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Postmodernism
Nov. 15th, 2020 01:14 amThe November issue of Commentary has a review by Tal Fortgang of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. This is a critique of postmodern Theory (the review uses a capital T, presumably following the book), including the idea of positionality, that the oppressed have a special insight into the system, and that their lived experience cannot be answered by mere facts or by scientific thinking and legal reasoning. There are other points made; the review describes “Theory as no theory at all; it is not interested in explaining the world as it exists.”
Having had squabbles of my own with postmodernists, going back to when I was thirteen years old if not before, I find this excoriation of Theory sound and persuasive as far as it goes, but I did finish the review (a week or more ago) thinking that a fat target had not been included; Donald Trump and his deplorables are as guilty of rejecting objective reality in favor of Theory as any anti-intellectual college freshman or any professor of Something Studies. Their version of Theory is somewhat different, but they too believe without evidence: that the election must have been stolen, or that tariffs are being paid by the Chinese, rather than by American consumers, or that Hillary Clinton is the leader of a gang of child sex traffickers, or whatever else the grifter in chief may proclaim.
The poison of radical subjectivism seems to go back to the Ancient Greek sophist Protagoras, and to recur in different cultures; there is probably nothing to be done except to try to maintain reason and sanity by rejecting it in each generation.
Having had squabbles of my own with postmodernists, going back to when I was thirteen years old if not before, I find this excoriation of Theory sound and persuasive as far as it goes, but I did finish the review (a week or more ago) thinking that a fat target had not been included; Donald Trump and his deplorables are as guilty of rejecting objective reality in favor of Theory as any anti-intellectual college freshman or any professor of Something Studies. Their version of Theory is somewhat different, but they too believe without evidence: that the election must have been stolen, or that tariffs are being paid by the Chinese, rather than by American consumers, or that Hillary Clinton is the leader of a gang of child sex traffickers, or whatever else the grifter in chief may proclaim.
The poison of radical subjectivism seems to go back to the Ancient Greek sophist Protagoras, and to recur in different cultures; there is probably nothing to be done except to try to maintain reason and sanity by rejecting it in each generation.
