Up from Postmodernism

In my last post, I made the point that conservatism has historically been connected to the fight against a metaphysical force which I called "chaos." This bit of nomenclature caused a good deal of confusion among my readers, some of whom thought that I was condemning liberty as a source of chaos - an argument which I took some time to refute before continuing.

Admittedly, my definition of chaos was underdeveloped (which is to say, nonexistent) in that note, and that was not due to intellectual laziness on my part, but rather due to the necessity of using examples to explain what chaos is. This would have taken far too long to do in one post, which is why I have split my examples into separate posts, the first of which follows:

Unless you've been living under a rock for a while (and I wouldn't blame you, considering the state of the world), you've almost certainly heard conservatives like David Horowitz, Jonah Goldberg or any of the fine authors over at Phi Beta Cons complain about something called "postmodernism." This concept, the argument runs, is a dangerous, anti-Western, anti-American, Nazi-inspired bit of intellectually incoherent desperation put forward by academics still in shock over the fall of communism/the election of George W. Bush/pretty much anything that pisses off extreme Leftists.

Whenever I read these polemical explanations of postmodernism, I always chuckle and mutter, "Would that postmodernism were so simple." It's not that the definitions are wrong. It's that they're futile. Yes, postmodernism's exponents frequently utilize it for anti-Western and anti-American purposes. Yes, one of postmodernism's first influences was Martin Heidegger, an infamously pro-Nazi philosopher. Yes, politically oriented postmodernism evolved largely during the eighties, when the young revolutionaries, finding themselves stuck in cushy academic jobs in a still-capitalist, still-racist, still-conservative society, had to produce adjusted versions of their incoherent rants from the old days. But is that all there is to the concept? Dear God, no.

Like most bewilderingly strange ideas that gain their hold in the political sections of academia, postmodernism started in non-political areas, such as architecture, art and most of all, literature. Though the term was first coined in the late 19th century, it didn't really catch on until the 1960's, and much of its ideas have their origins in French literary theory of the kind championed by Jacques Derrida. Because Derrida's theories are basically an attack on the "socially constructed" nature of language, therefore, it's no surprise that postmodernism has no definition. The concept is itself partially an attack on definitions, so such a thing would be strange indeed.

Now, it's easy to look at postmodernism as a foreign movement imported to America by Leftist academics desparate for a way to maintain their sophisticated disdain for the rest of society. However, the evidence doesn't bear this argument out. Since it's fashionable inception, postmodernism has certainly made more inroads on the Left than on the Right, but that doesn't mean its right-wing exponents are somehow tangential. Alasdair Macintyre, a contemporary philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, and one of the more influential intellectuals of today, might be rightly called a right-wing postmodernist and some scholars have even suggested that Russell Kirk himself was a closeted postmodernist.

But still, one has to ask - what is postmodernism? I can think of two definitions off the top of my head, and they have to do with different elements of the concept. If one had to define postmodernism's purpose, then I think the most blunt and accurate definition would be to call it intellectual chemo-therapy. Postmodernism, whether of the Left or the Right, aims to root out all the weaknesses and contradictions in intellectual life, sometimes destroying even the most morally admirable concepts on the way. To that end, postmodernism can be defined as a philosophy of pure negation, and that negation is always applied to modernism, hence the word "post" (which is really a euphemism for "anti").

Since one of modernism's biggest themes is the idea of universal truth discoverable by abstract reason, the postmodernist frequently makes this concepet his target. There is no universal truth in the postmodern mind - no universal human nature, no universal virtue, no universal facts, not even universal science. All is solipsism, and all attempts to universalize are by their nature doomed by the limited nature of the human mind. Interestingly, both postmodernism of the Left and postmodernism of the Right agree on what limits the human mind this way, though they differ on the remedy. Right-postmodernism calls this limiting force "tradition" and Left-postmodernism calls it "social constructs."

Now, because of the Left-wing nature of the academy today, it's no surprise that of these two views, Left-postmodernism dominates. This has led to the conception of a left-postmodern educational style whose purpose makes the word "education" laughable. Postmodern education aims to destroy what a student has already learned, rather than teach them new things. It is the systematic installation of a creed of absolute negation. And if it actually worked as intended, it would be the most deadly weapon for chaos in the modern world.

Now, it's time for me to begin to define chaos. I suppose a better but less sexy word for it would be "incoherence." Pure chaos is the complete absence of predictability, of discernable order and of understanding. It is the rebellion against cause and effect, and when combined with the American political ethos, it often manifests as what some commentators have called "radical individualism" - namely, the desire to divorce liberty from responsibility. It manifests both in excessive government control and in too much government control, for the former is unenforceable and the latter in unsustainable, and both contain the seeds of revolution, which, when not governed by the principles of the regime it seeks to escape (as per the American revolution), is the ultimate force of chaos. It is, in short, disequilibrium.

And it's what all Left -postmodernists aspire to create. The reason for this is relatively complex. For Left-postmodernists, all of modern thinking (or most of it) is based on false, systematic, "socially constructed" lies which appear neutral, but are actually in place to oppress particular groups because of the interests of ruling elites. This need not be conscious manipulation on the ruling elites' part, and it doesn't necessarily begin with contemporary elites. In fact, most post-modernists trace these socially constructed lies back generations, or even centuries, to an event like colonization or slavery, which is so traumatic that it defines a race/nation/gender/oppressed group for hundreds of years. These social constructs are often things that we take for granted, like logic or economics or basically anything that gets in the way of a utopian vision. The idea that something like capitalism might be rooted in human nature is sheer nonsense to a Left-postmodernist, since the very idea of "nature" is socially constructed and thus biased. As such, Left-postmodernists aspire to use the premises of these social constructs to tear them down and leave nothing but epistemological chaos, which they hope will be formed into something much more inclusive and liberating and Left-wing than the current system. To put it bluntly, Left-postmodernists argue that we should create nihilism and then hope something nice(r) emerges from it.

Now, despite my somewhat disdainful description, this strategy is very effective and deeply dangerous because Left-postmodernists are often extremely smart people with wide knowledge bases. The more stupid ones do things like attack physics  for being too masculine, but the really dangerous ones can use things like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to undermine the idea of universal physical truth, or can exploit Goedel's theorem to make mathematics look false. Their mission is, in short, to reduce anything "scientific" to nothing but a brand of literature, and then show how that literature was written by oppressors.

And because postmodernism is so well-versed in reason, modernism is powerless against it. And I don't have an ounce of pity for it, either. All right-wing postmodernists saw this coming, and the first person to expose it was Cardinal John Henry Newman in his book "Idea of a University," way back in the 19th century. Among other things, Newman complained about the tendency of the education establishment of his day to reduce everything to science at the expense of theology. This, he argued, was dangerous because science was inherently constrained by its own premises, and needed theology to balance it. He also mentioned that science was far too aesthetically austere to stand on its own, and that without concern for the Godly as its ally, the concern for truth would be utterly overturned by the concern for beauty, embodied by literature. And (arguably) unlike virtue, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, which means all hope for dialogue will disappear.

So what is to be done? Surely, this isn't a campaign issue to work with. Well, no. It isn't. The more relevant political version of chaos would be terrorism.

But that doesn't mean postmodernism is irrelevant to the Right. The postmodernism of the Left has been used by political handlerse, in a really bitter turn of irony, to produce convincing illusions about candidates so that they look better than they actually are. "Perception is reality" has become the guiding reality. This is not something the Right should be bemoaning, however - concern with the beauty of politics goes back to Edmund Burke. But we do need to make some incursions on the academic level. Conservatism started in the academy, and now it's almost dead there, having been exiled to think tanks.  Think tanks cannot educate students, and focus on issues of policy, not theory. This focus is  completely understandable and correct.  But we need  theoretical arguments as well, and that means we need to make our theoretical elements make sense again. In my next note, I will try and lay out a way  for the new fusionism to be created along the social and economic  wings of the Right, and I encourage everyone to think about how it might be achieved in the meantime.