- Hicks, Stephen R. C.
Explaining Postmodernism.
Phoenix: Scholargy, 2004.
ISBN 1-59247-642-2.
-
Starting more than ten years ago, with the mass pile-on to the
Internet and the advent of sites with open content and comment
posting, I have been puzzled by the extent of the anger, hatred,
and nihilism which is regularly vented in such fora. Of all the
people of my generation with whom I have associated over the
decades (excepting, of course, a few genuine nut cases), I barely
recall anybody who seemed to express such an intensively
negative outlook on life and the world, or who were so instantly
ready to impute “evil” (a word used incessantly
for the slightest difference of opinion) to those with opposing
views, or to inject ad hominem
arguments or obscenity into discussions of fact and opinion.
Further, this was not at all confined to traditionally polarising
topics; in fact, having paid little attention to most
of the hot-button issues in the 1990s, I first noticed it
in nerdy discussions of topics such as the merits of
different microprocessors, operating systems, and programming
languages—matters which would seem unlikely, and in my
experience had only rarely in the past, inspired partisans
on various sides to such passion and vituperation. After a
while, I began to notice one fairly consistent pattern: the
most inflamed in these discussions, those whose venting seemed
entirely disproportionate to the stakes in the argument, were
almost entirely those who came of age in the mid-1970s or later;
before the year 2000 I had begun to call them
“hate
kiddies”,
but I still didn't understand why they were that way.
One can speak of “the passion of youth”, of course,
which is a real phenomenon, but this seemed something entirely
different and off the scale of what I recall my contemporaries
expressing in similar debates when we were of comparable age.
This has been one of those mysteries that's puzzled me for
some years, as the phenomenon itself seemed to be getting
worse, not better, and with little evidence that age and
experience causes the original hate kiddies to grow out of
their youthful excess. Then along comes this book which,
if it doesn't completely explain it, at least seems to point
toward one of the proximate causes: the indoctrination in
cultural relativist and “postmodern” ideology
which began during the formative years of the hate kiddies
and has now almost entirely pervaded academia apart from the physical
sciences and engineering (particularly in the United
States, whence most of the hate kiddies hail). In just two
hundred pages of main text, the author traces the origins and
development of what is now called postmodernism to the
“counter-enlightenment” launched by Rousseau and
Kant, developed by the German philosophers of the 18th and 19th
centuries, then transplanted to the U.S. in the 20th. But the
philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism, which are essentially
an extreme relativism which goes as far as denying the
existence of objective truth or the meaning of texts, doesn't
explain the near monolithic adherence of its champions to the
extreme collectivist political Left. You'd expect that
philosophical relativism would lead its believers to conclude
that all political tendencies were equally right or wrong, and
that the correct political policy was as impossible to determine
as ultimate scientific truth.
Looking at the philosophy espoused by postmodernists
alongside the the policy views they advocate and teach their
students leads to the following contradictions which
are summarised on p. 184:
- On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the
other hand, postmodernism 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. (There's that word!—JW)
- Technology is bad and destructive—and it is
unfair that some people have more technology than
others.
- Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but
when postmodernists come to power, political
correctness follows.
The author concludes that it is impossible to explain these
and other apparent paradoxes and the uniformly Left politics of
postmodernists without understanding the history and the failures
of collectivist political movements dating from Rousseau's
time. On p. 173 is an absolutely wonderful
chart which
traces the mutation and consistent failure of socialism in its
various guises from Marx to the present. With each failure,
the response has been not to question the premises of collectivism
itself, but rather to redefine its justification, means, and end.
As failure has followed failure, postmodernism represents an abject
retreat from reason and objectivity itself, either using the
philosophy in a Machiavellian way to promote collectivist ideology,
or to urge acceptance of the contradictions themselves in the
hope of creating what Nietzsche called
ressentiment, which leads
directly to the “everybody is evil”, “nothing
works”, and “truth is unknowable” irrationalism
and nihilism which renders those who believe it pliable in the
hands of agenda-driven manipulators.
Based on the some of the source citations and the fact that this
work was supported in part by
The Objectivist Center,
the author appears to be a disciple of Ayn Rand, which is
confirmed by his Web site.
Although the author's commitment to rationalism and
individualism, and disdain for their adversaries, permeates the
argument, the more peculiar and eccentric aspects of the
Objectivist creed are absent. For its size, insight, and crystal
clear reasoning and exposition, I know of no better introduction to
how postmodernism came to be, and how it is being used to advance
a collectivist ideology which has been thoroughly discredited
by sordid experience. And I think I'm beginning to comprehend how
the hate kiddies got that way.
May 2007 