#34 - What is Postmodernism?
Understanding the reason the world seems to have gone mad.
Today we’re going to do a explainer on Postmodernism. Although very few people would claim to be “postmodernists,” postmodernism infected universities back in the 1970’s and as a result has permeated a lot of educated culture. You may not be a postmodernist, but everything you hear on the news and potentially a lot of what you think has been shaped by the ideology.
I’ll share my biases upfront: postmodernism is a deeply flawed and dangerous ideology. I think you’ll see why.
Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy starts its definition of postmodernism with the statement that “That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.”
Maybe that’s just Stanford. Well, Purdue starts its intro by stating “Postmodernism poses serious challenges to anyone trying to explain its major precepts in a straightforward fashion.”
This garbled “it’s too complicated to explain simply” explanation should immediately throw up warning signs. But I’ll do my best to put this into terms everyone can understand.
Put simply, postmodernism is the belief that the entirety our modern system is an immoral social construct and that there exists no absolute or knowable objective truth. Rather, reality is only shaped by individual perceptions interpretations.
The most direct outcome of this is that ground truth is subjective it’s not and that you could have “your truth” and I can have “my truth” and that these two things are equivalent. You see this most prominently in the Trans debate, with Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman?” doing a great job at showing college professors suggesting that “if someone feels like a woman then they are a woman.”
Perceptions are naturally an outcome of society and social structures. This is a natural observation: people with the most power in society can control it and shape the message to sway the perceptions of those with less power. This much is true: the ultra wealthy and various other elites have always had more sway on society than a peasant throughout all of history.
But Postmodernism uses this to declare all of modernity an immoral structure defined by the use and abuse of power to oppress others primarily along the lines, predictably, of race and sex. White men, the narrative would tell you, used power to oppress women and people of color, and everything we see in society today are the output and tools of a society focused on keeping that power structure in place.
This idea resonates (particularly with women and people of color) because there are of course examples of white men in power doing bad things. But it badly misses the point that all human societies had these dynamics (race and sex aside) and that more broadly our path has been toward enlightenment particularly in Western cultures.
Postmodernism throws the baby out with the bath water by discarding valuable scientific, philosophical, or religious concepts. If these structures are the tools of an oppressive culture, a postmodernist would say it’s more important to examine how they have been used to oppress rather than to further pursue knowledge in that area.
Seem insane? This is how you get Pete Buttigieg hemming and hawing about how the roads are racist. I’ve heard a University Professor say something to the effect of, “Yes, science is a social construct, but at the end of the day the plane still flies, so I guess there’s something in it.” And the list could go on.
This all may seem crazy and that such a belief system will never take hold. But the mindset already has. Two generations now have been taught to fixate on power and oppression. Many academic papers and a lot of news articles fixate on “disproportionate impact to [insert group here]” and companies now obsess over equity and inclusion exactly because of this power-oppression narrative.
The reality is that we already live in a postmodernist world.
Postmodernism serves as a foundation for a lot of the crazy that you are seeing in the world today. That’s why it’s important to understand and recognize it. We’ll get into more of the crazy soon, but here’s a (deliciously nutty) taste comparing children’s dieting to sexual assault.