Postmodernism Part 2

trying to explain how we got from modernism or the philosophy of the enlightenment to the postmodern predicament and the first hypothesis i was sketching involved putting essentially epistemology at the fore and then tracing the developments of epistemology primarily over the course of 200 years so the idea is that what you end up with is a kind of a dead end of skepticism which engenders a subjectivism which then engenders a relativism and since relativism is a key part of the post-modern strategy this seems like a natural fit so then i posed a problem for that explanation the problem was that all post-modernists to a man and woman are socialist and fairly far left socialist and that's a problem because if you would start from subjectivism you would expect people to be making commitments all over the map instead what we find is the commitments are narrowly directed to one part of the political spectrum and so there's got to be another factor here to explain this now another part of the problem that i left you with was that socialism has traditionally been ex defended on modernist grounds the claim was that socialism was provable by the evidence by the logic so what you have then somehow is a shift a major shift in strategy from modernist epistemological groundings for socialism to socialism being part of this highly relativistic postmodern strategy so the question is why is this the case all right i did my homework actually a long time ago so i'll just plunge in here since socialism was put forth on modernist grounds this meant that it made in effect a number of core assertions or key propositions that it thought would be provable by evidence and logic and i've got a slide here that includes the four of them if you ask socialists to defend socialism they'll typically offer two strands of argument one is a more moral strand they will argue a pair of theses one that capitalism is deeply immoral right and then there are a number of reasons why it's immoral it's exploitative the rich get rich off the back of the poor they enslave them it's war-like as part of its imperialistic mission and so forth socialism by contrast is humane it's peaceful everybody gets a share or everybody shares everyone is cooperative as opposed to the brutal competition that's characteristic of capitalism so that's the first two the economic wing of argument is that capitalism ultimately is unproductive it's doing pretty good so far but because of its internal contradictions and problems it will ultimately collapse it will sow the seeds of its own destruction socialist economies by contrast will be more productive and they will usher in a new era of prosperity now this then means that socialism has made some definite theses that can then be tested against the evidence and given uh logical scrutiny the problem then is that every single one of these claims has been extensively refuted both in theory and in practice we've had over 100 years of socialist argumentation several socialist experiments and in each case they reached dismal failure and it's brutal from at least from our perspective how thoroughly socialism has been discredited in theory if you focus on the free market economists people like mises hayek and friedman have made the case they've shown how markets are more efficient and they've shown conversely how socialist command economies are bound to fail necessarily they have to distinguished socialists such as robert heilbrunner have conceded in print that that debate is over and that mises and hayek won in theory the political debate is a little more up for grabs but the leading thesis i think at least on my reading is that some form of liberalism is the leading contender that if you're going to protect human rights in some broad form you've got to have some form of liberalism whether it's a more conservative version or a more communitarian version or a more libertarian version that's where the debate is it's all shifted to there the empirical evidence has been much harder on socialism than the theoretical debate economically in practice every single socialist country has failed and failed dismally and in practice every country that is by and large capitalists has become prosperous and increasingly prosperous and there's no end in sight here politically in practice every single capitalistic country has a good record on human rights issues respecting rights and freedoms by and large making it possible for people to put together meaningful fruitful lives socialism has time and time again proved to be more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history every socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and starts killing people on an unprecedented scale every single one produces dissident writers like alexander solzhenitsyn and nian chang who document from a first-person perspective or first-hand perspective what exactly goes on now if you have that handout the green one from yesterday there's got one piece of uh empirical data yeah the green one okay on the the back down at the bottom with the second table so political scientist named rj rummel who has done a lot of work in the trenches trying to come up with statistics that would empirically ground or not the socialist games and so on and what you find is in two fronts if you can compare the liberal democratic countries on the record of peacefulness versus war likeness and you can compare um human rights records that's the other one house groping for you can compare how much liberal dramatic your democratic countries protect their own people and look after them and leave them free versus at the other end kill them right and not make it possible for them to lead fruitful lives and if you just go through um this one here this one here is the one that scares me a lot in democratic countries more people have been killed by war than killed by their own government authoritarian governments the numbers are still actually they reverse the other way right if twice as many people killed by the government as killed in international wars and into totalitarian nations the numbers are just horrifying and so in here you've got of those 138 million you'd have the 6 million in the holocaust killed by the nazis but that's kind of small potatoes compared to stalin compared to mao and so on it's interesting that the vietnam war for example if you look at those statistics which was pretty nasty i think it was about 1.2 million people were killed during the war on both sides but in the immediate eight year period after the war ended the vietnamese government killed two million so war was better for the vietnamese than peace okay now these statistics are at least as objectivists and people in the free market side of the debate in the liberal side of the debate we suspect that those statistics are going to be there when the data comes in and so they come in and we say well yeah of course that's what we expect that's terrible but that's that's the way it is what i am emphasizing these points for is to try to get us to imagine what kind of a psychological impact the sum total of this refutation and theory and practice in politics and economics must have had on a socialist a true believer socialist by the 1960s there had been over 100 years of argumentation in economics and in politics and the socialists could sense that they were losing and by the 1960s it was clear that the great socialist experiments were failing nastily so put yourself in the shoes of a smart more or less open to the evidence socialist and you're confronted with all this data how do you react you've got a deep commitment to socialism you feel that it's true you want it to be true you've pinned all of your dreams of a peaceful and a prosperous society on socialism and all of your hopes for curing any ills that you see in current society now this is a moment of truth for anyone who has experienced the agony of a deeply cherished hypothesis run aground on the rocks of reality what do you do do you abandon your theory and go with the facts or do you find or try to find a way to maintain your theory and your belief in it there's a historically parallel example that i alluded to earlier there last yesterday and i want to draw a parallel here i think in the 1960s the academic left was facing the same dilemma that religious thinkers were thinking or facing in the 1700s the late 1700s in both cases the evidence was overwhelmingly against them during the enlightenment religions natural theology arguments were widely seen as being full of holes and science was rapidly filling the gap it was giving naturalistic and opposite explanations for the kinds of things that religion had traditionally explained religion was again in danger of being laughed out of intellectual debate by the 1960s the left's arguments for the fruitfulness and decency of socialism were failing in theory and practice and capitalism was rapidly increasing everyone's standard of living and showing itself respectful of human freedoms by the late 1700s religious thinkers had a choice except the evidence and logic as the ultimate court of appeals and thereby reject their deeply cherished religious ideals or and here's the strategy you can reject the idea that logic and evidence are the ultimate court of appeal i had to deny knowledge wrote kant in the critique in order to make room for faith faith writes kierkegaard in fear and trembling requires the crucifixion of reason and so he proceeded to do that and glorify the irrational the left thinkers of the 1960s face the same choice confronted by the continuing flourishing of capitalism and the continued poverty and brutality they decided like kant to limit reason to try to crucify it and so heidegger coming along an exalting feeling over reason is a godsend kuhn's theory laden paradigms quine's pragmatic and internalist account of language and logic do the same thing so the idea here is that the dominance in the academy of skeptical and irrationalist epistemologies provides the academic left with a new strategy confronted by ruthless logic harsh evidence they have a solution that's only logic and evidence logic and evidence are subjective you can't really prove anything feelings are deeper than logic and my feelings say socialism so that's my second hypothesis about the origins of post-modernism and i call it the kierkegaardian hypothesis that socialism is the crisis of sorry post-modernism is the crisis of faith of the academic left its epistemology justifies taking a personal leap of faith and continuing to believe your socialist ideals alright so so far what i've done is two things i'm trying to account for socialism subjectivism and relativism on the one hand and it's monolithic left-wing politics on the other and saying that there's a deep connection between the two now this is correct putting those two together what we get with or out of this is what i call reverse thrasymachianism yeah that's the syllables okay now the illusion here right is philosophers playing games the connection is to the sophist thrasymachus in plato's republic all right and some post-modernist actually many of them see a big part of their project is rehabilitating this office who've been out of favor for a couple of thousand years and this makes perfectly good sense now suppose after doing some philosophy you come to believe truly in subjectivism and relativism as this office do accordingly you come to believe that reason is derivative will and desire rule society as a battle of competing wills words are just tools in the power struggle for dominance all's fair in love and war that's of course what this office argued 2400 years ago the only difference then between the sophists and the post-modernists is whose side the postmodernists are on thirsimicus in book one of the republic is kind of a representative of a fairly crude second generation's office and what we find in him is subjectivist and relativistic arguments marshalled in support of the claim that justice is simply the interests of the the stronger coming after 2000 years of christianity 200 years of socialism simply reverse that subjectivism and relativism are true except they're on the side of the weaker and historically oppressed justice contrary to thrasymachus then is the interest of the weaker i like this hypothesis because i made it up but i think it still leaves something out and i think what it leaves out is some psychological components of post-modernism the first part of the problem is that i find it hard to believe that the leap of faith goes down very far for most modernist most post-modernists the average post-modernist is a very clever person has a phd in the humanities somewhere so i find it tough to believe that or to make psychologically real for myself the kind of turning off of one's mind that would be necessary to make and sustain that leap of faith maybe i need to have an expanded understanding of psychology but i think there's something else going on here let me give you some examples some fairly clear contradictions in the post-modernist assertions that any person who is smart and clever has to be aware of on the one hand all truth is relative on the other post-modernism tells it like it really is on the one hand all cultures are equally deserving of respect on the other western culture is uniquely destructive and bad values are subjective but sexism and racism are really evil technology is bad and destructive it's unfair that some people have more technology than others tolerance is good and dominance is bad but when we speaking as a postmodernist are in power we're as politically correct as hell now there's a common pattern here what you have is subjectivism and relativism in one breath dogmatic absolutism in the next okay now postmodernists are not stupid so we can't just say they don't know that this contradiction exists they're aware of the contradictions right and we're pointing them out to them all the time right all of the critics now of course you can say kind of dismissingly well that's just a logical contradiction right and you've got a lot of stuff i took off that will comfort you in that but i think it's one thing to say that okay and it's another thing to sustain it psychologically inside so it makes me wonder which side then of the contradiction is really deepest for a post-modernism is it the subjectivism around relativism or is it the dogmatic absolutism is that they really believe in the relativism and occasionally lapse into absolutism or is the absolutism deepest and the relativism is some sort of a tactical cover or other now here's three examples this time it's blatant clashes between theory post-modernist theory and historical fact post-modernists will say that the rate west is deeply racist but they know very well that the west ended slavery for the first time and that it's only in places where western ideals are making inroads that racism is on the defensive they will say that the west is deeply sexist but they know very well that western women were the first to get the vote contractual rights and that they have opportunities that most of the women in the world are still without they will say that the western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members subjugating them getting rich off them but they know very well that the poor in the west are far far richer than poor people in other countries both in terms of material assets and in terms of opportunities to improve themselves so there's something else going on here definitely i'm going to argue that most postmodernists don't really believe much of what they say that the word games the accusations that much of the use of anger and rage that is characteristic of their style is not a matter of using words to state things that they think are true but rather of using words as weapons against an enemy that you still hope to destroy think of the use post-modernists will sometimes use of science for example you find fairly regularly einstein's relativity theory that shows everything's relative right quantum mechanics shows that we can't know anything right chaos mathematics shows that the world is irrational girdles incompleteness theorem right we've heard of all of these things now these are all cited as proving the post-modernist epistemology but it's fairly clear especially when you speak to people who enunciate these claims hey you've got a graduate student in english literature okay or some equivalent they don't know the science okay but they are citing the science now there's a fun incident uh alan sobel a physicist and social text which is a post-modernist journal and he wrote an article showing that all of the recent discoveries in physics prove inexorably that post-modernism is true submitted it accepted published and it was all nonsense he just wrote it to show that the post modernists don't know anything about science and that they will just prove anything now the reaction or they'll just say anything okay if it seems so the reaction of the editors clearly shows this they were not arguing oh no no we think that this interpretation of science is true right they knew they had been caught out in a con game so it can't be that they are publishing these words because they think they're true they're using the words as a rhetorical weapon truth is not the issue here all right so we've got three options that we're trying i'm going to try out to explain the contradiction between the relativism on the one hand in post-modernism and the absolutist pc politics first option we've got is that the relativism is the deepest part and the absolutist politics is secondary you could say you know philosophers post-modernists will preach relativism but particular individuals they have their own particular agenda and that's what they assert absolutely the second option is to say that the absolutist politics is the deepest and the relativism is a tactic that's put on in order to advance those politics and how that would work we can get into the third option is that both the relativism and the absolutism do in fact exist in the post-modernist mind and the contradiction just does not bother them psychologically i'm going to rule out the first one as a possibility the relativism can't be the deepest thing simply because the politics is so uniform i think that argument shows that post-modernism is first a political movement sorry it's a political movement that has only recently come to relativistic arguments so let's try the second option the post-modernism is first about politics and only secondarily about relative epistemology so i'm going to try out the idea that the post-modernists are not relativists at all that the relativism is part of a political strategy a kind of a machiavellian real politic thrown in to throw the opposition off track all right suppose you're at a bar you're arguing politics right with a fellow student you can't believe it but you seem to be losing a debate you keep getting back into corners you find yourself then saying things like well it's all a matter of opinion it's just semantics now what's the purpose of saying that in that context well it's to get the guy off your back right to give yourself some breathing space if your opponent accepts that everything is a matter of opinion but it's all just semantics for example then you're seeming to have lost the argument doesn't much matter right you're just using words in a different way than you were on the other hand if he doesn't accept that everything is just semantics or that it's all a matter of opinion then he has the rather daunting strategy of proving that not everything is a matter of semantics and just opinion so his attention is diverted into doing some epistemology and so then he's got a really difficult task ahead of him all right suppose he takes it on and i don't suppose he's taking the semantic argument suppose he's doing a pretty good job on the semantics argument well then you can just say well what about perceptual illusions okay and then he's often running on that one for a while now meanwhile what this has done is got yourself out of hot water got some breathing space and it has diverted him from in fact going in for the kill on your politics now let's make the connection to socialism's current state socialism currently is in disarray it's feeling beat up on by history and its opponents but rather than believe that the battle against capitalism is really lost you could simply go underground do whatever it takes to throw the enemy off guard and divert them from in effect going in for the kill on socialism but if evidence of evidence and logic aren't on your side then your only weapons are rhetorical and political manipulation and in here relativist arguments are going to be very useful because they cause connections right in people who are modernist who believe that there are such things as universal truths and so forth and so they then are diverted into the epistemology they go off and write long books about relativism and why it's false and pernicious and so forth but in the meantime while they are doing that they're not attacking your politics they're not defending their own politics and so they're leaving the field open for you to regroup and come back again later frederick jameson whom i mentioned earlier he's a major postmodernist literary cricket a critic who's famous for having said did i say something funny okay everything is in the last analysis political now this strikes me as deeply machiavellian as a statement of a willingness to use any weapon rhetorical epistemological political to achieve one's ends if so a postmodernist doesn't have to believe the relativism in order to use it as a tactic it works to destabilize the opposition and the end justifies the means relativism then on this interpretation is post-modernism's big lie it's a pretense really they believe left politics absolutely and they're just buying time while they're regrouping now here's an example so i didn't just make this up kate ellis is a radical gender feminist ellis as she writes in stories without endings believes that sexism is objectively and absolutely evil affirmative action is objectively good capitalism and sexism go hand in hand achieving gender equality requires the overthrowing of existing society but she has a problem she says when she tries to teach her students these themes her students think like liberal capitalists they think in terms of equality of opportunity of judging everyone by the same standards of removing the artificial barriers that women have faced they think that by personal effort and ambition they can overcome most obstacles and achieve success this means to her that her students have bought into the whole liberal capitalist framework that she thinks is dead wrong so ellis writes she will enlist deconstruction as a weapon against those old-fashioned enlightenment beliefs if she can first undermine their belief in the superiority of capitalism of western values the idea that people make or break themselves their core values will be destabilized pushing relativism she finds helps achieve this and once their enlightenment beliefs are hollowed out by relativistic arguments she can then again turn absolutist and fill the void with politically correct principles now a familiar analogy here may help i'm proposing that post-modernists are no more relativistic than creationists are creationists in their battles against evolution post-modernists wearing their post or multiculturalist garb will say all cultures are evil are equal not evil but they are just like creationists who say that all they want is equal time for creation and evolution creationists will sometimes say things like both creationism and evolution are equally scientific or they will say both are equally based on faith do they creationists really think that well hell no they're opposed to evolution they are convinced that it's wrong and that it's evil and if they were in power they would suppress it however in the short term as a tactic since they're on the losing side right now they will push for intellectual egalitarianism and they will argue that nobody knows the absolute truth the same holds for the postmodernists they say they want equal respect for all cultures but really in the long run what they want to do is suppress the western one i think this machiavellian interpretation explains why relativistic arguments are arrayed against the western great books canon if your deepest goals are political you always have a huge obstacle to confront the powerful books written by brilliant minds on the other side of the debate and there are always lots of them for example in literature there's a huge body of staggeringly wonderful novels plays epic poems and not very much of it supports socialism a lot of it presents very compelling analyses of the human condition from opposed perspectives in law another place where post-modernism is very strong the constitution and the whole body of common law precedent provides a very powerful obstacle to many socialist agendas so if you're a left-wing graduate student or a left-wing professor in literature or law you've got two choices you can take on those opposing traditions have your students read the great books and read the great decisions and argue with them and about them in your classes now that's very hard work and it's also risky because they might come to believe the wrong thing or you can define or try to find a way to dismiss the whole tradition so that you can teach the books that fit your politics if you're looking for shortcuts or if you have a sneaking suspicion that your side won't fare very well in the debate deconstruction is seducing deconstruction allows you to dismiss whole literary and legal traditions as built upon sexist or racist or otherwise exploitative assumptions that way you can claim justification for setting them aside now suppose you're making this argument do you really have to believe that shakespeare was a sexist or that hawthorne was a secret puritan or that melville was a technological imperialist no you just make those arguments you rid yourself of an obstacle and then you don't have to read the challenging books you don't have to explore opposing perspectives and you don't have to have arguments against them all right that's the machiavellian explanation post-modernism is not so much a leap of faith for the academic left but a political strategy that uses but does not believe relativism one final darker psychological twist to add i have not yet accounted for the nastiness the obsession with darkness and destruction perversion that is characteristic of much post-modernist writing in older socialist writing you can often see signs of resentment envy anger exalting in the destruction that the socialist revolution will bring how those capitalists will finally get what's coming to them with post-modernism the negative emotionalism is often more extreme the sheer love of deconstruction the chronic deployment of crude ad hominem argument in my reading of the whole history of the western tradition these are unprecedented stanley fish calling all opponents of affirmative action bigots lumping them in with the ku klux klan andrea dworkins male bashing in the form of calling all heterosexual males rapists the rhetoric behind it is harsh okay or at least behind the emotion uh there seems behind the rhetoric there seems to be strongly felt negative emotion racism and sexism are obviously the current hot issues so we might expect overheated language in debating them but the same recuperation is leveled against historical figures all of those bad dead white european males so if you are reading deconstructions of great authors like shakespeare you don't find things like you know shakespeare really is great and it's kind of sad that i have to point out this element of sexism in him it's kind of a gleeful dismissing of all of shakespeare because he's got these sexist elements in them so i want to try to capture this psychological component as well okay and i find that for me what is most illuminating is nietzsche's concept of resonte mall horizontal mall in the french is close to the english resentment but it's got kind of a more curdled bitterness you know it's more seething and poisoned and bottled up for a long time that's race onto mom we're trying to project this psychological state i kind of like the idea of using nietzsche here and analyzing the post-modernists because he's one of the heroes of post-modernism they cite him for his perspectivalism and epistemology his use of the enigmatic and loosely structured aphoristic form instead of the more scientific treatise form his psychological acuteness in unmasking various guises which is core to the deconstruction methodology i want to use nature against the postmodernists for a change nietzsche uses the concept of resolve in the context of developing his famous account of master and slave morality and beyond good and evil most famously and more systematically in the genealogy of morals master morality for nietzsche is the morality of the vigorous life-loving strong it's the morality of those who love adventure delight in creativity in their own sense of purposefulness and assertiveness slave morality is the morality of the weak the humble those who feel weak victimized afraid to venture forth into the big bad world weaklings are the chronically passive largely because they are afraid of the strong as a result the weak feel frustrated they can't get what they want out of life they become envious of the strong and they also secretly start to hate themselves for be being so cowardly and weak but no one can live thinking that he or she is deeply hateful and so the weak invent a rationalization a rationalization that tells them they are the good and the moral because they are weak humble passive patience is a virtue so they have to wait a long time before they ever get to something what they want so patience is a virtue obedience is a virtue they can't do their own will they have to obey so make it a virtue humility and so is being on the side of the weak and the downtrodden people just like you and so of course the opposites of those things must be the evil aggressiveness pride independence being physically and materially successful does it sound familiar sure but of course nietzsche says it's a rationalization and a smart weakling is never quite going to convince himself of it and that will do damage inside meanwhile the strong will be laughing at him and that will do damage inside and the strong and rich will carry on getting stronger and richer and enjoying life and seeing that will do more damage inside eventually the smart weakling will feel such a combination of self-loathing and envy of his enemies that he will need to lash out he will feel the urge to hurt in any way he can his hated enemy but of course he can't risk direct physical confrontation he's a weakling his only weapons are words now in our time the capitalists are the strong the exuberant the active for a while in the past century socialists could believe that the revolution was coming that woe would come to them that are rich and blessed would be the poor but that hope has been dashed cruelly capitalism now seems like a case of twice two makes four unlike dostoyevsky's underground man it's easy to see that the most intelligent socialists would just hate that fact socialism is the loser and if the socialists know that they will hate that fact that fact they will hate the winners for having won and they will hate themselves for having picked the losing side hate as a chronic condition leads to the urge to destroy but again your only weapons are words how can you use words to destroy i think the whole idea of deconstruction comes out of this post-modernism is populated by large numbers of people who like the idea of deconstructing other people's work it's the opposite of constructing something of your own now consider parallel examples from the world of visual art i think the visual art world was a little ahead of the post-modernist this century asked to submit something for display at the art institute of chicago marcel duchamp sends a urinal which is then displayed this makes a statement about art art is something you piss on or there's the painter de kooning's version of the mona lisa a reproduction he makes of loner leonard leonardo's masterpiece with a cartoonish mustache added now that too makes a statement here's an achievement i can't hope to equal and so i'll turn it into a joke in fact destroy it so you become a bully and a thug not because it destroys something bad but just because it feels good to wreck something so if words are your weapons now and you want to destroy the achievements of western civilization especially the enlightenment how do you do it well consider a more personal case if you hate someone and you want to hurt him hit him where it counts do you want to hurt a man who loves his children and hates child molesters what would be the worst thing you could say about such a guy well accuse him publicly of child molesting or better yet spread sneaky rumors that he's a child molester do you want to hurt a woman who takes pride in her independence spread through the gossip grapevine that she married the man she did because he's wealthy now the truth or the falsity here of the rumors doesn't matter and whether you believe them yourself doesn't matter and whether the people you believe them or tell them to really believe them doesn't matter they get out there and they do their damage what matters is that you score a direct hit in the psyche of your enemy your target person you know that the accusations and the rumors are going to cause some tremors even if they come to nothing and you get that wonderfully dark glow inside of knowing that you did it right and they might just come to something after all now my best example of this psychology comes from the deadest and whitest of the dead white european males and that's shakespeare think of yago and othello now here i think shakespeare nailed this psychology centuries ago long before the postmodernist what we've got is yago just hates othello but he couldn't hope to defeat him in open confrontation so how best to destroy him well hit him where it hurts most his passion for desdemona hint that she's been sleeping around spread subtle lies and innuendo raise a doubt in othello's mind about the most beautiful thing in his life and let that doubt work like a slow poison now like the uh postmodernist iago's only words or weapons were words the only difference between the post-modernists and iago is that the post-modernists are hardly subtle now let's bring it back to then the western tradition the western tradition it prides itself on its commitment to equality justice open-mindedness making opportunity available to all the west is proud full of itself confident and it knows that it's the wave of the future this is unbearable to someone who is totally invested in an opposite and failed outlook and so that pride is what you want to destroy your best bet then to is to attack the west's sense of its own moral worth attack it as racist and sexist then as inherently dogmatic and cruelly exploitative undermine it at the core the words don't have to be true in order to do their damage and so i don't think it's accidental that postmodernism has launched the kinds of attacks on the core values of the west and it's done so knowing full well that the accusations it's making are not true it's a psychological compulsion in some cases and so that allows you to hold the contradiction you can be an absolutist into your assertions and you can assert the relativism and it just doesn't matter as long as it's harming someone your enemy that's fine that's the final explanation or my final hypothesis here and i call it the nihilist explanation for obvious reasons i think some postmodernists the worst of them in many ways are individuals of deep resolute psychologically that the combination of alienation bitterness envy and rage leads them to lashing out with an intent to destroy any aspect of culture that seems to them to be the opposite all right now i was going to bring a slide but i forgot so let me uh kind of summarize the whole thing in a little flow chart i think it starts here we'll use marx as a name with socialism socialism is the deepest part socialism goes along until the middle part of the 20th century and then it reaches a crisis in parallel what's going on in epistemology starting with kant is a development that leads the middle part of the 20th century to some sort of relativism and subjectivism okay the left thinkers at this point confronting their crisis are looking for a way out and so what they do is they integrate this and you get a little aha phone nominate let's put these two together and then at this point in fact the philosophy is done and what you then have is three possible routes to explore depending on what your psychological preferences are going to be the first option is the kierkegaardian option if you want to maintain your belief in socialism as a article of faith against all of the evidence this relativism and subjectivism will do that for you so this will justify the leap of faith for you personally continuing to believe in the socialism if you need a new strategy argumentative rhetorical strategy in order to try to continue the battle against capitalism then what you will do is adopt a machiavellian strategy this means that you will continue to believe in your left-wing politics you won't necessarily believe the relativism but you will employ it as a political tactic against capitalism and then finally if this crisis is legitimate and deeply felt then what you will have is just an urge to destroy capitalism not because you're ultimately thinking socialism is going to win not necessarily that you personally believe it anymore but what you then have is just a straight nihilism here so that's my argument i haven't argued today that post-modernism is false okay or yesterday this has mostly been intellectual history okay and i wouldn't argue that any of the issues that it raises can be set aside the issues of skepticism realism versus anti-realism the relationship between reason and emotion the dimensions of individualism and collectivism and human nature all of these are ongoing debates in the intellectual community and they should continue to be so what i think my argument shows is that postmodernism that collection of ideas is a function of left-wing politics post-modernism is a rhetorical strategy developed by the left's deepest thinkers in response to the felt crisis of the old left it's a movement that was set by the the agenda was set by the deepest thinkers and it's being carried out in a variety of intellectual fronts literary theory education theory legal theory and so on and i think on all of those affronts especially the epistemological front and the political front the battles have to be engaged in all of their various dimensions the post-modernist philosophy is the death knell of everything the enlightenment stands for it took centuries of philosophy to overturn feudalism and make the enlightenment possible and philosophical battles are never over forever and so the enlightenment's philosophical tradition needs constant rejuvenation in order to maintain its successes it's worth pausing here i think to for a moment just to consider exactly what's at stake what the enlightenment achieved and what post-modernism is rejecting and here's a list of the enlightenment's successes science both in the explosion of knowledge that science has created and in the conceptual idea of there being a scientific method that you can apply self-consciously engineering the systematic creation of new technologies medicine from anesthetic to antiseptic to invasive surgery to antibiotics to x-rays and so on and so on business the marshalling of capital on a large scale the development of financial markets the international network of businesses the increased number and variety of career opportunities if you just undergraduates worry about getting a job how many career opportunities do you have now compared to 600 years ago free markets are an enlightenment product democratic government constitutionalism the end of slavery the diminishment and almost ending of the subordination of women the very idea that progress is possible and the liberating feeling of optimism that comes with believing in progress the exponentially rising wealth the major increases in the available leisure time that we all enjoy a more than doubling of average life expectancy near universal literacy the explosion in the arts just in the sheer amount of painting novel writing poetry writing sculpture and music that's being created the development of new art forms like the movie now i think that the philosophy that underlies all of that is worth saving but it needs constant saving enlightenment philosophy was not completed it did not develop a satisfactory realist epistemology and it did not develop an individualistic ethic those were the things that left it vulnerable those were the things at the fundamental level post-modernism attacking the reason and the individualism the themes of post-modernism are not new they've always been a minority tradition in western intellectual life western culture in my reading of it is uniquely self-conscious and it often has doubts and second thoughts about its core values and it is rich and strong enough to afford intellectuals who articulate those doubts many of those thinkers are deeply alienated from their cultures rousseau most famously marks to a large extent nietzsche in some respects and with more justification but what's different about post-modernism now is that it is the dominant academic tradition in the humanities and it's in a position to do serious damage more serious damage so the question then is how do we go about defeating it the task of professional philosophers is to deal with all of post-modernism's components to develop the technical arguments needed to respond to post-modernism comprehensively from metaphysics and epistemology through ethics and political theory but there's a division of labor here in two ways professional philosophy is a very small though foundational part of the academy and so there's a huge amount of work that philosophically informed academics in other fields do they pick up the debate as it applies to history to law to literary criticism to educational theory to the practice of science the other division of labor is between those inside and outside the academy the academy again is a small very small the foundational part of a whole culture and there's a huge amount of cultural work that is done by informed motivated and committed individuals outside the academy a culture is maintained by what is decided over the dinner table on school boards in local state and federal politics on museums and art gallery boards in debates in newspapers and magazines by people who write op-eds columns letters to the editors in managers meetings when people are deciding hiring policies advertising campaigns where to spend philanthropic dollars in the coffee shop in the morning the water cooler over break in the bars and the restaurants in the evenings in an open society the debates go on at all levels of culture all the time and so for interested parties opportunities to confront post-modernism and to advance enlightenment values are limitless but nobody can do it all so we each need to pick our targets when i'm in the situation of arguing post-modernism i've made a policy to ask myself two questions early on in the discussion i always seem to picture myself in a bar about midnight it was a fellow graduate students arguing over beer i had my first my first significant encounters with postmodernism in graduate school most of graduate school goes on in the bars not the library and so i think that made a least lasting impression now the two questions are when i'm judging my interlocutor is first is this person honest okay and second what matters most to this person the first is important because it's easy to waste a lot of time discussing things with people who aren't really interested in thinking something through they may seem to enjoy debate initially but it's a game they're not really open to having their premises challenged or to think through their assumptions the mark of this is almost always evasiveness switching the subject when hot water is sensed and it's just not worth it to pursue if your our idea is to get to the truth here life is short there's an exception here especially when you're early in your career if you want to sharpen your debating skills then go for it or if you want to just really get a concrete image of how evasive people can be and learn to spot evasiveness do it okay the second question is what matters most to this person this question allows you to focus most effectively your time in that you spend in the debate for example any discussion about post-modernism is going to wander from politics to historical claims to epistemological claims about interpretation relativism and subjectivism now here's my bold claim 95 of the time the politics is what matters most to your interlocutor so focus on that the epistemology and whether the aztecs really perform sacrifices those are way secondary they're window dressing in my experience if you're arguing with post-modernists especially in english literature law and history they didn't come to post-modernism via epistemology they had a political agenda and they only later backed into relativistic epistemology so you're not going to change anyone's minds by proving that the senses are valid or that columbus was a nicer guy than montezuma there's a follow-up point here about focusing on the politics and here i would recommend that you emphasize the positive by that i mean focus on the case for capitalism and liberalism and de-emphasize arguing against socialism both of these need to be done but not only is it more enjoyable to focus on talking about why capitalism is so great it's more effective socialists are usually well aware of the problems of socialism so mentioning them is fine just to show them that you know what they are so that's not going to make the case for capitalism socialism often gets most much of its impetus from a failure to visualize any alternative in part this is driven by traditional mischaracterizations of capitalism so hammer home the successes of the enlightenment philosophy medicine standard of living freedom extension of the franchise etc there's lots and lots of data available and these things can be used to great effect in debate and hammer home especially the individualism that lies beneath the liberal capitalistic vision the importance of being an end in yourself setting your own goals figuring out the means prizing one's creativity ingenuity and responsibility these are all the things that capitalism protects and nurtures and these are the things that get people turned on much more than a dismal listing of socialism's failings all right i have emphasized the politics and the psychology and de-emphasized the epistemology in dealing with post-modernism nonetheless the epistemology is crucial and the technical work in epistemology needs to be done and marketed effectively and i think here objectivism has a unique voice without that the philosophical world will be chronically subject to subjectivism and in a climate of subjectivism some future irrationalist cultural movement will rise up to take advantage of it thank you okay thank you i can't tell you how good that makes me feel okay uh steve uh you talked um a little bit about the uh what almost appears to be the personal characteristics of some of the leading uh post-modernists um has anybody done any uh systematic uh analysis of them in comparison of these folks to try and illustrate more uh what their defects really are as as people as human beings you know my sense is that that actually may be something that could be constructive in terms of trying to focus more on on these people and their failures their failings as uh as individuals i mean you've you've touched on it but it seems to me that it's it's useful to try and get at uh you know the psychology of these people and what in effect what's wrong with them why do they feel this bitterness this alienation what are the uh the causes of it as much as anything else to help other people kind of uh maybe steer away from those characteristics right well it's obviously a very sensitive subject to raise within the academy when you start questioning people's motives you open the door to turning everything into ad hominem debate i mean debate is just going to shut down as soon as that becomes part of the academy so people will shy away from it in the public writings and the public lectures what you will get then is an emphasize on arguing against the relativism and it's not so much that you're trying to refute the rel to refute the post-modernist to the post-modernist your audience is some other group of people and you just say this is what post-modernism leads to it's ridiculous and so don't you believe this as well but you're quite right though that knowing that it's not just a philosophical movement that it's also a psychological phenomenon that's going on this canon should be very helpful to people in dealing with it with them and i don't think there's anything systematic that has been done the only thing that comes to mind as partly approximating that project is a book by paul johnson called intellectuals came out i'm not sure how long ago eight ten years ago and what he does is he goes through and he takes people like rousseau and some of the 19th century utopian socialism socialists and marx and some of the fabian socialists and i think bertrand russell is in there as well and they're all pretty much left politics and he does show that that matched their personal lives and that there was a lot of evidence that there was some destructive stuff going on in them psychologically so i think it would be valuable to be done i wonder how you could do it in the academy um well yes sure that's work and i think that's where it does go on that people are a little freer to or in a friendly audience like this steve i think your analysis was fantastic so thanks for a great job thank you uh since you ended with some uh debating tips i thought i'd take the liberty of given a couple of my own that i think mesh well with yours please do i've had much more experience than i care to recall with debating these sort of people the first is but what about is not the beginning of an argument there's no argument that begins but what about the poor but what about anything well what about the environment very careful if you want to debate successfully in here you'll be very careful that when when the the ball's in their court make sure you leave it there right this is a tactic that i find them to use all the time but what about the poor and well but what about the poor what am i supposed to say the worst thing you can do is to jump on that and start giving some random flailings about the poor right right whatever comes to your mind if they've got some concern about the poor make them tell you what their concern is right and that brings also if i could just add on that point you know if you sense that what the person's strategy is they've got a core disagreement with capitalism that's not going to be budged and there's just a whole bunch of what about the poor's and there's going to be another what about as soon as you finish this one right then don't go down that road try to figure out what that core thing is and i think that that's sort of a corollary of a more basic principle when you're arguing with someone about convictions that differ tell you should tell people what you think and the reasons that you think it and they should be telling you what they think and the reasons that they think it not some argument that they once heard that they think kind of supports it right not an argument that they hope might win but you should ask people you think that i don't want to hear some abstract argument that you once heard why you think that might that you think might work i want to know why do you think this is true so that if i can refute that argument you can't any longer think that it's true right okay because it's amazing how often i find myself i say to somebody why do you think that and they'll tell me and i say i refute it then and they say well how about this yeah right and but what about the poor right okay anyway those are my two tips following up on the second one uh i think it's the same spirit as that strategy is to get the person pinned down to something right so your position is this right this is your most important argument against say capitalism or whatever and then say if i can show you that that argument doesn't work are you going to change your mind they will say yes or no all right and then your options are obvious okay your choice michael oh sorry not michael this is rick rick uh when when you're doing writing about this sort of thing you don't have the opportunity to uh have people voice their objection and then to get back to epistemology and so when you write say in defensive capitalism the reader might say well that's just an opinion or whatever and then you can get back to those issues but that never comes out in the writing because it's not a dialogue so is there any solution to that problem uh could you rephrase once again what the problem is okay the lack of dialogue well because it requires a dialogue to go from the politics and then back to the epistemology when when you write so you write in defensive you're talking about uh capitalism and you're defending it and they say well that's just an opinion that's all relative and then you can get back to the epistemology okay but when you write you don't you don't it's not like that it's it's you defend capitalism and then your article or your what your paper is done and then there could be discussion later but it's not going to get to your audience and only the the political issue gets the audience right unless you're writing like a whole treatise or something and then you don't get back to the epistemology so there's any way of addressing everything uh in the same package without being just uh you know while still staying on the same theme uh yes and that's i think that's always the challenge of writing i mean that writing versus dialogue has the defects that you're mentioning it's much slower in terms of the feedback i mean the dialogue does go on but it goes on at a much slower pace now how then i think this is just a general writing question how do you pick your target and then tailor your piece of writing so that it effectively reaches that target given that you can't do it all at a at a particular time now in my presentation here for example today we're all over the map about just about everything and so the trade-off there is necessarily everything needs to be done with a much broader brush now the trick then is just to do it without sacrificing the accuracy and that's just the challenge of knowing your your field if you don't want to paint with that broader brush because you know the particular audience you're dealing with is going to raise fairly specific objections and you are then going to be wanting to deal with those objections then you need to paint with a narrower brush so you can phrase the issues in a way that allows you to deal with the objections so that way what you're doing is anticipating the kinds of criticisms that you want to answer and then tailoring your presentation in a way that you have like a dialogue within yourself so you say here's my position now someone might say this and here's the answer to that uh steve first did a great talk my question is how did the post-modernist deal with rummel's statistics i mean it seems like if murder is no big deal to you then the kierkegaardian or machiavellian angle is fine and if it does bother you then nihilism is the the answer or do they just take that uh approach that some people like the white supremacists the skinheads have taken this like the holocaust never happened it's just the fraud it's part of a you know worldwide i designed this plot that thing i don't know of any post-modernist responses directly to rummel but the kinds of responses that we could anticipate getting would be first technical responses of the kinds i'm starting to get rumbles about over lunch and stuff well how exactly is he defining democracy and what about the spanish-american war doesn't that count and stuff like that so the social scientists of course would have to pick apart his methodology and see how good his categorizations are but supposing the numbers are more or less right to an open-minded audience then the kinds of rhetorical strategies that post-modernists are going to come up with there's going to be the same kinds of ones that socialists have always come up with they're just going to say well your interpretation of the data is a capitalistic interpretation of the data or they will say the soviet union wasn't really socialistic right so you redefine the terms that was not what socialism is about so on and maybe they believe that maybe they don't in your outline you mentioned um a prediction that post-modernism will not will not survive another generation thank you could you elaborate and explain that please because i cut that for time i uh yeah i would have four reasons why i think post-modernism won't succeed it won't last for very long and the first the deepest one is that it doesn't have anything to say okay i mean that well yeah i mean that uh and all the ways i mean it's we can say that a very abstract philosophical level it's false so ultimately it's not going to be useful as a framework for understanding the world or us and so forth but also the postmodernists themselves are saying they don't really have anything to say about the world and so ultimately then what you're going to have is kind of an inbred movement where people start just saying the same old formulaic stuff over and over again right and there was will wilkerson sent me this website that has this post-modernist generator you know you can just take all of the stock phrases and it will just arbitrarily put them together at random but abiding by the rules of grammar and so you have a real postmodernist book the generator version and yeah now that's a sign that there's a problem okay all right now i think that means it will become an inbred group which means that bright decent students who are coming in to get an education will say these people don't have anything to say uh i mean i think psychologically disturbed people will hang around because it's going to push their buttons in the right way um but the healthy people will go off and do various other things second i think social because of post-modernism's emphasis on everything being ad hominem it's going to be a socially destructive movement i don't think it can retain its cohesiveness and what you will then have is uh faction okay and anybody who hurts my feelings within my group will then be lashed out against by me there are lots of examples of this happening right now i mean there was a fairly healthy debate about heidegger's nazism right and how deeply that influenced or was influenced by his deeper philosophical convictions right and this is a problem because nazism has had some bad press okay but and you know many deconstructionists will say that they are socialists and so the opposite of what the nazis are but nonetheless here is their main guy and he is there and so even after the evidence came out and was fairly compelling about heidegger's nazism some people within the post-modernist movement and started saying well okay maybe we need to distance ourselves a little from heidegger now the main disciples of heidegger derek daw then mainly went loopy and crazy insane attacking the various people who were not towing the line i mean heidegger can't be a bad guy and if you're going to raise publicly dissent then we're going to in fact excommunicate you and the the kinds of vituperation that went on at this well maybe you do have some sense of what that would be third my third reason was that usually slowly and reluctantly you get some fairly healthy counter reactions what usually go on goes on saying literary criticism or in the sciences is you've got people working out the modernist agenda they're doing good literary criticism they're doing good history they're doing good science then post-modernism grows and becomes enough of a nuisance that the good people say okay i need to take some time off my work in order to attack the deconstructionists and post-modernists and so what you then get is some good works that are written and show just what the problems are with post-modernism and deconstructionism and so on and those serve as a way to keep that sector healthy and there are a number of good works that have been written in the last five years and there are some i would recommend also finally i mean post-modernism is in effect empty is tying in with my first point if you take all of the claims that they make that are usually put in a third person perspective and put them in the first person perspective you can see that there's a huge vacuum here i mean they will say nobody knows anything about reality put that in the first person i don't have a clue okay emotion trumps reason i'm just going by my feelings ad hominem political tactics are justified i'm going to do anything i can fair or foul to get you that is just empty okay and what that means is going to leave a huge vacuum for someone to come along and fill and i think this is why in a way it's bad that post-modernism dominates in the humanities but in a way it's good because this is a real opportunity for objectivism to get in there and fill that vacuum so that's why i don't think it'll last for those four reasons it seems that one of the ways that ideas like post-modernism get out into popular mainstream is through art and popular culture and that sort of thing can you comment on ways that postmodernism is seen in popular movies books and that sort of thing and is it is it present there are we seeing it are people picking up on these ideas sort of subconsciously through the movies that they see and and popular culture in general um well here i'm getting out of my my depth because i'm i don't necessarily keep up enough with the current trends in all of these popular cultural manifestations i still think there's a fairly strong division in the arts and cultural movements between high culture which is fairly nihilistic and popular culture which is pretty healthy still pretty modernistic and so if you look at say architecture okay you can find modern stuff going on and you can also find post-modernist stuff going on like that new guggenheim museum in bilbo spain right that's clearly post-modernist it is just chaos and intentionally chaos um in literature you've got deconstruction works or post-modernist works of literature and they are read by other people in the academy but outside the academy you've got the booming popular culture and i think the same thing goes on now is are there strains of post-modernism running through popular culture well yeah of course and i'm sure if we look around we can always find a few but i don't think they're dominant in popular culture i think popular culture is still by and large modernist it's it's still good i think science is still by and large modernist business is anything in the technical field those are all pretty healthy all right that's gonna have to be the last one thank you stephen okay well thank you you

Channel: Atlas Society

Views: 77,176

Rating: 4.8329854 out of 5

Keywords: Postmodernism (Literary School Or Movement), Literary Theory (Field Of Study), Literary Criticism (Field Of Study), Jacques Derrida (Academic), objectivism, ayn rand, libertarianism, Gender Studies (Field Of Study), white privilege

Id: bChKoll81r4

Length: 73min 35sec (4415 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Chrono__Triggered]

A very powerful and suprisingly apolitical analysis of the nihilism that is postmodernism.