The Origins of Postmodernitis
The movement that we call “postmodernism” is so vast and nebulous that it has come to mean just about anything we want it to mean. According to David Kolb in Postmodern Sophistications, the word itself was first used in its current sense by historian Arnold Toynbee in 1946 to refer to the last decades of the nineteenth century when “the great modern synthesis began to break down.” It was subsequently picked up by artists, poets, architects, and critics and applied to the period after World War II. The word has now become a cowcatcher term sweeping all query and objection before it. It serves in the way a phatic interjection in everyday speech does — “umm,” “you know,” “like” — except that it punctuates the longueurs of flaccid thinking and insecure conceptualizing. You search for a word to describe the complexities of contemporary life or to fill in a blank when a more precise designation is required to account for the weird permutations in the aesthetic, political, and intellectual domains, and up pops, you know, “postmodernism.”
Can the movement be depicted somewhat more accurately? Can the tag “postmodern” be grasped in a short, compendious definition, or is it like trying to fasten a greased cravat to the neck of an octopus, if an octopus had a neck? The subject has been intensively discussed by legions of scholars and professors for the last fifty years, having become a veritable academic industry and achieved a level of frenetic intricacy impenetrable to the layman.
Let me offer a simplified distillation of the phenomenon, so far as I understand it, in an effort to chart the etiology of a cognitive disease, to clarify confusion, and to indicate why our present social, political, and intellectual world has become so freakishly distorted.
What we now call postmodernism is essentially an anthropological concept, harking back to one of the greatest thinkers and practitioners in the field. It owes its origin to Franz Boas, who developed and established the concept of cultural relativity as an ethnographic tool to aid in the unprejudiced survey of exotic tribes and cultures. In The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas wrote that all cultures should be regarded with sympathy, that we should hold the conviction that all “races” — today we would say “ethnicities” — have “contributed to cultural progress in one way or another” and that they are equally capable of “advancing the interests of mankind.” No particular culture should be considered as better or superior to any other since all cultures participate, each in its own way, in the human adventure. Each culture arrives at its own specific solutions to the problems of survival which confront it in the environment where it has taken root. And each needs to be assayed on its own terms.
Boas’ notable contemporary Bronislaw Malinowski arrived at a similar appreciation of cultural autonomy in his celebrated study of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, in which he propounded the theory that varying types of social behavior must be analyzed for the need each of them fills in maintaining the smooth functioning and longevity of a given community. We see the same ideas and assumptions operating in the work of their students, anthropologists like Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture) and Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa.)
Similarly, in such tomes as The Savage Mind and Tristes Tropiques, the structural anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss argued that the savage mind and the civilized mind exemplified the same set of basic structural features for parsing the universe, though differing in content, beliefs, usages, and empirical knowledge. Disparity is predicated on semblance. Because of this morphological unity — “Each is doing the same thing as the other,” as he writes of Buddhism and Marxism in Tristes Tropiques — the Western intellect was in no position to “talk down” to primitive man or members of other, presumably less “advanced” cultures. The diversity of cultures that stipple the planet are, as cultures, equally advanced, just as the myriad languages that proliferate around the globe are commensurate artifacts of communication fulfilling their several purposes — an idea put forward by Edward Sapir, who was trained by Boas, in his Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech.
We might also mention in this connection Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures which proposes that all cultures, despite their particularity, are normal and should be appraised as “imaginative universes” that make sense for their inhabitants. The meaning of a cultural action “varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed,” and not in virtue of some objectively supervening template of unilateral values. Ultimately, “Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations.”
While acknowledging the fundamental identity of mental processes, these thinkers concurred in denying or doubting the universality of Western norms and principles, a caustic suspicion which has gradually but decisively penetrated into the zeitgeist of the West, culminating in the amorphous yet potent cultural amalgam of postmodernism. As Margaret Rose points out in her The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial, postmodernism (affectionately dubbed PoMo by its proponents), comes in a range of flavors — reactionary postmodernism, consumer postmodernism, architectural pastiche, literary parody, etc. I would suggest, however, that among its many avatars, it is distinguished by two constitutive ideas.
1. There is no such thing as a master narrative, only local explanatory chronicles whose reach is confined to the groups that hold them. This notion is associated with the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard who, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, writes: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” Rather than the implicit, all-encompassing back-narrative by which a civilization or a people tries to understand itself and others as part of a historical dynamic, there are only “many different language games” — an idea Lyotard derives from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations — that “give rise to institutions in patches,” in other words, to a “local determinism.” Analogously, in the words of the influential Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia, “relevance is determined by … topicality.”
One can readily see where such thoughts and prescriptions are leading us. There is no “world” as such, merely regionalisms; no superlatives, only comparatives to be assessed non-judgmentally; no history, only a flux of explanatory fables. “What remains,” writes medievalist Paul Zumthor, somewhat ruefully, in Speaking of the Middle Ages, “is our myths as we recite them [and] our need for the imaginary rather than the intelligible.” Psychologist Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self goes even further, defining the postmodern sensibility as “the loss of identifiable essence…the erosion of authority [and] the growing disregard for rational coherence.”
The emphasis falls on the fragmented, the eclectic, the centrifugal, the play of reference and citation rather than on totalizing projects and models of continuity intended to unify and control the boundaries of “conceptual space,” whether theoretically or politically. The so-called big story, especially the story about the transcendent status of Western values, is a sectarian makeshift, an objective fraud and a mystification. We in the West have no special prerogatives in the carnival of the world’s multifarious cultures. Privilege is self-conferred. We have, in short, no priority, no higher attributes to boast of.
On the contrary, each cultural entity determines its version of how the “world” works, or is supposed to work, as represented in its rituals, myths, lineal configurations, and the particular stories it tells itself about origins and ends. But these stories figure as romantic equivalents, allegories of self-validation at parity with one another. Frederick Crews jokes in his satirical deflation of the postmodern mindset, Postmodern Pooh, that for its bearers history is only “an endless round of inconsequential neighborly exchanges” in the Hundred Acre Wood of anecdotal confluence. PoMo, we might say, has become PoohMo.
2. What we designate as “truth” is only the expression of a particular interpretation, an instance of hermeneutic localism. Following the infectious maxim of theoretical relativist E.H. Carr in What is History?, postmodernists conceive the search for truth and the study of history as entailing a “hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.” The current form of such revisionist thinking takes its cue from the “genealogical” inquiries of Michel Foucault, in such books as The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge. Foucault, whose relation to the documentary archive was notoriously supercilious, advocated the partisan, perspectival writing of history as opposed to the presumably unattainable goal of traditional historiography
As is well known, Foucault and his acolytes were influenced by Nietzsche’s pivotal axiom from The Genealogy of Morals that “there are no facts, only interpretation,” a maxim which is intended to be taken as a fact. Its chief American exemplar is, of course, Howard Zinn, who writes in the 1995 edition of his best-selling A People’s History of the United States of the need to produce a “biased account” of significant events as a “counterforce” to staple historical scholarship. (The 1999 edition modifies these assertions, with Zinn merely conceding that his critically formative “experiences were hardly a recipe for neutrality in the teaching and writing of history.”) Ironically, the governing canon such postmodern revisionists espouse, namely, the relativity of all truth claims, applies to everything, apparently, but their own absolute insights and pronouncements about the relativity of truth claims. All facts are fictive except their own.
No. Think you are missing the point. True structuralism, semiotics, post-modern (used as a casual adjective) not same things. John Berger attacked Israel’s right to exist. So did M. Foucault. So did many of their ilk with baseless statements of little intellectual value that were published and forcefed to university students as methodology. On a bad day Jabotinsky could think more clearly than any of their lazy lot but alas this is not fashionable. Also you are confusing historical revisionism with intellectual plagiarism. La nouvelle vague is not the root of the problem. It was during the 80′s when dialectics were very effectively used to do untold damage by exonerating Europe from total culpability of the Shoah. That’s what directly influenced historiography. It was an academic catastrophe. The resulting shockwaves can still be felt. Who would have taken the relativity of truth seriously in the first place? Hitler. Stupid and evil should never mix. The results are as hard to listen to as Wagner, and even worse if you are forced to look at them. PoMo was grossly misunderstood and over simplified by the masses. So now we have a P. Beinart. Yuck.
Awesome article, hilarious comments:
Postmodernism and the Destruction of Thought
The left sees gays killed by Muslims, or high criminal rates of gangsta subculture blacks on whites, as one-offs, i.e., unfortunate but necessary in pursuit of the overall multicultural paradigm. Thus we as individuals become little more than sacrifices, forced against our will to participate in a kind of death cult. Simultaneously, immigration and close proximity of highly unassimilable cultures creates a society that is degenerating into a seething collection of tribes, such that multiculturalism is essentially dragging us back down into tribalism. The left absolutely refuses to understand that some of these cultures are structurally hegemonic, and that incessant pandering to their demands, along with increased numbers via immigration or high birth rates, will ultimately exterminate the leftist agenda itself.
In order to end this madness, we need to stop catering to the seductive but essentially liberal notion that America is simply some abstract propositional nation. Instead both America and democracy are concrete entities that depend for their existence on definitive culture, religion, traditions, and morality, all of which are being progressively destroyed by the left. In practical terms this means a resurgence of (and celebration of) what once was our primary culture.
We must keep unassimilable cultures at arms length. This means two things, one internal, the other external: (1) We should completely halt the current quantity and quality of immigration, and then require members of such cultures already here to either completely assimilate into our primary culture, or else emigrate back from whence they came; (2) We should no longer foolishly expect to export our ideals via nation building a la Afghanistan, or that such ideals are universal and already in extent as in Libya. If defense of our nation requires military incursion, then do only that, get in and get out.
If we do not stop progressivism and its multicultural agenda, then America as a unique geopolitical entity that is worth living in and defending, will cease to exist.
Excellent.
Agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Stewart.
We must keep unassimilable cultures at arms length. This means two things, one internal, the other external: (1) We should completely halt the current quantity and quality of immigration, and then require members of such cultures already here to either completely assimilate into our primary culture, or else emigrate back from whence they came; (2) We should no longer foolishly expect to export our ideals via nation building a la Afghanistan, or that such ideals are universal and already in extent as in Libya. If defense of our nation requires military incursion, then do only that, get in and get out.
If we do not stop progressivism and its multicultural agenda, then America as a unique geopolitical entity that is worth living in and defending, will cease to exist.
In order for personal liberty to thrive, we need to have good old-fashioned inner moral compasses, of the type that our civilization and Judaism and Christianity support.
Endoskeleton or exoskeleton? it will have to be one or the other. Being a blob on the floor is not a survivable option.
Thank you Mr. Solway. This is the kind of stuff I come to PJM to learn – not Carey Roberts’ Palinastiness. I’m reminded of something I read somewhere about a British governor-type in the India of the 19th century forbidding a woman from being thrown or her husband’s funeral pyre. Told it was part of the Hindu cultural imperative, he replied it was part of his culture to forbid such things. Loved that . . .
Wouldn’t you just love to have a gander at this Solway chap’s library?
Solway wrote an interesting article, but he is missing some important figures and has an incomplete time line. I tried to correct it here: http://clarespark.com/2011/03/27/progressive-mind-managers-ca-1941-42/. Note that protofascist social psychology was well on its way before the war. And he did not mention at all the influence of German Romanticism, which I have taken up at length on my website. Too many links to list, but do a search for Herder and Fichte.
I did a partial index to my blogs on multiculturalism. Here are a few of them: http://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/. Putting it all on Foucault and the Frankfurt School won’t do.
I welcome the interest in my prior blog on progressive mind managers, ca. 1941 and 1942, and apologize for the formatting problems.
I heard that story slightly differently, with the Governor saying that it was part of his culture to hang people that caused the death of innocent women. Loved that even better!
> …French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard who, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, writes: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
Pardon me, but isn’t that a metanarrative, too?
> Foucault and his acolytes were influenced by Nietzsche’s pivotal axiom from The Genealogy of Morals that “there are no facts, only interpretation”…
Pardon me, but is that a fact?
C.S. Lewis describe such rhetorical machinations as an attempt to disallow debate while allowing it. That is, only the one who proposes such notions is allowed to employ that which his rhetoric denies to others. E.g.,
“There is no absolute truth.” Is that absolutely true?
“There is no free will.” Except for the fellow who chooses to say it.
“There is no absolute standard for good and evil.” Therefore, I spend my time telling this to people because I think it is good to do so.
It gets tiresome.
A mighty comment.
Actually, it is incorrect to say that the dedicated post-modern thinkers regard our culture as no more valid than any other. To them, any other culture is more valid than ours; ours is irredeemably evil,and we as its products must be punished for even existing (which handily explains “deep ecology” philosophy). In the end, our culture (and we as a people) must be destroyed to usher in a Brave New World of non-judgmental, post-modern enlightenment.
Run by themselves, of course, with all those other “valid cultures” worshiping them and waiting with bated breath to fulfill their every whim.
Cultures like Radical Islam, for instance.
Post-modern “thinking” has led the modern Western “enlightened elite’” up an intellectual cul-de-sac that they are incapable of perceiving.
It remains to be seen if the impact when they hit the barricade at the end of it kills the rest of us in addition to themselves.
clear ether
eon
…and I keep on coming back to my thought that IF all cultures are equally valid, enlightened and enlightening, enabling their citizens to prosper and grow, the WHY, OH WHY do they insist on coming here and attempting to change our way of life? If our way of life is so inimical to their existence they need to challenge it constantly and tell us that we are evil, corrupt and anti-life, then why don’t they just stay where they started and let us waste away, since obviously our way of life, to their way of thinking, is doomed to failure? I know I’m not the only one ever to have this thought, expressed by others as ‘if you don’t like it here, go back to whence you came’, but it keeps circling my teeny tiny brain, ne’er-the-less.
Coeurmaeghan in 29 Palms
“…and I keep on coming back to my thought that IF all cultures are equally valid, enlightened and enlightening, enabling their citizens to prosper and grow, the WHY, OH WHY do they insist on coming here and attempting to change our way of life?”
Having spent over three years of my young life at 29 Palms, i assume that you are not speaking literally…
Do they still serve “Bandini Burgers” at the “Last Oasis”, or did the War Crimes Tribunal catch up with that crew?
There you go, being logical again.
[As a daft boss of mine used to say.]
A certain objectivity is required of the herpetologist to treat all reptiles as equally important in the study and understanding of ” reptileness “. Thats fine for herpetologists, but it is absurd for the public at large to then put rattlesnakes on the cute-and-cuddly list. In my mind that is what multiculturism attempts to do.They have taken bits of truth and sound-thinking and woven them into a fairy tale in the same fashion that a practiced liar weaves his tales.
All cultures are not equal. They are not equal in sophistication, accomplishment, civility or the procurement of happiness for their members. To say that each culture is equal as a means of survival is like saying that dumpster diving is on par with a career as a physician as a means of survival. ( That is the best spread I could think of at 6 am, but it is not quite as wide as can be found between cultures)
In my eyes, Western culture is head and shoulders above every other culture that I am aware of. I am a cultural bigot in that sense, and wear the label proudly. To distort Mark Twain’s observation,” western culture is the worst one, except for all the others”. What I am getting at here is that however superior western culture is, it still needs alot of polishing. Our cultures foundation has many high ideals but we have had a difficult time living up to them. There is still plenty of gender and racial bigotry, violence, and our justice system barely resembles the one set out in the constitution. Despite our faults, we are still the best culture on the planet, and we have the greatest potential of any in history. One of the attributes that make us better is our recognition of these faults and our desire to continue polishing our culture rather than stagnate in some self-proclaimed state of perfection.
The motivations of present day ‘postmodernists’ might be worth looking into. I suspect that thier profession to hold all cultures equal is disingenuous. Their view springs instead from a hatred for western culture.
Thier individual experience has led them to feel disenfranchised, victimized or abused in some fashion by western culture’s imperfections and post-modernism has been distorted into a tool of revenge.
True and well said.
Thinking about it, two things occur to me:
1) If I look at certain cultures, say the tribal cultures in the oceanic cultures, I can say that my people once were (a couple of thousand years ago) as they are now. We have learned and progressed, they have not. For various reasons, we have changed and learned certain things, they have not. 2) I cannot say for certain that our ways would be as good for them as theirs are now, but neither can we definitely say that their current ways are the best that could be.
Cultures evolve, and cultural evolution – like biological evolution – is a blind “drunk man’s walk” (that’s a technical term) through a vast search space in hopes of finding a better way of surviving. While ours may not be – indeed most certainly is not – the best possible culture, I believe that we can say that we have discovered certain principles that will be of use to others in most circumstances.
A tepid defense of something or other.
I don’t think that evaluation of cultures is an action of bigotry and to come to a conclusion that western culture is ‘the best’ isn’t bigotry.
Postmodernism rejects evaluation – a passive and non-intellectual act which is essentially an act against our basic human capacity for the use of reason. To evaluate something is an act of reason. Is this food good or bad; is this way of life functional or dysfunctional?
We, who live within cultures, must evaluate them and change them when necessary. We have to ask questions of our mode of life. Does it enable us to live within a healthy state or are the people living with poor nutrition, vulnerable to diseases etc. Does it enable us to constructively interact with other peoples…or are we always vulnerable and must isolate outselves from all contact? Does it enable us to constructively interact with our environment or are we always at the mercy of nature – a snowfall, a rainstorm, a blight on our crops? Does it enable us to adapt to changes – or are we unable to adapt and then, become dysfunctional?
The western culture has long taken the stance that it will evaluate itself and ‘how we live’. It is thus capable of evaluating whether it is providing for the health and well-being of its population, whether it is constructively interacting with the environment, whether it can interact with other peoples, whether it can adapt to change.
Other cultures either refuse to self-evaluate (eg, Islamism) or move into isolation (many tribes try to do this); or are assisted in isolation by the ridiculous notion of multiculturalism which sets up peoples into isolate, non-adaptive frozen identities. They become ‘mummified’ cultures, dead, dormant and dangerous because they have lost the capacity to evaluate themselves and others.
Of course, the assumption that human nature and the human mind is one is Western assumption, rooted in Greek and Hebrew thought and belief, and reinforced by Christianity and the Enlightenment. In that case, it makes sense to assume we all do the same things but in different ways. So, as Solway seems to suggest, the methodological assumptions of those early to mid-20th century anthropologists were justified. What needs to be recognized, though, is that it is the very awareness of this fact that is not (yet) universal–we are all capable of the same ethical and intellectual advances but we haven’t all made them yet. The self-criticism implicit in “relativism” distinguishes us from the naively ethnocentric. And defending the institutions in which that distinction is embodied is our right and obligation
@adam: “..the assumption that human nature and the human mind is one is… reinforced by Christianity..”
This seems like an oversimplification, in that Christianity not only stresses the existence of a soul, but also the fact that the human mind no matter how advanced cannot by itself overcome original sin, thus the need for the Savior Christ.
@adam: “In that case, it makes sense to assume we all do the same things but in different ways.”
Apologies, but that statement seems to be a logical fallacy falling under the category of overgeneralization. Thus your conclusions that follow from the statement are suspect.
@adam: “The self-criticism implicit in “relativism” distinguishes us from the naively ethnocentric.”
Of what use is self-criticism if it is based on a value system that can only be used to judge ourselves but not others? Finally, your use of the pejorative ‘naively’ (1) seems to imply that those who are ethnocentric can only be naive, and (2) immediately forces you into the use of a universal and thus objective judgmental scale, which would seem to be contradictory when considered with the rest of your arguments.
You said: “…rooted in Greek and Hebrew thought and belief,…”
Sorry, stating it as: “its preciously little Hebrew (whatever roots of Christianity may be drawn from it), and very heavily Greek roots” would have been a far more accurate statement.
Western Civ is a European based civilization, not a Middle-Eastern rooted one.
Stunning! Brilliant!
The essential ideas of postmodernism comes from the French radical syndicalist Georges Sorel. When you distill PoMo’s essense from its inchoherent babbling and double talk it is just the intellectual underepinnings of Fascism. Everything Postmodern was said by Sorel and then Mussolini. This shouldn’t come in as a surprise since the Godfather of American Postmodernism was the Belgian Nazi Paul de Mann
A very good summary, I agree with it. But at the same time humans and their culture have to live in the real world. One has to eat, keep warm and and in the modern interrelated complex urban world engage in a huge number of transactions some openly acknowledged but most tacit. This is the pragmatic and ultimately objective world. Postmodernism leads to poor results in the pragmatic world. One finds oneself thinking it is getting warmer when in fact it is getting colder, a potentially fatal mistake. One finds oneself rejecting all practical forms of energy production in favor of idealized impractical energy sources, another potentially fatal mistake in an urban high energy society. One finds oneself laboring under an economic system, for instance Keynesianism, which is undergoing a catastrophic failure all around us, another potentially fatal error. Is the chief danger Islam inside the Trojan horse of postmodernism, relativism and critical theory? Or is the real danger a decline and failure of our complex society as postmodernism leads to make judgements which have very real negative pragmatic results?
…. one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House. Some believe it already does ….
Effectively it most certainly does.
GK Chesterton was so wise – that once man stopped believing in God, he would believe in anything. St Paul was so wise about listening to folks that would tickle our ears – no sin – no wrong – no God. What they don’t tell you is that their sanctimonious world view also means – no good –no love – no compassion – no sacrifice for others. (War, however, and controlling the world by using this stuff as pretext, is apparently okay)
The Godless (left?) would have us believe that since all cultures are equal and there is no right or wrong between cultures, therefore, there can be no right or wrong within our culture. Having values (religion etc.) becomes an evil in itself. Judging people who choose to live “evil” lives is not only wrong, but judging anything at all to be evil is to be the only unacceptable evil.
They are hoping that their followers never notice that they are, in fact, in direct contradiction to their own thesis when they not only judge, but condemn, Judeo-Christian culture as the one unacceptable component of this entire meme that, “all cultures are equal and never to be criticized or altered.”
The essence of all this anti-Judeo-Christian nonsense is a clear attempt to reduce man to a mere helpless fragment of his culture – to deny his humanity as being one of free will and a creature made by, and saved for eternity by his loving Creator.
This “postmodernist” philosophy is far more than a mere misguided anthropological treatise – it is a carefully constructed deceit to eliminate all vestiges of Judeo-Christian civilization from the world. This is but the corollary to the other Godless deceit – bio-diversity – the very idea that all living species are equal – “a boy, is a dog, is a rat.” That man made construct remains transparently, a patently obvious attempt (not to elevate the cockroach, for they could care about the lowly cockroach) to intellectually rape man of his dignity as a unique and special being made in his Creator’s image, and charged by that Creator with having dominion over his world. It is these same folks that remove man from nature (to some nether-sphere) in order to cast blame upon him for harming its fallen nature (see AGW, radical environmentalism, and eco-worship)
That this is straight from Hades is inarguable.
What these “intellectuals” will learn on Judgment Day, is that the clever delights of arrogance, self-deceit, and self-worship, are inversely proportionate to the eternal burdens they have freely chosen for themselves.
Actually, it is worse than man simply being equal to other species. It has morphed into man being the enemy of other species. Thus, the twisted idea that man is the source of all environmental problems. This is the foundation of environmentalism and has become the new religion for the post-modern world. Thus the craziness about global warming (excuse me, ‘climate change’) and all the rest of the environmental nonsense.
DD
You’re so right dd. I often laugh at the absurdity of the political left, positing man outside of nature as it’s enemy, hence the blame for its fallen status. Where oh where, is man to be hid, if he’s not a viable working part of nature (a plant, animal, or mineral,) where is he to be placed? Elsewhere, you say, but there is nothing, they say, outside of nature – (that would admit that God exists – the very thing they have disowned to make the state the god de jour.) If man is part of nature, then he merely remains a superior species – a superior predator, a superior…then again, perhaps they need a golden calf or something more tangable that’s not so suseptable to climate change and stuff?
Right dd. Their dilema is they can’t admit man is part of nature, because then their beloved nature (their eco-god – with exceptions for the unborn) becomes fallible and corrupt, and man must be ackowledged as a superior predator. So they must posit man as an enemy outside of nature as its reason for its (fallen) destructive character?
Then again they accuse Florida hurricanes as upsetting the eco-systems of Florida. As if the hurricanes are a very viable part of the Florida eco-system. Contradiction? Heck, that’s their food and energy drink.
“When Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Sind, was engaged in India in stamping out suttee a Brahmin protested that suttee was their custom. “In my country, too, we have a custom,” Napier replied. “When men burn women alive we hang them. Next to your pyre my carpenters will build a gallows and then let each of us act according to our custom.””
What the West badly needs is a return to, indeed a restored appreciation of the virtue of, cultural chauvinism. Multiculturalism is an abdication of human reason, a unilateral disarming of the power of discernment.
What you are outlining in your focus on the relativism of interpretation is not a new mode of thought but one as ancient as man.
The ‘flux’ of Heraclitus and his focus on essentialist ‘logos’ are similar to that of the postmodern Derrida. The relativism of Protagoras (man is the measure of all things) simply means that what the individual subjectively experiences is ‘truth’.
This domain of ‘the phenomenological’ where man is trapped within his subjective experiences, culture and language is offset by another mode of thought which you do not mention: Realism.
Realism scoffs at the narrow superficiality of phenomenologicalism; it insists that there IS an Objective Truth; this objective reality exists – and man can, trapped as he is within his created knowledge base, advance his knowledge towards this objective truth. So – man can move from viewing disease as caused by that witch on the hill…to its cause being due to bacteria.
Man can, rather than dance and pray to the whatever spirits, select the best seeds and most robust animals for the next planting, reproduction and thus, increase the food supply to support a larger and healthier population.
Man can invent new methods of interaction with the objective world, whether by the microscope or satellite..and so on. None of this would be possible if man lived without an acceptance of an objective reality.
As for universal morals – we do find a common thread in all of mankind. Focus on nurturance of the young and elderly, rejection of incest, support for the family, and yes, the ‘golden rule’ for members of your tribe. After all, no society, no group of people could survive if its morals were not nurturing but were harmful to its people.
Other forms of behavior (cock-fighting, rigid gender rules, punishments) are found in all histories of all groups – and change.
Therefore, the philosophical theory of Realism which asserts that existence of both an objective reality and universal morals contradicts that of Postmodernism or Cultural Relativism.
A pretty good nut-shell encapsulation of the various notions and tenets born of postmodernism (PM). It’s a good example of why man needs philosophy and what happens when humans reduce their thinking to the level of the concrete bound or ‘experiences’ and ‘traditions.’ I would have liked to see the author explain to the lay reader some of the terms used. For example the sentence “Master narratives by which we seek to elucidate the history of man and civilization are spurious and must be jettisoned in favor of the parochial and insular.” is an accurate statement of a PM tenet. But the phrase’master narratives’ means principles and ‘parochial and insular’ means the concrete bound state of the tribal mentality.
It is sad that philosophy has deteriorated to the point that principles are now identified as ‘master narratives’ and have been condemned as meaningless. That is, I submit, the raison d’etra for pragmatism, an unprincipled form of practicality which isn’t practical at all.
Fine writing. An epistemological tour de force taking an errorless road.
Thank you, David!
The description of post-modernism is interesting because it sounds like something a “sophisticated” person might say to impress the rubes. Used as a vague, sloppy interjection one can still sound very profound and obtuse.
People do not question the language of others much these days. The term “what-ever” is being used as a dismissive “Don’t bother me, I don’t care.” One hears it among teens a lot these days. The reason this term and others like it get used is because they are difficult to contest. The usage is so wrong that if anyone were ever called out for it by those with a penchant for grammar and vocabulary, both the user and the questioning authority would have share a blank stare when discussing the answers.
So, nobody goes there. (A delightfully post-modern statement)
Thank you for questioning this ugly behavior.
In addition to having foresworn God, consider those who have taken up drugs in His place. My generation, stoned to imbecility, has and is willing to believe, most seriously, nonsense of jaw-dropping magnitude.
The great joke of post modernism is that it refers to a prior conceit of fashionable thinking, proposing to supercede it with further, even more airy conceits.
Thank you, Mr. Solway, for this encapsulation of the codified insanity that is PoMo.
This curious movement, after all the lifetimes and wasted words devoted to convincing the world that nothing matters and what if it did? (apologies to Johnny Cougar) amounts to nothing more than the intellectual equivalent of a dog chasing its tail. It appears to give the dog satisfaction and provides amusement to an onlooker. To an even greater extent than a car, the question arises, once the object has been caught, then what?
I find it curious that all these “great thinkers” who see the world as merely some sort of false construct where absolutes don’t exist nevertheless rely on the Universal Absolute: you can view the world any way you wish.
I’m sure I’m not the only layman who dismisses a philosphy that contradicts itself. Give me Reality any day, warts and all.
Every few generations a society or an empire needs a sorting. Or to be destroyed and overtaken. To heck with ‘western culture’. Let’s just talk about this United States. We are deep into a culture war. It needs to go all the way and one side or the other win. Decisively. I’m sick to death of being controlled by leftist idiots. I hate people who believe in big government. Big government is bad government and any fool can see this. Let’s get it on.
Agree completely. The issues are clear. The opposition is understood. The goals are defined. Time to move out.
I also agree with this. There is nothing more to debate. The “post-modern” Left declared its intentions long ago and in the last 10 years at least has waged increasingly open war. Let’s have it. The problem is, while they have plenty of warriors, we are bereft. I see no one willing to challenge them directly and, i.e., to paraphrase another commenter here, take up the banner of chauvinism.
Yes, we are at that point where Obama says, “Who do you believe, me, or your lyin’ eyes?” The Left has had us watching postmodern birdies while they sacked the economy. I will never forgive them. Track down the architects of this Cloward-Piven nightmare and we will show them social-justice.
Nice essay.
“The hypocrisy is truly staggering. When a gay man is killed, a woman punished for being raped, a Christian firebombed or a Jew hunted down in some Islamic nation, the left has little or nothing to say.”
This is because the Left shares with Islam one very important goal: the destruction of Western civilization. The Left is thus reticent to criticize or weaken a movement that is advancing, by leaps and bounds, one of the pillars of their agenda. So a few women or homosexuals are put to death—what of it? What is that compared to the salvation of humanity?
Speaking of hypocrisy, the entire Multiculturalist narrative has become the epitome of it. All cultures are equal, it says, except of course for the European, which is inferior. Reminds one of the feminists, who maintain that both sexes are equal, except for the male, which is inferior.
An excellent “deconstruction” of postmodernism/multiculturalism is Alain Finkielkraut’s La Défaite de la Pensée (The Defeat of the Mind), written in 1987.
It takes a Canadian to explain postmodernism. And hockey.
Postmodernism? Perhaps. Hockey? No. Curling, on the other hand…
In art history, such a rejection of long-held values, including the golden mean, is termed ‘nihilism’. In art, it led to ‘modern’ art 100 years ago, when the artist cast aside discipline in favor of primitive, crude images similar to a small child’s artwork. The continuation of the movement led to paint splattered on canvas randomly in the 1950′s, then, last year’s depictions of a debased Christ in the Smithsonian. It begs the question ‘Were these two phenomena two parts of a larger movement to destroy one’s own culture?’
Were the roots of moral/cultural relativism a response to Charles Darwin’s racism, expounded in ‘The Descent of Man’, which implies he believed Europeans were more evolved than Africans?
What part did Marxism play in this? With the release of Soviet records about the funding/control of atheistic and communist organizations in the West, it’s clear to see the Kremlin’s hand in everything from the movies to the ACLU. The common thread seems to be the goal of Lenin and Stalin, a world-wide cult of atheists bowing and controlled by a cabal. One current iteration is the environmental movement, openly destroying traditional values and Western economies, and returning to pagan worship of the earth.
Academic elites in Ivory Towers have too little experience in the real world, dealing with real human beings, and too much idle time on their hands. They have rejected any notion of universal truths and spout nonsense in obtuse papers. They are dangerous when parents fail to properly educate their children in critical thinking.
Darwin, to my knowledge, doesn’t imply or state that the ‘races’ are intellectually different.
He writes: “the various races having similar inventive or
mental powers.” (ch VII).
Darwin’s focus was on the different biological characteristics and he did not imply any superior or inferior characteristic to even these factors. Darwin did, however, ignore the cultural or societal nature of these different populations – and ignored that their knowledge base was a result of a direct adaptation to their ecological environment.
You obviously haven’t read Darwin’s later works…for example,
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (The Descent of Man (1871) p.201)
I think you have to understand the knowledge base and the semantic terminology of the time. My quote was from the same book ‘Descent of Man’, 1871 as yours. My quote referred to his consideration of the intellectual capacity of all ‘races’ (his term; we would use ‘ethnicities). He said they were similar.
His outline referred to the fact that the modern (his term is’civilized’) intrusions into ‘native or indigeneous’ (his term is ‘savage’) areas of the world almost always led to the death of the natives – usually by diseases to which they were not immune…while the natives were immune to other diseases, such as yellow fever. This happens to be a fact; the indigeneous were not immune to the infectious diseases of urban residency: influenze, TB, smallpox – and these decimated the indigeneous.
Kindly note that Darwin was not advocating any extermination; he was observing the different biological characteristics, the different diseases and illnesses that each ‘race’ was prone to or was immune to, and the results of contact and intermixing. Therefore to conclude that he was ‘racist’; that he was setting up superior/inferior criteria; that he was advocating rulership of the one over the other, or extermination, is totally false.
Way WAY too complicated, and it misses the key point.
Whatever “post modernism” is, it is a subset of a massive attack on post-1776 western civilization. The American Revolution shattered the eternal construct of civilization that had been in place, unbroken, since mankind emerged from the ice ages, discovered agriculture, and settled into cities. That instigated the need for government, and government quickly and forever forced society into two dominant classes: the governing elite, and the rest, whose mission in life was to serve the governing elite. Since 1776, the goal of many in western civilization has been to restore the old order. Today, the bacteria that seek to force that will on humanity goes by the name “progressivism”, but that name is simply the latest in a long series: royalism, oligarchism, marxism, communism, socialism, facism, liberalism, statism, and now progressivism. The names change but the disease does not. They want everything for themselves, and they want you to serve them, forever, with no chance to ever overturn their mastery again.
A lot of people can’t understand why they would destroy the wealth of the world to do that, since well over 90% (probably closer to 99%) of the wealth (read: lifestyle improvements) has been developed since 1776. The answer is simple: when you control EVERYTHING, and 99% of humanity has NOTHING, your wealth is actually far greater than it is when the wealth is spread, as it is today. In other words, Commissars don’t care whether the wealth of the world crashes, because the Commissars’ wealth and power is going up, big-time.
From 1776 until the mid-19th century, the disposed elite were in disarray and despair. Republican forms of government swept the western world, often violently. The people could damn well see that the new way was better and they seized the opportunity. But then Karl Marx appeared with the magic elixir of royalism /progressism / et al – class warfare, or, at its heart, economic envy. Since that time, economic envy has been the weapon of choice of the royalists. Indeed, with the exception of Nazi Germany, western history since the mid 18th century has been the clash of two forces, capitalism (and the incredible riches it has brought to the world) and marxism (and the misery and hopelessness it brings to everybody but the commissars). It looks like an uneven contest, except for the fact that envy is the most powerful emotion. Lust fades, love is transient, but envy simmers and can be flared to epic proportions by a skilled practitioner, community organizer or mullah whenever the bacteria desire.
So what about “post modernism”? Well, it’s no coincidence that it arose immediately after WWII, because that is when the Marxists felt strong enough to start their long and violent march against western civilization. Unfortunately, as it turned out, free societies actually are capable of developing significantly more military might than centrally planned societies. This, of course, should not be surprising, since free societies are many times more effective than centrally controlled societies in every respect. Russia and China quickly realized that they would never conquer the west in the traditional military way.
So they decided to subvert the west instead. Post-modernism, relativism, unions, the media, the intelligentsia, the language, the culture, religion, balkanizing and angering people in every way possible (women vs. men, homosexuals vs. the rest, blacks vs. whites, city dweller vs. country, and on and on)…all with the purpose of destroying the civilization that stands in the way of the “progressives” re-ascendance to absolute power.
Skip to 2011. Barack Obama, an ignorant narcissist, a dedicated Marxist, the greatest con-man in history, sits in the most powerful office in the world. He has a trunk full of tricks to distract the rubes while his masters destroy the US and western civilization. The Marxian vision is 97% complete. They are one election away from ruling the world. You are one election away from becoming a hopeless serf, as are your children and their children. World order is scheduled to be restored in 2013.
I like your outline. The thing that does bother me, however, is the implication of intentionality to ‘the Marxists’. I don’t see them as an organized agenda – rather, a collection of isolate, secure, government funded ideologists.
That is, with the rise of large population nations post WWII, and the rise of industrialism that removes people from direct manual labor and into the isolation of the intellectual planner..and the concomitant increase in: bureaucracies, academics in pre and university institutions…we get a rise in the ratio of the population who are both in positions of power..and secure from acountability for that power.
That is, we get an Elite Class, protected from the realism of their utopian ideas, never having to deal with any hard realities of life, secure jobs, secure pensions..the rise of protection for the worker, the retiree etc…..Well, this Elite Class moves into the refined air of rhetoric. The seminar rooms, the conference rooms, the pundits and learned articles. And – they are the Elite in our govt and education.
This group are utopian, which means, out of touch with reality. They are also elitist and consider that people must be Ruled. Therefore they are against the individual freedoms that are the basis of capitalism and democracy. I don’t see this as a specific agenda of Russia or China! But as due to the emergence of a new ‘landed gentry’ in our societies.
China, by the way, is moving fast into private enterprise capitalism and away from socialism.
I don’t think they are a monolithic international organization, certainly not since Russia fell and Red China saw that economic central planning can’t succeed.
But I do believe a brilliant architecture was put in place by the Russians, an architecture that is now several generations old and which has taken on a life of its own. The main themes are to control the media, the intelligensia, and to divide and conquer every group in every way conceivable. In a way, marxism today is like Christianity. The pope doesn’t control much. There are many factions, with different agendas, but underlying everything is a basic framework: i.e., Jesus, the commandments, the trinity, sin and salvation, good and evil, etc., etc.
So, I maintain that the media is 98% marxists, but there probably aren’t more than a sliver of them who consider themselves to be followers of Marx. Same for professors and union officials. They think of themselves as liberal democrats or socialists who just happen to believe in all of the things that Marx and his followers laid out, and they just naturally feel that they are destined, even obligated to rule over us peons, because we are so stupid, and, of course, so greedy and imperialistic.
And every con man, scam artist, criminal and politician (deliberate redundancy to make a point) in the world flocks to them. There is no downside. Nobody goes to jail. They don’t have to work. Anybody that will hold a placard or espouse the future pharoes’ meme-du-jour can have a very nice life, at least for now. And the appeal is no less for the highly placed than for the guys with their elbows in your pocket. Gore and Imhelt are no different than the brain-dead placard wavers.
It’s self organizing, based on shared greed, power hunger, and the recognition that the marks can be enraged and scammed by envy and hatred, every time. Absolutely brilliant and consumately evil.
Ah, it tends to condense ones thought, when you know who to hate.
Since you bring up 1776, let’s jump to 1778 when the Confederation government had been deemed to be too weak, a Constitution was patched together and the ratifying conventions began. It clearly separated itself out into ruling Federalist elite (which happened to include most of the seaboard located merchant class vs many of the rest of the folks, who feared that giving themselves over to the elite might eventually yield a Catholic or Mohametan President, a Federal government which went to war regularly, taxed them to death, and let the “better classes” run things.
So, alas, all of the bad stuff has happened, but a lot of boats have gotten floated, a lot of teachers, union members, policemen, firemen, and even members of the military have had decent economic success, and the people who landscape their yards, sell them cars, and until recently, sell them houses, have done pretty well also.
I have heard it said that 50% are getting a free ride, because they pay no taxes, then we have the 10% who own 90% of everything, another 20% of the government-labor-military related class who are doing OK or better. Who exactly are the people who are getting screwed?
I think that Solway’s critique of post modernism has a the ring of truth in many places, but it is much less clear what the “solution” is. We are what we are, and whatever that is, will change slowly, because that is what humans do, short of plagues, major wars, or the Lord’s return.
“I have heard it said that 50% are getting a free ride, because they pay no taxes, then we have the 10% who own 90% of everything, another 20% of the government-labor-military related class who are doing OK or better. Who exactly are the people who are getting screwed?”
The free riders aren’t yet 50%. 10% don’t own everything. Government-labor-military doesn’t come close to 20% of the country. You are probably thinking of what unions get paid, not their % of the population.
So, other than everything in your post being wrong, good job Matthew.
And oh yes, why exactly shouldn’t we hate marxists (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, et al)? Is this related to your prior full-throated defenses of Stalin and Soros? Feel free to expound on this.
Ok, you can neither read with comprehension, nor remember whom I have or have not defended. When pressed you say, “don’t expect me to remember, because I don’t read half of what you say.” Well, you have just established THAT beyond a reasonable doubt.
Now about 1788; do you know ANYTHING about that, or are you a postmodern righty, sho doesn’t know the specifics of history but has strong BELIEFS about American history?
Do you imagine you have a valid point about 1788 or do you just spew?
You won’t find a conservative who wants to disable the government completely, but a nut like yourself suggesting the failure of the Articles of Confederation turned the Founding Fathers into Big Government afficianodos ala Barack Obamy, who stunningly asserts with no evidence whatsoever that governments are smart and effective, is the knee-slapper of all time. Yet you bring up the childish point over and over. And like dealing with a child, ignoring your inanity doesn’t work. You scream and pout until an adult finally gives in and pats you on the head.
And re the “hate” comment, I have to remind you that you are the guy who had 50+ orgasmic posts about the Arizona mass murder. Because, of course, you loved the fact that an atrocity could be used to smear Sarah Palin, who people like you froth about because she has more common sense in her pinkie than the Idiot in Chief encountered in his entire Harvard class, assuming of course, that he didn’t just invent the whole Harvard thing, like most of the rest of his “life”.
Now that we’ve cleared the details up, explain yourself again about your Stalin and Soros adulation.
You continue to make stuff up, which to me is again the sign that you cannot deal with content. I am open to your content (not belief) related assertions about the Federalists.
I will note for the tenth time that I did not in any way respond to the Tucson killings in the way you describe, except for the fact that I posted a lot, and probably destroyed your assertions a number of times in the process, obviously leaving a mark. I never defended the left’s attempt to smear Palin regarding Tucson, nor Soros or Stalin; Soros appears to be the left wing equivalent of the Koch brothers.
So “Proreason,” you make continual broad smears, would probably defend yourself (when proven wrong; and since Mr Lucky keeps a computer file on my comments, bless his soul, you can be sure that he would chime in to support any of your assertions about what I have said IF they were true.) by saying, “Well, if Dwight never said it, then Matthew or BC…or somebody did. What’s the difference?”
And that’s the biggest problem with you. The EMOTION and PASSION of what you say or want to believe trumps the facts. If I say, Madison and Hamilton did x, y, and z, you do not respond, “no, they may have done x1, y1, but never z in any form, and they did do a, b, and c, which disproves your case.” No, that is not how you argue; that would take precision and knowing your stuff.
Dear Matthew, Mr. Lasky pays as much attention to you as I do. He reads your first sentence if he feels like he needs a chuckle.
Or in other words (yet again) you got nuthin’!
You leave out the contribution of our English friends to the development of classical liberal society, but otherwise an excellent overview.
Where do I start?
Mr. Solvey, you said: “Barack Obama is America’s first postmodern president.” Really? He’s America’s first Non-American, non-Western President.
The term “post-modernism” is basically a term to signify a “post-Western” World – in everything cultural: economic, social, religious, philosophical, legal, artistic, etc, thought and action.
It’s origins trace to the mid-1800s, with Darwin’s and Marx’ work, the two mortal enemies of Western Civilization. The three pillars of this Civilization were Athenian Democracy, Christianity and Capitalism. Post-modernism is a frontal assault in all three of these pillars.
As to whether the Parthenon of Acropolis in Athens is equal to Machu Picchu and/or the faces of Easter Island, only a self-hating fool would argue this in a Western Society, but unfortunately we have plenty of those among us these days.
The author makes the needed connections that post-modern multiculturalism has been used and was probably invented by Marxists, or by people with Marxist sympathies, to tear down Western civilization in order to rebuilt on the Marxist model. Because the current occupant of the WH is an adherent of many leftist prescriptions for a new utopian order he no doubt subscribes to this one as well and may be doing his level best to carry it out. But even if his performance as president is not a product of incompetence, but is a deliberate policy to harm the US, a majority of voters now see it as incompetence and the plan to rebuild the US will officially come to an end next year.
Jeeze…I paraphrase Hermann Goering, and the moderator slams me into limbo.
I guess post-modernism doesn’t hold with comment moderators, either.
Those who disdain this ‘master narrative’ would seem to consist of members of the winning culture who are now secure in their position by virtue of the de facto conquest of other cultures and have the leisure to evolve from the real world view of such things to a leisurely academic view, and those whose egos are assuaged by a discredited view of that conquest because they are the conquered. No where is this more evident than in Israel where the descendants of the fighters have a more leisurely view of Palestinian Arabs and those Arabs themselves probing about for reasons other than themselves why they lost in the first place.
This theme echoes throughout Western academia which had those supposedly moronic explorers, capitalists, soldiers and politicians of the West act as bulldozers so that writers could stand above it all and preach. It is easy to have such a view now that the buildings have been built and the land cultivated and tamed.
Among those conquered the theme is also echoed in continuing and bewildering arrays of excuses and explanations running parallel to academia. Since anything that makes the conquered look good is all that is required, the Third World simply nods their heads and agrees and insists on departing their equally relevant cultures, ironically buying into the very idea they intellectually reject. That is why you have so many who believe their countries are so equal but will not live in those countries. No surprise that holding such mutually exclusive ideas is common to both the conquered and the liberal Left but for entirely different reasons; one props up the desires of the others and so they are natural allies. This is the source of my feeling that the centerpiece of liberalism in the Left is ‘nostalgie de la boue’ since it in one fell swoop encompasses so many themes of particular interest to them, the main one being a rejection and disdain for America’s history and that of the West in general to the point of expressing apology by action. That action is to assist in the wholesale movement of cultures from the Third World to the West by way of atonement and to prove their views on relativism which also consists of propping up a moribund black American culture that continues to behave as a Third World culture within a First World one.
The problem with this faith based madness arises when relativism falls apart as previously isolated communities and cultures butt up one against the other and the reality of man and both his talents and dark side come to the fore and all philosophy is thrust aside as well as any imagined balance and there are winners and losers. To subsequently reject history and make winners out of losers and losers out of winners is unhealthy. It is why so many in the Third World have evolved a point of view wherein success is deemed immoral and failure success since a rhetorical and dreamlike version of success is all that the Third World can ever hope to aspire to given the reality of the last 300 years that continues to this day.
A pragmatist will tell you that if you give over Haiti to 10 million Greeks and the Haitians thrown into Greece that Greece will be ruined in 2 generations and Haiti revitalized. A liberal will tell you that nothing of the sort will occur and that that pragmatist is in fact a racist. This disconnection from reality leads to sickness as do all thinking entities that are divorced from the real world. The only reason Darwinism doesn’t do away with liberal academics is that they swim in and are propped up by the very world whose reality based mechanisms they disdain.
Greeks? Was that your best choice?
Why, you’ve got a problem with that?
They are doing a hell of a job of ruining Greece, aren’t they?
Along with G. Soros, Goldman Sachs and a few others. Just how much do you really know about Greece, except of what you read in the lamestream “media”?
As I recall, I read most of it at PJM.
And so you think that by reading a half-baked article in PJM on Greece makes you an authority on modern Greece and Greece’s fiscal and monetary affairs, or Greek people and their culture? Typical leftist arrogance.
Throwing a dart at a map would have sufficed when you’re talking about Haiti.
I mean, c’mon – mud cookies? Why not just sift thru silt at the bottom of a river using you’re teeth. If their next President isn’t a giant condom they’re doomed. Or should I say America is more doomed. We are taking the detritus of the world expecting relativistic prime steak and getting those mud cookies.
No one
any where
has had any problem
understanding and adopting
the principles
you call
western
that’s your problem
that’s why you can’t see the forest for the fleas
Post-modernism is an attack on Judeo-Christian culture. If post-modernism ultimately triumphs, we’ll live, in a Muslim world.
In my orbit, postmodernism is the handmaiden of “deconstructionism” and the movement in academia to deconstruct literature.
The so-called big story, especially the story about the transcendent status of Western values, is a sectarian makeshift, an objective fraud and a mystification. We in the West have no special prerogatives in the carnival of the world’s multifarious cultures. Privilege is self-conferred. We have, in short, no priority, no higher attributes to boast of…Master narratives by which we seek to elucidate the history of man and civilization are spurious and must be jettisoned in favor of the parochial and insular.
For decades now, the modern liberal mind has been relentlessly indoctrinated into the notion that nothing is superior or preferable to anything else.
Barack Obama is America’s first postmodern president.
And so it is for him and the crowd of subversives with which he has surrounded himself, people who literally have no use for this nation’s founding principles, people who find the idea of a democratic republic no better than totalitarianism (in fact, they prefer totalitarianism, it’s so tidy) people who barely conceal their contempt for the United States Constitution but who, like Obama, had to pretend fealty in order to take the job.
Ironically, the governing canon such postmodern revisionists espouse, namely, the relativity of all truth claims, applies to everything, apparently, but their own absolute insights and pronouncements about the relativity of truth claims. All facts are fictive except their own.
Holier-than-thou sorts rarely catch irony, especially when one of their cherished precepts is involved.
All generalizations are (apparently) false except ones made by postmodernists.
As a result, we in the West, battered by our ideological elites into a coma of abeyance, have no right, for example, to denounce or legislate against stoning, limb amputation for certain offenses, female genital mutilation, sartorial confinement, wife-beating, polygamy, honor killing and other such practices prevalent in the Islamic world.
Multiculturalists are hoisted on their own petards when they are forced to carry their premises to “logical” extremes.
Academics truly don’t have enough to do. They’ve reconfigured themselves as morons.
“Academics truly don’t have enough to do. They’ve reconfigured themselves as morons.”
Well, most of them, not all however tanstafl, not all.
I know blanket indictments are spurious.
I’ve met some fantastic academic minds, one or two of them right here at PJM.
Frustration, however, drives me to hyperbole.
Well documented and utterly devestaing!
Congratulations on a fine piece of work, full of erudition and insight into the hideous termites burrowing away within the heartland of Judaeo-Christian civilization.
Last summer I had, and took, the opportunity to travel to Rapa Nui (a/k/a Isla de Pascua, a/k/a Easter Island) to view a total solar eclipse. When the Rapa Nui culture was the moai (big stone head) cult, they deforested their entire island in the process of making gear to transport moai from the volcanic quarry to ahu (platforms) in their villages. Their subsequent culture, the Birdman cult, was not as directly self-destructive but did become marked by cannibalism.
They are an example of cultures not being equal, but some cultures being more functional or dysfunctional than others.
A live white European male Franciscan missionary and a live white European male anthropologist helped the Rapa Nui find balance and believe in the beauty of their art (culture in another sense of the word). The European concepts of human rights and human dignity motivated them to resist being treated like vermin on their own island, much to their benefit (and to ours, because visiting their island and seeing the restored and fallen moai is quite an experience).
Good thing for the Rapa Nui that Englert and Malloy didn’t believe in cultural relativism. They brought change, change that has enabled the Rapa Nui population to recover. Even if the Rapa Nui are now promoting their culture as something different and interesting, such promotion provides them with sustenance. 80% of their economy is tourism.
Englert and Malloy admired the Rapa Nui and their megalith art and technology. That led them to advocate for them and their human rights, and the importance of their art. Cultural imperialism? Perhaps. But thanks to them, it doesn’t suck to be Rapa Nui anymore.
Excellent essay, Mr. Solway and wonderful, enlightening follow-on discussion. Additional gifts of ourPoMo world: transformational grammar, atonal music, abstract expressionism, minimalism, morphology and structuralism.
Skepticism in the face of PoMo is cause for ostracism.We have become cultural castratos as a result, with all apologies to eunuchs, of course. I am a proud anti-egaitarian.
Read David Harvey book The Condition of Postmodernity and you will see that there is nothing about modern leftism which is postmodern, exactly the opposite. Communists in Europe for years denounce postmodernism as neoliberal invention for destroying political ideologies and making cosmopolitan cultures with no coherent, social psyche. And all leftists are against that, so I don’t know where you are getting this.
Although your article is well sourced, it uses those unproved assumptions which are right out of Pat Buchanan Death of the West and are just not true. As I said, read 20 year old book by Marxist David Harvey, which is precisely attack on postmodernism.
In case you’re referring to this David Harvey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Harvey_(geographer)
let me note that his standing in the field of Economic Geography is low (never produced antthing of any note or any innovative theoretical or empirical finding of significance) and neither has he shown a new path in Human Geography or any broader field in the Humanities or Social Sciences except to come up of a new phraseology with normative arbitrary statements about a marxist utopian urban and regional milieu, employing marxist terms to well established socio-spatial propositions. And in any case that work of his doesn’t give him any authority to speak as a representative of marxist social theory, let alone of a broader social theory. He’s an empty suit.
That David Harvey is a marxist tool, a fool whose writings aren’t to be taken seriously. But then again, what marxist (Mordechai-ist to be exact) has written anything to be taken seriously?
Hm, if a leftish Christian, utilitarian capitalist may contribute, I agree with 90 something % of this article but I think there is some conflation, especially among the comments. Weak postmodernism has its uses as a preliminary intellectual exercise. Strong post-modernism self aborts, since why should postmodernism not be subject to the epistemological relativity it accuses other meta-systems of?
Certainly some on the left are suckers for absolute cultural relativity, but so are the games theoretic ‘power is right’ social Darwinists on the right who e.g. opposed the lifting of banking secrecy after 9/11 when the US government was trying to trace the laundered money of terrorist funding, or funded dictatorships in a misguided effort to promote American security.
Getting into a lather about leftists is good cover for the fact that the median US Joe is no better off than in the ’70s while e.g. from 1990 – 2005 over 90% of the increase in wealth went to the top 10% of which over 50% went to the top 1%. Conflated rhetoric may dupe them for now but capitalism without social justice (which puts USA way down the longevity rankings) will not maintain the economic margin which social dynamism (+ geography) once gave America over the rest of the world.
Incidentally I think we should try to be nicer to each other on blogs – it reduces the chances of the totally assured shooting people.
You economic figures are ones I occasionally quote, but they sometime get denied by people here. What all of us need are the hard numbers and the sources which either prove or disprove these assertions. Whether a thread on post-modernism is the best place to get people who would stay with this topic long enough to prove anything would be interesting to find out.
I would also be interested in knowing the total number of local, state, and federal employees in the country and their average incomes.
Obviously, our biggest problem is that each side uses cherry-picked figures which support their cause. I would like to just get a relatively neutral set of figures out there. I will note in your figures that “over 90% of the increase in wealth went to the top 10%” and ask what are the figures that show the “creation” of wealth? is that a simple rise in bottom line income?
Someone take us through the income figures, decile by decile. I will push for this on other threads too. Time to veer away from the post-modernism of the left…and the right.
I don’t wish to enter this debate you two are having(?), except to make a point about your quest for “accuracy” in socio-economic figures (statistically obtained socio-economic data, that is): to some social scientists, such figures are necessarily ‘fuzzy’ (some even argue they have a ‘quantum’ structure in them). Yes, they’re spinned to make ideological points, often in a ridiculous manner (such as by leftists), sometimes in a subtle way. So, live with it, ‘spin’ (just as in physics) is a sine qua non component of social science data.
And as for the academic side of post modernism, it seems that it took Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle squared and applied it to EVERYTHING.
As a teacher, educated under modernism, but at a time when the ground was shifting toward post modernism, I found that being grounded in Greek Mythology, grammar, the Bible, the classics etc. was the best solid base. Hard core, modernist old fogies would simply dismiss all else, whereas I found an eclectic blend of the classic and the latest ethnic voice from the Autobiography of Malcolm to The House on Mango St. worked reasonably well.
See my post above: it isn’t the Heisenberg Principle actually, simply a ‘spin’ and the ‘quanta’ nature of it.
Excellent article!
Postmodernism is best-described as the rear-guard action of Modernism–the rear guard of the avant garde, if you will. Nietzsche came up with two possiblities for the supposed liberating effects of Nihilism. The first was the superman, but he was pretty much dead after WWII. There was another possibility, however, and that was Dionysus, the laughing god. Postmodernism is the jokey phase of Modernism itself. Derrida tries to position himself as the great jester; unfortunately he wasn’t very funny. Even Howard Zinn didn’t take himself too seriously. He never pretended to be a well-grounded scholar like Morrison. To be cool like Obama is to be a supreme ironist. All things are play; let us go into the sandbox together.
“Cultural relativity: How did we get from there to here?”
if memory serves … it was Kant who started it. Then Hegel Nizsche ground some stones, the Marx brought the political need for the (post-modernism) and then Hitler destroyed half the world and then Heidegger, Gadamard, Sartre, Derrida and such pounced on the circumstances ( “See? Hitler was so sure of his ‘truth’. Hence, truth is dangerous, and hence there is no such thing as truth,” although most of this vanguard were Nazis, politically.) Of course all hell broke loose after that initial foundation of total nonsense. I must admit, though. In today’s emergency, the total Leftist takeover of the world, such ruminations about how post-modernism came to be do not serve much purpose except that of a death-bed flash-back of a formerly healthy donkey.
Hugely valuable and timely insights of PoMo’s impact on Western civilization but….
I would caution Mr. Solway not to so quickly and easily confine the impact the PoMo mindset/worldview on Western culture to the political left – indeed to the sphere of politics itself. To do so misses how extensively and more profoundly this destructive worldview has infected Western Society.
Witness the erosion of orthodox Christianity in America (because of its inherently propositional, and therefore anti-PoMo claims) and along with it, the collapse of mainline Protestant denominations (Methodist, Episcopalian-Anglican, Presbyterian, etc.) in the last 50 years. The clear imperatives of orthodox Christianity and Judaism inspired this country’s founders with the profound idea that a Creator endows men with rights, birthed this country’s political structure, and more importantly, reinforced the moral fabric that we now see tearing and unraveling before our eyes.
While it’s true that politics may more acutely diagnose the disease of Postmodernism on Western civilization, it (politics) is not the cure.
Let me make a suggestion, if I may: instead of whining about “the end of Western Civilization” and its causes, let us see to it that we spark a revival of it. How? My suggestion is by adopting the key tenets of 21st century Theism, a way of linking science and religion. And by forming a Nation founded on their principles.
I am a student with a dilemma, so please hear me out. I would like to take advantage of the typical reader of this post, because they too hold an unyielding, chauvinistic devotion to Objective Truth. This author is the most lucid, enlightened man I’ve read since Buckley. His clarity is inspiring, so much so that I ask myself how such wisdom could be attained?
I am searching for a college, but not just any college. It is nearly impossible to find an institution that nurtures Critical Thinking and Individuality rather than treating you as an empty vessel of postmodernism and group-think. I am a Saul in search of a Gamaliel.
My cynical side tells me to pick a top 25 school and self educate through outlets such as this one, but is there more? Is there a Modern Day Alexandria that produces men like David Solway? Men like Buckley became what they were in spite of, not because of their Education.
Aside from obvious center-right picks like Hillsdale or Chapman, would somebody point me toward a better option? I would appreciate any valid input, and apologize in advance for misusing the forum.
I recommend a small, religious private College like Davidson in NC, or the College of the Ozarks in MO.
Alas, there isn’t an Alexandria any more, anywhere; but hopefully, it will return, someday.
Another approach would be to go meet the enemy head on, and fight it within: any Ivy league University (I attended one in the early 70s) or a top 20 College/University will do, as long as you keep your mind in focus.
Funny you should mention CofO, I only live an hour away from them and am in their service area. Despite that, their 9% acceptance rate makes Cornell and Amherst look like State Schools; Who would have thought that Presbyterians were so exclusive? Unfortunately, their lack of funding means certain departments such as their Political Science Dept. are neglected to serve more practical purposes(I think I read that here: http://tinyurl.com/3ahhvb).
I find it interesting that an alumni of an Ivy recommended small Liberal Arts Colleges and refers to his own Alma Mater as something of a last resort. Did your degree from the Ivy open more doors than one from a less prominent institution would have? I’ve been given the impression that there is an arbitrary ranking among employers, and that every school ranked under say the #25, are esteemed equally whereas the top 25 schools are afforded higher regard. Is this phenomenon real? Or would a College of the Ozarks Diploma have gotten you as far as your current Diploma? Has your Alumni Network aided you or it that just a myth?
Mind you, I’m not just a rank careerist. President Reagan said that if he had the option to go to Eureka College again, he would; sames goes with Paul Harvey and Culver Stockton College in Hannibal, MO. Ceteris paribus, I might do better to invest in the best credential that I can afford and expect to self educate more to fill the gaps.
This is one of the biggest investments I will make in my life, so I’m trying to determine the best place to invest. If any other reader has a suggestion, I would be very interested.
Thanks for the prompt reply!
How much are finances an issue? My parents were so poor in 1963 that I had two choices: go into the army or go into an Ivy with almost a full ride and moderate loan. State University was beyond our means. I got the latter and it has worked out well for me. Just ask Mr Lucky or David Thompson.
An Ivy degree always helps to get you noticed, which is at least half the battle in the resume brandishing.
But let’s face it, your choices are a lot more proscribed by your finances, grades, and SAT’s than you are letting on here.
What’s the deal with Brigham Young?
I can relate. Suffice to say that because the past 5 years have gone very poorly for my household, I am an EFC 0 eligible for the best “full need” institutional grants available, which makes exclusive private schools much more attractive than public ones(excluding UVA, UNC-CH, etc.). If I believed differently, I could go to my state universities entirely on the MO taxpayer’s dime, but I do have to live with myself after it’s over. I planned to go to the Army, but between what happened personally and Obama’s election, that just isn’t going to happen right now(unless a Pearl Harbor happens and they need every available man, God Forbid).
As for my grades, they won’t get into the less than 10% accepted schools Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton or Stanford. However, schools like Emory and William and Mary are safe and a school like Cornell is within reach. As for the financing, this exercise is part of my cost/benefit analysis. Debt is unavoidable, but there are strategies one can employ to ameliorate it.
That aside, I’m trying to benefit from the experiences of yourself and others. Put another way, is it better to pick a heterogeneous Name Brand School or an LAC that isn’t given to indoctrination or repression, and still believes in Classical Education? Unfortunately, Grad Schools and Employers alike are more inclined to smile on the Name Brands, in spite of their partial intellectual dormancy and accredited political theater(I’ve actually read of a student adapting an old Soviet joke to his classes: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us” turns into “We pretend to learn, they pretend to teach us”).
Scratching my head over the Brigham Young question. Thank You for Responding.
OOOPs! That’s supposed to be,.”…as if hurricanes “AREN’T” a viable….
Great article, Mr. Solway! Unfortunately, however, there’s more: PoMo isn’t just a relativist philosophical movement, it’s an ideology with an agenda. Ever since the Left came into existence in the 19th century, the Left’s attitude toward “faith in things unseen” has ranged from indifference to secularism and on to militant atheism. Today’s cultural Left, the PoMo Left, explicitly rejects the Person who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” by denying that there is any such thing as truth.
Pope John Paul II wrote “Faith and Reason” (Fides et Ratio) to help us remember that objective truth actually exists, and that we can perceive truth through right reason. He wrote a marvelous opening sentence that is the opposite of PoMo in every respect “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”
“It is evident what this means for the once-cherished and increasingly threatened values that are intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian armature of Western civilization.”
This is historical revisionism. Judeo-christian values had nothing to do with the enlightenment peroid. Judeo-christian values are the values that enslave men. You’re taking a cultural relativist stand yourself when it comes to judeo-christian values by not seeing the flaw these values have produced in ancient, european and early american culture.
“traditional matrimony as pertaining to one man and one woman”
I hope your not saying there is something wrong with same-sex marriage?
There is nothing wrong with marriage between one man and one woman or between two men or two women. The sooner you realize that the better chance you have at fighting cultural relativism.
“We are not to intrude with such parochial notions as our having been endowed by our Creator with a number of unalienable Rights, among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
As you shouldn’t becuase your wrong. The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A – and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.
Man has inalienable individual rights, this means that the same rights are held, individually, by every man, by all men, at all times. Therefore, the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another. For instance: a man has the right to live, but he has no right to take the life of another. He has the right to be free, but no right to enslave another. He has the right to choose his own happiness, but no right to decide that his happiness lies in the misery (or murder or robbery or enslavement) of another. The very right upon which he acts defines the same right of another man, and serves as a guide to tell him what he may or may not do.
Proxywar,
You’re obviously not a PoMo (because you reject a particular culture’s “narrative” – Judeo-Christian)…
But I’m curious; where do these rights that you have invoked come from if not Judaism and Christianity? For instance, “..the rights of one man cannot and must not violate the rights of another…” sounds quite like the Christian ethic “..Do unto others what you would have them do unto you”. The fact that both Judaism and Christianity (and other cultures) have codified versions of this and the other ethics that comprise traditional morality may bother you but there they are – you either accept them or you have nothing to stand on. The latter is like trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling up on your pants.
But the problem is that it is usually a package deal. Few quibble with the elements of the JC you cite, probably because they are universal truths, whether given by God, or spun out of the centrifuge of human evolution.
But there are other elements in the tradition regarding diet, sexuality, menstruation etc.,, that undoubtedly once served a useful purpose for survival, reproduction, community, whatever. But as progress has taken place, it is clear how the dietary injunctions have gotten outdated. A few hard core Orthodox folks stick to day-to-day adherence, and the rest move on to trusting their ovens to kills germs and their dishwashers clean the plates.
Then, between the basic truths almost everyone accepts both inside and outside the tradition and the narrow truths still believed only by the hard core, is a whole string of other propositions, practices, beliefs, rituals, taboos etc.
So we get down to something like my “right” not to have my children learn about birth control or homosexuality in school. Am I being persecuted if I am “forced” to acquiesce? It gets muddled both for people supporting and people criticizing the tradition.
In my childhood, our basic rights were to go start our own church, if we didn’t like the one we were in. Then I realized that I had the right not to go to church.
No – it’s not a “..package deal….” and not nearly as complicated as you argue…
We must all live together and therefore need The Moral Law to restrict our natural bent toward evil. But my eating shellfish and pork is not part of that Moral Law, nor does it infringe on anyone else’s right to NOT eat those same foods. So, it’s not a “package deal”.
Laws that govern relationships between individuals are what codify the Moral Law and are remarkably coincident in nearly all ancient traditions, Judaism, Babylonian, American Indian, Ancient Aboriginal, etc. Laws (more properly regulations) governing diet that you cited are what constitute ceremonial Law and apply specifically and exclusively to adherents of a specific religous tradition. They may include dietary restrictions, clothing of different materials, hair length, etc, but NOT sexuality (you did try to sneak that one in there it seems).
Sexuality (more properly sexual morality), because it regards relationships (albeit one of an intimate and specific nature), is therefore a valid aspect of Moral Law, NOT ceremonial law. The simple definition of sexual morality is the distinct exclusivity and restriction of physical union between a man and a woman within marriage (marriage being the public acknowledgment and recognition of that relationship). It therefore contains an indicative restriction on any sexual activity outside of this (homosexuality, fornication, bestiality, incest, etc.). So, it would follow that naming what is immoral as “moral” is just as absurd as it sounds…e.g. homosexual “marriage”, “honor” killing, “justice” stealing, etc.
How about “the red tent?”
“Turn the other cheek” is one of the rougher ones, but the easy way out is to conclude that Jesus was just kidding…or mistranslated.
Allow me to expand on what I said eariler. — Our rights are based on irreducible primaries and therefore can’t be refuted even if you use the stolen concept fallacy of denying the senses all you have done then is unkowningly vaildate my position on rights because you had to use the sense to deny them. Your’s is based on God/Faith and are therefore nonexistent/arbitrary. ie. irrational.
You said: “sounds quite like the Christian ethic “..Do unto others what you would have them do unto you”.”
This is vague. This can be taken as ambiguous. This is also cherry-picking the bible. This could mean anything to different people. As Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked: “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may be different”.
Sorry, but your juedo-christian values have nothing to stand on except the irrational and arbitrary.
Proxywar,
You have NO rights if you have no Judge to appeal to….
Think about it.
That was an unusually well-written statement, proxywar. Ever hear of quotation marks?
(I am referring to your first statement, proxywar.)
In the end PoMo is but a grand sounding recipe, with few offensive sounding ingredients. After it is baked and solidified, we’ll all easily recognize it as just another form of Godless statism – with no other gods before it. Sadly, after PoMo gets baked, it will be impossible to return it to a state where the ingredients can once again be compatible with the true nature of man.
Excellent article and subsequent comments. Isaiah Berlin in his essay, The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will, said this:
If I may be permitted an almost unpardonable degree of simplification and generalisation, I should like to suggest that the central core of the intellectual tradition in the west has, since Plato (or it may be Pythagoras), rested upon three unquestioned dogmas:
(a) that to all genuine questions there is one true answer and one only, all others being deviations from the truth and therefore false, and that this applies to questions of conduct and feeling, that is, to practice, as well as to questions of theory or observation — to questions of value no less than to those of fact;
(b) that the true answers to such questions are in principle knowable;
(c) that these true answers cannot clash with one another, for one true proposition cannot be incompatible with another; that together these answers must form a harmonious whole: according to some they form a logical system each ingredient of which logically entails and is entailed by all the other elements; according to others, the relationship is that of parts to a whole, or, at the very least, of complete compatibility of each element with all the others.
These are, in essence, the central tenets of “Modernism” which the post-modern project has discarded. And why? Very simply because of their atheism; if there is no God there can be no universal truth. Consequently, with no universal standard for anything, no one can say what is right or wrong, better or worse, etc. And the most ridiculous nonsense can be believed and propagated as true. As Chesterton says, It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense. ["The Oracle of the Dog" (1923)].
But here is the dilemna. Because it became clear that there was NOT one and only one correct answer, or if there were, the process of finding it was interminable with many dead ends, modernism, if it ever embraced it, gave up the one and only one true answer meme.
Evolution and the scientific method are parts of modernism, and both search for “truths” but not truths of the absolute kind for which you yearn.
What we have to learn to live with is the lack of most absolute truths, sorry, but not the lack of distinction in that some “truths” are better than others. It is more, “history had tended to show, rather than history has absolutely revealed…” There is not much evidence that man/womankind is perfectible, but decent evidence that he/she are grudgingly improvable, albeit rarely without civil war or societal upheaval, and always with unintended consequences. Life is a messy business.
Socio/Liberals try to order it one way, religio/righties another way and if we let them duke it out, they supply the some of the “work” because they so beleeeeve in their fantastic visions. Our (those of us not plunk in either camp) job is to bounce them off each other in the appropriate rhythms, and maybe we can muddle on fo another century.
“Tolerating the intolerant, the postmodern left has, in effect, lapsed into a state of culture schlock, a condition which author Howard Rotberg in his book of that title has aptly labeled “tolerism.” “Postmodernitis” would be another name for it.”
Wonderful writing and now I have to buy a dozen new books. Just finished “Explaining Postmodernism” by Stephan Hicks to get my teen daughter up to speed on her philosophy courses. I actually witnessed a bloody cockfight on Bali while motorbiking my way around the island 40 years ago and it’s one of my indelible memories. I have read Geertz in several different books and am wondering if the dialogue between Jurgen Habermas and Pope Benedict XVI continues to this day. I understand that Pope John Paul II got it started, as a well-regarded philosopher in his own right [and perhaps a saint too?], with Jurgen, whose nearly impenetrable essays I’ve attempted to crack. I did enjoy Nietzsche in my phase of philosophical prepubescence, but am stuck back with Plato and Aquinas again after all these years.
I must say, however, that the corrosive effect that postmodernitis has on American political institutions is beginning to affect the extreme left and even some outliers on the right to the extent that the Constitution is now being defined as “over 100 years old” and presumably thereby irrelevant by an esteemed 25-year old pundit on the editorial staff of the Washington Post. I’ll take Plato’s Forms over the unintelligible gibberish emanating from those quarters.
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