Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to reimagining Liberty, a show about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. I'm Aaron Ross Powell.
On the one hand, we're told we live in a postmodern age. On the other, postmodernism is a notoriously challenging set of philosophical ideas to nail down and understand. But it's worth the effort, because postmodernism.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Even if it gets some of its.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: Arguments wrong or overstates its case, is deeply interesting, with genuinely valuable insights.
To help me tease out just what postmodernism is and what we might learn from it, I'm joined by my good friend and frequent reimagining liberty guest, Matt McManus. He's a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan and author of many books, including the rise of postmodern conservatism and the emergence of postmodernity at the intersection of liberalism, capitalism, and secularism.
Let me very briefly mention that reimagining liberty is a listener supported show. If you enjoy these discussions and want to get early access to new episodes, you can become a supporter by heading to reimaginingliberty.com. With that, let's turn to my conversation with Matt.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: We're talking today about postmodernism, but let's start with what is modernism? What is the thing that postmodernism is post?
[00:01:29] Speaker C: Well, that's a really good question, and if you ask two people, you'll get three, probably four different answers.
[00:01:35] Speaker D: Right.
[00:01:36] Speaker C: I'll just give you two of them that people usually see postmodernism as reacting against. One of them is modernity broadly, which is a kind of sociopolitical term for, depending on how you want to date it, the ideological shift that took place in the 16th 17th century from antiquarian and medieval ways of conceiving the world and conceiving society towards those that are more liberal and modern, quite frankly.
[00:02:01] Speaker D: Right.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: And people have different views on modernity, and they align it with different social forces. Capitalism and secularism are two that are very prominent in the literature. But broadly speaking, what seemed to characterize modernity for many was this faith in big P progress, the idea that whereas inactiquity, society tended to move in the famous aristotelian cycle, reach a golden age, and then there was decline, and then there was fall, and then there was a resurrection or a new kind of society that emerged and then another decline. For people in modernity, the expectation was rather like Stephen Pinker, that everything was just going to get better over time. And you can see many different iterations of this, right? It comes in a lot of different flavors. So liberal modernists, if you wanted to characterize them like that, from Kent through John Stuart Mill through to even somebody like John Rawls, for example, would put forward this argument that, look older. Human societies were unfree, dominated by authoritarianism. Certainly the economy was nothing to write home about. And now, because of a combination of technological innovation, the exercise of human reason, and emancipating people from the strictures of dogma and authoritarianism, things are getting better. And there's also a marxist tale that you can tell about modernity as well, which is, we had an earlier mode of production, feudalism, that was characterized by all kinds of antirationalist and irrationalist theologies. But capitalism has emancipated many people from those kinds of ideological illusions, albeit replacing them with its own. But in the long run, eventually people will rise up. They'll overcome the limitations of capital, and then they'll produce a socialist society. And then the free development of each will be the precondition for the free development of all. And what does Mark say with Engels? We'll hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize in the evening, without know Hunter Fisher or critic.
[00:03:54] Speaker D: Right?
[00:03:54] Speaker C: So these are both progressive narratives. They're emblematic, if you want, of this idea of modernity. The other way that it's been understood, certainly in the aesthetic sphere, is as a kind of art or artistic style. And this is a more narrow way of understanding it. But it's an important one. You think about people like, say, James Joyce, for example, right?
[00:04:14] Speaker E: So James Joyce had this very comprehensive.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Systematic view of the world that he reflected in his literary works. And the idea was that art should represent the broader structures in which people are embedded. And there was faith that human reason could apprehend those structures. And that should also be apprehended in art. Now, it's important not to be too strict here, since many forms of modern art anticipated many forms of postmodern art, right? Like, think about James Joyce. He was a huge influence on a variety of different postmodern literary figures. Like Don DeLillo, who actually, I'm very fond of, right? Thomas Pitchon, et cetera, et cetera. Or you could think about somebody like, say, sigmund Freud, who was an immense influence on a huge array of artists. Freud definitely argued that it was possible for science, so called science, psychoanalyst analysis, to interrogate the deeper motivations behind human action and therefore explain them. But there's also a postmodern reading of him as showing that actually we're not these rational creatures. We're always driven by these unconscious motivations that are ultimately opaque to us. So aesthetically, right, it's this faith that human reason can apprehend the structures, even the unconscious or unclear structures, that determine us, that's emblematic, in many senses, of modernist art. And postmodernist art and aesthetics constitutes a break from that in certain kinds of profound ways.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: So is that related then, to another divide that gets talked about in the context of postmodernism, which is between structuralism and post structuralism? It sounds like structuralism dovetails with a lot of what you just described about. There are these structures and we can analyze them, we can understand them, we can figure out what's going on with them, see them at work in the world.
We can have structures. We call it like a science of signs.
And then the post structuralists. And it seems, and maybe this is just a point of clarification, it often seems like the terms post structuralism and postmodernism either get used interchangeably or have so much overlap that it wouldn't be a huge error to use them somewhat interchangeably.
[00:06:25] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Let's be careful here. Right. When we refer to post structuralism and structuralism, those are more technical terms than modernism and postmodernism. Not that you can't use the terms modernism and postmodernism in a technical sense. Many people do, including me.
[00:06:40] Speaker D: Right.
[00:06:40] Speaker C: But they've kind of become general or popular terms which are used in a wide array in the broader culture. Whereas if you were asked the average person on the know, what are your.
[00:06:50] Speaker E: Thoughts on post structuralism?
[00:06:52] Speaker C: They probably wouldn't have that much to say about it. And understandably right. But broadly speaking, you're absolutely right. People like Ferdinand socier or the early Wittgenstein, also an important influence on various modernists, put forward this idea that we can have a science of science or a science of language, right? And we can describe the way that language, often holistically, kind of hooks on to the real world and paints a picture of it, if you want to use, again, the early Wittgenstein's famous metaphor. Whereas post structuralists start to become more skeptical that language can mirror the real world in this way. And they do so for a wide variety of different reasons.
[00:07:30] Speaker D: Right?
[00:07:30] Speaker C: I mean, Derrida is very critical of aspects of cesarean linguistics, at the very least arguing that what's much more interesting than what language represents are all the things that it represses, if you want, in its attempt to represent at least a certain kind of view of the world, right? Or you could think of in America, Richard Rorty, right, who is deeply influenced by a wide array of modernist thinkers, but is often associated with postmodernism. He wrote a pioneering book in many ways in the 1970s, philosophy in the mirror of nature, which I'm sure many of your readers have heard of doing something very similar to what Derrida did in continental philosophy to analytical philosophy, where Rorty says, there's this long standing view in philosophy that when you have what he calls a glassy essence, right, that the fundamental feature of human consciousness, at the very least, is to represent or mirror the world in a famous metaphor. And language is another attempt to do, where we use words, to try to, again use Wittgenstein's term, paint a picture of the world around us. And Roddy was very critical of this for a wide variety of different reasons, pythagarian and late, with constinian reasons. For the most part, we don't need to get into it, right? But this view became pretty ubiquitous for a little while, and I want to stress, I have serious problems with it, but it can reach pretty rarefied intellectual heights in a way that I'm not sure that sometimes critics of postmodernism appreciate, because anybody who reads, for instance, philosophy.
[00:09:01] Speaker E: In the mirror of nature wouldn't be.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: Of the opinion that Rory just didn't know what he was talking about.
[00:09:06] Speaker D: Right?
[00:09:06] Speaker C: He was really well versed in analytical philosophy of language, analytical philosophy of mind. So it's a problematic book, but definitely a worthwhile read.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: So we have this world where there are structures, they are intelligible, we can analyze them, and then we shift to a postmodern world or ethos or set of philosophies that says no, that says these structures that you thought were solid maybe aren't. These structures that you thought were coherent contain internal contradictions.
You have the Derrida famously interrogating binaries and saying these, deconstructing the binaries. So saying language in our conceptual world is constructed around binaries between good and evil, male and female, nature and civilization, et cetera. But if we look closely at these things, they start to blur, they start to become less clear, and that a lot of this has an ideological perspective on it, that this clarity is in the service of ideologies.
And a lot of people react very strongly against these critiques.
Is this just radical skepticism or nihilism?
Are the postmodernists just basically throwing up their hands, saying there's no reality there's no objective reality, there's no progress, there's no actual knowledge, there's only language games and power relationships and so on. Is it just kind of a philosophy of rejection and giving up?
[00:11:12] Speaker E: No.
[00:11:12] Speaker C: I mean, they never just say that, right? In no small part because they're all intelligent and thoughtful enough to realize that you can't build a sustainable politics or even a sustainable way of living on that.
[00:11:24] Speaker E: However, I'm a critic of postmodern thought.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: And I would say that that does seem to be the conclusion that one would be led to dealing with their thoughts sufficiently.
[00:11:33] Speaker D: Right.
[00:11:33] Speaker C: So let's just take Michelle Foucault as a good example. Michelle Foucault is often painted as a nihilistic figure, right? Somebody who showcases that forces of discipline and power are operative everywhere, and so the best that we can do is resign ourselves to them. Actually, in his later work, we'll co developed an ethics of the self, if you want to call it that, endorsing various forms of self creation that were.
[00:11:56] Speaker E: Inspired by, let's just call it broadly.
[00:11:58] Speaker C: A left wing kind of nietzschean view, right. He never really kind of unpacked that all that thoroughly, but then again, he died early from AIDS, unfortunately.
[00:12:06] Speaker D: Right.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: So we never got his systematic ethics, if you want to call it that. But this is a relatively small part of his work, next to all the deep, gloomy, often very dark and pessimistic ruminations on power. And even though he endorses this idea of a kind of ethics of self creation, he never really suggests how politically this would be achievable, since he's often so willing to say that even a politics that looks emancipatory on the surface often contains within it the seeds of new forms of discipline or new forms of domination or new forms of subjectivization. You can use your terminology. So the conclusion that even people who are fond of Foucault, like Thomas Lemke come to is that it's very, very.
[00:12:48] Speaker E: Difficult to kind of construct a positive.
[00:12:51] Speaker C: Kind of outlook from his work. You can do it, but it's hard.
[00:12:55] Speaker D: Right.
[00:12:56] Speaker C: But before we kind of dive into this, I think it's just helpful to.
[00:12:58] Speaker E: Kind of be analytically clear here about.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: The variety of different ways that one can understand postmodernism or post modernity, right. Oftentimes its critics kind of lump all of these together when actually they're quite discreet.
[00:13:11] Speaker D: Right?
[00:13:11] Speaker C: So in my work, I distinguish between two different ways of understanding postmodernism, but there are more.
So one of them is, again, as a kind of skeptical philosophical position that raises objections to the idea that we can access, let's just call it universal truth about ethics or epistemology or wide variety of philosophical areas. Now, I'm not convinced by a lot of these skeptical arguments, and I want to make it very clear, but some of them are quite sophisticated, right? If you read, for instance, the late Wittgenstein's work on language and the problem of representation, and the late Wittgenstein was profound influence on many of these postmodern theorists. These aren't slight objections. They're things that people need to think through carefully and try to respond to them programmatically, the way, say, somebody like Saul Kripke does in his work on Wittgenstein. Another way of understanding postmodernism that I think is more productive and more interesting, though, is as what you might call a cultural condition, right? And this is the sense in which many Marxists, and I should also add, many conservatives, use the term postmodernity. And this refers less to the writings of, let's say, esoteric french intellectuals who are raising new forms of skeptical arguments, and more to an attitude or disposition.
[00:14:26] Speaker E: That is engendered, depend in the postmodern.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: World, right, for a variety of different reasons, where people are increasingly skeptical of what leotard calls grand narratives about projects. Sorry, about grand historical projects, right. Or meta narratives about historical progress. And what's really interesting about this discourse around the culture of postmodernity is not just what its symptoms are. And everyone has a different kind of catalog of its symptoms, but what its catalysts or determinations are. And this is where you really start to see people disagree, because, for instance, conservatives will argue that the reason that post modernity emerged is because of deepening secularism. For example, that's a very common argument made by people like, say, Peter Lawler, right? It's this rejection of the old aristotelian scholastic worldview, which leads to what he calls a kind of hypermodern attitude, that there's no purposes to nature, that everything that is of value is just a matter of human subjectivity. And so consequently, what we need to do is go back or recover a kind of aristotelian to mystic outlook. And then, of course, you have various kinds of marxist critics who will argue that really, the roots of postmodernity are, surprise, surprise, capitalism.
[00:15:45] Speaker D: Right?
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Now, there are a lot of different arguments put forward to this, and we don't have to rehash them all, but let's just take a very simple one, right? So many Marxists will say that, look, what happens under capitalist conditions is the logic of the market tends to colonize a wide array of different spheres of life, including those that initially didn't seem subject to the logic of the market, right? And Marxists will say, this includes our value system, for example. So just as when somebody goes to the market, they will say, really?
[00:16:16] Speaker E: Whether I buy Rice Krispies or corn.
[00:16:19] Speaker C: Pops is a matter of subjective taste. So too, people will come to say, well, whether I believe that western civilization is the greatest civilization in the world or I want to convert to fundamentalist Islam, there's no way of arguing for which of these is better in some kind of abstract and metaphysical sense. It's just a matter of taste, right? And Marxists will claim that this is the result of these different logics or outlooks that capitalism induces, spreading themselves all through, if you want to use a technical term, the life.
And then, you know, you have liberals who will make their own kind of arguments about where most moderity comes from. So the great philosopher, Charles Taylor, great canadian philosopher, should add, argues that in older antiquarian societies, let's take a village, for example, right? People had a significant number of what he calls sources of the self that helped tell them who they are, right? Say you and I grew up in Nantucket, population 500. You and I probably know each other from the cradle to the grave. You would be the blacksmith and I would be the butcher. It's used Adam Smith's terms.
[00:17:24] Speaker E: And we would be the blacksmith and.
[00:17:26] Speaker C: The butcher because that's what our dads did. And we would know that's what we were going to do when we grow up. And we both attend the same church and we both believe the same things. And so there are these kind of stable value systems that enabled us to kind of know who we are. And Taylor would say that in post modernity, which is really an extension of modernity in many senses, we don't have those know. You and I will go and live in big urban cities where there are a wide catalog of different communities that we could join, different value systems that we might race, different aesthetic styles that we might decide to adopt, and we might decide to experiment with any number of them over the course of our know. I'm sure you went know a couple of different phases when you were a teenager, like, you know, thinking, well, maybe I'm a punk, or maybe, you know, I'm actually just a square who knows, right? And Taylor would know in many ways there's something valuable from this, because the dissolution of these traditional sources itself means that I am more free to experiment with who I want to become. But there's also an alienation and a sense of anxiety that comes from that, right? Because there's a comfort in knowing that, well, I'm going to grow up to be the butcher or the blacksmith. That's my role in life. I'm going to marry the girl next door and I'm going to go to the church, and that's going to be my life. Having to choose, especially under these kind of extraordinarily rapidly changing conditions right now, is frightening for a lot of people.
[00:18:45] Speaker E: So for somebody like Taylor, who's a.
[00:18:49] Speaker C: Left liberal commentator on modernity and post modernity, it's a mixed blessing, right? And we can go on and on and on. But like I said, this is where I think the real action is on the discourse around postmodernism. What's most interesting and most intellectually substantial.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: As you were saying, that what occurred to me is.
So I guess one of my reactions, I should say, to postmodernism and postmodern thinkers, and I have this reaction to a lot of the ideas that fall under the broader. The kinds of things you learn when you take a lit crit or a literary theory class in. So psychoanalysis, Marxism, got to ontologize the.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: Ontology of the presence.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Yeah, but the category of philosophies that end up in that class, as opposed to what you learn in a 20th century philosophy class in a philosophy department, is that there's a lot of really interesting ideas, there's a lot of really interesting arguments, that a lot of it is intellectually engaging and exciting in a way that analytic philosophy is less so. Especially when I was as an 18 and 19 year old, taking my first lit crit class in college, just became obsessed.
These ideas are really exciting because they just seem to kind of upend everything and explain or explain away lots of things. But 20 some odd years later, my reaction is more. Some of this seems kind of like, obviously true, but often it seems overstated that it's not as true or universally true as the people making these arguments claim it to be. But one of those obvious truths that seems to fall out of a lot of this and the incredulity towards meta narratives is, first, yes, we should be incredulous towards meta narratives. I think that's just a healthier way to go through the world than being credulous in the face of particular meta narratives. But that one reason, I wonder, that we see this now, that we see this with the rise of global capitalism, is not necessarily markets forcing their way into things, but rather credulity towards meta narratives, to a particular meta narrative. And to go to your nantucket example seems to depend on two things. One, that you don't have a lot of exposure to alternative narratives, because then yours looks more solid if it's not just one among many. And two, that you don't see much in the way of change over the course of your life and the lives of the people before you. And so you can come to believe that the particular meta narrative isn't a narrative, but is just nature is truth.
Roland Bart's writing on mythologies speaks a lot to the way that we kind of mythologies make natural what was kind of contingent narratives, and that the modern world simply broke down those two things that were exposed. Technology exposes us to the world outside of the immediate 10 sq mi of our village in a way that historically was not the case at all. So now we're aware of what's happening, can we can be really into pop music from Korea and animation from Japan, and we can know about the cultures of sub saharan Africa in a way that our ancestors did not, and think the pace of change has just accelerated. And so we can see these people thought that this was the way things always were, but I've seen them change in my own life, and so the likelihood that they change again.
And I wonder how much the strong reaction against postmodernism that seems motivated. Often you can critique the arguments, but often it's more just like a visceral. I don't like.
Even if their arguments are good, these conclusions that they have bother me deeply, is more just about. They're kind of the ones pointing out, look, this stuff that you thought was solid and insisted was solid, these ideologies that you clung to and assumed were natural, these myths, in the Barth sense, rather obviously aren't.
And so kind of deal with it and then face the political repercussions of that, which is that if they're not natural, if they are contingent, maybe you.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Can'T force them on other people.
[00:23:43] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to point out, postmodernism.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: As his name suggests, has a kind of continuity with modernism that's important.
[00:23:51] Speaker E: And I think that this is one.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: Of the things that Marxists and conservatives have been especially adept at stressing that liberals sometimes resist, but they shouldn't.
[00:24:00] Speaker D: Right?
[00:24:00] Speaker C: Because one of the things that both modernists and conservatives will stress is, look, you cannot understand the emergence of post modernity with all of its kind of vulgarities unless you understand that there were serious problems with liberal modernity, or at least there were social conditions within liberal modernity that lead to the emergence of these kinds of attitudes. They didn't appear externally, right. They were kind of baked in potentials in people like, say, John Stuart mills or in the emergence of capitalism or in the rise of liberal institutions. And we can get into that somewhat later. But I want to kind of take a step back here to stress what.
[00:24:35] Speaker E: I think you're getting at, which is.
[00:24:37] Speaker C: That people, I think, react very viscerally to the skeptical dimensions that they associate with postmodern thinkers. And I want to add myself to that list, right? Because, again, I've written a lot about postmodernity and for the most part, I don't like it. And I don't like the thinking that's.
[00:24:51] Speaker E: Associated with it, because there are people who will point out, look, skepticism has.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: A long, proud judicial in western thought going all the way back to Socrates, right? Socrates sat there and he pissed people off by deconstructing their myths, deconstructing their meta narratives, if you want to call it that, pointing out that the value systems of the city weren't things that people could actually defend systematically. Aren't, you know, the kind of postmodern thinkers just doing the same thing? Well, not quite, right, because Socrates always.
[00:25:19] Speaker E: Was critical of these kinds of doxa.
[00:25:24] Speaker C: In the name of a higher truth, right? This idea that, look, we have to kind of be ruthless on our value.
[00:25:29] Speaker E: Systems, not because there's nothing that sustains.
[00:25:34] Speaker C: Them, but because by being ruthless to them, we're kind of clearing away the moss in order to get to the gems, right? Whereas for a lot of these postmodern thinkers, let's use Richard Rorty as an example, the end conclusion to a lot.
[00:25:47] Speaker E: Of their thought is, look, we can.
[00:25:49] Speaker C: Just abandon the idea of truth, right? Truth is a convenient fiction, right? It's a narrative that we tell ourselves when certain kinds of value systems or certain kind of epistemic outlooks happen to be useful for solving human problems for a reasonably long period of time.
[00:26:08] Speaker E: But truths might, what we consider to.
[00:26:11] Speaker C: Be true might be sustainables for a certain period of time, but then we'll find a more useful way of looking at things in the course of time. An example Rorty gives, drawing upon Thomas Kuhn, is take newtonian physics, for example, right? For many people, starting in the 17th century, Newton unspooled the mysteries of the universe, right? Showed us the language of God, if you want to call it that. Well, Rorty said actually, what he gave us was a pretty useful way of looking at things for a long period of time. But then we have Einsteinianism and particularly quantum mechanics that basically showed that there were fundamental problems with classical physics. Right, particularly its notions of determinism and the role that the subject plays in framing our understanding of the universe. And so we've replaced this old utonian paradigm of looking at things with a more useful one. And over the long enough period of time, that, too, will be abandoned by another more useful way of looking at things. Well, I just don't agree with that.
[00:27:12] Speaker D: Right.
[00:27:12] Speaker C: I do think that science progresses in certain kind of fundamental ways. I think that Rorty is onto something when he says, we shouldn't suggest that there's a kind of clean through line from one scientific to development to another. Sometimes there are radical breaks, but I see those as progressive where, you know, building upon what happened before, standing on the shoulders of giants, to use, you know, Einstein and Bohr and all these other figures raised science to a higher level of sophistication than it did before. But they wouldn't have been able to do that without the accomplishments of those who had came before. So there's something that's really dissatisfying about this kind of postmodern idea that everything is just about use convenient fictions, narratives, illusions that are helpful, that kind of thing. And I don't blame people, and, in fact, I sympathize with them when they react strongly against it. All I'd like to say is that the argument is typically a lot more sophisticated than, say, what Jordan Peterson would have you believe, or even Stephen Pinker would have you believe. So what I would just like people to do is take it seriously. And I also would add that I think that there are uses to these arguments, much like there were uses to Socrates going around pricking at the pretensions of different figures in Athens. Because sometimes it's useful to have your presuppositions challenged in a very fundamental way, because it inspires you to think more seriously about the kind of things that you just took for granted in your epistemology or in your value system and to try to articulate a more sustainable defense of them in the future.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think one of the ways that I think about that is I agree that the postmodernism, in this overstated sense, and in a way that's overstated by a lot of it, is overstated in that way by a lot of postmodernists. Oh, definitely goes too far. But I think a lot of the arguments to the contrary about, no, it's just truth. And we find truth, we find knowledge, it's an objective process and so on, are also overstated and often used in a rather cynical way. And so I analogize it to there's this GK, Chesterton has Chesterton's fence, which for listeners who aren't familiar with it, is this kind of argument for ultimately, like a GK testerson is quite conservative. It's a conservative argument that across, you're out wandering and you come across a fence that someone has built and you think, that fence doesn't seem to have any purpose. I'm going to tear it down. And his argument is, wait, someone put up that fence for a reason, and it's been there for as long as it has for a reason. And maybe that reason isn't any good. Maybe it was never good. Maybe it's not good anymore. Maybe the fence, in fact, should be torn down. But don't tear it down until you know what that reason is. And you've thought about it and you've examined it, because it could be that the fence looks like it serves no purpose to you right now, but in fact, the reason still obtains, it still is a good one.
And that argument on its face sounds quite reasonable. Yes, of course, you should try to figure out why that thing is there, why that tradition exists before you tear it down.
But in application, it feels like 99 times out of 100 that someone would cite Chesterton's fence. It's not this kind of epistemically humble. Let's actually interrogate the reason for the fence and see if it's a valuable one, but instead, a kind of just reactionary argument of, this is a way for me to not have to have a conversation about why we still have that fence. I can just say Chesterton's fence is this tradition, this social hierarchy, this grand narrative that is socially beneficial to me or makes me comfortable at the expense of others. We can buffer it from criticism by way of just pointing to Chesterton's fence. And I feel like a lot of that goes on too, with the pushback on some of the postmodern arguments is that, yes, of course, science progresses. Yes, of course there are facts that science uncovers, and that's why it accomplishes all the amazing things that it accomplishes. But there are also ideologies at work. There are scientific truths that scientific racism, which is still. There are still an unfortunate number of people who are really, that's for sure, to science and IQ research or race and IQ research for reasons that, look.
[00:31:53] Speaker C: What do they say? I'm just asking questions.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: And so saying, like, wait a second. You can talk in the language if you're just pursuing objective facts. But there's more going on here. There are ideological things that can be going on. There are narratives, there's mythologies, there's so on. And we should critically examine them. And maybe we come to the conclusion that, yes, in fact, what you're doing or what this is, is just truth seeking, but it feels like kind of a buffer for defense of hierarchies and narratives and so on. And so we should take these postmodern arguments, I think, more seriously than a lot of people do, especially when they are targeting those things that we personally those myths, those power structures, those beliefs about nature and what's natural, particularly about people and society and identity and so on, and be willing to critically examine in the ways that the postmodernists might be overstating but still are kind of demanding that we do.
[00:32:59] Speaker E: Oh, absolutely. And this is where things get really complicated.
[00:33:03] Speaker D: Right.
[00:33:03] Speaker C: In terms of the political implications of postmodernism.
[00:33:07] Speaker E: So I'll just start by saying that.
[00:33:08] Speaker C: I think what you said is very interesting, because one of the things that I find so amusing about a lot of the responses to postmodern arguments is, in many senses, they actually reflect what Nietzsche talked about. And Nietzsche was a foundational figure for many postmodern thinkers when he know our commitment to truth isn't really about truth, it's about values.
[00:33:28] Speaker D: Right.
[00:33:29] Speaker C: We don't want to see our values deconstructed because we're aware that they are.
[00:33:33] Speaker E: Ultimately both foundationless and necessary in order.
[00:33:36] Speaker C: To save us from these kinds of nihilistic anxieties. Because so often the arguments that I see made against the postmodern thinkers, even when they're raising epistemic or metaphysical claims, are morals our moral objections?
[00:33:50] Speaker D: Right.
[00:33:50] Speaker C: Well, if we buy into this epistemic skepticism, then we're going to be uncertain about how the world operates. And I can't tolerate that because I need to know how the world works. Ergo, postmodernism has to be untrue. Or if our value systems are challenged and deconstructed this way, then it leads to these kinds of nihilistic conclusions about value systems in general. We can't have that because it's socially irresponsible. So we need to put a stop to that. And my response to that is, well.
[00:34:17] Speaker E: What about their arguments?
[00:34:18] Speaker C: Actually, what about the content of what they're saying?
[00:34:19] Speaker D: Right.
[00:34:20] Speaker C: Maybe it is the case that your epistemology is really deeply flawed? Maybe it is the case that your value system isn't built upon a secure enough foundation. You can't just hand wave that away by saying, well, the consequences of adopting this view morally or epistemically are really bad.
[00:34:35] Speaker E: So I don't accept it.
[00:34:36] Speaker C: Develop a better value system.
[00:34:38] Speaker D: Right.
[00:34:38] Speaker C: Develop a better epistemology.
[00:34:40] Speaker D: Right.
[00:34:40] Speaker C: And this is, again, where I want to dive into the politics of this, because a very interesting set of transitions have occurred over the course of modernity in relation to a lot of these different outlooks. It's very much worth noting. And Terry Eagleton, the great marxist thinker, stresses this excellently in his criticism of postmodernity, called the illusions of postmodernism, where he says, look, the funny thing about this all is if you were to go back to the 18th century and ask who around here is making skeptical arguments about reason, arguing that all value systems are ultimately contingent and grounded in history, and that we should be wary of meta narratives, while it would almost invariably be people within the conservative tradition, people like Joseph Demestra, what have you, all of whom mobilized these kinds of arguments against the enlightenment, saying, look, all of these liberal and radical philosophs are claiming that reason tells us how we can reconstruct our society, or that these traditions that we rely upon don't have any kind of secure foundation. But actually, look, this foundation for our value systems lies in history. This is contingent and different everywhere that we go. And any attempt to kind of use reason to scrutinize these is inherently dangerous, because reason has very, very impotent kinds of powers, and what it takes to be universal truths are actually just the fantasies of its own imagination.
[00:36:07] Speaker D: Right?
[00:36:07] Speaker C: And you don't need to take my word for know. You can go read Joseph Demestra, where he says, what the enlightenment calls philosophy is fundamentally a destructive force because it removes people's faith and convictions around the societies into which they are born.
[00:36:22] Speaker D: Right?
[00:36:22] Speaker C: And Eagleton's point is to say that a lot of people like, say, Michel Foucault, make very similar sounding arguments today, except now with a kind of progressive left bend. And I'm actually quite sympathetic to that argument.
[00:36:35] Speaker D: Right?
[00:36:35] Speaker C: But more broadly, it is important to.
[00:36:38] Speaker E: Recognize that a certain kind of skepticism.
[00:36:43] Speaker C: Of meta narratives and skepticism of received truths can also be conceived in liberal terms.
[00:36:50] Speaker D: Right?
[00:36:51] Speaker C: So there's also a kind of liberal anticipation of postmodernism that is put forward by people like, say, Kent or even John Stuart Mill. Now, a lot of people might react very strongly against this. But other kinds of conservatives who aren't historicists like Peter Lawler, have pointed. You know, once upon a time, we had this old aristotelian worldview and scholastic worldview that everyone took for granted, where everything in the universe was seen as being ordered by God. It had a purpose, telos to it. And human reason, with a combination of faith, was seen to be sufficient to understand that. Well, along come people like Kant, and along come people like John Stuart Mill, and along come people like Descartes. And they say, well, no, actually, the universe doesn't seem to have any kind of telos to it. If there is a purpose to the world out there, it's just one that human subjects ascribe to it. And related to this is the idea that, look, actually, value systems aren't handed down to us by nature or handed down to us by, say, God, for example. They're things that human beings create, or at least they're the products, if you want, of human reason and human cognition, right? And this, of course, can anticipate in a lot of ways, various kinds of postmodern arguments, right? Where Nietzsche, for instance, will, you know, once we accept Kant's idea that values aren't handed to us by nature or by God, they're just created by human reason or human cognition, then we can recognize that all value systems are just, again, useful fictions, or not so useful fictions in Nietzsche's terms, that we tell John Stuart Mill, also great skeptic, argues that what we should endorse are experiments in living, because every person is different. And this idea that there's some universal good that all human beings pursue, rather than a variety of different forms of the good life that different people might want to pursue. Well, again, you can cast that in foucaultian terms, right? This idea that experiments and living are good things, we should resist the forces of domination that impede us to create more space for free experiments and living, right? What I think differentiates these kinds of mature enlightenment arguments from their postmodern bastardizations. And this is the kind of view that I hold, is, know, Kant and Mill would say, yes, it is the case that we should be skeptical of many forms of received wisdom. Yes, it is the case that we have to recognize that values aren't handed to us on high. They're something that human beings and human reason creates. But that doesn't mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, because we can actually offer constructive arguments for why it is that one should endorse this value system over another because it's utility maximizing right or respects human dignity in certain kind of fundamental ways, or because I'm a rawsian right. It's what would be agreed to in the conditions of the original position. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.
[00:39:42] Speaker E: And that's the view that I think.
[00:39:44] Speaker C: I hold to and I think is the most responsible one that people should adhere to.
[00:39:50] Speaker E: But it's important to note that these.
[00:39:51] Speaker C: Liberal arguments can mutate into these postmodern forms. And any sophisticated commentator on postmodernity would say, you have to be dialectical about.
[00:39:59] Speaker E: This and recognize that the skepticism induced.
[00:40:02] Speaker C: By liberal societies and this idea that each person should be free to live by their own value systems, of course, can be taken too far into these kind of postmodern directions.
[00:40:14] Speaker E: So let's be careful in recognizing that.
[00:40:18] Speaker C: It was all I would want to.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: Say is there a skeptical read on, or I guess a cynical read on what you just said and the way you talked about these ideas manifesting among conservatives during the Enlightenment and then shifting to the postmodernists of its emergence in the left, the far left, that effectively what's going on here is when you like the dominant paradigm, the dominant ideology, the dominant myths, the dominant sense of what is natural and moral and so on. So you like where society is, then arguments that come along that destabilize that or critique it or say, maybe it's not as rational as you've made it out to be, maybe it's not as objective as you've made it out to be, you're going to push back pretty hard on and say, these are unreasonable. But when you're in the position where you don't like. So you don't like the direction things are going. You don't like where things are. You're in one of the marginalized groups, or your sympathies are with a marginalized or oppressed groups, then you're going to argue the opposite, which is we need to.
The arguments, the structures that prop up the existing regime and distribution of values and beliefs and so on don't actually work. We should have, we should be kind of more radically skeptical. But then if you get your way, you suddenly you're going to become a conservative again and say, no, what we've got now is the objective, obvious truth. These are the structures that are real.
[00:42:21] Speaker C: That's a fantastic question.
[00:42:22] Speaker E: And actually, I'm writing a fair bit.
[00:42:25] Speaker C: About that right now in my new book on liberal socialism, where I'm kind of chastising the LA for abandoning the.
[00:42:31] Speaker E: Enlightenment and its optimistic view of human reason. Right, which I think was conducive or certainly essential and providing affective motivation for.
[00:42:42] Speaker C: Pursuing liberal socialist goals. But let's just put it this way, right?
[00:42:45] Speaker E: I think that skeptical arguments and skeptical.
[00:42:48] Speaker C: Positions are endorsed by political ideologies when they see themselves on the back foot, rightly or wrongly.
[00:42:54] Speaker D: Right.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: So let's just take Birkin de Maestre as a good example, right? They were writing at the time of the French Revolution when it looked like a kind of radical enlightenment liberalism and republicanism was everywhere the intellectual vanguard. These figures understood themselves to be the intellectual vanguard also, and would appeal to things like truth and universal rights and the dignity of all human beings. And so consequently, what did Birkin demestra or a wide array of other reactionaries do? Well, they became skeptics, right? They pricked holes in the kind of universalistic aspirations of many of these figures, right?
[00:43:28] Speaker E: And let's flash forward to the 19th century.
[00:43:32] Speaker C: Eventually, socialists, along with liberals, start to think that they're the vanguard of the future. So you have a mature enlightenment figure.
[00:43:39] Speaker E: Like Marx come along claiming that, look.
[00:43:41] Speaker C: The utopian socialists were wrong in just putting forward these moral arguments for why socialism or communism is a good thing. Actually, I've scientifically shown that the contradictions inherent within capitalist society are going to lead to the emergence of socialism and then communism. And we can take this for granted.
[00:44:01] Speaker D: Right?
[00:44:01] Speaker E: There's a lot of confidence, I would.
[00:44:03] Speaker C: Say way too much confidence, that comes into making those kinds of predictions, right? And I would agree with anybody who would say, well, that wasn't going to come to pass.
[00:44:11] Speaker D: Right?
[00:44:11] Speaker C: But this emerges from this sense that socialism is the way of the future. So socialists don't have to be skeptics, right? Or they don't have to just be critics. They can confidently project their ideal into the future. But then something very unusual happens in the 20th century that I think is just starting to be reformulated now or well understood now. So Sam Moyne has a really good book about cold War liberalism where he points out that what's interesting about liberalism in the 20th century is, for all many liberals claim not to like postmodernism. Many of the iconic liberals of that century also endorsed various kinds of skepticism or these resigned views towards history, right? And you don't need to tell me that. Think about somebody like fa Hayek, right? Fa Hayek was also very much an epistemic skeptic. One of his core arguments, of course, is this idea that we can fully understand the world and consequently fully remake it is deeply problematic. And so instead, what we should do is defer to the accumulated wisdom inherent within liberal institutions. And we should also recognize that the.
[00:45:19] Speaker E: Market plays a valuable role in basically.
[00:45:23] Speaker C: Organizing human interest in a way that is conducive to human utility, but is.
[00:45:28] Speaker E: Not necessarily transparent to us and certainly.
[00:45:32] Speaker C: Cannot be controlled by planners, for example. Or you can go forward to somebody like Isaiah Berlin, right, where Berlin also advances kinds of very skeptical arguments about things like positive liberty.
[00:45:44] Speaker E: For, look, it might be nice to.
[00:45:47] Speaker C: Aspire to a degree of positive liberty, and we shouldn't necessarily downplay its importance, but we also recognize that all efforts to try to rationally pursue positive liberty so far have been, at the very least, dangerous and in some cases outright disastrous. So we might have to just rest with the view that negative liberty is all that we can achieve safely.
[00:46:11] Speaker D: Right?
[00:46:12] Speaker C: And these kinds of skeptical arguments obviously.
[00:46:14] Speaker E: Aren'T iterated in a postmodern idiom, but.
[00:46:18] Speaker C: They contain the same kind of germ of pessimism that you would see in people like Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. And of course, on the left, particularly after the hungarian invasion, May 1968, the realization that Maoism was catastrophe. You start to see many on the left also adopt this extremely pessimistic attitude that's in sharp contrast to marxist optimism.
[00:46:42] Speaker D: Right?
[00:46:42] Speaker C: And Jean Francois Leotard, who I know you're familiar with, is a great example of this, where he goes from being a Marxist to writing a book about the condition of post modernity, saying Marxism is just another meta narrative. It's failed. Clearly, we're not moving towards this benighted future that Marx talked about. So the best we can do is engage in local kinds of struggles. By contrast, though, what you really start to see starting in the 1950s, and conservatives, odly enough, dropping a lot of the more skeptical arguments that they had leaned very heavily on for a long time, including much of the early 20th century, and suddenly adopting much more universalistic, confident kind of language as they surge in political power.
[00:47:22] Speaker D: Right?
[00:47:23] Speaker C: And you don't need to take my word for it. Think about somebody like Ronald Reagan.
[00:47:28] Speaker D: Right?
[00:47:29] Speaker C: By the time Ronald Reagan gets into office, he's citing, of all people, Thomas Payne, the great social democratic revolutionary, saying, we have it in our power to remake the world anew.
[00:47:41] Speaker D: Right.
[00:47:42] Speaker C: Very anti echian sentiment, I should also add.
[00:47:45] Speaker D: Right?
[00:47:45] Speaker C: But this reflects, again, this confidence on the part of many conservatives that we're it. We hold the kind of universalistic value system. We understand what truth is, we have the right formula, and so we don't need to be skeptics any longer.
[00:47:59] Speaker E: We can be confident in asserting the.
[00:48:01] Speaker C: Importance of, say, american power or the supremacy of western civilization.
[00:48:05] Speaker D: Right?
[00:48:06] Speaker C: So I think that skepticism has, for.
[00:48:09] Speaker E: The most part, been not particularly helpful.
[00:48:12] Speaker C: For many progressive liberals and those on the left. And I think, frankly, it's time to get rid of it, because I think while it can be conducive to producing very interesting critical projects.
[00:48:23] Speaker D: Right.
[00:48:23] Speaker C: And again, I want to stress, I.
[00:48:24] Speaker E: Do think that a lot of these.
[00:48:26] Speaker C: Projects are quite interesting.
[00:48:27] Speaker D: Right.
[00:48:28] Speaker C: It's not very helpful in motivating people to commit themselves to a positive kind of politics, which is what I think.
[00:48:34] Speaker E: Really we need right now, at least from my standpoint, to close this out.
[00:48:37] Speaker B: You mentioned at the beginning, or earlier on in our conversation, that even if people react viscerally against postmodern ideas, they should look to the arguments themselves, because the arguments are often more sophisticated than they're given credit for.
How do you recommend people do that? And I ask that specifically because one of the seemingly just fundamental characteristics of the postmodernists is they're awfully difficult to read that pick up a book by Derrida, and it may be more opaque than you mentioned Joyce, than like, Finnegan's wake.
None of them are particularly clear writers.
[00:49:32] Speaker D: So.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: How does one like, okay, I want to learn more about postmodernism. Where do I begin?
[00:49:40] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. And look, I completely agree with you, right?
[00:49:43] Speaker E: I mean, I enjoy thinking through some Deridian ideas.
[00:49:49] Speaker C: I don't agree with him about 99% of stuff, but he's always thought provoking. But boy oh boy. When I was reading of grammatology, did I just want to throw that book against the wall or burn it? Or you choose, right? Throw it in the trash, chuck it in the river.
[00:50:04] Speaker E: It's a very annoying text to read.
[00:50:07] Speaker C: I would suggest for your listeners who are interested in a kind of sophisticated take on this to read Richard Rordy.
[00:50:13] Speaker D: Right?
[00:50:14] Speaker C: So Richard Rordy was deeply sympathetic to figures like Darede or Wittgenstein or Heidegger, and he writes in a much more clear, even pleasant way. I should add in particular, if you want a good book that is emblematic of this outlook, contingency, irony and solidarity is a good one. Or you can read his book Philosophy and social hope, which is a collection of essays where he comments on a lot of these issues.
[00:50:39] Speaker E: And again, they're sparklingly well written.
[00:50:42] Speaker D: Right?
[00:50:43] Speaker E: If anything, some of them were published.
[00:50:45] Speaker C: In newspapers for reasons. They're just really well written.
[00:50:47] Speaker E: And don't always trust what he says.
[00:50:50] Speaker C: About Foucault and Derrida, because like everyone else, he's offering his interpretations of them. But he offers a kind of distillation of a postmodern attitude that's a lot more clear than what you can find in a lot of those french thinkers.
[00:51:02] Speaker E: If you want another book that is clear, even though it was repudiated by.
[00:51:08] Speaker C: Its author, the condition of post modernity, Leotard's book isn't the hardest thing in the entire world.
Certainly by the standards of french theory, it's not that difficult. And Leotard later said, there are deep problems with the book. I don't like it. But for anybody who wants to understand what all this talk about meta narratives or grand narratives is, it's really the essential place to start, I would say. And for those who are looking for good criticisms of postmodern thought.
[00:51:39] Speaker E: I'll give two.
[00:51:40] Speaker C: So I would suggest reading, if you're interested in kind of left perspectives on this, pick up Terry Eagleton's illusions of postmodernism. Again, a very good, very sharp marxist critique of postmodernity, which is also one of the things that I wanted to come on here and say, because this is a pet peeve. People will sit there being like postmodern neo Marxism or postmodern Marxism.
Marxists despised postmodernism precisely because all these postmodern figures were know Marxism is the great grand men, and narrative of modernity needs to be rejected. And they all had problems with that. So the illusions of postmodernity or postmodernism by Terry Eagleton. Very lucid, very clear book. And if you're looking for a good liberal critique, again, of the problems with postmodernity, I would strongly recommend reading Charles Taylor's sources of the self. It's a big book, it's very dense, but it's also quite.
And, you know, you'll also pick up a really good view of the history of western philosophy when you go through it.
[00:52:36] Speaker E: And what's nice about Taylor is he's.
[00:52:39] Speaker C: Kind of even handed about this, where he's know, liberals need to accept that there were some reasons why post modernity and modernity emerged, that, you know, they can't be laid at the feet of other kinds of movements. But also, let's not throw the Bible out with the bathwater. There's some good things about this as well. Again, this capacity to engage in experiments and living is something that any liberal should want to get behind.
[00:53:01] Speaker D: Right?
[00:53:01] Speaker C: And it's something that postmodernism or hyper modernity, or whatever you want to call it, really radicalizes in certain kinds of ways. Oh, or better yet, if you want, go watch Seinfeld. Seinfeld is often taken to be like the quintessentially postmodern show. There's good reasons for that. The show about nothing. So if you want postmodern aesthetics, then go through the nine seasons of that and you'll get a pretty good sense of how this trickles down into the more general culture.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to reimagining liberty.
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