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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Reading List: Explaining Postmodernism
- 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.
Posted at
22:36
