I find Peterson, Saad, Dennis Prager, and other PoMo-bashers stimulating, charismatic, often inspiring. I share a classical liberal political outlook. But in making sense of challenges facing liberalism, the PoMo bashing is misleading. It dumbs down understanding of the challenges. By positing a demon that believes an absurdity (“no interpretation better than another”), PoMo-bashing gives easy hope of correcting the belief and undoing the demon.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Klein cites Deirdre McCloskey, who is a long-time opponent of logical positivism and hence sympathetic to post-modernism.
Let me try to take a position between two extremes. The extremes are:
1. Truth is truth. It can be judged impersonally, using logic and empirical methods. Decoupling, if you will.
2. Truth is relative. It can be judged from the perspective of the individual’s location in social space. “As an African-American woman, my reality is that. . .”
One problem with (1) is that it denies the reality that emotions and social circumstances do affect people’s beliefs. Another problem with (1) is that it does not include a category (other than dogma) for beliefs that cannot be evaluated scientifically. It risks biasing you toward a faith that “social science” can be used to rationally construct human affairs. I think that these concerns, particularly the last one, incline McCloskey and Klein to have some sympathy with post-modernism.
One problem with (2) is that it is overly nihilistic. There are plenty of objective truths. Another problem is that it is too power-conscious. People abuse it to try to exercise power in conversations where truth-seeking, not power-seeking, ought to be the nature of the discussion.
In general, when a label is deployed as a boo-word, it has lost its usefulness. “Neoliberalism” falls into that category. It seems that “post-modernism” does, also.
Is it possible that some truths are ‘essentially universal’ and some are dictated by perspective – because some of them are about ‘statistical truths’ and others are actually about relationships – and that its a question of relative importance in different applications?
Sure. Some truths apply everywhere (2+2=4), some truths are pan-human but probably not universal (people need sleep), some truths are determined entirely by culture (it is safest to drive on the right side of the road (unless you’re in Britain or Japan), some truths are objective but personal (I am allergic to chicken, but most other people aren’t), some truths are common to all or most cultures because they solve recurring problems (murder is punished, warriors are men). Further types of truth are left to the reader.
It’s my guess that for many of us as individuals, we have an individual experience that is subjective and “phenomenological.” We have a lived experience in which our emotions and perspective looms large, and many facts don'[t really seep in. We don’t actually need many facts about social issues that don’t involve us. Therefore we believe things that probably aren’t true.
There are social facts that (it seems to me) many people don’t have an interest in knowing. Facts about IQ and impulse control and life outcomes. Facts about class mobility or the lack thereof. Facts about compound interest. Facts about government contingent liabilities or how much it would cost to buy, as a bullet-proof annuity, a defined benefit pension. Facts about how many people make a living in the NBA, or as rock stars, or rappers, or flipping houses. Facts about how easy it is to successfully invade Russia or to establish a military occupation of Afghanistan based on the historical record.
Theodore Dalrymple claims that Charles Darwin had an interesting habit. He would promptly write down any fact that contradicted his current beliefs and understandings, knowing that otherwise he would very soon forget it entirely.
If everyone could agree on certain facts, the space for some debates would grow smaller.
My general impression is that intellectual sorts of disputations like these are a permanent part of the landscape. New ones will rise up as these fade. However, the extent to which they carry pragmatic relevance to the larger world of ordinary people is an indicator of the excess authority and resources devoted to academia. The philosopher kings need to be herded back into the ivory tower and their fasces unbundled. These kerfuffles will never help a person lead a better life or increase general prosperity.
Postmoderism just isn’t moral relativism, which isn’t even modern let alone postmodern. In fact, it’s downright ancient – think about Paul arguing in the Areopagus in Athens. The vast majority of moral relativists certainly do not deny the truth value of statements like “murder is wrong”, “Hitler was evil”, etc. They’ll say some things like food restrictions and sexual ethics are indexed to culture, and some things like murder being wrong are common enough that they are tantamount to being universally true. Neither does moral relativism forbid objective truth – just because morals are indexed to a culture doesn’t mean they can’t be a feature of the Universe that applies to that culture.
So when Prager etc go after the average leftist for having no objective moral compass, their eyes roll – “you actually think I believe that Hitler wasn’t evil??”. People are perfectly happy to believe the objective truth of their moral impulses through intuition alone
I often point out that the modern leftist / progressive isn’t a moral relativist at all, and on the contrary, are akin to fervent zealots and Puritanical theocrats who, once they achieve sufficient political power on any particular matter, are perfectly willing to impose the implications of a moral code on everyone within their jurisdiction, and the objective truth of which they are supremely confident.
This is a key error that certain opponents of progressives everywhere keep on making over and over, taking some old rhetoric seriously that was mostly just an expedient rationalization. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it reflects a gap between the experience of generations. A generation or two ago, many of contemporary culture war topics were matters of some uncertainty and ongoing, unsure dispute, if they were even on the radar at all. Today, when one reads discourse on the internet or goes to deep blue neighborhoods, or where college students congregate, one cannot avoid the impression of absolute confidence and moral certitude. They are wide a-woke.
What many older and religious people on the right think is that without God and revealed scriptures, it’s anything goes with no moral tether and straight away to nihilism and Nietzsche and then the various mass-murderous disasters of the 20th century.
That’s not how progressives see themselves at all, which is as a movement that has discovered the correct moral principles on a purely secular foundation, and that, indeed, that this is the only proper foundation, and that the various old religious foundations were the fundamentally faulty ones that were, at best, only grasping in the same direction, and rarely but occasionally hitting the true mark, and at worst, a bunch of superstitions that just made groups hate and oppress and kill each other for no good reason.
What the critics are right about, however, is that such a cultural situation has a tendency towards meltdown like a runaway reactor, as people compete to innovate faster and faster to one-up each other in terms of consistency with implications of the ideology, which, being artificial and unreal, inevitably leads to completely inhuman and disastrous places. But they are wrong that any of that is ‘relativist’. We are in danger precisely because it isn’t relativist.
A quote from Hotel Concierge seems appropos here:
There is a kind of extreme intellectual nihilism which has become respectable for powerful groups to apply to arguments (and standards and achievements and facts, scientific, historical, and otherwise) that they find inconvenient. I think in principle a word for it cuts reality at the joints. Furthermore, it’s sufficiently common and important that it is useful in practice to be able to speak of it. It seems to me that the term “post-modernism” (or something related, like “cod po-mo”) identifies the pattern well enough to be useful. “Post-modernism” isn’t a great word for it, and it can be intentionally misused as a boo word, but it seems to be understandable by people of good will, and we don’t seem to have a better alternative.
The word doesn’t cut reality *perfectly* at the joints. I think most people would agree that the Sokal hoax is comfortably inside the boundaries, but e.g. maybe reasonable people can argue whether tabooing arguments attributed to taboo sources (not just today — bourgeois deviationist thought, Jewish science, Papist snares…) should use the same term. I think probably not: those older patterns of unclean sources seem more like the modern discrediting of an argument because of its association with business, or with a specific interest like the Koch brothers, as far as I know, people usually don’t refer to that kind of specific taboo as post-modernism. I think if we try to look for historical analogues of modern cod po-mo, it’s less like taboo than like (yet another instance of) the left reinventing privilege under a cosmetic redefinition.[*] In this case, it’s a lot like reinventing the doctrine that it’s impossible for little folk to have a valid point in some arena — historically in various arenas such as legal limits on central authority, or true speech being seditious libel, but most famously in theology and biblical interpretation esp. around the Reformation. To complete the historical analogy one has to appreciate the redefined terms for the complement of what cod po-mo declares meaningless. E.g., we hear how centrally important the rule of law is, where the true meaning of rule of law means is obedience to whatever arbitrary decision a favored court makes. Similarly, we’ve seen a recognizable push to how what is central to true science is official, e.g. formal peer review and consensus, certainly not the kind of unofficial biased arguments about words and evidence and reasoning that could be made by just anybody.
Incidentally, an alternative term for po-mo doesn’t need to be a single word — terms can be phrases, and phrases like “fake but accurate” and “politically correct” seem to serve adequately well to refer to some similarly common modern standards of argument. But I’m drawing a blank not only for useful single word alternatives to po-mo, but alternative phrases too.
[*] Some are more equal than others. And the left are totally not racists employing the power of the law to disadvantage ethnic groups which are not valued by the coalition, they merely see (1) that diversity is so important that old protections of equality under the law simply must be set aside in the national instance and that (2) rival ethnic groups are the undiverse ones, and especially that only diverse ethnic groups can be overrepresented. (And also, esp. a decade or three ago, another true non-naive definition of racism involved oppression, and the t. n.-n. definition of oppression involves an oppressor class, and the left is not an oppressor class, so merely recognizing that people in an oppressor race needs to be treated differently based on race is not wrong, racism is what is wrong.) And they certainly don’t believe in dehumanizing people, and indeed either racism or dehumanizing people are candidates for the highest wrong. And just like racism has a proper definition, so too dehumanization. Moral codes should be chosen so that every human would agree with the choice behind a veil of ignorance — by which we properly mean every human *who* *is* *a* *citizen* should agree. Or we did mean, anyway. From somewhat before the publication date of _A Theory of Justice_ to around the Bush II administration inheritance tax debate, nationalist redistribution was a central part of the pitch, so oh hey, it turns out that only humans of the same nationality are the true humans who should be allowed behind the veil of ignorance with you. Totally not dehumanization — they are not the true humans, after all — or nationalist socialism, more properly understood as non-internationalist socialism. I can date the always-at-war-with-Eastasia swerve away from this fairly closely because ca. 2003 I made a libertarian universalist sneer at the morality of attacking inherited privilege by taxing private inheritance to redistribute to people who had inherited their national citizenship, and I was informed in no uncertain terms that Rawls had proved it was a moral imperative. Not many years after that it was silently forgotten in service of new talking points like how borders are nonsense, except of course for undiverse rival ethnic groups which could easily become (even more) overrepresented if we let them stay here when their H1Bs expire.
What does post-modernism have to do with Cody Yellowstone Regional Airport? Seriously, if you’re going to use abbreviations that aren’t obvious to everyone, spell out what they stand for. I don’t know what you mean by cod but I’m pretty sure it’s not the video game.
Ditto t. n.-n. Yeah, I’m terrible at Wheel of Fortune.
I often point out that the modern leftist / progressive isn’t a moral relativist at all, and on the contrary, are akin to fervent zealots and Puritanical theocrats…
Yes!
One reason people get confused is that part of the theology is, “never punch down; always punch up.” There is a scale of upness and downness, with the most “privileged” “oppressing” on the top and the “least privileged” “most oppressed” on the bottom. So since criticizing the culture of any former colony would be “punching down,” one hears rhetoric about how no culture is better than another. On the other hand, in talking about gay rights in the United States, one hears about how oppressive and homophobic–and morally wrong–American society is.
There is a meta-morality there that is very strong.
Peterson, Saad, Dennis Prager, and other PoMo-bashers stimulating
That is fairly wide net between Peterson and Prager. I may not be Peterson biggest fan but he does give good insights and his knowledge on corporate leaderships are great. Dennis Prager is simply Rush Limbaugh with a Phd who just throws bombs on progressives for talk radio listeners. (I remember him being a reasonable debater on talk in the 1980s.)
Yes there are two extremes with the truth in the middle.
Anyway, the immediate Post-WW2 order was great for 1948 – 1973 when white men could signal to society they are a good citizen by spending two years in the military (or a veteran), married, and went to a Christian church on Sunday with the family. (Remember I talking about 1950 & 1960s) In the 1970s this model starting breaking apart for a variety of reasons, as the Boomers did not like some signals, women wanted different roles, minorities wanted their piece, and there was mass employment growth. (the 1970s did have the highest job creation of any post-ww2 decade.)
In reality, I do think Progressives are not completely correct in modern times either as they do miss family formation issues and society needs other signals outside of education.
Also I think there are some generational truths as well. Look at Cortez Primary victory last week where the big difference of white voters was age. (Young white voters flocked to Cortez while older white voters went Crowley.) So in terms of truths, my kids in High School will see an African-American President with reasonable success as part of our history while prior generations did not.
Sometimes he have remember how much political creative destruction we have had over the last 60 years.
Who in 1961 America would have believed that a future President born that year was an African-American? 20% maybe? I don’t even know African-Americans would have believed in 1961 to be honest.
Harry Frankfurt wrote a charming little book called _On Bullsh*t_ which is a serious and demanding book. I need to go back and read it more carefully.
He discusses the notion of the college dorm “Bull session” in which one tries on arguments for size, like items of clothing, to see how they fit and feel.
That tendency, combined with lack of deep interest in established facts, seems to be exacerbated by postmodernism.
One could say that postmodernism is “a bullish*t multiplier.” Bullsh*t we will always have with us, and phenomenological views of the world come naturally to us. Postmodernism has made things worse by excusing inattention to facts.
And it gets worse with what Tom Nichols has called _The death of expertise_. We can tell that there are forms of expertise and actual facts. We prefer a good surgeon with a working command of facts about anatomy.
Probably we are back to Thomas Sowell’s distinction between “mundane specifics” and “verbal virtuosity.”
Yet Prof. Arnold is correct–the term postmodernism has been partly emptied of meaning. I could never justify spending more time learning about it, which may demonstrate a lack of seriousness and zeal. But life is short.
I think that postmodernists have zeroed in on some half-truths and then run with them. The example Dr. Kling uses is the idea that truth is relative. Some truths are relative, but some aren’t. (The statement “all truths are relative” would, if true, be a transcendental, non-relative truth and would, therefore, be false.)
Another example is the idea that there are an infinite number of ways to interpret a statement or a piece of writing and that no interpretation is better than another. The first part of the statement is true. The second is false. There may well be an infinite number of ways in which to interpret a manual on how to defuse a bomb, but there are a very few that will keep you alive.
Given the description of the two extreme positions, I think you are being too hard on (1) and not hard enough on (2).
For example, does (1) actually deny the reality that emotions and social circumstances affect people’s beliefs? It doesn’t. One can both believe that “The Truth is that rain dancing does not make it rain,” and also conduct an anthropological investigation into the cultural and social-psychological mechanisms by which such (false) beliefs in the possibility of ritualistic weather modification propagate through primitive tribes, how they may have special importance in preserving the status and authority of shamans or elders, and so forth. There is a ‘positivism of the origins and consequences of human beliefs’ that has no undermining impact on the basic approach to, or perspective, on proper epistemology.
I called this ‘Positivist Realism’ (or post-post-modernism, or socially realistic positivism) during a former go-round on the topic. Roger distinguished between good and bad postmodernism there, but “realistic social analysis of claims” is a tiny baby in a lot of filthy bathwater. Indeed, it looks like ‘good postmodernism’ was meant to fight ‘bad positivism’, while ‘bad postmodernism’ undermines ‘good positivism’. What a mess!
One could say that if most people in a society stop believing that private property, and trading for profit and personal wealth accumulation, are morally suspect, and start believing these activities are noble and that complementary personal discipline and behaviors are admirable, then the material conditions of that society will tend to improve, and general political attitudes will tend to become more individualistic with emphasis on social equality and personal freedom and rights. But at the same time one could also say that this is different from claiming these moral beliefs are objectively true or that they are even definitely superior by other possible standards of analysis.
As for (2), the real ‘pragmatic’ problem (and origin of its popularity) is that it makes impersonal and respectful criticism and falsification of objective-like interpretations and claims socially impossible because every dispute about claims is transformed into a personal confrontation likely to be perceived as an offense to one’s dignity and which cannot be resolved with resort to epistemology; logic; evidence; or rigorous, reasoned argument, but instead by social position and the relative power of the participants and the membership of political coalitions willing to enter the mob rumble. This is terribly pernicious and a real scourge that prevents any kind of genuinely friendly and forthright engagement and amplifies the us-vs-them mentality and social segregation. Is it ‘post-modern’ to say that this kind of thinking, regardless of whether it is true or false, should be discouraged by everyone who thinks identity-based political polarization is a big problem?
I have no interest in trying to divine whether something like McCloskey’s take on economically-relevant moral rhetoric is ‘really’ post-modern, or whether the ideas that Klein is sympathetic towards / semi-defending from Peterson’s criticisms are ‘genuinely’ post-modern ones. Being boo-words that started to go out of fashion 20 years ago is one measure of uselessness, but another is when it becomes impossible to tell what ideas or claims would even be properly assigned to the category.
However – and perhaps ironically this is a kind of ‘post-modern’ analysis itself – I don’t think the classical liberal economists really case about these philosophical and epistemological ideas, theories, and debates at all. Instead – and for perfectly good reasons! – they really, really don’t like the catastrophic past failures and continuing danger of rational constructivism and the naive and hubristic optimism associated with the principle “rule by social engineering experts” in a human world that is far too complex for the application of simple models. In a human world with knowledge and coordination problems, with high causal density, Hayek’s ‘fatal conceit’ of simple-model scientism has no good place.
I called this “overconfident positivism” last time – which, yes, was historically associated with the spirit of ‘modernism’ – and which has a long history of providing false justification for all kinds of radically distorting and liberty-erasing state interventions in economic activity which have reliably led to utter disaster, not to mention lower authority, reputation, influence, and social status of free marketers and classical liberal economists.
For historical reasons, those free market economists who want to fight against this ‘modernist’ mentality and rhetorically elevate the status of pro-economic-liberty norms have embraced the word ‘post-modernism’ to describe the character of that dispute. But in doing so they have picked up a lot of trashy and nebulous intellectual baggage too, with which they should be eager to disassociate themselves.
Finally, in perhaps another irony, I sometimes think of the way I intellectually interact with the world of claims as being in a post-modernist, contrarian spirit, since I score high on curiosity and skepticism but low on conformity and agreeableness.
Every time I encounter any claim I think about the various decision processes of how it has come to my attention vs. the ocean of other possible and current claims, the biases and interests and influential position of those making it, their possible political and ideological agendas, the influence on their own fame and status and those of their allies and opponents, various social failure modes, and so on and so forth. This is different from trying to substitute my own reasoning for someone else’s expertise, but it very much undermines the tendency to accept claims unquestioningly as a matter of authority or even when there is a purported consensus.
What I find these days in that a few areas of a few hard sciences, the old positive and decoupled analysis and trust in claims is still warranted, but that in a growing number of fields – especially those having anything to do with human behavior, social processes, or with political implications – the social analysis and highly skeptical ‘post-modern’ approach is of increasing necessity and value, and that straightforward review and analysis of the claims themselves is almost besides the point.
I went back to the former go-round where I tried to distinguish “good post modernism” from “bad post modernism.” I think we are basically in agreement (the last three paragraphs of this comment describe me), and, I suspect, so is Deirdre McCloskey.
Perhaps we should run with your aside and call my “good postmodernism” post-post-modernism. Hey, if it’s after post-modernism, that implies progress, right? That it fixes some of the mistakes in post-modernism.
As a Jewish/Mormon/Native-American with a blended ancestry of at least three different historically oppressed groups, my reality is that truth is objectively true and while in may be illuminated uniquely by different perspectives, it can still be judged using logic and empirical methods.
If you’re a #2-style person, then don’t be a hater and try and tell me my personal perspective on this isn’t true.