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A Thinker’s Guide to Postmodernism by Steven Yates
There’s an old saying – maybe I came up with it myself years ago – that if you want to find out how much junk you really have: move. You’ll have to transport it all at once, and if you don’t know how much junk you have, you’ll soon find out. I did, having recently relocated across two states to undertake some new projects. Moving can be a hassle, but it has an upside: something might turn up you’d completely forgotten about. For a writer, this can mean finding an item – perhaps just a collection of notes, perhaps more – that you’d set aside and then simply dropped down the memory hole. Sometimes, when you move, a bona fide gem can surface amidst the debris. That recently happened to me, as I uncovered a set of notes I’d taken long ago for an article on postmodernism, alongside the religion of diversity one of the reigning orthodoxies of today’s academy. It’s easy to get bogged down just taking notes on postmodernism, especially if you’re trying to make sense of the primary sources. The subject is rather mysterious for most people. For good reason. Postmodernists, one quickly learns, are not exactly clear about what they are doing. Consider this, from one of the founders of the movement:
See what I mean? That is from a French writer named Jean-Francois Lyotard, from his book The Postmodern Condition (published in French in 1979), p. 81. If sentences were made to be eaten, that one would give you heartburn. A huge quantity of academic product is worse than that, to the point of unintelligibility, which is why most of it gathers dust in university libraries unread. Lyotard is also the author of a collection of essays called The Postmodern Explained. If there is anything for certain, it is that a book entitled The Postmodern Explained, probably doesn’t. But some sense can be made of what postmodernism is all about, in a way that pulls the movement down from its academic Mt. Olympus. Let us try. Cutting through all the jargon, the neologisms, the double-talk and a lot of hideously bad writing, what do postmodernists really believe? Do they believe anything we can pin down? Is there anything to postmodernism, or is it just another racket, like Keynesian economics or Kinseyan sex-ed? Let’s take these one at a time. Here is a catalogue – culled from those old notes – of what postmodernists seem to believe. I offer them advisedly; postmodernists are slippery as eels, and if they excel at anything it is in weaseling their way out of assuming responsibility for having assumed or taken for granted these kinds of propositions. I trust I’ll be forgiven for not illustrating every one of them with a lavish set of quotations or footnotes. Surely you don’t want to wade through a darkened swamp of linguistic murkiness beyond what you just saw. So here we go. 1. "There are no absolute truths" – which may be expressed as, "There are no absolutes," or "The search for knowledge yields no final and lasting results," or any of a number of variations on this theme. Of course, this is hardly a new idea. Nietzsche seems to have believed something much like it over a hundred years ago. So, apparently, did many of those in a school of ancient Greek philosophy called the Sophists (from whom we derive the word sophistry). The idea is logically self-destructive, though. It presents itself as an absolute truth, or a final and lasting result. In other words, it contradicts itself. Besides, it is surely false in science, life and morality. In science, there is absolute zero, for example. This is a fairly important concept – the coldest anything can be. Modern physics and chemistry require it, even if experimenters have never actually chilled anything to that temperature. In life, if you’re run over by a car you’re absolutely dead. Absolutes in morality seem to bother people more, though, than absolutes in physics. However, I’m sure most readers would agree that causing pain or suffering to an innocent person with no greater good in mind (e.g., treating an illness with a shot) is absolutely wrong, and that only a sociopath of some kind would fail to understand that. 2. "Claims to truth are just concealed impositions of authority masking social structures of domination." A few years ago I had the dubious pleasure of a long correspondence with a professor of public administration at a major university who repeated, like a mantra, that "Truth is determined by authority." For a long time the statement had me baffled. If you’ll notice, it’s caught in the same contradiction: surely the professor wanted to claim that his own statement was true – but in the context of our "relationship" it couldn’t be true because he had no authority over me. (He also disavowed any relationship to the postmodernist movement – although he continued to parrot views that were indistinguishable from its heroes.) Postmodernists, having abandoned truth, are obsessed by power. They take their cues from classical and cultural Marxism, maintaining that certain groups (usually white heterosexual males) maintain or are maintained in "structures of domination" over other groups (everyone else). Postmodernists, like Marx before them, draw sweeping generalizations about how different groups live in different "universes." For Marx, of course, the difference was between bourgeoisie and proletariat. For postmodernists, the disconnect can fall along the lines of race, or gender, or sexual preference, or some combination of these. This brings us to 3. 3. "Everything is relative to history and culture." This idea, which controls the mindsets of the multiculturalists and their ilk, isn’t new, either. It, too, goes back to the ancient Greeks. It also contradicts itself. If everything is relative to history and culture, then the truth or knowledge of the statement that everything is relative to history and culture is again itself relative to history and culture – in this case, the "history and culture" of the postmodernist movement, whatever that might be (academic culture?). Relativism of this sort is destroyed by its own internal logic. 4. "We can’t know anything for certain." When I hear something like this, I want to respond with, Who is this we, anyway? There’s a definite collectivism surrounding postmodernism, a collectivism about truth and knowledge as well as in politics and economics – one that ties in closely with their beliefs about history and culture. Postmodernists really believe that there is nothing but consensus. They claim not to be able to make sense about truth as correspondence with facts of reality. More recent postmodernists extend their exegeses to science, saying that scientific truths are invented and not discovered. Of course, a consensus can change. What was "true" yesterday can therefore be "false" today. Nothing is certain. Except, again, the statement that nothing is certain. Again we’ve hit a blank wall of contradiction. (Besides, while our theories about gravity may well be inventions, gravity itself is certainly not. Anyone who thinks otherwise is hereby invited to test the hypothesis by stepping off the roof of my building – it’s only perhaps 20 feet down.) 5. "An individual’s beliefs result from psychological, social or chemical conditioning." Aside from the contradiction problem here, too, such statements have been the source of huge amounts of mischief. Much of what passes for education in today’s government schools, going back at least as far as John Dewey, is based on the idea that children are just products of conditioning and its companion idea that the causes of their behavior can be changed, making them into good little socialists. The basic idea goes back to a man named Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), sometimes thought of as the "father of experimental psychology." Wundt was a complete materialist who saw human beings as nothing more than sophisticated animals to be studied and manipulated in laboratories no differently than one would study white mice. While some look to Nietzsche as standing at the origins of the postmodernist movement, the school of thought that began with Wundt surely contributed to it as well, for the Wundtian approach to the human person did much to remove the concept of individual responsibility from the intellectual scene. 6. "The human essence is its collectivity." I am here paraphrasing something Karl Marx once said. A firm belief – almost as if thought to be a true belief (goddess forbid!) – of this sort lies at the heart of all postmodernist theorizing about knowledge as rooted in human social life. It helps to keep in mind that most postmodernists are willing to endorse the cultural Marxist thesis that humanity comes divided into two large groups, oppressors (straight white Christian males) and victims (everyone else). Hence the close ties between postmodernism and radical feminism, or with identity-politics generally, and with that ragtag bunch that can’t accept that the Cold War is over and they lost. I once had the strangest conversation with an English professor about my age (the sort who gets hired in today’s universities) who, upon learning that I reject the group-identity politics at the core of, say, affirmative action ideology, asked me, "You’re white, you’re a male, you’re a heterosexual [did he know this for certain?]. When you subtract these, what’s left?" Subtract them? Whatever was he talking about? What was standing in front of him, attempting to converse with him, was an acting person, an individual who happened to be white, male, etc. There is, of course, no room for the autonomous individual in the postmodernist bestiary. 7. "We aren’t really saying that there are no absolutes, or that truth is relative to history and culture, just that the search to define ‘true’ has ended in failure." In that case, I beg to differ; we’ve found some useful things to say about the notion – the problem is, none of them support the postmodernists’ political goals of more socialism and more so-called diversity. There is, of course, the postmodernist’s final fallback stance: if you believe all that self-contradiction stuff it just shows how you’ve privileged your white, male, heterosexist, Eurocentrist, Aristotelian logic. Note first this use of privileged as a verb instead of an adjective – the most common literary tic among postmodernist writers. Note second that postmodernists who have made such claims, such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith of the infamous English Department at Duke University (who once wrote a tedious article entitled "Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge," published in an otherwise obscure journal called Common Knowledge) are utterly unable to present anything resembling a clear alternative to "white, male, heterosexist, Eurocentrist, Aristotelian logic." Barbara Herrnstein Smith gave it the old college try, but her references to such things as "applicability, connectability, stability" are presented with no further explanation, and so fall flat, utterly unconvincing. In what ways do these overturn Aristotelian logic? She doesn’t tell us – probably because she doesn’t know. Postmodernism can be looked at as an intellectual movement, or as a phenomenon of contemporary academia. As an intellectual movement, it looks suspiciously like the product of minds chronically out of focus. The ideas themselves aren’t new, as we’ve noted. Most can be traced to the ancient Greeks – or to Marx or to Nietzsche (white males all, I cannot resist pointing out). Occasionally postmodernism borrows from American pragmatism – usually John Dewey’s version of it, because Dewey’s philosophy emphasizes flux and change (with an eye to changing children for social engineering purposes, of course). Many of the ideas, moreover, suffer from terminal confusions that are repeated from author to author. Take for example the claim, popular among postmodernists, that "We have no God’s Eye point of view." I would have to agree, because we are not God! But so what? It doesn’t follow that our own point of view is invalid. Such claims are often bound up with the postmodernist rejection of such ideals as objectivity and rationality. Objectivity in particular, the postmodernist considers an illusion. But when we inspect writers such as the above-mentioned Herrnstein Smith it is clear that they are confusing objectivity with a quite different notion, omniscience. Being objective just means basing your beliefs on the relevant facts in your scope of awareness, as well as being flexible and aware of your own limitations. Being objective doesn’t mean basing one’s belief on all the facts, whatever that might mean, just relevant facts. I imagine there is some fact of the matter as to how many blades of grass there are on the lawn beside my apartment. No one would care, because the information wouldn’t be of use to anyone. But the point is, there is some number that could, in principle, be discovered. But it wouldn’t be a fact relevant to anything, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for someone to count them. We base our beliefs on relevant facts because we can use them to improve knowledge or achieve our ends. Our scope of awareness, moreover, changes as we discover new relevant facts. Here is where the flexibility and awareness of our limits comes in. We aren’t infallible, so reasonable thinkers build fallibility into their concept of objectivity. This concept is much richer and more flexible than most of today’s intellectuals give it credit for being (this includes Randians!). Omniscience, of course, means total knowledge – of the sort Christians attribute to God. Of course we don’t have this, and we never will – not in this life, anyway. But we do have partial knowledge of most things, including things postmodernists call "social constructions." We have lots and lots of partial knowledge, in fact. We don’t know if our current physical theories about gravitation are complete. We might see Einstein revised or replaced somewhere down the road. But this doesn’t mean that gravity isn’t a real phenomenon we experience everyday – especially when we step on the scale and don’t like what we see! Likewise, few of us can say we understand electricity. But we all flip switches and know not to stick our fingers into wall sockets. At a more basic level, how many of us can give a complete and accurate account of how our car’s engine works? But we all drive everyday. We could multiply these specifics at length. When held up to the light of common horse sense, philosophical skepticism is silly. But postmodernism is rooted in a deeply skeptical, almost cynical view of our logical and cognitive abilities. In sum, the postmodernist complaint seems to be that (as they might put it) reality is not completely transparent: we can’t just look at the world and achieve universal knowledge of it right off the bat. Now there are some truths I believe we are as certain about as we ever need to be – that five plus seven equals twelve, that electricity powers lightbulbs and computers, that hot stoves burn, that it rained yesterday, that capitalism is superior to socialism, that causing the innocent to suffer for no good reason is wrong, and many others besides. And then there are other truths that are going to be very, very hard to find out – the precise nature of quarks, for example, or what really happens with regard to gravitation at the event horizon of a black hole. But no one except postmodernists is losing much sleep over such things, or concluding from this that we don’t have considerable knowledge in our day-to-day world or even in "ordinary" science. As a sociological phenomenon of contemporary academia, postmodernism looks very much like the product of a privileged intellectual class that doesn’t want the rest of us to see that the emperor (or empress) has no clothes. So they surround ideas, many of them centuries old, in trappings of unintelligible prose, all portrayed in the excitement of conferences where they announce how diverse their faculties now are. Many Ivy League universities have been dominated by this sort of thing for a number of years now, which is a good reason – it seems to me – for prospective students to steer clear of those places. Most state-sponsored public universities are following suit – because what the "upper-tier" colleges and universities do, the "lower-tier" ones try to imitate. The hostile job market in academe also helps postmodernism. When there are hundreds of applicants for every tenure-track job in some cases, hiring committees can pretty much do what they want (within the limits of the religion of diversity, of course). So they tend to hire intellectual clones of themselves. Nonconformists learn early on that they are not welcome, that their services are not required. And so what has helped the triumph of postmodernism in today’s university environment is not intellectual superiority in a "marketplace of ideas" but the equivalent of inbreeding. (There are colleges that are exceptions to this, of course, but they are relatively few in number.) But what this means is that postmodernism, despite all the attention it has received, is really a racket. When you look for substance, there is no "there" there: as a postmodernist might put it. A Gary North article published here not too long ago explored in some detail additional causes of academia generally becoming a racket – many of these have to do with the fact that the whole structure of higher education in America is outmoded. Most of it just isn’t needed anymore. Serious education can be delivered by correspondence or over the Internet, and done so much more cheaply – without the overhead required by operating on a huge, sprawling campus. Cyber-education is looking more and more like the wave of the future, as institutions like the University of Phoenix which delivers nearly all its education online enroll tens of thousands of students. In the immortal words of Michael Doonesbury, there are still a few bugs in the system, but one thing is assured: the technology of delivery is going to improve. Only accreditation, employed by the established institutions with the heavy hand of government support, prevents the collapse of this system in the face of changing technology and the desires of students who want a real education. Some might look back over all this and wonder what the fuss is about. Isn’t postmodernism an academic movement that is, well, academic – in the pejorative sense in which one says, "it’s an academic matter," meaning pointless? If only this were the case. The fact is, a postmodernist mindset permeates Western culture today. It is evident in all the hypersensitivity – a fear many people have of defending their own deepest convictions lest they hurt someone’s feelings, or "offend" someone. Few people are willing to assert their beliefs as true – lest they offend someone, or be derided as "judgmental" or "authoritarian"! Just the other day at a meeting I listened to a speaker state her reasons for not using the word Easter – Easter is a distinctively Christian holiday, of course, and she feared she might offend any Muslims or Buddhists that might be present. This woman was a professed Christian. She is not an academic, and I would not classify her as a radical leftist or even outside the mainstream in her views. But she was afraid to assert them as if they were true, and therefore worth asserting as superior to their competitors. This is not uncommon; a subtle postmodernism has crept into the official scripts of numerous Christian denominations. It has also affected the workplace, where it threatens to compromise important goals. One of my current contracts involves technical writing and editing for a cancer-prevention research network. Cancer prevention is a laudable goal, because too many people die needlessly from the various forms of this disease. But at another meeting just recently I listened to a speaker regale the audience with claims that insufficient diversity and insufficient "cultural sensitivity" were interfering with cancer prevention efforts. Naturally, he dragged the Confederate flag into his rant. It may be true enough that blacks don’t trust white doctors or clinicians; but might this not be the fault of those who have spent the last 50 years erecting a near-insurmountable cultural divide between the races? Such efforts are not going to achieve worthy goals when diversity and sensitivity become the overriding factors. The postmodernist mindset is partially responsible for this, to the extent that diversity and sensitivity are more important than truth and the conditions of effective action. Bill Clinton was arguably our first postmodernist president – someone for whom "truth" was entirely fluid. The result was that he could tell us in one State of the Union speech that "the era of big government is over" while continuing to sign executive orders and enact policies that expanded the size and scope of government. (Or think of his, "It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is" – not that the Lewinsky episode the media was trumpeting was more important than on what they kept carefully under the wraps: their hero’s selling of nuclear secrets to the Chinese Communists to help finance his re-election campaign.) Under Clinton’s watch we found ourselves buried under an avalanche of double-speak and official falsehoods: about foreign policy, about the economy, about education. By the late 1990s, in particular, it is fair to say we were living in a government-media-PC–created fantasy world. George W. Bush and the neocons, instead of reversing course, have picked up essentially where Clinton left off. Bush has expanded the size and scope of the federal government more than Clinton did. He has repudiated very little of the Clintonian agenda. The neocon worldview is closer to postmodernism than I think they’d care to admit. Ask the neocons what, in the spirit of conservatism, they are attempting to conserve, and you’ll get the same blank stares of noncomprehension as I got from the English professor above when I discussed the individual person. So, in other words, yes, this matters. It isn’t an academic game. Ideas do have consequences when they are carried from educational institutions into the rest of society. The effect of postmodernism on politics has been the abandonment of truth, including moral truth, so that power gets the last word – as it is doing today in our government’s present and prospective interventions in the Middle East. Once you’ve abandoned truth, you feel free to plan, and to carry out those plans, as if there were no constraints such as those of either economics or the desires of indigenous peoples to rule themselves. I cannot begin to discuss the effects of postmodernism on popular culture, from movies to music to art and fiction, and so on down the line. We’d be here all night and all day. How do we combat the effects of postmodernism? I’d say that we have our work cut out for us. Fortunately, the common horse-sense many people carry with them through life – if it hasn’t been "educated" out of them in government schools – saves them from the worst excesses of the postmodernist mindset. For the rest, a detailed study of basic logic might help. But that’s another article. April 19, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Steven
Yates [
