Status Updates From Explaining Postmodernism: S...

The next question, then, is how postmodern epistemology comes to be integrated with postmodern politics.

If one is an academic foe of capitalism, then one’s weapons and tactics are not those of the politician, the activist, the revolutionary, or the terrorist. Academics’ only possible weapons are words. And if one’s epistemology tells one that words are not about truth or reality or in any way cognitive, then in the battle against capitalism words can be only a rhetorical weapon.

But the liberal Accordingly, in the 1970s, as the far Left collapsed once again, it turned to those best able to think strategically, those best able to situate the Left historically and politically, and those mos were not entirely soft and complacent, and by the mid-1970s their police and military forces had defeated the terrorists, killing some, imprisoning many, driving others underground more or less permanently.

But the liberal capitalists were not entirely soft and complacent, and by the mid-1970s their police and military forces had defeated the terrorists, killing some, imprisoning many, driving others underground more or less permanently.

The rise of Left terrorism in nations other than those controlled by explicitly Marxist governments was a striking feature of the 1960s and early 1970s. Combined with the broader turn of the Left to non-rationalism, irrationalism, and physical activism, the terrorist movement made that era the most confrontational and bloody in the history of the Left socialist movements of those nations.

In effect, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, significant portions of the Left came to agree with the collectivist Right on yet another issue: Forget internationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism; focus on smaller groups formed on the basis of ethnic, racial, or other identities.

Common to all of these variations was a new emphasis on the principle of equality and a de-emphasis on the principle of need. In effect, in changing the ethical standard from need to equality, all of these new varieties of Left-socialism had resolved to quote Marx less and to quote Rousseau more.

Broadly Marxist themes of conflict and oppression carried over into the new splinter groups’ analyses, but again the dominant theme was equality.

Abandoning the traditional economic class analysis’s implication that effort should be focused upon achieving a universal class consciousness, Left thinkers and activists focused on narrower subdivisions of the human species, concentrating their efforts on the special issues of women and of racial and ethnic minorities.

Feeling excluded and without real opportunities to achieve the good life the rich were enjoying, the proletariat would experience psychological oppression and thus be driven to desperate measures.

the new argument abandoned the claim that capitalism would generate a physically malnourished and therefore revolutionary proletariat—capitalism did not cause such absolute poverty. Rather the proletariat would become revolutionary because, while their basic physical needs were being met, they saw that some others in society had relatively much more than they did.

A variation on this strategy was implicit in a new definition of “poverty” that the Left began to offer in the early 1960s: the poverty that capitalism causes is not absolute but relative.

A new ethical standard was therefore necessary. With great fanfare, then, much of the Left changed its official ethical standard from need to equality. No longer was the primary criticism of capitalism to be that it failed to satisfy people’s needs. The primary criticism was to be that its people did not get an equal share.

Yet come the 1950s it was hard to argue that capitalism fails to satisfy its people’s needs. In fact, a big part of the problem seemed to be that capitalism had satisfied its people’s needs so well that the people had become fat and complacent and not at all revolutionary. So a moral standard that made satisfying needs primary was now useless in a critique of capitalism.

The lesson that the leftest of the Left radicals drew was: So much for democracy. So much for the grass-roots, bottom-up approach, and so much for appealing to the masses and waiting for them to do anything.

Socialism in Russia could not wait to develop out of mature capitalism. The revolution would have to take Russia directly from feudalism to socialism. But without capitalism’s organized proletariat, the transition would require an elite who would, through force of will and political violence, effect a “revolution from above” and then impose socialism on everyone in a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

According to classical Marxism, waiting for socialism to come to Russia meant waiting for capitalism to come to Russia, for capitalism then to develop an industrial proletariat, for the proletariat then to achieve a collective class consciousness and then revolt against the oppressor. That would take a maddeningly long time. So Marx’s theory had to be altered.

Western liberal civilization, however, survived both the Great Depression and World War II, emerging stronger than it had been before. During the war and its aftermath, the National Socialists and the collectivist Right were wiped out physically and discredit-ed morally and intellectually. The new battle lines were simplified and starkly clear: liberal capitalism versus Left socialism.

That is my second hypothesis: Postmodernism is a response to the crisis of faith of the academic far Left. Its epistemology justifies the leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism, and that same epistemology justifies using language not as a vehicle for seeking truth but as a rhetorical weapon in the continuing battle against capitalism.

The dominance of subjectivist and relativistic epistemologies in academic philosophy thus provided the academic Left with a new tactic. Confronted by harsh evidence and ruthless logic, the far Left had a reply: That is only logic and evidence; logic and evidence are subjective; you cannot really prove anything; feelings are deeper than logic; and our feelings say socialism.

Postmodernism is born of the marriage of Left politics and skeptical epistemology.

As I will argue over the course of the next two chapters, the far Left faced a dilemma. Confronted by the continued flourishing of capitalism and the continued poverty and brutality of socialism, they could either go with the evidence and reject their deeply cherished ideals—or stick by their ideals and attack the whole idea that evidence and logic matter.

Here, then, is my second hypothesis about postmodernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.

These points are well known, and I dwell upon them in order to project the depth of the crisis that this meant for Left-socialist intellectuals. By the 1950s, the crisis was being felt deeply.

Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale. Each has produced dissident writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nien Cheng who have documented what those regimes are capable of.

Morally and politically, in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives. Socialist practice has time and time again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships in history prior to the twentieth century.

Evidence, reason, logic, tolerance, and civility were all integral parts of the modernist package of principles. Socialism in its modern form began, in part, by accepting that package.

or whether it is Andrea Dworkin’s male-bashing in the forming of calling all heterosexual males rapists, the rhetoric is very often harsh and bitter. So the puzzling question is: Why is it that among the far Left—which has traditionally promoted itself as the only true champion of civility, tolerance, and fair play—that we find those habits least practiced and even denounced?

to enact “politically correct” authoritarian measures, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics. Whether it is Stanley Fish calling all opponents of affirmative action bigots and lumping them in with the Ku Klux Klan,

A related puzzle is explaining why postmodernists—particularly among those postmodernists most involved with the practical applications of postmodernist ideas or with putting postmodernist ideas into actual practice in their classrooms and in faculty meetings—are the most likely to be hostile to dissent and debate, the most likely to engage in ad hominem argument and name-calling, the most likely