Postmodernism! We Hardly Knew You!

We all know that postmodernism is the movement that... Yes, what exactly does it say?

I would say that postmodernism argues that every narrative about Life, the Universe, and Everything is ultimately a narrative of power, the way a ruling class, every ruling class, creates a story that proves conclusively that it has a divine -- or historical -- right to rule.

In part this movement was part of the German Turn, a movement away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and from the notion that you could establish a just society on Earth from rational principles. A philosophy of reason was just as much an apology for rule as the divine right of kings.

In part, of course, the postmodernists saw themselves as heroic resisters against bourgeois supremacy, pushing against the notion that the philosophy and faith of middle-class property and business owners was the highest and best form of life.

So in the little book I picked up on Nietzsche and Postmodernism by Dave Robinson, we are to understand that 

Postmodernists like Jacques Derrida celebrate difference, diversity and the marginal, those things that flourish in a pluralist and tolerant democracy.

Derrida is against "logocentricity," the idea that languages rule.

The conviction that language can create stable and "total" certainties is dangerous as well as misguided. Language can only be made to do this by excluding alternative readings by excluding what is considered to be "other." 

Quite right, Jacques, mon vieux.

In practice this has usually meant the establishment of hegemonies that marginalize all those whose values and beliefs don't conform to some limited and contingent world view. 

Well, we are certainly a couple of marbles short of the celebration of difference from establishing norms where your average white working-class deplorable is concerned right now. Shall I go on?

Ethical and political doctrines are always founded on some essentialist myth about human nature. But language cannot establish essentialist "truths", so ethical values and political doctrines are nearly always the constructs of authoritarian institutions imposed on the rest of us.

Exactly, Jacques. So that helps us understand the current notion from gubmint "bioethicists" that access to the COVID vaccine should be prioritized according to race. It's just the current ruling class of educated Gentry imposing its world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

Or Jean-Francois Lyotard, who decided after 1968 that "Marxism had inbuilt authoritarian tendencies" and that "the latent passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine."

Guess what postmodernist Lyotard wants instead.

Lyotard himself recommends a society that is tolerant, pragmatic and pluralist, libertarian and anarchist, one which again celebrates difference and avoids monolithic certainties. 

Good luck with that when you chat with our wokey friends, Jean-Francois.

Jean Baudrillard thinks we are all living in "a fragmented world of alienated individuals with no sense of self or history" but "just consumers of media in a world of signs without signifiers." Well, not if our "trained Marxists" at Black Lives Matter have anything to do with it.

Robinson's Nietzsche and Postmodernism was published in 1999, at the last moment before we could begin to speak of "woke leftism" as a movement of neo-Marxism devoted to imposing a single ruling-class world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

The funny thing is that all the critiques of the postmodernists, which were sorta true back the bad old days of the patriarchy, now apply in spades. And the reason is that while the old ruling class was indeed a hegemony that dominated society as any ruling class does, it did not do so with a deliberate strategy of liquidating certain groups and classes, and enforcing its class supremacy, but in reaction to actual rebellions and opposition.

The new ruling class -- from its "trained Marxist" at Black Lives Matter to its educated Gentry with a divine right to salaried tenured pensioned positions of power of the rest of us -- has a direct faith in domination and hegemony, that derives from its essentialist doctrine of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

The "allies" movement has a transparent argument for power that blithely ignores the findings of the postmodernists. It denies "difference" and imposes the "monolithic certainty" of systemic racism. It shows, I suppose, that people will believe anything so long as it is to their personal advantage.

In American Greatness, Edward Ring proposes an end to the bitterness and rancor of the last four years by "reaching out" to the good people on the other side and trying to find a common ground upon which to move forward together.

But I think he misunderstands the situation. Right now our educated Gentry friends are in the grips of a religious prophecy, a prophecy that decrees that the world is on a trajectory to climate disaster, unless we act now, and decrees that America is on the way to a racist hell of white supremacy, unless we act now.

They don't just argue this. They believe it as a saving truth.

The point about prophecies is that you can't argue rationally about them. You can only move forward when the prophecy has collapsed in ruin, as argued in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al.

And right now our globalist friends are determined that we must end fossil fuels, because end of the world. What can you say to them? That Derrida says that they have got it all wrong?

What can you say to our Wokie friends that are determined that systemic racism is tearing us apart? Because anything you tell them just confirms their conviction that you are a racist and that racism is systemic, just as they believe.

Humans do not respond to argument. They respond to ruin.