society, the Soviet Union’s agrarian and

52

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

industrial sectors struggled to grow over a half century.

Considerable amounts of land, labor, and wealth were centrally managed, wasted, and redirected to serve the military and not the people. A prime example was Holodomor, the famine in the Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s; historians still quibble over whether it was poor economic planning or also an intentional genocide. Scarcity also tends to promote survival habits, where people hoard and are less productive overall. Emigration (which basically amounted to flight) from the USSR also stifled its prospects and raised its infamy as the brutalities of Joseph Stalin, at this time only rumors, gave the nation a disgraceful repute around the world.

In 1956, two blows were dealt to the USSR. A revolt in Hungary was crushed with tanks and soldiers, killing Hungarian workers and students in the streets, followed by public executions of others who were suspected to have been involved. As news and horrific images were broadcast around the world, the USSR was cast as a brutal nation not living up to its socialistic ideals of peace and prosperity. The second blow provided the same effect. That same year, a speech by now-chairman Khrushchev, leader of the Communist Party, was leaked.

The speech revealed the rumors about Stalin to be true: during his reign, he had millions of USSR “comrades” killed, tortured, or sent to slave labor camps in Siberia.

Much of the world recoiled as the gulags of communism came to light and the flagship of socialism was found guilty of crimes against humanity. Many socialist sympathizers were in shock. How could socialism have descended to this?

Some thought perhaps Khrushchev was a traitor, a stooge of the West sabotaging the great project of socialism. Over

The Crisis of Socialism

53

the decades, however, more of the tragedies under Stalin were revealed and could not be ignored. Firsthand accounts of eight years in the gulags were published in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, first translated to English in 1973.

While socialist intellectuals were now dealing with schisms within their political ideology, the revelations did not end there. China’s “Great Leap Forward,” orchestrated

by Mao, was revealed in the 1960s to have been the cause of thirty million deaths. Socialist intellectuals shifted in response. Stalin and Mao had the wrong approach. Instead, Cuban dictator Castro was the ideal. Then it shifted again to Vietnam, then Cambodia, then Albania in the 1970s, then Nicaragua in the 1980s. However, the track record of socialism never recovered; human rights abuses seem to follow socialism wherever it goes. Previously, while socialism had been working on its failures to achieve prosperity, it was now buried in a moral crisis. It could not possibly justify the mass slaughter of human beings as “necessary to the state.”

Table 5: Deaths from Democide1 Compared to Deaths from International War, 1900–1987 Killed by Own Government Killed by International War 1 2

Democratic

Authoritarian

Totalitarian

2 million

29 million

138 million2

4.4 million

15.3 million

14.4 million

“Democide” is defined as “killing of one’s own people.”

Communist governments account for 110 million of these deaths.

Source: Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. Transaction, 1994.

54

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Socialism’s Response to Failure—A Change in Ethical Standard The only way for the collectivist Left to proceed was to take a more radical approach. First, socialist intellectuals distanced themselves from the eyesores: National Socialism in Germany under Hitler was not socialism, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Stalin was not socialism. Neither were Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, nor Mao’s China. Socialism had never really been practiced correctly anywhere in the world. “On paper,” it was argued, socialism works; it is nice, friendly, and based on kindergarten ethics—all we ask of people is to share or be sent to the naughty chair.

Having absolved socialism of any wrongdoing through the actions of careless nations, the Left began a new strategy of increased criticism of capitalism. Previously, the main critique was that capitalism does not provide for the needs of its people. However, by the 1950s not only were socialist nations having that exact problem, capitalist nations provided for citizen’s needs so well that they became overweight, hedonistic, and too comfortable to be interested in a revolution. Thus, the target of criticism needed to change, and it did: from need to equality.

The German social democrats took the lead in developing a new strategy. They would no longer criticize all business as exploitive and greedy. Instead, using their new ideal of equality, they would only criticize what they now called “big” business, corporations. Alongside this, socialists began applauding and seeking support of what was now called “small” business. These businesses were small and local,

The Crisis of Socialism

55

and unable to compete with the larger, often multinational, players. Equality meant fairness across the marketplace.

Another change was to the meaning of poverty. Before, poverty meant not being able to meet basic needs; it was an absolute term. Every human being needs a few basic things, like food and shelter. With the new strategy, however, poverty was to become a relative term. Popularized by Michael Harrington in the United States in the 1960s, it was not a malnourished capitalist population that might rebel, but one agitated by envy of the wealthy. A psychological bug was thus to be placed in the ear of every working American: having a white picket fence, the American dream, was no longer acceptable; instead, it was to have the same wealth as your neighbor, i.e., equality. Similarly, some Leftist intellectuals also turned to agitate women and ethnic minorities about their lack of parity in wealth to men of European descent.

The environment became another avenue to attack capitalism. Socialists ignored environmental conditions in socialist nations and attempted to turn the attention of their listeners toward the environments in capitalist nations.

Rooted in Marx’s concepts of exploitation and alienation, the immense wealth of capitalism could only have been sourced from strip mining the Earth, figuratively and literally. Wealth had a cost, it was argued, and the environment was one of them. Industry, once a symbol of working-class socialism, was now a sin against the planet.

The essential point was that economic production and environmental health were incompatible, and for one to gain, the other had to lose. This is where concepts like “carbon footprint” emerged, which implies that each of us, by our very existence, puts a cost on the planet’s well-being.

56

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Previously, Marxist socialism had lauded technological mastery over nature, as was symbolized by the Soviet hammer and sickle, but now, egalitarian critics argued that we cannot put human interests above the interests of the planet. All life was also given an equal moral footing, so a human and an aardvark had equal value. This came to be called “deep ecology” and essentially removed the humanitarian elements from Marx and inserted Heidegger’s antihumanist values. High-tech socialism was replaced by lowtech egalitarianism.

Wealth was also attacked, led by the soon-to-be leading philosopher of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse. Previously, wealth, at least in a moderate amount, was considered necessary to any nation and its people. Now that capitalism was shown to be the superior producer of wealth, that very ability to be productive needed to be considered evil because a comfortable populace is distracted from their historical duty to transcend capitalism and make progress toward socialism. In other words, wealth was now framed as a malicious distraction that capitalism uses to put its populace to sleep. Joe six-pack became the “one-dimensional man,” from the title of one of Marcuse’s popular books.

Socialism, concluded Marcuse, needs to watch for capitalism’s technocracy to inevitably repress human nature until the masses burst out into irrationality (Freud would likely have also suggested this). These irrationalities, then, were to be encouraged in order to break the system. Socialists should seek out the marginalized, the outcasts, including poor but intellectually eager students, those least fogged by the luxurious haze of capitalism, and “emancipate” them into activists. As a result—and it is hard to see this as purely a coincidence—a flood of Marxist socialist

The Crisis of Socialism

57

terrorist groups formed in the 1960s, including the Black Panthers in the United States and the FLQ in Canada. The New Left was looking to take advantage of the turmoil in the 1960s. After the death of Marxist icon Che Guevara in 1967, student demonstrations, particularly in France, came to their peak in 1968. But by the mid-1970s, much of the destruction had ended—the New Left seemed to have lost its steam.

When Marcuse was asked in 1974 to comment on the winding down of the movement, he replied, “I don’t think it’s dead, and it will resurrect in the universities.” And it did, but under a new intellectual banner composed of namely Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty. But why these four?

Upon examining their biographies, all were within seven years of age from one another, all studied philosophy, and all were strongly committed to Left politics. They also experienced the crises of socialism in the 1950s and 1960s and watched the New Left fail in the 1970s. These four philosophers rose to leadership to signal a new direction for the academic Left, which became postmodernism. Having reviewed its philosophical history, we can now soberly examine postmodernism, the focus of our final chapter.

On the following page, one can find a summary of socialist strategies, including its many paths, some of which have failed and others that have not yet resolved themselves.

Chart 2: The Evolution of Socialist Strategies (Or: From Marx to the Neo-Rousseauians)

Chapter 6. Postmodern Strategy Having toured the history of the collectivist Left and all its schisms, how did postmodernism eventually take hold as its guiding framework with its skeptical and relativist epistemology? Was it out of desperation, since all other avenues had failed, or was it by design and conviction that postmodernism be the logical and necessary end?

The status of language became a strategic focus. The epistemological position one advances necessarily renders consequences for language, not only in its content, but also its methods. In postmodernism, language merely expresses opinion and persuasion rather than facts and logical argument. This is why deconstruction, a concept of postmodernism, is an endless process of unpacking what words mean, for there is no bottom or foundation to meaning. To the realist modernist, words are concepts that are tied to reality in some fashion, either by a perception about reality or another concept. Rhetoric becomes a method of best revealing the cognitive connections one makes to reality, i.e., the facts.

Rorty articulated the postmodern position on language.

In The Contingency of Language, he wrote, “the world does not tell us what language games to play” and as a result, “human languages are human creations.” Rorty is actually the least extreme of the postmodernists; he acknowledges that language can be used in resolving social conflict, although he insists, as many postmodernists have adopted from the collectivist Right, that we may only be able to socially interact empathically with our own ethnicity, and “we must, in practice, privilege our own group.” Most postmodernists,

60

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

however, see language more negatively, as basically a weapon used to claim power and be deployed in the service of progress.

However, having lost confidence in a step-by-step guide to progress as outlined by Marx, faith became desperately needed to uphold the dream of socialist progress. In this fashion, the postmodern strategy evolved to share affinities with religion. Both had been exhausted when battling in the arena of reason, and so the arena itself needed to be abolished. Once we remove reason and reality, a foundation in which to find the superior argument, nothing is left but opinion, and here postmodernism has an equal footing and can advance its agenda by any means necessary.

Succinctly put, and now returning to the first thesis given by Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, postmodernism is a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith, because now it is precisely faith that is needed to continue believing in socialism. However, as we saw in the history of the far Left, faith would eventually be replaced by realpolitik as the postmodern strategy. Therefore we might term this movement a Reverse Thrasymacheanism, a revival of the Sophists of Ancient Greece. If society is now reduced to merely competing wills, words are the tool of power struggles for dominance. However, recall that Thrasymachus famously argued in Plato’s Republic that justice is the interest of the stronger. Postmodernists today, perhaps due to the influence of two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of socialist theory, simply argue the opposite, that justice is the interest of the weaker. And like the Sophists’ view that rhetoric was merely a tool to play the debating game, postmodernism, in the words of Lentricchia, “seeks not to find

Postmodern Strategy

61

the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”

However, even with this ideal that postmodernists sell, a number of contradictions (which they don’t deny) arise that make this whole thing suspect: ● If all truth is relative, why is postmodernism the right one? ● If all cultures are equal and respectable, why is Western culture uniquely bad? ● If values are subjective, why are sexism and racism bad? ● If technology and wealth are bad, why is it unfair if some have more than others? ● If tolerance is good and dominance is bad, why should we adopt postmodern political correctness?

Wouldn’t that be a new intolerance and a new dominance?

We can see a pattern here: promote subjectivism and relativism in theory but promote dogmatic absolutism in practice. We might ask, what are postmodernists more invested in? The means, relativism and subjectivism, come what may, or the ends, absolute socialism by any means necessary? Or perhaps both are part of postmodernism, but psychologically, the contradictions do not matter to supporters?

The first option seems impossible since their political advocacy is so uniform. Instead, what should follow from the premises of relativism in epistemology is relativism in politics.

What about the second option? Recall from Jameson, “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.” We might

62

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

understand the Machiavellian twist given to postmodernism with any means being available to them. But this would make postmodernism not relativistic at all; it would be profoundly devoted to realpolitik—politics, by any means necessary—including deceit, manipulation, and violence. And precisely these means have been used by collectivists world-wide. As an example, deconstruction is merely a means to accomplish the end.

Encountering resistance, one can simply analyze the words used in the resistance, plunge the conversation down into epistemology, and require the opposition to prove that knowledge is possible, and perception connects to reality.

Most may have trouble doing this, and so the postmodernist achieves some breathing room. Postmodernists have rarely attempted to affirm their own conclusions; instead, they rely on placing doubt on their own critics. They play offense, and when in defense, they hide the ball.

They attack the Western canon of philosophy and literature as “white male” biased or Eurocentric and dismiss it out of hand to avoid competing with it. Or they use science, such as Einstein’s Relativity Theory, quantum mechanics, chaos mathematics, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to cast doubt on reality. On that note, a humorous (and revealing) event occurred when physicist Alan Sokal deceived editors and published a bogus, intentionally nonsensical article in the far-Left academic journal, Social Text. He argued that the Enlightenment was thoroughly discredited, and that quantum physics supported far-Left politics. After it was published, he later admitted that his article was a parody of postmodern criticism of science, embarrassing the editors for seemingly bypassing the arguments in his article for the favorable political conclusions they offered.

Postmodern Strategy

63

Returning to our options for explaining the means and ends of postmodernism, a third option remains. There is certainly a kind of pessimism one can see in postmodernism, and perhaps this third option, leaving in the contradictions, is a psychological projection that identifies with some of postmodernism’s intellectual base. Contradiction can be likened to psychological destruction, and while it would affect most who hold logical consistency as a value, to those without a care in the world or who are desperate for the outcome, contradictions do not matter. Nihilism, then, is a likely affliction of some postmodernists, and as we have pointed out, it may explain why 20th century violence and human depravity is so often part of the consequences of collectivist politics on both the Left and Right. As well captured in the writings of Nietzsche in Daybreak, When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do they explain angrily, “May the whole world perish!” This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is “If I cannot have something, no one can have anything, no one is to be anything!

Nietzsche is another key to understanding postmodernism. He developed the concept of ressentiment in his Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals. He devised diagnoses of master and slave morality. Master morality was the approach to life of the strong, the able, and the confident, having much of the qualities of the Enlightenment: command of nature, predictive abilities, knowledge, and the like.

Slave morality was the approach to life of the weak, the humble, the passive. The slaves become envious of the strong, but they must rationalize their plight. They cannot

64

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

simply hate themselves and their inabilities; they must save themselves internally from guilt by blaming the outside.

They must decide what they do is good: being patient, obedient, poor, etc.; and everything the strong do is evil: success, assertiveness, pride, independence, wealth, etc. Eventually the weak will want to lash out, but they cannot physically. Instead, they become clever with words.

What can be likened to this characterization is the historical failures of socialism. Weakened, they have lashed out, and having failed at that, now have the urge to destroy.

If we cannot have socialism, we will have nothing; nothing will reign. Perhaps this sounds radical, but one can sample postmodernists and find precisely this ressentiment.

In philosophy: ● Man is “an invention of recent date” that will soon “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” — Foucault ● God is dead — Hegel and Nietzsche ● “Life is absurd” — Sartre Or in art: ● A urinal as a piece of artwork — Marcel Duchamp ● Kunst ist Scheisse — Dadaism (Art is shit) ● Painting overtop another artist’s work and calling that achievement — Rauschenberg Certainly, more examples exist but overall, it appears that the quest for socialism has been exhausted, and so deployed has been the postmodern strategy of destruction.

We might compare this to Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello.

The rogue Iago defeats the mind and heart of Othello using

Postmodern Strategy

65

only words. Nietzsche wrote on this precise strategy in the Genealogy of Morals: …when would they [the men of ressentiment] achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said to one another: “it is disgraceful to be fortunate”.

The insidiousness of it all is that Iago does not win the girl in the end; destroying Othello was enough.

In a final remark, what can be done to reach beyond postmodernism and enter a post-postmodernism? It would seem that, for all the great ideas of the Enlightenment, certain inconsistencies and holes in the argument have been allowed to persist over time. These serve as the hovels for postmodernists to dig and undermine the foundations of the Enlightenment. Only with a rediscovery and defense of the premises of the Enlightenment - a knowable reality, reason as the only means of knowledge, commitment to personal happiness, and respect for the same, equal rights of all people - do we have the chance to continue the Enlightenment project.

Its postmodern opponents, past and present, do not seek to enhance this project through critique, for that would make a contribution; instead, postmodernists intend only to move past the Enlightenment but not to the “null” that would seem the logical next step of anti-realism and subjectivism. We do see them use the postmodern “null” as

66

Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

a method when attacking free speech, for instance, by deplatforming speakers and silencing debate. However, through the “null,” one can detect a pervasive political advocacy of collectivism, often but not exclusively of the farLeft variety, that have failed in practice every time. Experiments in socialism continue to cost human lives and perpetuate world-wide misery, especially outside the West. Instead, we might seek to rediscover, build upon, and spread across the world the Enlightenment values that prolong human life and enrich human happiness.

Our Work

Publications: From graphic novels to pocket guides, our books are available in multiple formats and languages.

Social Media: The Atlas Society has the largest and most engaged following on all social media platforms, engaging our audience with memes, video shorts, and weekly Instagram takeovers.

Videos: From animation to comedic features to music videos, our productions include Draw My Life videos, animated book trailers, and animated graphic novel series.

Educational Resources: With online courses, weekly live podcasts, webinars, campus speaking tours, and campus activism kits, we educate students of all ages.

Student Conferences: Our annual Galt’s Gulch conference welcomes hundreds of young people from around the world to engage with our faculty of scholars and take the next step in their journey of advanced intellectual engagement.

Commentaries: In addition to educational resources, our website offers commentaries on a wide range of political, cultural, and personal topics.

The Atlas Society is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. For additional information, or to support our work, please contact us via email (tas@atlassociety.org) or via our website www.atlassociety.org.