Postmodernism, Steel Manned
The right wing conception of post modernism is dumb and wrong
When the postmodern philosophers say things like “there is no truth there is only perspective” or “morality is relative” they aren’t saying “so believe and do whatever you want”.1 They are saying that everyone is already believing and doing whatever they want and are just oblivious to it. It’s not prescriptive, it’s descriptive; not an endorsement of what we should do but a scathing critique of what we are already doing.
Postmodernism is not saying there is no foundational reality. It’s saying that what you think is foundational reality is mostly just an amalgamation of various biases and tribe-preserving fictions. And that the concept of “The Truth” is more often a battering ram of whoever is currently in power to enforce whatever fiction keeps them there—or, for whoever is currently not in power, whatever fiction will make them as competitive as possible in an effort to gain it—rather than an objective and holistic description of reality.2
It’s not truth, it’s Truth™: A product you are sold that you, a dumb monkey with a buggy alpha build of the new Rationality expansion pack (your neocortex), are just too dumb to notice the difference between.
The Muslims, the Christians, The Liberals, The Conservatives, The Libertarians, The Atheists, The Progressives, and everyone else all say that their Truth™ is the real truth. And they all really believe it. With equal levels of certainty no less. And yet they are all wrong. Not entirely and not about everything, of course—all Truth™’s are almost entirely made with real, 100% all-natural facts. The problem is that the same facts can be used in a million different ways to tell a million different stories. And this can’t just be waived away as “stupidity” or “bad methodology”. Particularly, given that most 21st century Truth™’s are using the exact same methodology—Enlightenment Rationalism.3
Honestly, who do you know who says “I don’t care what the science says” “I don’t care what is ‘rational’” “I don’t need evidence”? No one, that’s who. Maybe a tiny minority of hyper-religious weirdos. And none of them are on the left. Every single leftist holds—or at least think they hold—“reason and evidence” as their basis for all belief. And that their opinions are based in science and data and facts and logic and they change them when the science and data and facts and logic warrant it. If holding science and data and facts and logic as the basis for all belief doesn’t constitute Enlightenment Rationalism then I don’t know what does.
Meaning most of the right’s conception of who the “Post Modernists” are is a complete fiction—an ironically perfect example of my, and the postmodernist’s, point. To The Right, “Postmodernism” just means “resentful leftists who hate the truth and want to burn down the forest they feel has not provided for them or not met their idealistic utopian delusion”. This is nonsense. It spreads of course because it is itself a convenient fiction that gives their preferred mind virus more competitive advantage in the marketplace of ideas.
Conflating the post modern philosophers to the “pOsT MoDeRn Neo MarXiSts” (the SJWs, the CRTers, the LGBTQIA++ activists, or even just the solipsistic college educated white girls) is like conflating Hari Seldon—who is simply pointing out it’s a mathematical certainty the empire will fall—with the marauders raping and pillaging as it does.4
The Postmodern philosophers were not trying to tear down Western Civilization. They were trying to identify why it was tearing itself down. If you’d ever spent anytime reading them yourself rather than parroting the parroting of “Goofy Objectivist Thinks Leftists Are Dumb And Cherry Picks The Entire History Of Philosophy To Prove It” it becomes very obvious that the Postmodern critique is—like Nietzsche and his position on the death of God—not a proposed future ideal but an observation of what has already happened.5 And further, something that is not celebrated but mourned.
Such observations on the death of Enlightenment Rationalism—or rather, the death in its conclusions’ (and soon, institutions’) credibility—are an entirely sane and “rational” response to how things played out. It promised the end of war, scarcity, suffering. And what it gave us was the bloodiest century in all of human history. If considering the possibility that we could engineer a civilization that doesn’t kill hundreds of millions per century makes one a “resentful leftist” who holds “impossible ideals” then start calling me Max-stein and raise my taxes because I’m as libcuck as they come.
Don’t get me wrong: telephones, refrigerators, supply chains, air travel, and antiseptics are great. But you start to second guess just how great when you factor in that the trade off was a pile of bodies large enough to reach the moon.
If you consume Rationalist or IDW content you already take issue with “ideology”. You just don’t know that A. most if not all ideologies thinks they are rational and scientific just like you do (and thus you are as “ideologically possessed” as they are, just with a slightly less dangerous strain) and B. you are literally half a century behind the postmodern philosophers (post-leftist) in your awareness and articulation of this problem.
While all the Modernists were busy yelling at each other about how the other guy’s Enlightenment Rationalist Scientific Utopia is bad and “I can prove it, look how many millions of people it killed!”, The Post-Modernists set their encapsulation of the problem wider.6 That perhaps it’s not the Communists or the Nazi’s or the Liberal Capitalists who are the problem but the Enlightenment Project they are byproducts of.
Libertarian Rationalist types (alt-lite folks like Jordan Peterson or IDW followers in particular) can get as triggered as they want and make retarded strawmen like “So YoUr SaYiNg RaTioNaLitY iS Bad?” or “TrUtH DoEsN’T ExiSt???” but until they can answer the questions of “why did your perfect Enlightenment Rationalism, so perfect that the only people who could possibly critique it must be ‘evil resentful truth hating nihilists’, kill three hundred million people?” and “How did your perfect Enlightenment Rationalism lead to Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Progressivism?”then they are no better than sports fans and should go back to the kiddie table where they belong.
“Ah, you see X bad-group-who-I-don’t-like was simply using Enlightenment Rationalism wrong! When used right, you come to my awesome and amazing conclusions!”
You know Jordan Peterson’s super persuasive argument about how all the Communists saying “it wasn’t real communism” are really saying “If I was in charge, I could do better”? It applies equally to him and the entire pro-Western Civilization camp.
Cherry picking Enlightenment Rationalist projects and saying “it wasn’t real Enlightenment Rationalism” about the ones that you don’t like is just saying “I could do it better. Look, I am.”
Is America better than Stalinist Russia or Maoists China? Yes. But that’s not a particularly impressive bar.
Though let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it were. Perhaps pretend the mythical super America conservatives believe in was real. Even then Enlightenment Rationalism has proven to be at best a game of super Russian Roulette, where every chamber except one has a bullet in it. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if your strategy had the outcomes of even classic Russian Roulette, it’d be pretty obviously something deserving of critique.
And further, you’re right that it wasn’t “real” Enlightenment rationalism. That’s the whole point. You can see the silliness of this cope when the left uses it but not when you do.
If your theory is impossible to practice, it’s a shitty fucking theory.
“But my version of Enlightenment Rationalism, liberal capitalism, at least kinda’ works sometimes! It can be done, unlike Communism which never works!”
If one communist state was still running reasonably well today, would you now all of the sudden say “Ah communism is great now!”? No you’d just say that it’s only a matter of time before it too suffers the same fate as all previous. Same applies to this.
And that is exactly the point anyway. Liberal capitalism is kinda’ working for now.7 But not particularly well and the writing has been on the wall for decades. The tree may still be standing, but it has been dead and rotting from the inside for a century. The entire Enlightenment project is today where the Communist project was in the eighties. You just can’t see this because you haven’t zoomed out far enough.
To be clear, I’m not saying that nothing is better than something mediocre. Eating rice is better than starving to death. But the postmodernists aren’t saying this. If you actually read them—whether it be Baudrillard or Foucault or Derrida or Lyotard or whoever— then you’ll see that there is a pretty reasonable amount of self awareness about how twentieth century Socialism and Marxism were disasters. Which is what led them to “check their priors” and question the Enlightenment ethos from which Socialism and Marxism spawned in the first place.
And further, you’ll see that there is little to no prescription. Because they were still trying to investigate the root of the problem.
“Don’t critique things without proposing an alternative”. Fair enough. But rewriting the foundational philosophy of an entire civilization is not as easy as solving some minor business problem (which, if you’ve gone out into the business world, know is already quite hard and something few can do). I’m sure they would have proposed a solution if they’d found one. But they all died before they could.
And it’s not really their job anyway. Humans are a meta organism with specialized roles, our labor divided amongst clusters of temperaments. Some people’s job is to critique the regime, others to defend it; Some to ignore it, Others to fight it; Some to be oblivious that there even is one, and others to devise its replacement.
But that’s besides the point. The point is:
When you shoot the messenger, you don’t get the message. And when you don’t get the message, you lose the war.
And I can tell you right now: you are losing And the messenger is bleeding out on the sidewalk!
As far as I know, they don’t even say this. This is other people summarizing them, generally in bad faith, but if you knew that already why are you reading this piece?
It honestly blows my mind how Jordan Peterson and the IDW at large fail to understand this. Literally every critique they make, about how the left enforce their opinions through the media, government, and law calling it Truth when it isn’t, and how this is harmful to society is literally the Post Modern critique.
I am writing this piece as someone who considered themselves an “Enlightenment Rationalist” for almost a decade. Having spentspent my early twenties in the New Atheist camp (Dawkins, Sagan, Tyson, etc), mid twenties in the Liberation Atheist camp (consumed easily 2000 episodes of Stefan Molyneux’s podcast) and late twenties in the IDW camp (watched literally every video posted on Jordan Peterson’s Youtube channel up through 2020), this post is in many ways written to my former self. So don’t take my tone too hard ;).
You are watching Foundation, right, anon?
pretty much the entire Right Wing perspective on Post Modernism is based on this one book, and it is worse than CNN as far as being objective or precise.
You do know that for the first decades, Marxism was referred to by both Marx and Engels themselves as Scientific Socialism, right anon?
America works reasonably well for its ingroup. But this is an ingroup which is shrinking by the day. For a long while this ingroup was “white Americans”, but the last few decades it is mostly just “wealthy elites”. I don’t think it’s arguable that it isn’t “better” than Soviet Russia or Maoist China for its citizens. But saying a punch in the face is perfect and amazing and not worthy of critique because it’s not a stab in the throat is not exactly a compelling argument. And further, the question of the collateral damage done to the civilians of its enemies is not nearly as clear, and if anything, leans heavily to a the US is far worse than Communism.
I would love to read a second, third and even fourth part.
I've watched countless JP videos, and I was always surprised to hear him talk about "neomarxists" & "posmodernists", considering he's a psychologist he's supposed to have real knowledge about philosophy and psychology because of his degree and this includes postmodernism.
I think this happened because he became a public figure, he made one wrong assertion, and then for the sake of consistency to his followers he had to keep the charade of 'cultural marxism'. It works because it's a very powerful memetic concept that the right wing has been using for decades to blame the left for all the moral and cultural failings of capitalism.
This plays into the fantasy of "We could have a perfect capitalist system with economic freedom and conservative christian values if we could eliminate cultural marxism". But this is not possible and it was already perfectly explained by Ted Kaczynski:
“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
To conserve economic freedom & conservative values at the same time you'd need a powerful State, ideally a dictatorship / monarchism with the perfect leader/king whose values would align exactly with said ideology. Or an Anarcho Capitalist System a la Hoppe with covenant communities:
"covenant communities are made up of residents who have signed an agreement defining the nature of that community. Hoppe writes 'There would be little or no 'tolerance' and 'openmindedness' so dear to left-libertarians. Instead, one would be on the right path toward restoring the freedom of association and exclusion implied in the institution of private property'. Hoppe writes that towns and villages could have warning signs saying 'no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no homosexuals, drug users, Jews, Muslims, Germans, or Zulus'."
Obviously said scenarios are highly unlikely to occur.
Why not straight-up identify postmodernism with the Silent Generation? These are people whose formative experience was the jarring dislocation of WWII, dissonantly followed by the normality of the post-war period. It gave them a metaphysical suspicion that nothing is as it seems. What conservative postmodernists do is not fundamentally different from their leftwing counterparts, the same way Burke and Rousseau inherited the spirit of their age. A few examples:
1) Allan Bloom (1930-1992) followed Leo Strauss, who, like the French Post-structuralists, was influenced by Nietzsche and taught the difference between deadly truths and life-giving myths. The non-philosopher is always kept in focus in relationship to philosophy; classical philosophy is juxtapositioned against modernist thought to motivate a spirit of finding the questions for answers instead of answers to questions. (The lowbrow version of this is Dave Rubin mumbling about "ideas.")
2) Thomas Sowell (1930- ) makes an anti-utopian contrast between what he calls the visions of the anointed and benighted. He has a Lyotard-like suspicion of explicit knowledge, which Sowell, taking cues from Hayek and Polanyi, sees as tacit, stored, distributed, and fragmented. He feels that any grand politics has totalitarian costs that are not worth paying.
3) Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) resembles those who emphasize how cultural discourses shape reality. He rejects the idea that liberal democracy is the endpoint of human evolution. He is a cultural relativist skeptical of universalism and thinks plurality, conflict, and power are part of life.
4) Maurice Cowling (1926-2005) attacked liberalism since he believed it assumes social prediction is possible. His idea is that we can never get a good grasp on history because not only is the past retrojected from documents, buildings, letters, and memories -- there is also a matter of selection when it comes to choosing a subject matter, and there is always an ineliminable aspect of interpretation. He thinks politics is more often than not about charm, bluffing, cunning, brazenness, and luck, which are elements that aren't even on the radar in the philosophy of Mill and its relatives and descendants.
Now, I'm a liberal atheist Democrat and find much of this to be tactical nihilism, a way to support the status quo and discourage us from pursuing achievable aims. My point, though, is that post-truth postmodernism can be and is used with devastating effectiveness from a conservative outlook. Trump, while a Boomer, is postmodernism incarnate.