Explaining Postmodernism Quotes

“In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims. On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is. On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next. Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity. And of course a post-modernist can respond dismissingly by citing Hegel—“Those are merely Aristotelian logical contradictions”—but it is one thing to say that and quite another to sustain Hegelian contradictions psychologically.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“why is it that that prominent segment of the Left—the same Left that traditionally defended its positions on the modernist grounds of reason, science, fairness for all, and optimism—is now voicing themes of anti-reason, anti-science, all’s-fair-in-love-and-war, and cynicism? ”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Consider three more examples, this time of clashes between postmodernist theory and historical fact. Postmodernists say that the West is deeply racist, but they know very well that the West ended slavery for the first time ever, and that it is only in places where Western ideas have made inroads that racist ideas are on the defensive. They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without. They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Therefore, it is a combination of the two factors—widespread skepticism about reason and socialism’s being in crisis—that is necessary to give rise to postmodernism.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Included in the Totalitarian/Killed by Own Government cell are the 10 to 12 million human beings killed by the German National Socialists in the period 1933-1945. Subtracting that number from 138 million, along with subtracting a few million killed by miscellaneous totalitarian regimes, means that over 110 million human beings were killed by the governments of nations inspired by Left, primarily Marxist, socialism.[260]”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Modern debates were over truth and reality, reason and experience, liberty and equality, justice and peace, beauty and progress. In the postmodern framework, those concepts always appear in quotation marks. Our most strident voices tell us that “Truth” is a myth. “Reason” is a white male Eurocentric construct. “Equality” is a mask for oppressions. “Peace” and “Progress” are met with cynical and weary reminders of power—or explicit ad hominem attacks. Postmodern debates thus display a paradoxical nature. Across the board, we hear, on the one hand, abstract themes of relativism and egalitarianism. Those themes come in both epistemological and ethical forms. Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products. Culturally, therefore, no group’s values have special standing. All ways of life from Afghani to Zulu are legitimate. Coexisting with these relativistic and egalitarian themes, we hear, on the other hand, deep chords of cynicism. Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays. Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.[24] Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual, and class identity. Our current social context, however, is characterized by oppression that benefits whites, males, and the rich at the expense of everyone else. That oppression in turn leads to an educational system that reflects only or primarily the interests of those in positions of power. To counteract that bias, educational practice must be recast totally. Postmodern education should emphasize works not in the canon; it should focus on the achievements of non-whites, females, and the poor; it should highlight the historical crimes of whites, males, and the rich; and it should teach students that science’s method has no better claim to yielding truth than any other method and, accordingly, that students should be equally receptive to alternative ways of knowing.[25]”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflictual reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism And Socialism From Rousseau To Foucault

“The contemporary Enlightenment world prides itself on its commitment to equality and justice, its open-mindedness, its making opportunity available to all, and its achievements in science and technology. The Enlightenment world is proud, confident, and knows it is the wave of the future. This is unbearable to someone who is totally invested in an opposed and failed outlook. That pride is what such a person wants to destroy. The best target to attack is the Enlightenment’s sense of its own moral worth. Attack it as sexist and racist, intolerantly dogmatic, and cruelly exploitative. Undermine its confidence in its reason, its science and technology. The words do not even have to be true or consistent to do the necessary damage. And like Iago, postmodernism does not have to get the girl in the end. Destroying Othello is enough.[320]”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“As Nietzsche noted in Daybreak: When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do they exclaim angrily, “May the whole world perish!”  This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is “If I cannot have something, no one can have anything, no one is to be anything!”[312]”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“What is the purpose in this context of appealing to opinion and semantic relativism?  The purpose is to get your opponent off your back and to get some breathing space. If your opponent accepts that the debate is a matter of opinion or semantics, then your losing the argument does not matter: nobody is right or wrong. But if your opponent does not accept that everything is a matter of opinion, then his attention is diverted away from the subject matter at hand—namely, politics—and into epistemology. For now he has to show why everything is not merely semantics, and that will take him awhile. Meanwhile, you have successfully diverted him. And if it looks like he is doing a good job on the semantics argument, then you can throw in—“Well, what about perceptual illusions?”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“For the modern realists, consciousness is both cognitive and functional, and those two traits are integrated. The primary purpose of consciousness is to be aware of reality. The complementary purpose of consciousness is to use its awareness of reality as a guide to acting in that reality. For the postmodern antirealists, by contrast, consciousness is functional—but it is not cognitive, so its functionality has nothing to do with cognition. Two key concepts in the postmodern lexicon, “unmasking” and “rhetoric,” illustrate the significance of the differences.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Traditionally, Marxist socialism had supposed that providing adequately for human needs was a basic test of a social system’s morality. The achievement of wealth, accordingly, was a good thing since wealth brought with it better nutrition, housing, healthcare, and leisure time. And so capitalism was held to be evil because Marxists believed that it denied most of its population the ability to enjoy the fruits of wealth. But as it became clear that capitalism is very good at producing the wealth and delivering the fruits—and that socialism is very bad at it—two new variations on Left thought turned this argument on its head and began to condemn capitalism precisely for being so good at producing wealth.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“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.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“As it became impossible to believe in the morality of the Soviet Union, a shrinking contingent of true believers shifted their devotions, first to communist China under Mao. But then came revelations of even worse horrors in China in the 1960s—including 30 million deaths between 1959 and 1961. Then Cuba was the great hope, and then Vietnam, then Cambodia, then Albania for awhile in the late 1970s, and then Nicaragua in the 1980s. But the data and the disappointments piled up, all dealing a solid and devastating blow to socialism’s ability to claim a moral sanction.[259] One such set of summary data is reproduced below in the form of a table comparing liberal democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian governments in terms of one measure of morality: the number of their own citizens those governments have killed.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“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.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“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. 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.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“From the postmodern anti-realist metaphysics and anti-reason epistemology, the postmodern social consequences follow almost directly. Once we set aside reality and reason, what are we left with to go on?  We can, as the conservatives would prefer, simply turn to our group’s traditions and follow them. Or we can, as the post-modernists will prefer, turn to our feelings and follow them. If”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“In postmodernism we find metaphysical antirealism, epistemological subjectivity, the placing of feeling at the root of all value issues, the consequent relativism of both knowledge and values, and the consequent devaluing or disvaluing of the scientific enterprise.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“The essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling.”[54] One should strive to realize oneself by exploring and embracing this feeling of absolute dependence. This requires attacking reason, for reason gives one a feeling of independence and confidence. Limiting reason is thus the essence of religious piety—for it makes possible a fully-entered-into feeling of dependence and orientation toward that being upon which one is absolutely dependent. That being is of course God.[55]”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism And Socialism From Rousseau To Foucault

“Reason and power are one and the same,” Jean-François Lyotard states. Both lead to and are synonymous with “prisons, prohibitions, selection process, the public good.”[6] Postmodernism then becomes an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Our four figures, by contrast, voiced themes of strong collectivism in ethics and politics with calls for individuals to sacrifice for society, whether society was defined as the species, the ethnic group, or the state. We find in the case of Kant a call for individuals to be willing to do their duty to sacrifice for the species; we find in the case of Herder a call for individuals to find their identity in their ethnicity; we find in the case of Fichte a call for education to be process of total socialization; and we find in the case of Hegel a call for total government to which the individual will surrender everything.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Kunst ist Scheisse (Art is shit) was, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. Duchamp’s urinal was the fitting symbol. Everything is waste to be flushed away. On this hypothesis, then, postmodernism is a generalization on Dada’s nihilism. Not only is art shit, everything is.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“In our time, the world created by the Enlightenment is strong, active, and exuberant. For a while in the past century, socialists could believe the revolution was coming, that woe would come to them that are rich, and that blessed would be the poor. But that hope has been dashed cruelly. Capitalism now seems like a case of “twice two makes four,” and like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man it is easy to see that the most intelligent socialists would just hate that fact. Socialism is the historical loser, and if socialists know that, they will hate that fact, they will hate the winners for having won, and they will hate themselves for having picked the losing side. Hate as a chronic condition leads to the urge to destroy.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“In American law, there is the Constitution and the whole body of common law precedent, and very little of that supports socialism. Consequently, if you are a Left-wing graduate student or professor in literature or law and you are confronted with the Western legal or literary canon, you have two choices. You can take on the opposing traditions, have your students read the great books and the great decisions, and argue with them in your classes. That is very hard work and also very risky—your students might come to agree with the wrong side. Or you can find a way to dismiss the whole tradition, so that you can teach only books that fit your politics. If you are looking for shortcuts, or if you have a sneaking suspicion that the right side might not fare well in the debate, then deconstruction is seductive. Deconstruction allows you to dismiss whole literary and legal traditions as built upon sexist or racist or otherwise exploitative assumptions.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Deconstruction as an educational strategy   Here is an example. Kate Ellis is a radical gender feminist. Ellis, as she writes in Socialist Review, believes that sexism is evil, that affirmative action is good, that capitalism and sexism go hand in hand, and that achieving equality between the sexes requires an overthrow of existing society. But she finds that she has a problem when she tries to teach these themes to her students. She finds that they think like liberal capitalists—they think in terms of equality of opportunity, in terms of simply removing artificial barriers and judging everyone by the same standards, and they think that by personal effort and ambition they can overcome most obstacles and achieve success in life.[303] But this means that her students have bought into the whole liberal capitalist framework that Ellis thinks is dead wrong. So, Ellis writes, she will enlist deconstruction as a weapon against those old-fashioned Enlightenment beliefs.[304]”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“Ironically, then, by the 1930s large segments of the radical Left had come to agree with what national socialists and fascists had long argued: that socialism needs an aristocracy. Granted—the far Right and much of the far Left now agreed—socialism must be for the people. But it cannot be by the people. The people must be told what they need and how to get it; and for both the direction and impetus must come from an elite.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

“So far Fichte’s program of education includes the communal separation of children, severe authoritarian top-down training, strict moral duty and selflessness, and total religious immersion. Not quite the Enlightenment model of liberal education.”
― Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault