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June 22, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
01:01:35
Understanding Postmodernism with Professor Stephen Hicks
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Hello everyone, I'm having a conversation with Professor Stephen Hicks from Rockford University, who is the author of the book Explaining Postmodernism that I have now read twice in preparation for this interview.
Professor, how are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Thanks for having me on.
An absolute pleasure.
So I guess before we get into the meat of it, what inspired you to write a book called Explaining Postmodernism?
Well, it needed explaining.
It's a very broad, sprawling, bewildering, infuriating movement, both intellectually and culturally.
And it struck me back in the 1990s.
It's the first decade after I'd finished my graduate school.
And I was reading around in literature and noticing trends.
In a way, I was after graduate school.
In graduate school, you specialize, and it's like you have the blinders on while you're doing your dissertation and research.
So I was looking around at the broader intellectual world, and postmodernism was a thing.
And it struck me that lots of the commentary on it was apt and perceptive, but typically focusing on elements of it.
So I did not see a synthesis of what made all of these apparently very disparate trends and movements in a wide variety of fields all postmodern.
And then the more interesting question to me was where it came from.
How did it suddenly seemingly spring out of nowhere?
And of course, we know intellectual and cultural movements don't just spring out of nowhere.
There's a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid.
And given my training, it struck me both out of personal interest and professional training that I was well positioned to put the pieces together.
Right.
I mean, I'm glad that someone's done it, to be honest, because like you say, it's a very broad movement, but it's also remarkably deep as well.
I've been reading around the subject an awful lot recently.
And I've got a sort of a long-standing interest in military history.
And as soon as I started reading into postmodernism, I was very struck by how much of a tactic it appeared to be rather than a purpose in and of itself.
It seemed to be a method of getting to a destination, but didn't have anything that I would consider to be just a base in any kind of value system.
Right.
Can you tell me more about that?
Yeah, well, I think that's perceptive.
That one place where postmodernism becomes applied.
Obviously, it's an intellectual movement and the people who are in it are PhDs and they're trained in literary criticism and philosophy and all sorts of arcane disciplines.
But what you do often get is the sense that it's not about truth.
It's not about inquiry into an even-handed discussion of what the arguments for and against would be.
And you also don't find that when we are having the arguments or discussions, even although among intellectuals we always have sharp arguments and we can disagree passionately with each other, you don't get the sense that the goal of the conversation is to achieve some sort of understanding, mutual understanding, figuring out where I might have made mistakes, being willing to change my mind instead.
And the way I do put it is that it does seem to be a weaponized intellectual movement.
And so what you have is rhetoric not being used for the purpose of convincing people of something that you think is true, but rather to use weapon, sorry, rhetoric, right, as a set of weapons, right?
to put people on the defensive, throw them off guard, use them in explicitly deceptive fashions, and rather to overpower the person or undermine their power.
So that weaponized use of rhetoric, I think that is very characteristic of postmodernism.
That is the way it is.
It can be analogized to a military tactic.
Well, I mean, it's not that I couldn't not see it that way.
You know, it was just, it was startling, the way it was almost kettling people with the language itself.
And a lot of people I hear say, oh, postmodern is stupid.
And it's like, no, it's not.
It's brilliant.
It's genius.
I mean, there's no getting away that some of the finest minds of the 20th century have worked on this and come up with something that is diabolical, in my opinion.
It's really hard to explain to people that that's true and without them thinking that suddenly I personally am also a postmodernist.
Although, I mean, I can see that it, you know, I can see that it could easily be applied to almost anything.
I mean, why do you think it's the far left that's taken this skill set, this toolbox, and applied it to real life rather than the far right or any other movement, really?
Yes.
Well, that's a good pair of questions there.
You know, on the first half of what you were saying, right, if you just take some concrete examples, you know, the very common use of insulting language, right?
Calling someone a fascist, right?
Calling someone a Nazi, right?
Calling someone a racist or a sexist, really at the drop of a hat.
And we know, of course, that when we're arguing, sometimes we say insulting things out of frustration, right?
We're feeling attacked, we're feeling threatened, and we just want to say something to vent, right, so on.
And that explains some of the rhetoric, but it does not explain the rhetoric of people who are intellectuals for a living.
The give and take of argument and being able to take the heat, that is part of their job.
And so when they are regularly deploying this kind of language, everyone is a fascist, a Nazi, and so on, it can't just be that they're frustrated and they are venting, right?
This has to be part of a strategy.
And so what, of course, they know is from their study of rhetoric and their study of social psychology is that certain kinds of language, right, when you direct them at people, particularly when you direct them at decent people, right, who are very sensitive about moral charges and are very concerned with the truth and so on, that immediately puts them on the defensive.
And they feel a sense of personal attack.
Their emotions get up.
And when people's emotions get up, they do not argue very well.
So it is intentionally a destabilizing tactic when it's used by sophisticated practitioners.
So it's definitely weaponized.
Now, the morality of that is if you are intentionally using tactics like that, then you are, of course, confessing that you're not that interested in civil discourse.
You're not interested in giving the person the benefit of the doubt that maybe they've just made some sort of error.
You're playing a different game.
And we can talk about the morality of that a little bit later.
Now, why the far left?
Well, I don't think that postmodernism as a general philosophical framework has to be the property of the far left.
And one of the things that we are seeing, I think, in the last 10 years is movements from other parts of the political spectrum starting to adopt postmodern strategies.
We also see postmodernism being applied to areas outside of politics in religion and other places where, of course, things are highly normatively charged and so on.
So in one sense, this is not quite right.
It's a historical accident, right, to say that it was first the left, right, that postmodern framework and then applied it in various ways.
And part of the thesis of my book, though, is that there are good reasons why, given the history of the left, why the left, out of a sense of desperation, but out of a sense of re-strategizing, would find postmodernism very agreeable in its moment.
So the argument that I do make is that, you know, as we know in the modern world, the left has, by and large, been a failure.
It's been a failure intellectually.
It's been a failure, an outright humanitarian disaster everywhere that it has been trying.
But nonetheless, there are any number of people in any generation who find leftism of various sorts highly appealing.
If you find it highly appealing, but you are aware of the dismal history of left-wing theory and practice, if you're going to be strategic in your maintaining your leftism, you need something better than the old tried and failed methods of defending leftism.
Postmodernism is one of those strategies.
So let me jump straight to it then.
This is why it's not real communism, isn't it?
No, I think in one sense, there are no more real communists.
I think if you talk to people on the far left, they might see communism as an aspirational ideal.
Really functions more as, in their mind, or in their psychologically, a kind of a platonic form, right, or an abstracted understanding of heaven right on earth.
You don't find anybody, or at least I don't, right, anymore.
When I was younger, you did find people who actually believed the communist revolution would happen, that we could achieve real existing socialism right here on earth.
Rather, it's an ideal.
It's a failed ideal.
They don't think it's realistic.
And so at the same time, they are still, for various reasons, appalled by liberalism, appalled by capitalism, appalled by Western Democratic Republicanism, whatever you want to call it.
And so all they are left with is a critical stance.
So emotionally and kind of aspirationally, some sort of communistic socialism is the ideal, but they're not putting forth plans to bring that about.
Instead, what they're focused on is their long-hated enemy and finding ways to attack it, critique it, lessen it, bring it down.
And I would ascribe that to the manifest failures of socialism and Marxist theory, socialism in practice, and I mean, the demonstrable superiority of capitalism and liberalism.
Sure, absolutely.
I mean, in your book, you suggested that it was effectively a tactic by some very intelligent socialists.
Could you tell me about that, please?
Yeah, I think that one of the strategies I have, I think there are actually four major subspecies of postmodernism, and we'll get to those in the sixth chapter of my book.
But one of them is a kind of what I call it, a Machiavellian strategy.
So if you're a Machiavellian taking the cartoon of Machiavelli, you don't think that there is truth, goodness, justice, decency, right, and so forth in the world.
Instead, it's about power and being willing to use any tactics, fair or foul, all's fair in love and war, et cetera, et cetera, to bring about whatever your desired goals are.
And you don't have any sort of meta-justification for the rightness of your goals.
You just take your goals, your agenda, your interests, right, as a given, and you're trying to achieve them by whatever.
So it then ultimately becomes a form of power politics.
Now, if you then put yourself in the position of an intelligent socialist in the 1950s and the 1960s, because I think that was the crux decade.
I mean, some of the indications there are there's widespread recognition among Western leftists that the Soviet Union has been guilty of a huge genocide under Stalin.
However blinkered they are with respect to the economic data, they're aware that the West is and so forth.
The argument that they traditionally had that capitalism drives people into poverty and that the workers are going to rise up.
You can't make that argument anymore in the 1950s, right, when all of the poor people in the West are buying televisions and cars and so forth.
Everybody's getting fat, right?
And we're starting to worry about that.
That's our modern disease now It's not hunger, is it?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, we have the fattest poor people in history.
And that says something.
And then you start to see the manifestations, right?
There's an explicit shift from the old left to the new left with a total branding and a new strategy that's going on.
I think also important symbolically is the Bad Goetesberg program of the German Social Democrats.
They're probably the leading historical socialist party with roots tracing themselves all the way back to Marx.
And I think it was 1956 or so, announced in their program that they're shifting away from, we're going to criticize capitalism on the basis of that it's inhumane because it doesn't provide for people's basic needs, right?
From each according to his ability to each according to his need, right?
The criticism was capitalism does not satisfy people's basic needs.
They abandoned that explicitly and said we're not going to be able to attack capitalism because it obviously satisfies people's basic needs very well.
The new criticism is going to be equality.
It's not that capitalism doesn't produce a huge amount of stuff.
It's just that it does not distribute it equally across various dimensions.
And you also see around this time the splintering of the left, which had been a relatively unified movement around some kind of Marxism or neo-Marxism and so forth into all kinds of splintered, hyphenated leftist movements.
You've got gender socialism and ethnic socialism and racial socialism and environmentalist socialism and so on.
And so socialism then comes to be defined in terms of all of these hyphenated adjectives.
And two generations later, that's identity politics, which is where we are right now, where your identity is a whole concatenation of hyphens.
It's disturbingly prescriptive as well.
Well, there is, of course, the prescriptive element tacked onto that.
So it's both.
So the left was in disarray in the 1950s and the early 1960s.
And we see all of the elements of this going on.
So at that point, since the left was feeling beat up on historically, intellectually, both theoretically and in practice, it needed a new strategy.
And postmodernism is one of those strategies.
And it's a rhetorical strategy.
Why intellectuals are doing this?
Because the intellectuals are the ones who are the most well-read in the history.
They're the ones who are most politically active.
They're the ones with the PhD degrees, the cutting edges of their disciplines.
So they're able then to deploy the latest and greatest things coming out of particularly philosophy at this point to come up with a new strategy.
Now, to call it a Machiavellian strategy is then to say, look, you can say that you are interested in equality and fairness and looking after the dispossessed and the oppressed and so forth.
And there's a long well-traveled road by politicians who will profess that that is their end.
And if you give us power or if you give me power, I will give you what you want.
And they do not have to be sincere in that goal.
Instead, the goal can be to get the power.
But given whatever political landscape, demographic landscape you are operating in, how do you get a power base?
And one of the ways of doing so is by appealing to certain sorts of groups who might have grievances.
And if you can get them on side, on your side, then they give you power and so on.
And then at the same time, there are any number of philosophical tools coming out of literary criticism, coming out of academic epistemology that are very effective.
And we can talk more about the epistemological element here, but that are very effective at putting your intellectual or ideological enemies on the defensive.
So for example, I don't know, if you and I are having an argument about something and you're a really smart guy and you're really convinced of your position, but I just keep throwing these facts at you and I keep throwing this data at you and I give you this argument and you find yourself, wow, man, I didn't know that factor.
I didn't know that argument.
I don't know what to say to this.
And you find yourself saying, well, you know, it's just semantics.
It's all just a matter of opinion.
Well, what you're trying to do in that case is deflect the necessity to deal with the facts.
Because it's just a matter of opinion or it's all just semantics, then it doesn't really matter.
Well, you're deliberately shifting the frame of the conversation.
You already consented to a specific argument and a boundary within which we're debating.
And then you say, well, it's all just opinion.
That's you effectively conceding the argument, isn't it?
That's right.
Okay, so then the other person then has to then come up with an epistemological argument.
Say, no, no, no, not everything is a matter of opinion, right?
And then actually a very hard project.
How do you make an argument that there are, in fact, objective truths, and there are facts of reality.
And if you cannot instantly, right on the spot, right, come up with an argument that adequately develops that, then the fact that everything is just opinion stands, and the other person doesn't seem to have lost the debate.
And of course, if they come up with, you know, good argument is not as opinion, then you can shift it to semantics or you can shift it to perceptual illusions or definitional issues and so on.
And the person then is disarmed and you diverted the person's attention from the original argument.
So people, you know, these are sneaky lawyer tricks.
And one way, of course, of looking at postmodernism is to say, and this is the Machiavellian argument, is to say, just like in a court of law, if you have a cynical view of the law, you say, well, there's not really truth.
There's not really justice.
What just matters is we're going into a court of law.
It's your side against my side.
And whoever has the best rhetorical strategy is going to win.
Just need to deploy any tactics we think will be convincing to the jury or the judge.
If we can make up stuff and get away with it, if we can define terms, if we can draw the wool over people's eyes in various ways, that's fine because the goal is to win, not to get what's true.
And so if you then apply that outside of the courtroom to politics in general, right, if you think, okay, fine, the historical record has not been good socialism.
The goddamn capitalists seem to be doing better.
If I can then come up with a new rhetorical strategy to give myself some breathing room to put the bastards, so to speak, on the defense, I will go ahead and do so.
And what had happened in academic epistemology, right, in the early part of the 20th century was some very sophisticated epistemological tools had been developed.
And those are the ones that the postmodernists deploy with great success in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Before we go on, I just want to just want to clarify for my audience.
So as I understand it, epistemology is the method by which knowledge is discovered.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Yes, it's the criterion standards for knowledge.
So how do we really know?
We all have beliefs and ideas and opinions, and some things are hypothetical and some things are factual.
We know we can, there are fantasy things.
How do we sort all of that?
So if we're interested in knowledge, under what circumstances can I say I know something?
Right, okay.
So this is leading me to exactly where I wanted to go with this.
Let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about language, because this was one of the most fascinating parts of your book for me.
The idea that if I'm remembering this correctly, or if I've understood this correctly.
So as I understand it, the postmodern sort of strategy in this regard is to do with their conception of the way language is effectively a prison for human thought.
And this is actually something I've meandered about myself, just thinking, well, that's an interesting thing, isn't it?
If you don't have language, can you think?
And I can't remember exactly how you put it.
Something like language always connects with language.
It never interfaces with what we would term reality, I suppose.
Yes.
And this is, it's a very, very complicated idea.
And I'm sure I'm doing it a grave injustice.
But it's very interesting.
No, no, no.
You're on the right track, exactly.
Oh, I'm really glad to hear that, actually.
Yes.
But it's very interesting how this becomes the avenue of attack.
Can you elaborate more on that for me, please?
Yeah.
Well, the broad issue is the relationship between human consciousness and reality.
The holy grail, right, so to speak, in philosophy.
Because if philosophy is the quest for truth, but truth is some sort of mapping of what's going on in my mind onto reality or some sort of connection between the subjective and the objective, articulating how we do that is critical.
Now, what the postmoderns do is they buy into all of the skeptical arguments that have been developed by philosophers about every element of our cognitive processes and then reach the negative conclusion that there is no way to make a connection between the contents of our minds and reality.
So in some sect, we are trapped inside our heads or we're trapped inside of our minds.
And since we are conceptual beings and we do use language, language then is not a tool of cognition, right?
Language then is a, and you use the prison metaphor.
It becomes a set of walls that we build around ourselves that block ourselves from having access to an external reality.
Now, how they get there, that's a long set of stories, but a short way to do it is to say if you look at your introduction to psychology textbook where we start studying the functions of consciousness or our various modes of awareness.
Well, we have our senses.
If we are born healthy, we have five of those.
And so if you're a skeptic, though, then you will take seriously the various arguments that say our senses do not put us in direct contact with reality.
So already we have an obstacle between our minds and reality.
So that's just our senses.
Memory is another cognitive function.
But then you can develop various skeptical arguments about memory.
We form abstract concepts, words, right?
But a word is abstract.
You're a human being.
I'm a human being.
But you're also a particular human being.
You're very different from me.
And I'm very different from others.
But we all share this common humanity that we call it.
Well, what is this abstract humanity that we all share?
And there are some philosophical puzzles about that.
So if you think that abstractions are subjective or not really tied, then you're also then going to say, well, even just the use of words is already a distancing type of thing.
But then we take words and we put them into more complicated structures.
We form sentences.
We put them into stories and narratives and theories.
And as you go on, there are, of course, puzzles and challenges there.
So what we get, though, is that by the time we get to the early to middle part of the 20th century, philosophy, particularly epistemology or cognitive studies, was in a very skeptical place on all of these various areas.
We don't see how the senses connect to reality or memory or abstract concepts or narratives or theories, less scientific method, which takes all of those and puts them together in very complicated and sophisticated ways.
And so most philosophers of science and most epistemologists were just throwing up their hands and saying, I guess, right, everything is subjective.
Everything is arbitrary.
And leading postmodernists, all of whom got their PhDs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, all of them actually in philosophy, they're well aware of all of these skeptical arguments.
And that gives them some tools in their toolkit to use your language.
Well, it was just what came to mind.
So this is really interesting because as far as I can see, they've kind of painted themselves into a corner.
So we can't be sure that anything around us is real.
We don't think science actually can yield results.
And objective reality and the very concept of truth are in doubt.
So what's the value judgment that they can possibly make against something like racism or sexism?
If everything has been deconstructed, nothing has any value anymore.
And nothing means anything, who cares if someone's being oppressed?
Why do they care?
That's right.
That's right.
So then if a postmodernist is not careful, then they are trapped in a contradiction because on the one hand, they do seem to be saying things like, no, racism is evil, right?
Sexism is bad, right?
Various sorts of inequalities are an affront to human dignity.
And so they're using highly charged normative concepts, but they're portraying them and deploying them as kind of objective universal truths about the human condition.
But then you cannot, at the same time that you're saying all of that, deploy all of the skeptical epistemology that everything is just stories, it's just narratives.
It's just people's subjective value preferences and there's no right and wrong.
There is a contradiction at work there and there are any number of them.
And the way that they are handled then is to say, well, look, when we are talking about the normative realm, we will grant to you that everything really is just subjective, right, and arbitrary.
And that there is no way for anybody to think objectively outside of their own subjective right and arbitrary right framework.
But then they will just say, well, as a matter of fact, and again, I'm flirting with contradiction here, right?
I happen to have been born with a certain constellation of value preferences that have been formed on me.
I was born this gender, this race, this ethnicity, this, that, right, and the other thing, speaking a certain language that shaped my thinking a certain way.
And there is no way for me to think outside of that framework or realistically to adopt a different value framework.
But the way life is, is just individuals having their value framework and trying to assert their value framework in the world.
And of course, other people with different value frameworks are doing the exact same sort of thing.
And so it really is just a power struggle among competing arbitrary value frameworks.
And from my perspective, I just want mine to win.
Well, that's literally like the, that's essentially as far down as I've drilled it.
Because once you get to this point, as far as I can see, there can be no arguments in favor of one value system or another.
So now it is exactly the same.
It's just a power struggle.
And if that's the case, why would they approach me as if I would care about their moral condemnation or their character attacks in the form of an insult or an accusation about racism or sex and whatever?
I mean, the very idea that this is something I should care about, I mean, unless they were doing this cynically and they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't even dream of approaching it if they wanted to be consistent anyway.
Right.
No, the reason for that is that they know that you're operating from a different philosophical framework, right?
From them, power is the goal and the assertion of their subject interest is the goal.
But if they know something about you, they know that you are a person who believes in facts, in reality, in objectivity, and that you believe that civil discussion and argument is the way that we should resolve our differences, and that you're willing to be tolerant and cut people's back and give them various safes.
So that then becomes a set of attitudes and beliefs and practices that you have, but ones that can be used against you.
If they can convince you that you need to be civil and argue and come up with all kinds of facts, well, that's going to use up a lot of resources.
And to the extent that you're not able to do so, you're going to feel like a failure.
You're going to be less effective at doing so.
Meanwhile, they can just continue to move the goalposts, use various other tactics and be more successful in the competition.
Yeah, continue to just assert and gain ground by doing that while keeping everyone else on the defensive.
That's very interesting.
And I suppose that explains the effectiveness of their rhetorical tools, doesn't it?
Sure.
I mean, they've gone for the very, I mean, the most sensitive things underlying modern Western culture.
You know, accusing people of arbitrary bigotry of any kind is just, it's such a condemnation.
And this isn't accidental, obviously, is it?
No, absolutely not.
So, you know, for the first time in human history, really, it was Western civilization, right, in the early modern world that started to become sensitive to issues of race, class, gender, right, and so forth.
Authoritarianism concerned with people's dignity, rights, liberties, equality, right, and so on.
So this is now a very strong part of our cultural DNA.
And we know that a vast majority of people are very sensitive to those issues.
And so they use exactly that sensitivity against the person.
For many of them, the Machiavellian ones that we're talking about, that is a calculated strategy.
So the point of making various sorts of demands is often not that they actually expect people to grant those demands.
It's rather to put the other person on the defense of how much you can get away with.
That's really interesting.
And I feel like I should defend Machiavelli.
I feel like his name is being misused.
Well, yes, I know.
Yes.
There is the more Republican Machiavelli.
Yes.
He wasn't a bad guy, he was just, he invented an idea.
It's not his fault.
Okay, yeah.
So this, honestly, I find this just such a huge topic.
I'm not even sure where to start, where to go.
Okay, so let's talk about the sort of relativistic nature of postmodernism.
This is something I really find interesting.
Because I read, what was it, Towards a Political Philosophy of Race by Falgooni Sheff.
And I was amazed by the, I guess, by the perspective that she was taking, because in a way, it was almost like she was taking the eye of God when analyzing Western liberal civilization.
And she was effectively trying to make a case for the racialization of Muslims in Western civilizations because they have a different set of values.
And these need to be sort of normalized with Western values before they can be fully incorporated into the politics.
It's not untrue, but it was the way she was taking the position of the sovereign, the opinion of the sovereign, and how it drills down.
And from her perspective, and it's not wrong, but it's also not human the way she's doing this.
Because, I mean, from the position, it was just a power analysis.
And so from the position of the sovereign, it really doesn't matter to you if your subjects are, you know, like the orcs from Lord of the Rings or the elves from Lord of the Rings, as long as they are your subjects and the state continues to function.
But that's just so far out of the realm of real people's experiences.
And I was, until I read your book, I was amazed by the way that she could just equivocate between modern Western liberal democracies and Islamic theocratic patriarchies without ever criticizing the patriarchies.
She just did not have a single word to say about these.
And she even went into long-standing defenses, like lengthy defenses of burqas and forced oppression of women and things like this.
I mean, why don't they care?
What's wrong with them?
Why did they just attack Western liberal democracy?
Okay.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with this author or this book, but you're pointing to the general issue of relativism and its implications.
So on the one hand, of course, we know it's possible to do some philosophy, think about issues, and have a hard time justifying any sort of factual basis or objective basis for normative conclusions.
And so then you reach the conclusion, right?
Well, I guess it's the case that normative judgments are relative.
They can be relative to us as individuals, in which case, you know, you have yours and I have mine, and we're never going to see eye to eye.
And so what do we do about that?
Or we can relativize it to social groups, right?
Environmental determinist view, right?
I happen to have been born into a certain culture, and so I'm conditioned to think and feel and emote a certain way.
And the same thing holds for you, but if you come from different cultures, right, and so on.
So I can't say that my way of thinking and feeling and emoting is any different from or better than yours.
I can just say that I just happen to be in that in that case.
If you go down that road, then you should, right, logically speaking, stay in a completely non-judgmental perspective.
And this might tie into what you were talking about, the absolute God's eye view, that as an intellectual, then you might be able to scale out and I can say, well, there's this group and they have their values and there's this group and they have their values and that's just the way it is.
And I don't necessarily have God's authority to put my thumb on the scale and say this one is better than this one.
Now, what you do about that then is if you're a hardcore relativist in that perspective is you face then a fork in the road.
One fork in the road is the one that is often taken by Western liberals who want to say that we are in this relativistic predicament.
So what we should do then is say all groups' normative standards are equally valuable.
So if I as a Western liberal might be conditioned to think that peace and tolerance and some sort of liberalism is the right kind of system, but there might very well be Islamic theocratic regimes that have all sorts of practices with respect to their women and children.
I can't apply my Western liberal standards to judging them.
I can only apply my standards in my social circle.
And what I should do then is not do that.
I should not be judgmental.
And that means I need to have a certain kind of toleration for those sorts of practices.
And if I don't do that, then if I try to apply my Western liberal standards to Islamic theocracy, then I'm being morally imperialistic.
I'm trying to force my standards on them.
Then we know imperialism doesn't sit well with Western liberalism and so on.
So then you get a tolerationist kind of perspective.
And I think there are any number of Western liberals who are in that category as well.
Now, then what you have is a problem because what happens if the other side is not abiding by that set of standards?
So take Islamic theocrats.
They, their perspective, are not playing the game of saying, oh, all cultures' value standards are equally legitimate and we can't impose ours on them.
So they're not willing to play the toleration and live and let live game.
They are trying imperialistically to impose their standards on you.
And then that, of course, puts the Western liberal in a dilemma.
And we see that dilemma being played out all over Europe than we do in North America right now.
So it then becomes totally disarming from the Western liberal.
You literally do not know what to do because your philosophy does not give you any tools for dealing with this kind of a threat.
So I'll leave it at that for now in case you want to jump in on.
I mean, it's interesting you say that because I've actually spoken to social justice advocates who, and these words have literally come out of their mouth.
Isn't it illiberal to impose liberal values?
Well, not really.
Like, I don't think it is.
How could being liberal be illiberal?
I mean, it's, and the thing is, as soon as they get to this point, this is always at the end of a long conversation that I'm having with them, where they're- I've just got to the point where it's like, look, I'm not prepared to accept the second-class citizenship of women.
I'm not prepared to accept that.
And I think that force of law should be used against people who are trying to impose that.
And then they'll say to me, isn't it illiberal to do that?
It's like, no.
I think that's what a liberal should do.
I think you should be vocally objecting to these things rather than tolerating them.
Absolutely right.
I mean, liberalism, the bottom line is that the liberty and dignity of each individual is your fundamental value.
Believe and have arguments for saying that there are such things as objective facts, including there are objective moral facts and the liberty and dignity of each individual is your basic fact, then you are justified in using force in defending against those who are going to violate that fundamental fact.
So as liberals, you give wide scope to other people to do whatever they want, but you draw the line at the fundamental violations of liberties of other individuals.
Yeah, like John Stuart Mill's harm principle, isn't it?
Well, yeah, the harm principle is a variation on that.
Yeah, that's a detail.
There are other formulations that I'd prefer, but Mill is important in this.
He's just the one that jumps to my mind.
But what ones do you prefer?
Yes.
Lockean and Jeffersonian.
But that's another set of issues, broadly speaking, within the Western liberal tradition and issues of defining harm.
And then we get into some technical issues importantly here.
But there's another part of what you were saying, and that, though, does seem to be that there is a double standard in the application of tolerance.
So if you, and this is not original, this is pointed out all over the place.
So if you take, for example, the status of women, right?
If you are a Western liberal woman, then you will use objective and absolutist language to argue that the second class treatment of women is a moral abomination.
And of course, it is a moral abomination.
Women should have full liberty rights with men.
And that we need to get rid of any double standards in the law and reform various cultural practices and so on.
And all of that is long-standing liberalism.
So it is a puzzle then when we come to second and third, fourth generation kinds of feminism that then do seem to strategically turn a blind eye to very objective, brutal oppressions of women in other parts of the world.
And you see being played out in their intellectual framework exactly the contradiction here that we have been talking about.
Because one heart of hearts that they have is to say that obviously all of those treatments of women are wrong, objectively wrong, and we should be fired up and passion and use all of the cultural and political tools to end that oppression.
But then at the same time, they do get themselves into intellectual pretzels, trying to say, well, it's different if it's done by Islamic people to their own women or to their own children, and we can't be imperialistic and so on.
So yeah, that's a huge philosophical problem.
It's interesting you say that because recently Iranian feminists are complaining, have been complaining about Western feminists because the Iranian feminists are currently trying to liberate themselves from the theocratic commandment that they have to wear a hijab and Western feminists are backing up the mullahs, which is strange, isn't it?
Well, it's worse than strange.
It's a moral abomination.
Of course.
That points to there being other things at work.
And this is where you start entertaining the hypothesis that really many of the Western feminists of the whichever set of adjectives you want to put in front of that iteration of feminists, the liberty and equality of women is not really their agenda.
That that's a cover that maybe they bought into when they were younger, but they have evolved into something else.
So if you are willing to tolerate the objective brutalization of millions of women around the world, obviously women's liberty and equality and dignity is not your agenda.
It's something else.
Yeah, it's very interesting, actually, the unholy alliance between feminism and Islam that's springing up everywhere.
And I've been thinking about this a lot.
I think that part of it comes from the, they both share effectively the same moral paradigm where they, if they're not hegemonic, they consider themselves to be the victims of whatever dominant moral philosophy is dominating society.
And so they love to portray themselves as victims, despite the fact that obviously, I mean, no one else within the society would consider it.
Yeah, so that's a point of commonality, right?
Or to go back to your military strategy point from earlier, right?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Then you would then ask the question, well, who is the deepest and most powerful enemy of the mullahs?
And it's going to be the same enemy as the current.
Of the liberals, isn't it?
That's right.
It's Western liberalism, right?
It's Western democratic capitalism, right?
And so on.
That's the big enemy.
And so they're willing then to engage in a strategic alliance, defeat the common enemy, and then in the future will take on the mullahs.
I mean, that's the only way it could possibly be, really.
And it's interesting how I'm absolutely certain that each group harbors sort of secret designs on the other.
I think that's the only thing.
I'm sorry.
I didn't hear all of that.
Yeah, I think each group harbors secret designs on the other one.
As in, I think that they think they can subvert one another's ideology.
But I don't want to get too deep into that rabbit hole.
It's just so right.
So coming back to postmodernism then, why is it that postmodernism manifests itself in so many different fields when it comes to like architecture, arts, music, poetry?
And then, I mean, does this all spring from philosophy or is it, you know, how does it get everywhere?
Yeah, good.
You stole my thumb, thunder, right?
This is a testament to the power of philosophy, right?
Whether we're not as smart, intelligent human beings, we have to be philosophical, right?
We think broadly, we think in terms of principles, and then when we adopt very broad principles and apply them to various aspects of our lives, we get the same sorts of results.
So, yeah, human beings, when we're thoughtful and passionate, we're interested in all sorts of things, right?
We're interested in politics and religion and art and music and history and archaeology and the astronomy and the whole thing.
But then if we have a small set of unified principles by which we're going to think and evaluate in all of these different areas, then we should have the same sorts of manifestations.
So when postmodernism, right, as a set of principles, as a philosophical way of looking at the world, that is skeptical, is anti-realistic, is kind of jaded about human relationships, is suspicious and hostile toward the objectivity and the achievement of genuine values.
So if that is your philosophy, and then you apply that to art, well, you're going to get certain outcomes.
If you apply it to politics, if you apply it to whatever, you'll get similar dynamics.
This is really interesting because for the longest time, I couldn't understand sort of postmodern art.
I was just looking at it and thinking, I mean, subconsciously, I was thinking, you know, this has no value to me.
But it's only after reading your book, it's like, well, of course it doesn't.
Why should it?
What value does value have?
That's right.
Well, as we know, art is deeply intellectual, deeply emotional.
And the works that we respond to most strongly are the ones that resonate with the most important elements of our psyche.
So it would make sense that if you are a deeply cynical, jaded person who thinks everything is shit, want to express that, well, if people who believe in genuine values and positivity and genuine connections between humanity, they're not going to connect at all.
You will be alienated in a fundamental way by that art.
Right, okay, so let's talk about, and this is such a broad topic.
I'm not even sure how to address it really.
I guess the connection between values, narratives, and metanarratives.
Because as a layman, I'm looking at this and thinking, right, okay, so obviously narratives, plural, make up metanarratives.
And from these stories, we gain a set of values.
And so the postmodernist attack on metanarratives, to break them up and to atomize them almost, it seems like a deliberate attack on the way that people form a value system.
Have I got that correct, or is that?
Well, it can go the other way.
If you start with the values, what many of the postmoderns will say is that the values come first, that they are.
And so what narratives appeal to us are going to be the ones that already push our subjective value button.
So we'll only tell the stories we want already.
Yes, that's right.
We'll only hear those ones and we'll only associate with people who share that set of values.
Otherwise, we start telling stories to each other, but we're using language in ways that is uncommunicable to people of different value frameworks.
That's interesting.
And an example of that would be, I've heard the story of Muhammad's wife Aisha told several times in several different perspectives.
And the most interesting one, I mean, the standard one that we hear from Sunni Muslims is that she was nine years old when Muhammad first copulated with her, obviously making him quite reprehensible in the eyes of a modern person.
But this is a very interesting conflict of values because apparently she might actually have been in her 20s.
And the reason that the Sunni Muslims say, well, she was only nine years old is to make sure that she was a virgin.
Because if Muhammad is marrying a 22-year-old, it's likely she's a virgin in 7th century Arabia.
And it's, I mean, that seems to be like an extraordinary example, but I'd just tell you.
So there you have a value commitment driving the narrative.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Yeah.
That's exactly.
And so, yeah, the meta-narratives themselves, I mean, they're the stories we build our civilizations on, aren't they?
How we know what we are and why we are these things and why these things are good.
Isn't it really immoral to attack that?
Well, yes, right.
I agree that it is.
But that just is to do a general value judgment against postmodernism.
And I would absolutely share that.
But at the same time, I would have to say the postmodernists do travel a long philosophical road to get there.
One interesting way to put it is to say you are concerned with defending the foundational values of civilization.
To put it crudely, postmodernists don't believe in civilization.
And is that there are only cultures.
Because civilization is to say that there's a certain complexity that is possible and a certain level of achievement.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Before we start calling something a civilization.
And modernism wants to deflate that.
All of the alleged civilizations are either frauds or they are just one other culture that has told a highly self-congratulatory narrative about itself and is trying to put on airs and say, oh, no, we really are a civilization, but there are no such things.
Again, that's really interesting because I'm aware that a person's self-confidence and self-worth comes from the things about themselves and their culture, Williams, that they believe.
And so to attack them, to attack that, and attacking identity in particular, I mean, all of this is an attack on identity, really.
But to attack these things seems like a form of psychological warfare.
I mean, this is, if you wanted to make someone afraid, isolated, insecure, and just malleable to outside forces, you would be attacking the value structure they believe in, the civilization or the culture in which they live, and their own moral stance as an individual, their own moral worth, by calling them whatever, whatever name.
And I mean, it's, again, devilishly clever tactic.
Yeah.
No, what you're saying is perfectly well put, right?
To be a human being, to live a good life, right?
We want our lives to be meaningful.
Yes.
We are self-reflective beings.
So if we are intelligent and sensitive, we put a lot of time into thinking about what our core beliefs are, shaping our characters, developing habits, committing ourselves to long-term projects that over time form my identity.
This is what my life has amounted to.
And we want it to be positive.
We want it to be good, noble, beautiful, meaningful, significant.
And all of that is very healthy.
And rational philosophy should help each of us in this astoundingly important project as individuals.
So in that sense, yes, postmodernism is a wicked attack on all of that, because what it wants to do is just at a philosophical level is to say philosophy is of zero use to you in this project.
And then it does systematically go through.
Anything about you that you think is of worth, dignity, that is your accomplishment, well, we are going to deflate that.
And at the most, we will give the credit to some other institution, right?
Or you have something about you that you think is noble, true, and or beautiful, right?
We do deflate it.
We undermine it.
And then particularly if we see you as part of a value group, right, that we are opposed to antithetical values.
Yes, what we want to do is destabilize your sense that in any way you are a worthwhile, right, deserving person and that you're very clever people at doing so.
That's exactly what's going on.
Yeah, like I said, I'm a big fan of military history, and I'm looking at this as if as if territory is being taken, and this is an Alexander.
It's unstoppable.
It's your psychic territory, yes.
Yes, yeah, that's exactly it.
But right, okay, so what can we do about it?
I mean, if we agree that we've come to a place, I mean, I don't know that my senses are sensing reality.
I have to take that on faith.
And I'm an atheist, so I don't take a lot of things on faith.
Well, you were a better epistemology then, right?
That would be my fundamental point, right?
So, I mean, human beings are smart.
We have a big brain.
We have a very sophisticated conceptual apparatus working out how that actually works and that it works effectively and successfully.
That really is our most important philosophical project.
The success of postmodernism has been as a result of the failure of philosophers and cognitive scientists to develop articulate responses to that.
Now, things I think are a lot better in the last generation compared to where philosophy was and cognitive science was two generations ago.
So we do have better answers to all of that.
So the short, the quick and dirty answer to your question is to say we need better philosophy.
Postmodernism is a result of skeptical failed philosophy.
It's now in its second, third, or fourth generation, depending on how you slice and dice things.
But it was the application and institutionalization of a set of philosophical failures that has led us to where we are.
By contrast, earlier in the interview, you're pointing out, in the modern world, we do have all sorts of enormous achievements that have been increasing life expectancy, the material benefits that have come out of free.
Yeah, that's so forth.
The magnificent edifice of science, the physics, the astronomy, the chemistry, the biology, and so on.
The astounding technologies that you and I across an ocean can have a conversation like this.
All these things that we know, all of that, of course, came out of a philosophy, broadly speaking, Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century.
We still live largely in an Enlightenment philosophical culture.
Just to be clear on this, this is what we'd call modernism, isn't it?
Well, I think modernism is a little broader.
I mean, I views it as a little bit narrower.
We can get into that.
But yes, broadly speaking, the modern world has an enormous amount of successes, but those successes came from a philosophical set of revolutions in the early modern world.
The Enlightenment, I think of as a kind of a capstone few generations, where modernism matured and then became not just an intellectual movement, but also a social movement and became institutionalized in various aspects of the culture.
And that's essentially what we're living in.
So postmodernism is a reaction against that and in its self-conscious forms, an attempt to tear that down and destroy it.
So what we do need is, I don't like returning to, I'm not fundamentally a conservative, but we do need to take the core insights of the Enlightenment and reaffirm those, identify its weaknesses, and there are weaknesses, all of the ones that the postmodernists have exploited.
and come up with better philosophy, better cognitive science, better understandings of normative issues, especially to rebuild and build upon what are legitimate foundational achievements of the Enlightenment.
So that's the philosophical project, and not everyone is a philosopher, but I do think everyone does need to be philosophical at some end, be aware of what these issues are.
Some of the battles, though, are institutional, right?
In whatever institutional institutions we're working at, whether it's a university or a corporation or even within our own small businesses and our families, we need to have these discussions.
We need to reaffirm core liberal, rational, civil values and fight for those in our workplaces against the corroding effects of postmodernism.
And so we all have the ability to do that as well.
So it's a multi-front battle.
Okay.
And on a sort of personal level, I've been, the best I can recommend to people is that they be self-confident and that they take the time to ground themselves in who they are, what they believe, and don't accept unfair attacks on their character, obviously.
Absolutely.
Is there anything else you would add to that?
No, I think that's very nicely put.
Once you realize that part of the postmodern activist strategy, the so-called social justice warriors, or actually anti-social and anti-justice.
There are certainly warriors, though.
You've got to give them that.
Yeah, of a sort.
So once you realize what the weapons are and what the tactics are, yes, having enough self-confidence to say, what I believe are importantly true values.
Now, of course, if you know you've not done the philosophical work to justify those, you might be in a position to say, I think these are important and decent values, and I'm committed to them.
But maybe I've made a mistake along the way.
So you need to be open to the criticism.
But when you are faced with what you know are unfair attacks, people are calling you a racist or a fascist and so forth, don't let that inside at all.
And in fact, turn that against the person, because one of the things that we do know is that if you're at all concerned with justice, unfair accusations of justice are enormously destructive and counterproductive.
So call people on it.
Words need to mean things.
If we want really to be concerned with racism, you can't be throwing racist accusations around casually.
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