Opus 8: The Postmodern Paradox & The Death of Discourse
Along with Police, Mongolia, Phillip Glass, & John Cage
“How is it that, in our societies, “the truth” has been given this value, thus places us absolutely under its thrall” - Friedrich Nietzsche
My 9th-grade history teacher opened the first day of class explaining how history is nothing more than a story. It is a story that can into both the fiction and non-fiction sections of the school library because much of history is an account with no basis to fact check itself against. Our history textbooks are accounts of the wars, revolutions, and paradigm shifts throughout time. Stories that cover the early foraging humans to feudalism leading to the great battles of the middle and dark ages and the subsequent Renaissance, Imperialism, and eventual establishment of the great world powers. The history we remember has grand story arcs: defined characters, conflict, resolution, etc.
But then, history ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. Francis Fukuyama believed the Soviets were the last legitimate conflict to the West and its liberal democracies that, seemingly, proved to be the final form of society. Now that they were gone, the world had exhausted its’ story arcs. Liberal democracy was the governing singularity that people had been chasing for thousands of years: individual representation.
But then in 2018, Fukuyama rescinded his 1989 declaration with the resurgence of the postmodernist and critical theory movements leading to our “post-fact world.” History discovered the new conflict provider was not great world powers but, rather, between The Individual vs. The Group, Feeling vs. Fact, and The Truth vs. The Alternative Truth.
I have spent the last two months diving into Postmodernism, its history, and its impact on our society today. I have read as much as I can to get to a point where I feel comfortable writing about it at length. By no means have I reached a point of final opinion, but understanding this cultural movement has helped me better understand the grand question of, “How did we get here?”
Dr. Jordan Peterson
For those that do not know Dr. Jordan Peterson, he is a clinical psychologist that became famous, or infamous to some, for his dismissal of identity politics speech legislation. His book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, focuses on the individual, pushing back against Postmodernistic thinking with a biological and natural attack vector. Dr. Peterson’s rise to fame happened at breakneck speeds, and he soon became a focal point across college campuses, online forums, newsreels, and the intellectual dark web.
In late 2019, Dr. Peterson had to check himself into rehab after a near-fatal addiction to antidepressants after his wife was diagnosed with cancer - even Dr. Peterson points out the irony of the situation after he spent years preaching responsibility and controlling one’s outcome. For over eight months, Dr. Peterson did not make a public appearance as he was fighting for his life during his withdrawal. That changed in June when Dr. Peterson post the following video with his daughter going over the story of his rehabilitation:
Dr. Peterson’s reappearance was timely amid the growing tensions around the world, specifically America, surrounding politics, sexuality, and race. By and large, people have shunned the legitimacy of these movements and turned to strawman and exception arguments.
There are endless highlight reels of people blocking Dr. Peterson’s speech at university campuses; places once thought to be the oasis of free thought. Nazi, fascist, and patriarch were all labels placed on Dr. Peterson in response to his speeches about one’s individual responsibility. Watch any interview with Dr. Peterson (Channel 4 and GQ being the two highlights), and you will see the endless inaccurate restatements of his thoughts.
I recommend watching a few of Dr. Peterson’s speeches on Postmodernism and the chaos which erupted in response to his simple presence. It will quickly become clear why Fukuyama claims history has indeed not ended.
A Very Short Introduction on Postmodernism
One of my favorite book series is the Very Short Introduction publications from Oxford Press. These mini pocketbooks provide excellent foundations for broad topics like physics, Nelson Mandela, probability, hormones, and specifically Postmodernism (written by Christopher Butler of Oxford). I currently am on my 35th book and hope, one day, to have read and owned all 715+ of them. The books are always written by a leading academic figure within the respective domain, and the late Butler's passing in March marked an eerily coincidental time for his work and its latest surfacing within society.
But, first, what is Postmodernism?
After the Renaissance, there were two large cultural movements: The Englightenment Period (1700-1800) and The Modernism Period (1875 - 1945). While different in many ways, these two periods focused on the individual, specifically Newton and John Locke in their respective eras. Progress thrived: Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, modern medicine accelerated at paces never before seen, and human life expectancy saw its first material increase ever. Progress, measured by most factors, spread around the globe for all genders, races, industries, cultures, and people.
After the World Wars, though, progress slowed as the world recouped itself, and a section of culture had time to start asking questions. Postmodernism was born. Stephen Hicks writes in Explaining Postmodernism:
Postmodernism’s essentials are the opposite of modernism’s. Instead of natural reality—anti-realism. Instead of experience and reason—linguistic social subjectivism. Instead of individual identity and autonomy—various race, sex, and class groupisms. Instead of human interests as fundamentally harmonious and tending toward mutually-beneficial interaction—conflict and oppression. Instead of valuing individualism in values, markets, and politics—calls for communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints. Instead of prizing the achievements of science and technology—suspicion tending toward outright hostility.
Postmodernism rejects the two axioms upon which the Enlightenment and Modernism movements were built: the singular truth, backed by logic and discourse, and the individual. Instead, they are replaced with the created, synthetic truth and the group.
The postmodern reality is an equation of two variables: the creation of truth and the distribution of that created truth through the narrative, or metanarrative. Walter Anderson, in his fantastic The Truth About the Truth essays adds,
“Surrounded by so many truths, we can’t help but revise our concept os truth itself: our beliefs about belief. More and more people become acquainted with the idea that, as philosopher Richard Rorty puts it, “the truth is made rather than found.”
At the risk of politicizing this writing a bit more, Postmodernism cuts across the political spectrum. One can see this truth creation today everywhere they look with the current “conservative” executive branch. Alternative facts, the truth isn’t the truth, and many other soundbites have filled the news cycles for the last four years. And the President is the master of distributing this created truth through his narrative construction that we have witnessed with COVID first hand. One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers provided this interesting anecdote:
It would be fascinating for someone to examine the parallel ideology of the right, especially among less-educated whites. If you’re looking for neo-Marxists and nihilists in my home state of Mississippi, you’ll find them more easily in the poor white communities than the black ones. Their beliefs aren’t as well articulated as the left’s (or actually, maybe they’re easy to understand, unlike the left’s academic jargon), but their utter lack of faith in truth and institutions, and their even stronger belief that they are powerless versus elites, forms a remarkably similar ideology to the critical theory gang. Whenever my friends back home defend Trump’s latest attack on truth or the rule of law with the usual “what about Clinton,” and when they refuse to acknowledge that wrongs on both “sides” are worthy of scorn, I always congratulate them for having, unwittingly, joined the far left in its assault on truth and morality.
On the point of the individual versus the group, individual sovereignty and identity are bypassed in favor of group classification and labeling in the postmodern world. Everyone, regardless of unique attributes, must fall into a broad stroking group identifying their race, gender, sexuality, privilege, etc.
Andrew Sullivan adds in his Roots of Wokeness piece:
And in this [postmodern] worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide.
Coincidentally, a hierarchy arises in the grouping. In Andrew’s case, his views (which led to his departure, or firing, from NY Mag) were in line with the left’s interpretation of a modern, white man, but this trumped his sexuality and immigrant grouping as they did not fit the classification of others with his political and cultural viewpoints pushing back against the agreed-upon narrative:
Just as this theory denies the individual, it also denies the universal. There are no universal truths, no objective reality, just narratives that are expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy.
Which leads us to the paradox.
The Postmodernism Paradox
There is a fatal flaw within the current postmodern thinking around both identity groupism and narrative discourse. Christopher Butler explains the former:
The result is that although much postmodernist thinking and writing and visual art can be seen as attacking stereotypical categories, defending difference, and so on, it left all these separate groupings to demand recognition as ‘authentic’ but isolated communities, once they were freed, in and by theory, from the dominant categories of the majority. […] But then how could such differentially defined groups, the result of acategorical freeing up, communicate back with any actually existent political centre? This was difficult, given the sustained and near anarchist hostility of many postmodernists to any overall theory or picture of society. It is a paradoxical result: a left-inspired distrust of authority makes recognition of difference possible, and yet those who are perhaps most in favour of leaving differently defined groups in isolation, to compete and fight it out, are those on the right, who believe in individual freedom with the minimum amount of state restraint.
It makes sense to return to Dr. Peterson now and his central theme of intra vs. intergroup variance. The postmodernist views the world as a collection of groups that all hold the same, uniform viewpoints within the groups. You hold the same viewpoints, experiences, and perspectives as the others in your group. All men must hold the same opinions, all black people must have the same experiences, and all homosexual people must have the same political viewpoints.
Scientifically, though, this is untrue. In other words, there is less average variance between groups (white vs. black, man vs. woman, heterosexual vs. homosexual, etc.) than there is within those groups. Dr. Peterson writes:
Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique—and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability.
While research has been limited, the data is supportive of Peterson’s claim when measured in a clinical setting:
The proportion of human genetic variation due to differences between populations is modest, and individuals from different populations can be genetically more similar than individuals from the same population. [...] All three of the claims listed above appear in disputes over the significance of human population variation and “race.” In particular, the American Anthropological Association stated that “data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.
Postmodernist identity grouping ignores the diversity of the sub-group and focuses on the diversity across an entire population. Put another way, postmodernists believe one cannot achieve the desired diversity of background, thought, or experience from one sub-group, whether it be race, gender, or sexuality.
Regardless of opinion, creating group identities promotes rage toward the individual that creates a contradiction within the group’s narrative: military families supporting BLM, black women rejecting BLM’s portrayal of white supremacy, or any of the other outgroups. These individuals create divides by not fitting in their pre-assigned identity buckets. Some can, rightfully so sometimes, call these individuals’ viewpoints extreme and inappropriate. But, the discussion needs to be allowed in and not rejected at the door. Unfortunately, the postmodernist has rejected discourse, as Butler explains:
“The most important postmodernist ethical argument concerns the relationship between discourse and power. A ‘discourse’ here means a historically evolved set of interlocking and mutually supporting statements, which are used to define and describe a subject matter. These discourses, as used by lawyers, doctors, and others, do not just implicitly accept some kind of dominating theory to guide them (for example, in the guise of a paradigm as used by those engaged in orthodox science).[…] They involve politically contentious activities, not just because of the certainty with which they describe and define people – who is an ‘immigrant’, or an ‘asylum seeker’, or a ‘criminal’, or ‘mad’, or a ‘terrorist’ – but because such discourses at the same time express the political authority of their users. […] They have turned against those Enlightenment ideals that underlie the legal structures of most Western democratic societies, and that aimed at universalizable ideals of equality and justice. Indeed, postmodernists tend to argue that Enlightenment reason, which claimed to extend its moral ideals to all in liberty, equality, and fraternity, was ‘really’ a system of repressive, Foucauldian control, and that Reason itself, particularly in its alliance with science and technology, is incipiently totalitarian.
Reread that last bolded sentence. The postmodernist rejects reason on the grounds of it being “incipiently totalitarian” - this is dangerous territory. Today, this repudiation of reason manifests itself in campus safe spaces, banned speakers, and syllabi outlining conversations that can no longer happen in the classroom. Dialogue and debate are the basis of liberal democracies. Progress no longer comes about after the pouring of blood but rather the printing of ink. If the latter cannot freely flow, the former will.
The rejection of discourse is a slippery road to begin taking. Paul Graham recently wrote:
You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.
The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.
The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences in fields far removed from their origins.
Conformism has overtaken the world, and the edge of ideas has become an uncomfortable place for most people. Banned books, banned words, and banned discussions are now commonplace. We as a people have become uncomfortable with anything in the political sphere. Chamath Palihapitiya accurately pointed this out in his explanation of the shrinking Overton Window:
This is a frightening place to be: the death of discourse. Important societal movements (namely BLM and police reform) have lost most of their nuance because the discussion has turned to destruction and strawman arguments. Butler warns,
The best that one can say here, and I am saying it, is that postmodernists are good critical deconstructors, and terrible constructors. They tend to leave that job to those patient liberals in their society who are still willing to attempt to sort out at least some of those differences between truth and fantasy, which postmodernists blur in a whirlwind of pessimistic assumptions about the inevitability of class or psychological conflict.
Unfortunately, polarization is similar to nuclear proliferation in its feedback loop progression. Paul Graham’s preservation of the independent-minded, while the end goal is what we need, will continue to worsen this divide in the near term. The world needs a modern-day Delphi mindset. When I visited Delphi, Greece, many years ago I was fascinated by the idea of all Greek people - even the feared Spartan warriors - would make an annual pilgrimage to Delphi to discuss society defining ideas. No weapons were allowed inside the holy city, and discussions were required to be civil. Modern democracy, as we know it today, was created within these peaceful walls.
Why has this behavior of discourse all but disappeared in modern Western culture? Polarization has some part to play, yes, but the ancient Greeks would go back to literally killing one another after they left Delphi. They were undoubtedly polarized.
Americans like to think we are at the forefront of governmental design, but yet our political participation is some of the poorest in the developed world. Talking about politics has become taboo among friends and off-limits in any professional setting fearing an eruption of emotion. This has led to having the worst of us (and many times the most extreme among us) being the representatives at the governmental level. Why have we become frightened by our own emotions?
There must be a return to some basis of truth and the only way we get there is through discourse.
Homework Reading
I only have two interesting reads for this Opus. Many more to follow as I catch up on the reading backlog.
To Protect and to Serve - Global Lessons in Police Reform
The United States is a wealthy, stable outlier in the list of countries with the highest rates of police killings. In 2019, the rate at which people were killed by the police in the United States (46.6 such killings per ten million residents) put it right between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (47.8 per ten million) and Iraq (45.1 per ten million), both of which are just emerging from years of conflict. Countries with levels of police brutality comparable to that in the United States are generally far more violent places to live and include ones, such as Egypt and Iran, that are often described by human rights campaigners as “police states.”
I have dreamed of going to Mongolia for many years now. This trip is the exact kind of experience I would want to have.
Wherever you go in this half-continent of a country, you can walk into a ger and everything will be in exactly the same place – kitchen and food to the right, saddles to the left, the stove dead ahead. Beyond that, on the left, is the guest area and you must make your way there at once and drink the bowl of tea given to you. Even if you are a complete stranger, even if you have already placed your saddlebags inside the door for the night, only then might you attempt some sort of introduction.
As Mongolians worship the land and sky around them, so gers, their shelter against the climate, have become microcosms of these elements. At the apex is the tono, the smoke hole through which can be seen kokh tenger, blue sky. From there radiate uni or roof supports, painted orange to represent the rays of the sun (itself one of the eyes of the Father of Heaven, the other one being the moon). Because gers always face in the same direction, you can tell the time simply by seeing on which of the uni the sunlight is falling.
Today’s Music
I wanted to share two of the most preeminent postmodernist composers: John Cage and Phillip Glass. Their music is minimal, scattered at times, and does not follow the chord progressions that our ears have come to expect in 21st music.
A few of my favorite pieces from each are below:
Philip Glass’s Glassworks 1st piece: Opening
Etude no. 2, Mad Rush, and Six Etudes for Piano N96 are some of my other favorites.
John Cage’s In a Landscape is technically before the postmodern era but many themes fit:
And of course I had to include some Jackson Pollock art:
